Hand-counting. [LWN.net]

Hand-counting.

Posted Oct 15, 2008 16:28 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Oh. And one more thing... Elections are run by people. People are stupid and flawed and make mistakes.

Absolutely! In a paper-ballot, hand-counted system, there are many checks in place to detect mistakes or malice. The system has many people involved and most of them have an interest in assuring a fair outcome.

With electronic voting machines, fraud can be perpetrated on a massive scale, by a very few people, in an undetectable way.

People are stupid and flawed and make mistakes.. Including those people who write software. Maybe especially those people who write software.

If a system cannot be understood by the vast majority of voters, or relies on technology most people don't understand, or can theoretically be subject to massive fraud, it is anti-democratic even if there are no actual flaws in a particular instance.

Hand-counting.

Posted Oct 15, 2008 21:19 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

> Oh. And one more thing... Elections are run by people. People are stupid and flawed and make mistakes.

It is _not_ about mistakes.
Mistakes in the manual counting don't matter for the outcome. One more or less vote for one party. Who cares. And well, even in case, you can recount.

What _does_ matter is the possibility to setup a _giant_ fraud based on a modified voting machine hardware/software. That fraud is _extremely_ difficult to detect, because in practice no voting machine operator does understand these machines. They blindly trust them. The CCC proved that several times here in Germany.

So the real difference between traditional voting and electronic voting is:
Traditional voting is extremely difficult to manipulate (so that it changes the outcome in practice).
But voting machines are (compared to traditional voting) extremely easy to manipulate. Even if you have checksums and seals. They often are simply not checked in practice by the operators.
And even a checksum can be manipulated.

So let's see, what does a checksum do? Basically nothing. It's printed on the screen or maybe on a sheet of paper. So well, if you have control over the whole machine (and you often do, as they are not stored securely. CCC showed that), you can print whatever you like on the screen or the printer.

The problem is not that you can make machines secure by doing cryptographic stuff and so on. The problem is that the human operators do not understand the system and do not operate it in a secure way.
And in my opinion you can _not_ change that. No way.

Or well, let's take another example. Here in DE you can request recounts. How does that look like traditionally? Well, the sheets of paper have to be recounted. You can _watch_ the people doing that. You can _check_ them for correctness.
How does it work with a voting machine? The operator presses the "recount" button and another sheet of paper is printed out. That is _not_ transparent and I have _no_ chance to check the result. I'm forced to _trust_ the machine. But I don't. I mean, I don't even trust my own code... :)

Hand-counting.

Posted Oct 16, 2008 12:24 UTC (Thu) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

You know what?? I already mentioned that Germany has had voting machines in a few _very_ limited insignificant (test) cases. And they are in steep decline.
Anyways more of the same from you .. go back to your imagination land where government issued voting machines solve all of your problems.

Hand-counting.

Posted Oct 16, 2008 15:48 UTC (Thu) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

> You know what? *gasp* Germany has electronic voting machines
> in several areas. Imagine that. .

You know what? In Germany, there is major opposition against their use by *gasp* computer scientists and IT security experts.

The most vocal opponents of voting machines are people who design and use information technology for a living, not some backwardly haters of glorious progress.