Internet-based and open source: How e-voting works around the globe

There is no substitute. Electronic voting is dependent upon others, and tends to leave no audit trail.

Why is F/OSS so good? Audit. One -can- look at the code.

The equivalent in voting is a stack of paper ballots that can be physically counted.

That's why people that come out of an awful vote-rigged tyranny demand paper ballots.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14198-focus-h...

Here is another issue where I 100% agree with you, Bob. To make matters worse, we have a situation in one state where the son of a candidate owns the voting machine company. Even if the voting in that state is honestly counted in a close election this will raise questions and doubts that really aren't necessary. Nobody would care about ownership if you could audit both the code and the results to verify the integrity of the election.

It's not just a software issue.

One of the Diebold machines, sadly of the kind used here in NH, was shown to be hacked in a very ingenious way:

The vote totals on the memory card were started not with entries of 0, but of +10 and -10. The simple addition of the software itself showed 0 votes, because 10+(-10)=0.

And as the ballots were counted by the machine, the totals remained perfectly in line with the number of ballots counted. But the totals when the "votes" were tallied were 20 votes wrong, as demonstrated by a hand count of the paper ballots.

Without that hand count, everyone involved (except the guy who put in the pre-set numbers) would have certified that the totals were perfectly valid.

> Nobody would care about ownership if you could audit both the code and the results to verify the integrity of the election.

Exactly.

The hardware needs to be open and verified. The software needs to be open and verified. And a paper trail must be kept.

This isn't anything new. We have lots of experience and historical evidence to guide us.

IMO, the obvious reason neither major party wants anything to do with this issue is that they're both up to their ears in campaign fraud. Neither wants to start the process because they're afraid they'll both get caught.

That's completely unsupported by an readily available information, of course.

Quoting: IMO, the obvious reason neither major party wants anything to do with this issue is that they're both up to their ears in campaign fraud. Neither wants to start the process because they're afraid they'll both get caught.

That's completely unsupported by an readily available information, of course.

100% agreed, although I believe we should go back to real paper ballots. Regardless of the extra time involved in counting paper ballots, voting is too important an issue to rely on machines for validation.

Quoting:100% agreed, although I believe we should go back to real paper ballots. Regardless of the extra time involved in counting paper ballots, voting is too important an issue to rely on machines for validation.

I completely agree.

Quoting:IMO, the obvious reason neither major party wants anything to do with this issue is that they're both up to their ears in campaign fraud. Neither wants to start the process because they're afraid they'll both get caught.

That's completely unsupported by an readily available information, of course.

To me that's nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Are there issues? Yes. Are they major? I doubt it. Is one party better than the other? Not on this issue, no.

If I may make an philosophical observation, I was talking about this with a coworker yesterday.

The only way to make electronic voting auditable would be if it was not anonymous. So long as voting is anonymous, it must have some distinguishable, physical attribute that is independent of the "vote totals", and that is paper ballots.

Ok. It's Wednesday, we all agree (which is wonderful), see you in 2 years when we do it all again.

...wait, isn't that insanity?

Well, there's another way to make it audit compatible, ... create a paper trail... Simple,... Voting machine displays your choice on screen,... and in a tamper-proof observation window, displays a paper tape copy of your vote to verify it. At the end of the night, the digital results, and the paper tape tally all have to agree. To save blank space on the paper tape, you can make the observation window have an LCD screen that blacks out the physical record until it displays the result for the next voter.

Convenience of digital voting, reliability and audit trail of a physical record...

Quoting:there's another way to make it audit compatible, ...

There are so many good ideas and excellent methods to accomplish a reliable, fast, and fair election. With all the technology and resources available in the US, designing and creating a complete system is not the problem. The problem lies in getting the two parties and the 50 states to agree and have a sincere commitment to doing that. This will only happen when our democracy matures enough. As it stand now, I am not sure there is any mature democracy in the world, or will ever be one.

But this initiative might help

In today's news:

Cause For Concern: 'Experimental' Patches Applied To Ohio Voting Machines Without Certification

Foundations Of Today's Election Are Shaky, Especially In Ohio

Machine turns vote for Obama into one for Romney

Now, tell me again, about how sensible electronic voting is...

Quoting:The only way to make electronic voting auditable would be if it was not anonymous.

You can do it with clever cryptographic protocols. There are just two problems with this: as with all things clever, you need clever people to design it and make sure it's not hackable; and there are not enough clever people ;) The thing is that none of the voting machine vendors takes this seriously. For them it's just "user presses a button; machine adds one to a register" kind of problem. THIS is not auditable and fundamentally broken.