11 ms·

Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers

136 points by Varcht 10y ago

ithipster 10y ago
more fundamentals on the issue: http://ithipster.com/47.html http://ithipster.com/47.html
- leggomylibro 10y ago
  That's not exactly 'more fundamentals'; it's a much shorter, less informative, and more biased piece. The linked article goes far more in-depth, is far more objective, and after reading through the first 5 articles I feel a little bit more edified about the issue. Now I understand the core beef: that a schema change to this voting software caused all votes to be stored in their relational DB as doubles instead of ints, and a good way for observers to verify that an ordinary election isn't behaving as a weighted one behind the scenes was never added, which makes this voting system insecure and not what a reasonable person would consider "observable". The article you linked, on the other hand, made me feel patronized, skeptical of the author's central premise, and a little bit uncomfortable.
  - ithipster 10y ago
    biased which way?
labster 10y ago
I don't see what the problem is. Fractional vote transfer is a basic feature of Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections. Although there's no reason to do any counting on the voting machines themselves in that case, just recording the ballots.
- imron 10y ago
  The problem is when it can be enabled in elections that do not use Single Transferable Votes, and discovery can be plausibly denied as a configuration error (oops, it's still set to weighted voting from a previous election and wasn't reconfigured correctly).
huac 10y ago
The entire argument is DOUBLE instead of INT http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-3/ http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-3/ within some Access database.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Access has a signed 32-bit long integer type, so it is odd to see a double used here. Still a hell of a lot of stew from one oyster.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I've seen all kinds of data type mismatches in databases. Unfortunately, I don't find this all that surprising.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      "Harris found the “DOUBLE” setting in all GEMS databases from all states for version 1.18 forward. Looking at older GEMS databases, version 1.17 and before, votes were instead configured as whole numbers (LONG INTEGER)." On top of that, they claim that there's also specific functionality to deal with rounding in the output results - why would anyone do it if they honestly thought that votes are always integer. In fact, they even present an email discussing the implementation of this, so it wasn't exactly under the radar.
nxc182 10y ago
This is why we absolutely do not need electronic voting (or electronic vote counting) in any way. Paper voting (with polling locations distributed to balance load) with hand counting and verifiable addition operations to get the final vote counts is what is needed. Having voted in person at town hall, and then having helped count the votes, I know that it is doable - just like any other laborious task is doable with enough people involved. Electronic voting just doesn't buy you anything more than risk - all at the cost of verifiability. The other advantage to hand counting with a neighbor nearby is that there is a strong penalty for manipulating the election - your neighbor will notice. These machines make it way too easy to manipulate elections at mass scale without detection.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  And yet we trust software to do things like run our credit card transactions and withdraw money from our bank accounts. The resistance [from several in the industry not just your comment] to making voting happen via software really concerns me.
  - NikolaeVarius 10y ago
    Those systems are made by massive companies with a hugely vested interest in NOT screwing up because screwing up would massively screw up their revenue. Voting systems do not have that.
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    That's significantly less important than voting. And the incentives are properly aligned: the bank is responsible for making its systems secure, and if they lose your money they have to refund it. Voting? Not so much. Lost ballots? "Woops :) sorry." If the voting machine vendor executives faced actual personal serious jail time for botched counts, I might be more inclined to trust it. Then again, I bet you a tenner they'd suddenly have a lot more fail safes in place. Aligned incentives is absolutely, 100% required for anything to work in our society. It's what we're built on. Otherwise you will always be swimming upstream.
DonHopkins 10y ago
They implemented the fractional voting feature just in case the United States reinstitutes the three-fifths compromise. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
ahh 10y ago
I gotta wonder: if this was really a way someone was trying to steal an election...why would they bother? Once you have thoroughly owned the voting machine system and can set weights why not, I don't know, just ignore the counted ballots entirely and report the totals as whatever you want?
- ccarter84 10y ago
  If you go too far down the rabbit hole, you'll find that's what some folks believe. Been there, got the t-shirt. Ultimately not sure where I stand now.
- imron 10y ago
  Because of the need to do it in a way that is both plausible and not readily detectable.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  I think the idea is that you want the results to "match-up" with exit polls and number of voters. I assume it adjusts the proportionality so the sum total remains the same, and ballot questions that the hijacker is not concerned with are not skewed. Since you have no idea how many people will vote until the conclusion, if you wait until after the conclusion to modify results, it would be more obvious and difficult.
serge2k 10y ago
> PART 1: VOTES ARE BEING COUNTED AS FRACTIONS INSTEAD OF AS WHOLE NUMBERS Should really be > PART 1: VOTES COULD BE COUNTED AS FRACTIONS INSTEAD OF AS WHOLE NUMBERS Existence of the feature doesn't indicate it's use, although it is obviously worrying.
- Bud 10y ago
  Definitely a sensationalized clickbait headline that's not backed up by the article in any way.
- sctb 10y ago
  Thank you for pointing that out! We've updated the submission title to clarify.
trendia 10y ago
I'm not sure that storing ints would be more resistant to fraud than storing as doubles. You could easily manipulate the vote by randomly switching X% of votes like so: if wrongVote && rand() < X: FlipVote() This would have the same effect as fractional voting, even if you store as integers.
- vilhelm_s 10y ago
  But that would be easily detected by looking at the source code or disassembly. I think the concern here is that the "weighted" election mode provides an easy way to manipulate election outcomes while providing deniability ("oh, that code is just used for weighted elections in California").
  - trendia 10y ago
    A weighted election mode would also be visible through source code or disassembly?
    - colanderman 10y ago
      Yes, it's also made visible in the documentation.
  - chipperyman573 10y ago
    Wait, are there actual states in the US that use weighted elections? I thought the whole point of the US's system is that (ideally) every citizen has as much say as anyone else.
    - vilhelm_s 10y ago
      Apparently California has a system (Proposition 218) where local government can impose certain property taxes, but such taxes have to be approved by a 2/3 majority of property owners, and the vote is weighted by the amount of property they own.
maerF0x0 10y ago
there are cryptographic voting systems that would allow results to be verifiable and for voters to verify their vote was counted. That and FOSS voting software would probably help .
wnevets 10y ago
The paper ballots that caused the 2000 debacle really wasn't any better the problems with e-voting we have today. The problem isn't the medium of voting but who is in charge of creating and maintaining the ballots.
- tomohawk 10y ago
  The paper ballots that were punch cards caused problems. The paper ballots that were marked and optically scanned caused no problems and were easy and fast to recount. Some counties in FL had the old punch card ballots, some had the optically scanned. All of the problems were with the punch card ballots. And with the lawyers arguing over hanging chads and other nonsense.
  - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_chads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_chads
  - wnevets 10y ago
    You're also forgetting about the butterfly ballots that confused voters because of their design. A large number of voters claimed they voted for the wrong person because of it. > http://andrys.com/flballot.html http://andrys.com/flballot.html
- DamienSF 10y ago
  Paper ballots works well in every European democracies and is far more transparent and secured than the electronic machines we have today. As a matter of fact, Germany has tested electronic machines but went back to paper ballots to preserve the reliability of the vote. The article doesn't just cast the doubt on electronic voting machines, it shows they are set-up to enable election fraud. How many more proofs is needed to convince voters that sadly, elections results can't be trust?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
douche 10y ago
Any sort of software for voting machines really ought to be open-source. Anything less than complete transparency is a non-starter.
- Scirra_Tom 10y ago
  And how do you verify the machines are running that code? And how do you know someone's just not adding to the total when it's collated?
  - acobster 10y ago
    You have redundant integrity checks involving cryptography and independent, human professionals built into the compilation/deployment/testing process.
- hairy_man674 10y ago
  Not ought but must. It's a fundamental concept in system security known as as Kerckhoffs's Principle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity The rationale is to allow anybody to audit the system, so that soundness of the design can be proven against an adversary with perfect knowledge of it. And yet Americans let companies enforce intellectual property rights over systems whose security (flaws) could change your vote... update: Bruce Schneier on security of electronic voting: https://www.opendemocracy.net/media-voting/article_2213.jsp https://www.opendemocracy.net/media-voting/article_2213.jsp
legostormtroopr 10y ago
> What fractionalized votes can do: > They allow “weighting” of races. Weighting a race removes the principle of “one person-one vote” to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. This is extremely inflammatory language. What I think they mean is: > They allow “weighting” of electoral contests. Weighting an electoral contest removes the principle of “one person-one vote” to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. However, what they wrote seems to heavily imply a racial bias to electronic elections. Why they would choose to use such racially charged language around such a benign topic at this time seems only to drive links to their site over such a non-controversial issue.
- vilhelm_s 10y ago
  Note that the "races" wording is taken from the voting machine manual. But I agree, it seems kindof deliberate.
- grzm 10y ago
  I think they're using "race" in the contest/competition sense, aren't they? For other uses in the article: "The “Summary” vote tally, which provides overall election totals for each race on Election Night" and "Presidential race in an entire state switched in four seconds" Granted, they could have chosen other language that's less likely to be misconstrued. As for the choice of language, I don't think the article is all that well written (for another example, mixing "fractional" and "decimal" to mean the same thing). I don't think there was that much thought put into the language.
DamienSF 10y ago
There have been many statistical analysis pointing out to potential election fraud due to the electronic counting of the votes. For those who missed it, here is a comprehensive report on potential election fraud during recent Democratic primaries: http://www.election-justice-usa.org/Democracy_Lost_Update1_EJUSA.pdf http://www.election-justice-usa.org/Democracy_Lost_Update1_E... The last part is related to the electronic counting of the votes. Here what Fritz Scheuren, the 100th President of the American Statistical Association, had to say on the Democratic primaries “as a statistician, I find the results of the 2016 primary voting unusual. In fact, I found the patterns unexpected [and even] suspicious. There is a greater degree of smoothness in the outcomes than the roughness that is typical in raw/real data […] the difference between the reported totals, and our best estimate of the actual vote, varies considerably from state to state. However these differences are significant—sometimes more than 10%—and could change the outcome of the election”
nkassis 10y ago
I read part 1,2,3,4 and found multiple issues with this article. In part 2 they show results for alaska with fractional numbers. What isn't clear is that it's actually results from part 4 where they edited the access DB to change the numbers to match set percentages they wanted. Second reading those emails in part 2 it seems they are discussing that the per candidate numbers in weighted elections (when the machines are used for those) then adding them they show totals with one less digit. But that only matters if they have fractional parts which they haven't shown to have happened in a real election. There doesn't seem to be any proof of actual fraud here. Just a bunch of suppositions.
natch 10y ago
This is really disturbing. We need a DARPA-challenge level effort to get some better solutions designed for this. It can't be that hard. A git repo per machine, recording an audit trail further verified by the block chain, could be the start of a solution, for example.
- benchaney 10y ago
  "A git repo per machine, recording an audit trail further verified by the block chain" This is just a list of technologies. It's not the start of a solution, and it isn't even really clear what problem you are trying to solve.
  - natch 10y ago
    The problem of undetected vote tampering at scale > individual voter being relatively easy -- this problem was pretty clear in the original article.
Keverw 10y ago
It's sad that elections, one of the most important things we have here in America are ran on closed sourced copyrighted systems owned by corporations. They say it's rigged, I would hope it's not but really who knows if they don't have access to the code?
- grzm 10y ago
  I think it would be nice to have the source code open for review. However, that doesn't solve the problem. It's very difficult (impossible?) to guarantee the reviewed software is what's actually running on the machines, not to mention how does one validate the compilation, the OS, the firmware, the hardware—you get the picture. And the voting machine itself is only one part of the whole voting system. It sounds like this is something you're interested in. I encourage you to take a look at what's being done. I've shared a couple of links elsewhere in this thread, which if nothing else can provide a starting point.
  - Keverw 10y ago
    Yeah good point. Hashing the binary wouldn't really help because they could modify the GUI to report the wrong hash and most people who aren't computer people wouldn't really get what it means anyways. I been thinking a blockchain based system would be interesting, but it'd have to be really easy to use for everyone. People who have no computer or phone all the way to the computer expert.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I think blockchain might have some application, but I'm unconvinced that computer technology alone is going to solve it. Have a look at this slide deck from Ron Rivest (of RSA fame). https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf I think he does a pretty good job of covering the history of modern voting and how technology can be properly applied. You might find this Google Tech Talk by Ben Adida "Verifying Elections with Cryptography" interesting as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s
mentos 10y ago
What would be wrong with a voting machine assigning you a UUID that you can print out and verify your vote on a website where everyone else's 100 million votes are displayed?
- Animats 10y ago
  Because then party goons / your employer / cops demand your UUID, check your vote, and beat you / fire you / arrest you if they don't like it.
- s_q_b 10y ago
  When ballots are not secret, they can influenced by social, political, or economic actors through punishment and reward. For example, voters in many places used to face extreme peril if they voted against the candidate picked by their social group, party, or union. This peril ranged from reduced social standing, to loss of employment, and even physical violence. As such coercion is contrary to the democratic objectives of an election, secret ballots were introduced to ensure ballots represent the free will of the voters. There are mechanisms by which one could both keep the ballot secret and allow a public tally. But to avoid hacking, like the floating-point vote-value in GEMS outlined in another story, the system does require bullet-proof crypto. Regardless of how the ballots are counted, I do believe there should always be paper backups, scanned, and filed so that citizens can examine them digitally and in person if necessary. With that system one could spot-check any suspected irregularity. Only with such physical redundancy would I trust digital voting systems at this point. Sometimes there's no substitute for good old dead trees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot Article 21.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "The will of the people...shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which...shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."[19] Article 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights (the Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica) grants to every citizen of member states of the Organization of American States the right and opportunity "to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrange and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters".[20] Paragraph 7.4 of the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE, obligates the member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to "ensure that votes are cast by secret ballot or by equivalent free voting procedure, and that they are counted and reported honestly with the official results made public."[21] Article 5 of the Convention on the Standards of Democratic Elections, Electoral Rights and Freedoms in the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States obligates electoral bodies not to perform "any action violating the principle of voter's secret will expression."[22]
Animats 10y ago
The CEO of Diebold Election Systems in 2004, where GEMS came from, was Walden O'Dell, who was also a fund-raiser for the Bush campaign at the time.[1] "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" wrote Mr. O'Dell.[2] He resigned in 2005 after being indicted for securities law violations. That's probably when this feature went in. [1] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Diebold_Election_Systems http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Diebold_Election_System... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/machine-politics-in-the-digital-age.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/machine-politics-...
- c22 10y ago
  In part two it's claimed the feature was added on 6/27 2001.
askvictor 10y ago
On reading that headline I thought maybe someone had come up with a voting system where you could assign a portion of your vote to one candidate and a portion to the other. E.g. 60% to Clinton, 40% to Trump
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  For some strange reason, I like this idea.
- DamienSF 10y ago
  If you read beyond the headline, you'll see that this is actually the conclusion of the article.
stevetrewick 10y ago
I'm deeply unconvinced by TFA (and the rest of the series). There are insufficient technical details (and those that are there are taken way out of context) to judge whether a) the author's conjecture is reasonable, and b) the author actually has sufficient understanding of such details to make their claims credible. There's stuff like 'some code I found an FTP server one time' which add considerable amounts of doubt and ambiguity. That said, such objections merely highlight the root cause of the problem - the software and process is not auditable. If it was I could just go and check for myself. Without that access neither I nor anyone else can verify the claims, nor the counter claims that everything is legit (though see also Thompson hack, reproducible builds, etc) I'm not a 'closed source = evil' kind of a person but here it seems like an absolute no brainier.
aaronhoffman 10y ago
I'm pretty sure most voter fraud/electronic count type issues can be solved with git (and/or blockchain). Anyone working on that?
- VLM 10y ago
  Its hard to implement those without timestamps and anonymity is impossible with timestamps plus ubiquitous cameras and modern image analysis software, not to mention "the internet of things powned by foreign governments and corporations". I'm not implying anything, but an anonymous vote for Trump was registered into the blockchain at 9:55:01 at XYZ elementary school, and at 9:55:23 a hacked gas station security camera across the street shows a dude walking out the door and into a car license plate WTF-123 that seems to be registered at the same address as drivers license number 1234-XYZ which happens to be VLM and his rather studly DL demographic data (height weight race gender) seems to match the dude in the video... Meanwhile VLMs phone, which is powned by the NSA, KGB, and god knows who else, records VLM's GPS coordinates as in the voting booth at 9:55:01 and shows him driving the car back to the coordinates of his house. And of course VLM's kids went to that elementary school when they were little. So it could just all be a coincidence, but I think I might know who VLM voted for ...
  - aaronhoffman 10y ago
    Very true, it would not make a perfectly anonymous voting system, but I think it could prevent some fraud. You could take steps to separate the name from the vote of course. e.g. After the person confirms their identity somehow, give them a random number that only they see/have access to, associate the vote with that number. The "repos" could be made public and you could confirm your vote afterwards. No vote could be "changed" if it was in a chain of hashes... Your point about timestamp is true. And although I personally think we could stand to be more open about how we vote (and also more accepting of others) I agree anonymity is important. Perhaps a system like this would be efficient enough to greatly reduce the voting time window. Make it harder to determine who voted by timestamp due to "noise". (or perhaps, can't vote unless there are 5 people present... not a perfect solution, just throwing some ideas at the wall.)

136 points by Varcht 10y ago

ithipster 10y ago

more fundamentals on the issue: http://ithipster.com/47.html http://ithipster.com/47.html

leggomylibro 10y ago
That's not exactly 'more fundamentals'; it's a much shorter, less informative, and more biased piece. The linked article goes far more in-depth, is far more objective, and after reading through the first 5 articles I feel a little bit more edified about the issue. Now I understand the core beef: that a schema change to this voting software caused all votes to be stored in their relational DB as doubles instead of ints, and a good way for observers to verify that an ordinary election isn't behaving as a weighted one behind the scenes was never added, which makes this voting system insecure and not what a reasonable person would consider "observable". The article you linked, on the other hand, made me feel patronized, skeptical of the author's central premise, and a little bit uncomfortable.
- ithipster 10y ago
  biased which way?

labster 10y ago

I don't see what the problem is. Fractional vote transfer is a basic feature of Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections. Although there's no reason to do any counting on the voting machines themselves in that case, just recording the ballots.

imron 10y ago
The problem is when it can be enabled in elections that do not use Single Transferable Votes, and discovery can be plausibly denied as a configuration error (oops, it's still set to weighted voting from a previous election and wasn't reconfigured correctly).

huac 10y ago

The entire argument is DOUBLE instead of INT http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-3/ http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-3/ within some Access database.

throwanem 10y ago
Access has a signed 32-bit long integer type, so it is odd to see a double used here. Still a hell of a lot of stew from one oyster.
- grzm 10y ago
  I've seen all kinds of data type mismatches in databases. Unfortunately, I don't find this all that surprising.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    "Harris found the “DOUBLE” setting in all GEMS databases from all states for version 1.18 forward. Looking at older GEMS databases, version 1.17 and before, votes were instead configured as whole numbers (LONG INTEGER)." On top of that, they claim that there's also specific functionality to deal with rounding in the output results - why would anyone do it if they honestly thought that votes are always integer. In fact, they even present an email discussing the implementation of this, so it wasn't exactly under the radar.

nxc182 10y ago

This is why we absolutely do not need electronic voting (or electronic vote counting) in any way. Paper voting (with polling locations distributed to balance load) with hand counting and verifiable addition operations to get the final vote counts is what is needed. Having voted in person at town hall, and then having helped count the votes, I know that it is doable - just like any other laborious task is doable with enough people involved. Electronic voting just doesn't buy you anything more than risk - all at the cost of verifiability. The other advantage to hand counting with a neighbor nearby is that there is a strong penalty for manipulating the election - your neighbor will notice. These machines make it way too easy to manipulate elections at mass scale without detection.

tedmiston 10y ago
And yet we trust software to do things like run our credit card transactions and withdraw money from our bank accounts. The resistance [from several in the industry not just your comment] to making voting happen via software really concerns me.
- NikolaeVarius 10y ago
  Those systems are made by massive companies with a hugely vested interest in NOT screwing up because screwing up would massively screw up their revenue. Voting systems do not have that.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  That's significantly less important than voting. And the incentives are properly aligned: the bank is responsible for making its systems secure, and if they lose your money they have to refund it. Voting? Not so much. Lost ballots? "Woops :) sorry." If the voting machine vendor executives faced actual personal serious jail time for botched counts, I might be more inclined to trust it. Then again, I bet you a tenner they'd suddenly have a lot more fail safes in place. Aligned incentives is absolutely, 100% required for anything to work in our society. It's what we're built on. Otherwise you will always be swimming upstream.

DonHopkins 10y ago

They implemented the fractional voting feature just in case the United States reinstitutes the three-fifths compromise. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

ahh 10y ago

I gotta wonder: if this was really a way someone was trying to steal an election...why would they bother? Once you have thoroughly owned the voting machine system and can set weights why not, I don't know, just ignore the counted ballots entirely and report the totals as whatever you want?

ccarter84 10y ago
If you go too far down the rabbit hole, you'll find that's what some folks believe. Been there, got the t-shirt. Ultimately not sure where I stand now.
imron 10y ago
Because of the need to do it in a way that is both plausible and not readily detectable.
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
I think the idea is that you want the results to "match-up" with exit polls and number of voters. I assume it adjusts the proportionality so the sum total remains the same, and ballot questions that the hijacker is not concerned with are not skewed. Since you have no idea how many people will vote until the conclusion, if you wait until after the conclusion to modify results, it would be more obvious and difficult.

serge2k 10y ago

> PART 1: VOTES ARE BEING COUNTED AS FRACTIONS INSTEAD OF AS WHOLE NUMBERS Should really be > PART 1: VOTES COULD BE COUNTED AS FRACTIONS INSTEAD OF AS WHOLE NUMBERS Existence of the feature doesn't indicate it's use, although it is obviously worrying.

Bud 10y ago
Definitely a sensationalized clickbait headline that's not backed up by the article in any way.
sctb 10y ago
Thank you for pointing that out! We've updated the submission title to clarify.

trendia 10y ago

I'm not sure that storing ints would be more resistant to fraud than storing as doubles. You could easily manipulate the vote by randomly switching X% of votes like so: if wrongVote && rand() < X: FlipVote() This would have the same effect as fractional voting, even if you store as integers.

vilhelm_s 10y ago
But that would be easily detected by looking at the source code or disassembly. I think the concern here is that the "weighted" election mode provides an easy way to manipulate election outcomes while providing deniability ("oh, that code is just used for weighted elections in California").
- trendia 10y ago
  A weighted election mode would also be visible through source code or disassembly?
  - colanderman 10y ago
    Yes, it's also made visible in the documentation.
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  Wait, are there actual states in the US that use weighted elections? I thought the whole point of the US's system is that (ideally) every citizen has as much say as anyone else.
  - vilhelm_s 10y ago
    Apparently California has a system (Proposition 218) where local government can impose certain property taxes, but such taxes have to be approved by a 2/3 majority of property owners, and the vote is weighted by the amount of property they own.

maerF0x0 10y ago

there are cryptographic voting systems that would allow results to be verifiable and for voters to verify their vote was counted. That and FOSS voting software would probably help .

wnevets 10y ago

The paper ballots that caused the 2000 debacle really wasn't any better the problems with e-voting we have today. The problem isn't the medium of voting but who is in charge of creating and maintaining the ballots.

tomohawk 10y ago
The paper ballots that were punch cards caused problems. The paper ballots that were marked and optically scanned caused no problems and were easy and fast to recount. Some counties in FL had the old punch card ballots, some had the optically scanned. All of the problems were with the punch card ballots. And with the lawyers arguing over hanging chads and other nonsense.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_chads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_chads
- wnevets 10y ago
  You're also forgetting about the butterfly ballots that confused voters because of their design. A large number of voters claimed they voted for the wrong person because of it. > http://andrys.com/flballot.html http://andrys.com/flballot.html
DamienSF 10y ago
Paper ballots works well in every European democracies and is far more transparent and secured than the electronic machines we have today. As a matter of fact, Germany has tested electronic machines but went back to paper ballots to preserve the reliability of the vote. The article doesn't just cast the doubt on electronic voting machines, it shows they are set-up to enable election fraud. How many more proofs is needed to convince voters that sadly, elections results can't be trust?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

douche 10y ago

Any sort of software for voting machines really ought to be open-source. Anything less than complete transparency is a non-starter.

Scirra_Tom 10y ago
And how do you verify the machines are running that code? And how do you know someone's just not adding to the total when it's collated?
- acobster 10y ago
  You have redundant integrity checks involving cryptography and independent, human professionals built into the compilation/deployment/testing process.
hairy_man674 10y ago
Not ought but must. It's a fundamental concept in system security known as as Kerckhoffs's Principle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity The rationale is to allow anybody to audit the system, so that soundness of the design can be proven against an adversary with perfect knowledge of it. And yet Americans let companies enforce intellectual property rights over systems whose security (flaws) could change your vote... update: Bruce Schneier on security of electronic voting: https://www.opendemocracy.net/media-voting/article_2213.jsp https://www.opendemocracy.net/media-voting/article_2213.jsp

legostormtroopr 10y ago

> What fractionalized votes can do: > They allow “weighting” of races. Weighting a race removes the principle of “one person-one vote” to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. This is extremely inflammatory language. What I think they mean is: > They allow “weighting” of electoral contests. Weighting an electoral contest removes the principle of “one person-one vote” to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. However, what they wrote seems to heavily imply a racial bias to electronic elections. Why they would choose to use such racially charged language around such a benign topic at this time seems only to drive links to their site over such a non-controversial issue.

vilhelm_s 10y ago
Note that the "races" wording is taken from the voting machine manual. But I agree, it seems kindof deliberate.
grzm 10y ago
I think they're using "race" in the contest/competition sense, aren't they? For other uses in the article: "The “Summary” vote tally, which provides overall election totals for each race on Election Night" and "Presidential race in an entire state switched in four seconds" Granted, they could have chosen other language that's less likely to be misconstrued. As for the choice of language, I don't think the article is all that well written (for another example, mixing "fractional" and "decimal" to mean the same thing). I don't think there was that much thought put into the language.

DamienSF 10y ago

There have been many statistical analysis pointing out to potential election fraud due to the electronic counting of the votes. For those who missed it, here is a comprehensive report on potential election fraud during recent Democratic primaries: http://www.election-justice-usa.org/Democracy_Lost_Update1_EJUSA.pdf http://www.election-justice-usa.org/Democracy_Lost_Update1_E... The last part is related to the electronic counting of the votes. Here what Fritz Scheuren, the 100th President of the American Statistical Association, had to say on the Democratic primaries “as a statistician, I find the results of the 2016 primary voting unusual. In fact, I found the patterns unexpected [and even] suspicious. There is a greater degree of smoothness in the outcomes than the roughness that is typical in raw/real data […] the difference between the reported totals, and our best estimate of the actual vote, varies considerably from state to state. However these differences are significant—sometimes more than 10%—and could change the outcome of the election”

nkassis 10y ago

I read part 1,2,3,4 and found multiple issues with this article. In part 2 they show results for alaska with fractional numbers. What isn't clear is that it's actually results from part 4 where they edited the access DB to change the numbers to match set percentages they wanted. Second reading those emails in part 2 it seems they are discussing that the per candidate numbers in weighted elections (when the machines are used for those) then adding them they show totals with one less digit. But that only matters if they have fractional parts which they haven't shown to have happened in a real election. There doesn't seem to be any proof of actual fraud here. Just a bunch of suppositions.

natch 10y ago

This is really disturbing. We need a DARPA-challenge level effort to get some better solutions designed for this. It can't be that hard. A git repo per machine, recording an audit trail further verified by the block chain, could be the start of a solution, for example.

benchaney 10y ago
"A git repo per machine, recording an audit trail further verified by the block chain" This is just a list of technologies. It's not the start of a solution, and it isn't even really clear what problem you are trying to solve.
- natch 10y ago
  The problem of undetected vote tampering at scale > individual voter being relatively easy -- this problem was pretty clear in the original article.

Keverw 10y ago

It's sad that elections, one of the most important things we have here in America are ran on closed sourced copyrighted systems owned by corporations. They say it's rigged, I would hope it's not but really who knows if they don't have access to the code?

grzm 10y ago
I think it would be nice to have the source code open for review. However, that doesn't solve the problem. It's very difficult (impossible?) to guarantee the reviewed software is what's actually running on the machines, not to mention how does one validate the compilation, the OS, the firmware, the hardware—you get the picture. And the voting machine itself is only one part of the whole voting system. It sounds like this is something you're interested in. I encourage you to take a look at what's being done. I've shared a couple of links elsewhere in this thread, which if nothing else can provide a starting point.
- Keverw 10y ago
  Yeah good point. Hashing the binary wouldn't really help because they could modify the GUI to report the wrong hash and most people who aren't computer people wouldn't really get what it means anyways. I been thinking a blockchain based system would be interesting, but it'd have to be really easy to use for everyone. People who have no computer or phone all the way to the computer expert.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I think blockchain might have some application, but I'm unconvinced that computer technology alone is going to solve it. Have a look at this slide deck from Ron Rivest (of RSA fame). https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf I think he does a pretty good job of covering the history of modern voting and how technology can be properly applied. You might find this Google Tech Talk by Ben Adida "Verifying Elections with Cryptography" interesting as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s

mentos 10y ago

What would be wrong with a voting machine assigning you a UUID that you can print out and verify your vote on a website where everyone else's 100 million votes are displayed?

Animats 10y ago
Because then party goons / your employer / cops demand your UUID, check your vote, and beat you / fire you / arrest you if they don't like it.
s_q_b 10y ago
When ballots are not secret, they can influenced by social, political, or economic actors through punishment and reward. For example, voters in many places used to face extreme peril if they voted against the candidate picked by their social group, party, or union. This peril ranged from reduced social standing, to loss of employment, and even physical violence. As such coercion is contrary to the democratic objectives of an election, secret ballots were introduced to ensure ballots represent the free will of the voters. There are mechanisms by which one could both keep the ballot secret and allow a public tally. But to avoid hacking, like the floating-point vote-value in GEMS outlined in another story, the system does require bullet-proof crypto. Regardless of how the ballots are counted, I do believe there should always be paper backups, scanned, and filed so that citizens can examine them digitally and in person if necessary. With that system one could spot-check any suspected irregularity. Only with such physical redundancy would I trust digital voting systems at this point. Sometimes there's no substitute for good old dead trees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot Article 21.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "The will of the people...shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which...shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."[19] Article 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights (the Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica) grants to every citizen of member states of the Organization of American States the right and opportunity "to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrange and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters".[20] Paragraph 7.4 of the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE, obligates the member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to "ensure that votes are cast by secret ballot or by equivalent free voting procedure, and that they are counted and reported honestly with the official results made public."[21] Article 5 of the Convention on the Standards of Democratic Elections, Electoral Rights and Freedoms in the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States obligates electoral bodies not to perform "any action violating the principle of voter's secret will expression."[22]

Animats 10y ago

The CEO of Diebold Election Systems in 2004, where GEMS came from, was Walden O'Dell, who was also a fund-raiser for the Bush campaign at the time.[1] "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" wrote Mr. O'Dell.[2] He resigned in 2005 after being indicted for securities law violations. That's probably when this feature went in. [1] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Diebold_Election_Systems http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Diebold_Election_System... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/machine-politics-in-the-digital-age.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/machine-politics-...

c22 10y ago
In part two it's claimed the feature was added on 6/27 2001.

askvictor 10y ago

On reading that headline I thought maybe someone had come up with a voting system where you could assign a portion of your vote to one candidate and a portion to the other. E.g. 60% to Clinton, 40% to Trump

gm-conspiracy 10y ago
For some strange reason, I like this idea.
DamienSF 10y ago
If you read beyond the headline, you'll see that this is actually the conclusion of the article.

stevetrewick 10y ago

I'm deeply unconvinced by TFA (and the rest of the series). There are insufficient technical details (and those that are there are taken way out of context) to judge whether a) the author's conjecture is reasonable, and b) the author actually has sufficient understanding of such details to make their claims credible. There's stuff like 'some code I found an FTP server one time' which add considerable amounts of doubt and ambiguity. That said, such objections merely highlight the root cause of the problem - the software and process is not auditable. If it was I could just go and check for myself. Without that access neither I nor anyone else can verify the claims, nor the counter claims that everything is legit (though see also Thompson hack, reproducible builds, etc) I'm not a 'closed source = evil' kind of a person but here it seems like an absolute no brainier.

aaronhoffman 10y ago

I'm pretty sure most voter fraud/electronic count type issues can be solved with git (and/or blockchain). Anyone working on that?

VLM 10y ago
Its hard to implement those without timestamps and anonymity is impossible with timestamps plus ubiquitous cameras and modern image analysis software, not to mention "the internet of things powned by foreign governments and corporations". I'm not implying anything, but an anonymous vote for Trump was registered into the blockchain at 9:55:01 at XYZ elementary school, and at 9:55:23 a hacked gas station security camera across the street shows a dude walking out the door and into a car license plate WTF-123 that seems to be registered at the same address as drivers license number 1234-XYZ which happens to be VLM and his rather studly DL demographic data (height weight race gender) seems to match the dude in the video... Meanwhile VLMs phone, which is powned by the NSA, KGB, and god knows who else, records VLM's GPS coordinates as in the voting booth at 9:55:01 and shows him driving the car back to the coordinates of his house. And of course VLM's kids went to that elementary school when they were little. So it could just all be a coincidence, but I think I might know who VLM voted for ...
- aaronhoffman 10y ago
  Very true, it would not make a perfectly anonymous voting system, but I think it could prevent some fraud. You could take steps to separate the name from the vote of course. e.g. After the person confirms their identity somehow, give them a random number that only they see/have access to, associate the vote with that number. The "repos" could be made public and you could confirm your vote afterwards. No vote could be "changed" if it was in a chain of hashes... Your point about timestamp is true. And although I personally think we could stand to be more open about how we vote (and also more accepting of others) I agree anonymity is important. Perhaps a system like this would be efficient enough to greatly reduce the voting time window. Make it harder to determine who voted by timestamp due to "noise". (or perhaps, can't vote unless there are 5 people present... not a perfect solution, just throwing some ideas at the wall.)