Paper Vote Canada

The Debate: E-Voting: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Technology and the vote: Why has there been a stubbornly slow adoption of electronic voting?

The Agenda - November 10, 2008

Note: This episode has not yet aired, it will be on television tonight at 8 PM and again at (I think) 11 PM. The video is usually up online a few days after the show airs. I will update this posting with new information when available.

UPDATE: I have created a discussion thread on the "Your Agenda" discussion forum: e-voting. You'll have to create an account there if you want to add your thoughts before or after the show. ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 9 PM: The show has just ended. I thought the debate was good. I also thought it was positive that the debate focused on a much more realistic assessment of evoting in terms of voter engagement and turnout.

If voting was about convenience, you wouldn't have seen people standing in line for hours in the United States. Voting is about citizen engagement. If the citizens find something interesting to engage with, technology can be an enabler. But you don't need online voting for that, you need an online presence for every day other than the election, much as we're seeing already with Barack Obama, who reached out through BarackObama.com (and into many other Internet channels) and is now connecting with Americans through his transition site change.gov

To me this technology argument "young people use technology, so voting should use technology" is ridiculous. Young people aren't stupid. Putting up a Facebook page is not the answer, putting up content that they care about is the answer.

Both of the letters from the MPPs were very well informed.

As well Farhad Manjoo and Darin Barney were both well-informed about the technical issues, and it was great to see Don Lenihan being very clear that it is for the computer security experts to determine whether voting online is secure, not the politicians or corporations.

Marie Bountrogianni was obviously not well-informed about the technical issues, but unfortunately that didn't seem to stop her making incorrect assertions (if we can bank online, why not vote online? um, because they have COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SECURITY REQUIREMENTS).

John Hollins brings a corporate perspective to voting, talking about "serving customers", an approach which to be quite frank, I hate. Voters are not consumers being provided a service, they are citizens engaged in one of the few public activities of our democracy. Voting is not the same as paying a parking fine. (Longtime readers of this blog will know of Mr. Hollins and his boosterism for technology solutions.) In Canada we have very simple elections. You don't need a $3000 touchscreen voting machine with VVPAT paper trail, to record a single vote, so that when there's a problem, you can count the votes on the paper trail. JUST VOTE ON PAPER FIRST.

I will write a follow-up post on citizen engagement vs. e-voting.

Overall I thought it was a good discussion which in the end turned far more on the citizen engagement aspect.

After posting on the Agenda forum I was fortunate to get an email from Sandra Gionas and to have a chance to talk with her on the phone, and she has kindly included substantial quotes from me in her Inside Agenda blog posting Control, Alt, Delete and Vote.
ENDUPDATE

I love the loaded language people use for paper voting: "quaint", "old-fashioned"

or for the lack of technology in Canada's federal elections: "stubbornly slow adoption".

stubbornly?

This is what I had to say the last time someone argued that you couldn't stop the wheels of e-voting progress:

Ah yes. The real world. The modern world. The practical, down-to-earth, realistic, Common Sense Revolution world. Paper is obsolete, so old-fashioned, like the Geneva Convention and other inconveniences.

Bullshit.

corporate voting bullshit - Paper Vote Canada - November 24, 2006

If paper voting is so obsolete, why is it that, overwhelmingly, the most articulate and forceful campaigners against electronic voting are computer scientists? Are computer scientists generally considered stubbornly slow adopters? Could it be that the actual experts in computer technology know that from the standpoints of security, cost, simplicity and core principles of democracy, electronic voting is just a very bad idea?

You don't believe me?

* Computer Scientists question electronic voting - March 3, 2003
* Computer scientists slam e-voting machines - CNet News - September 27, 2004
* Following issuance of an analysis by four computer scientists who were members of the SERVE Security Peer Review Group, the Pentagon decided to scrap plans for the use of this technology to cast ballots in the 2004 Presidential election.
* Computer scientists weigh in on e-voting - July 20, 2006
* UC Computer Scientists Release Video on How to Hack a Sequoia Touch-Screen Voting Machine - September 9, 2008
* E-Voting Doesn’t Get Computer Scientist’s Vote - October 10, 2008

I could go on listing reports and articles for many pages, but I hope I've made my point.

Not having electronic voting is not stubborn resistance to progress, it's rational opposition to expensive, unnecessary, insecure technology that will undermine the foundations of our democracy.

Labels: canada, electronic voting, television

Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President



All hail the DRE 700.

Labels: electronic voting, humour, video

500th post.



What's interesting (and sad) is that Oprah blames herself for her voting problems.

First of all, if the machine doesn't record your vote, that's because the machine is badly designed. Second of all, it means you shouldn't be using machines.

It doesn't seem to occur to Oprah that the fault could lie with the machine.

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

shape-shifting electronic votes are more than fantasy, according to reports from states including West Virginia, Missouri, Nevada, Georgia and Colorado. Whether by accident or design, touch-screen voting machines have "flipped" votes from a caster's chosen candidate to one he opposes.

Unlike the old days when campaigners hung around street corners haranguing voters with handouts and pints of beer, the electronic era presents a sophisticated challenge to democracy.

Now, says Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and Subversion of Democracy 2000-2008, changes can occur seamlessly, without a breath of suspicion. Electronic glitches are only one of a range of mishaps, mistakes and dirty tricks that may decide outcome on Nov. 4.

Complaints about the electronic machines have mounted, along with calls for a return to paper ballots, like Canada's.

"More traditional systems are better," says Jeremy Epstein, a technological security expert and member of two Virginia legislative commissions that studied voting machines. "Paper-based and hand-counted ballots are fast, accurate and cheap. Studies show that machines are insecure and vulnerable to attack."

Fraud fears grow as [US] voters throng polls - The Toronto Star - October 21, 2008

(The article title is not great, something like "voting machine errors and voting surpression plague election" might have been closer to the mark.)

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

Election Data Services provides the US November 2008 voting equipment composition (I'm tempted to say "breakdown").

I should mention that they use some confusing terminology.
To me electronic voting covers optical scan, DRE and Internet voting.
They consider electronic voting to cover only DRE (usually touchscreen) machines.

An optical mark-sense reader is an electronic device just like a touchscreen machine. It uses optical sensors to read a dot on paper, rather than to record a fingerprint. It is subject to most of the kinds of attacks that a touchscreen suffers from: you can compromise the software/firmware, there may be errors in the software/firmware, the optical sensors may be mis-aligned or malfunctioning, the paper path may jam, the power can fail, etc.

As well, if you record the order in which voters submit their ballots for scanning, you can reverse this to determine exactly who voted for whom, by going down the stack of ballots - once again the secret ballot is compromised.

It is true that IF AN ERROR IS DETECTED or IF A RECOUNT IS MANDATED, you can then hand-count the ballots (albeit going slightly crosseyed staring at tiny circles for hours).

Of course if you were a clever hacker, you would just program the scanner to distort the election by a margin smaller than that which would trigger any investigation. A similarly small error would also not be detected.

NOTE: some kind of rendering bug puts this table far down on the page.

Type	% Registered Voters
Punch Cards	0.10
Lever Machines	6.72
Hand-Counted Paper Ballots	0.17
Optically-Scanned Paper Ballots	56.17
Electronic (DRE / Touchscreen) Systems	32.63
Mixed	4.22

from 2008 Voting Equipment Study (PDF)

According to votingmachines.procon.org the numbers previously were

2004: 1% paper, 35% optical scan, 29.5% DRE
2000: 1.5% paper, 29.5% optical scan, 12.5% DRE

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time.

...

so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

...

In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish.

An extensive New York Times Magazine report from January 6, 2008: Can You Count on Voting Machines?

And these are just the obvious, visible ways in which machines can fail.
There are many other silent ways in which the machines could fail internally that you would never detect.

You can move to optical mark-sense, but these are still machines:
* the poll workers need to get trained on them
* the paper can jam
* the scanners can fail
* the entire machine can fail

and on and on and on.

In case you think those are unlikely scenarios, they are already happening in advance voting in the United States.

The Jacksonville Times-Union reported long lines in northeast Florida, with at least two counties reporting problems with voting machines. In Duval County, 7 of 15 optical scanning machines used to count ballots had to be replaced, the newspaper reported.

Early voting suggests 2008 may see record turnout, expert says - CNN - October 21, 2008

Labels: election, electronic voting, usa

Note: DRE stands for Direct-Record Electronic, most commonly in the US these are "touch screen voting machines".

The main issue, according to a 2005 overview of electronic voting by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, is that if the record of votes cast exists only in digital form in a touch-screen system, there is no independent way to confirm the votes were recorded accurately and thus no way to conduct a reliable recount.

Overall, in the nation’s 170,000 polling places, there has been a shift from predominantly using manual systems (lever machines, punch cards, paper ballots) to computer-based systems (optical scan and DREs) in federal elections.

But according to news reports, as a result of the controversy over DRE machines, in the 2008 election many states might use optical scan paper ballots that require voters to fill in ovals with a pen.

Debate Continues over Security, Reliability of Voting Technology - America.gov - 27 August 2008

As I've said before, optical scan is the least-worst electronic technology, because you can at least do a manual recount of the paper ballots,

but you're still better off just counting the paper ballots by hand in the first place.

Labels: electronic voting

The Coast has an excellent and extensive article on issues with electronic voting, particularly as related to the Halifax Regional Municipality.

It's no wonder that Americans are increasingly distrustful of the voting process. Voting experts challenge every aspect of elections, including the registration process, the procedures at the polling place itself, the use of electronic machines and the counting and recounting of votes.

Contrast the sour American experience to Canadian elections: In this country, voters show up at the poll and are handed a paper ballot and a pencil. They check the box next to their preferred candidate and put the ballot in a box. After the polls close, an election official opens the box, and the official and poll observers from the political parties examine each ballot and agree on how the vote was cast. A final tally takes about half an hour.

The Canadian system is clean, unambiguous and fair.

But the Halifax Regional Municipality doesn't like the Canadian system, and is determined to change it.

iVote: Can electronic voting save democracy? - The Coast - September 18, 2008

Labels: canada, halifax, internet voting

There is this charming myth that machines are "reliable" and "correct" whereas people are error-prone. (The above post title is me being sarcastic.)

This will be shown to be totally false when, on election day, a percentage of the millions of voting machines fail in the following ways:

* mechanical failure
* touch screen misaligned
* touch screen doesn't work at all
* display screen fails (black screen)
* power fails
* printer fails
* card reader fails
* software error

If they were using Internet voting, the ways in which things could fail would be even more spectacular:

* computer monitor fails
* computer hard drive fails
* mouse not working
* keyboard error
* power fails
* network card fails
* router fails
* connection to ISP fails
* network attack or denial of service
* ISP hardware or software fails
* network transmission error
* voting software error
* central voting servers fail
* air conditioning in central voting server room fails
* power fails in central voting server room
* network fails in central voting server room
* server room catches fire (this happens more often than you might think)

Note that all of the above is just a sample of what WILL happen (the odds of a hard drive failing eventually are 100%) and none of the above require any malicious activity, just normal failures of systems. When you add in malicious activity, the scenarios get much, much worse.

Labels: electronic voting

"People make mistakes more than machines," said Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright.

Dear Jeff Waybright,

You are way wrong. You are confusing consistency with correctness. If a machine is programmed to do something (programmed, by a person) it will do that thing, consistently. If what it was programmed to do is WRONG, it will do it CONSISTENTLY WRONG.

Yours Truly,

Someone who actually knows about machines

Above quote from More W.Va. voters say machines are switching votes in the Charleston Gazette, October 18, 2008. The story reports that machines are not correctly displaying votes (presumably because of touch screen misalignment, or other malfunction).

Labels: election, electronic voting

One way to illustrate the simplicity of paper voting is to talk about how machines can fail, so...

On November 4, 2008 voting systems will fail somewhere in the United States in one or more jurisdictions in the country. Unfortunately, we don't know where. For this reason, it is imperative that every state prepare for system failures. We urge each state to take steps necessary to insure that inevitable voting machine problems do not undermine either the individual right to vote, or our ability to accurately count each vote cast.

Is America Ready to Vote? State Preparations for Voting System Problems in 2008

Labels: electronic voting, usa

It's election day in Canada.

Please vote.

Remember there are new identification rules, roughly you need either a driver's license (or health card with photo and address in Ontario) or two pieces of ID, one with name & photo and one with address.

See Voter Identification at the Polls for more information.

In general, see

http://www.elections.ca/

for any information you need about voting today.

If you're new to the process, this very simple guide will walk you through (with the exception of the new identification rules).

Labels: canada, election

I had the good fortune to be interviewed for The Toronto Star by Leslie Scrivener--which incidentally is a great name for a journalist. She quoted me quite a bit, I think the article came out well, I'm grateful to her for the opportunity.

"It's a very human system. It works," says Akerman, 40, an Ottawa technology planner and security expert. "You mark your ballot in private, but it's in a public setting. And it balances interests. You have scrutineers from different parties watching each other. It's hands on, easy to understand."

The ballot question: Paper or not? - The Toronto Star - October 11, 2008 - by Leslie Scrivener

Previously:
The Star had a very good article about the electronic voting issue in 2004, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be online anymore, I wrote about it at

July 13, 2004 Is the future in line or online? - Toronto Star - published July 12, 2004

Labels: canada, electronic voting, newspaper

Bump in stats from being on CBC Spark on October 8.



That reminds me I should put up some info about voting places and election results on the 13th, since I usually get a pile of hits on election day.

UPDATE: In case you're wondering, most of the hits are people searching for general voting/election information (where to vote, how to vote), not about the specific issue of electronic voting in Canada.

Labels: meta

I recognize that most people don't spend much time thinking about computer security. To the extent that they do, they either assume that there's some "security stuff" that is protecting their computer and transactions, or that such stuff could be created.

Here's the problem: lots of people have tried to create secure systems for a long time, and have failed miserably.

I don't have to get technical at all, I can just talk in the consumer space.

1. For years, games companies put elaborate efforts and skilled people into trying to protect their games from piracy. They had special codes, special floppy disks with holes punched into the magnetic media or deliberate errors, physical dongles, you name it.

And yet their games were always pirated. Eventually most of them just gave up on protecting their games.

2. For years, continuing today, media companies like the record and movie industry have attempted to protect their content from piracy with Digital Rights Management (DRM). They have sophisticated hardware, elaborate codes, highly skilled people and a large monetary incentive. And they have failed.

iTunes music DRM? There's a hack.
DVD DRM? There's a hack.

3. Apple has an incentive to protect its iPhone from being used on any network, as it has an exclusive deal with AT&T. Their phone is "locked".

iPhone locking? There's a hack

THERE IS ALWAYS A HACK.

Because any piece of software or hardware you can create, I can put a layer in front of. Your software talks to a hardware dongle? I write a layer of software that pretends to be the hardware.

And we're not talking big power or political incentives here, we're talking smart kids (mostly) who wanted to play some games, listen to some music, or watch some movies.

So if they couldn't even protect SONGS, do you seriously think they're going to be able to protect AN ENTIRE ELECTION?

There is no unbreakable "security stuff" to do that, it simply doesn't exist.
And even if it did, the incredible complexity of it would mean that the entire election would boil down to "trust the machine and the computer guys".

Wouldn't you rather trust a piece of paper you can see, a counting system so simple elementary school students could perform it, and volunteers and scrutineers from your own neighbourhood that you can watch?

Labels: security

There were e-voters in more than 30 countries, with the oldest born in 1913, they said.

"We had people vote from Sri Lanka, from Korea, from over 50 Canadian cities and 25 American states," said Cathy Mellett, e-voting project manager for the Halifax Regional Municipality.

10% of HRM voters cast e-ballots (via Carol) and 28,709 cast municipal e-votes (via sparkcbc Twitter)

Hmm, so let's see. You assign a PIN number to each citizen, and mail the PIN to their address, and the verification info is their birth year, AND you're tracking their voting location, which can only be done by tracking their IP address, which semi-uniquely identifies their computer.

So you know who they are multiple times over, through the combination of PIN, birth year, mailing address, and IP address.

So number one, goodbye secret ballot.

Are you seriously going to take it on trust that they won't be tempted to check to find out who voted for whom? That no one will ever be tempted to check this?

Number two, in a world full of good people and lots and lots of bad people, from Nigerian scammers to Russian mafia, letting people vote in a Halifax election from any computer anywhere in the world is a feature? Are you kidding me?

Labels: halifax, hrm, internet voting

Dan talks to Ilona Dougherty, Richard Akerman, and Grace Lake about voting online

Episode 48 - October 8 & 11, 2008 - CBC Radio - Spark - posted October 07, 2008

The audio is available as an MP3 download, or you can subscribe to the podcast, or get it through iTunes.

Just a couple quotes from me were used, but I think I got my points across.

Labels: audio, canada, cbc radio, cbc radio spark, electronic voting

Just trying to sort out my terminology:

Internet voting = web voting = Using the Internet to record your vote on some central election servers.

Electronic voting machine (or I sometimes just say "voting machine") = any of a number of different technologies for voting, primarily about touch-screen voting machines, but I would extend it to mark-sense optical scanners as well, in its broadest sense.

Electronic voting encompasses both using electronic voting machines, and Internet voting (which you can think of as using an electronic voting machine, at a distance, over the net).

This is fairly consistent with the use at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting

Labels: electronic voting

I'm trying to gather my rather rambling thoughts on this topic.
This is what I just said in an email to a newspaper interviewer:

Ultimately it comes down to a choice between a very simple system in the physical world where we use a combination of privacy, being in public, and the competing interests of strangers (the scrutineers and election workers) to provide results based on physical evidence that everyone can agree upon,

or an incredibly complex system involving your computer, many computer networks, and computer servers, all running software created by strangers, with all the possibilities this raises for either malicious attacks on the election, or normal computer errors, a situation where there simply is no evidence to rely upon other than what the computer says, and the computer can lie.

In other words, electronic voting is no different than telling a stranger how you want to vote ("I want to vote for the blue party"), and then having to trust that they actually voted the way you asked, despite the fact you know that they can lie.

Can you imagine if we had used Internet voting for the last Quebec referendum? We would still be arguing about the results.

In short, although I love technology, I know the difference between appropriate technology and unnecessary technology.

Paper and pen is the appropriate technology for voting.

Labels: canada, electronic voting

Nick Van der Graaf wrote me with a pointer to his very clear and thoughtful posting about voting machines.

If it ain't broke don't fix it - May 13, 2008

When officials come away from observing an electronic vote-counting system used in Monday's New Brunswick municipal election, I hope the lesson they take with them is this: Citizens do not need a machine to vote, nor to count those votes. And I hope for the health of our democracy that they will see that the application of technology to replace humans in this area is wholly inappropriate.

Labels: canada, electronic voting, new brunswick