Paper Vote Canada

a couple weeks ago, the chairman of the E.A.C. [Electoral Advisory Committee] announced the introduction of electronic voting of which fingerprinting of voters is a feature.

from Proposed electoral reforms

I think the above is not correct, from what I have read.
Initially at least, it is a fingerprint system that gives you a ballot.

The E.A.C. is part of the Electoral Office of Jamaica.

ORDERS FOR the procurement of 40 machines capable of triggering a ballot by matching fingerprints are likely to be placed with the two overseas-based companies shortlisted for the purpose within the next two weeks.

The machines should arrive in the island in time to be used in local government elections due by September, following a pilot test to determine their effectiveness.

The cost of the equipment has not been disclosed although the chairman of the Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC), Professor Errol Miller, told The Gleaner some time ago a budget had been set aside for the purpose.

He told The Gleaner on Monday that the technical committee set up in April to determine the specifications to which United States-based Cogent Systems Ltd, and French company SAGEM, would build the equipment had completed its work.

...

Mr. Brieffs [senior vice president at Cogent] confirmed Jamaica would be the first country to use the equipment in an actual election, but said he anticipated no major problems.

According to him, "it does not matter what the system is being used for. Whether for immigration purposes or for border control, the concept remains the same." He said the software designed for Jamaica was "user friendly and designed to keep the election flow."

...

With the cost likely to run into millions of dollars, the EAC is already exploring other uses to which the equipment can be put when not being used in elections. Areas being examined are law enforcement and the education and social security systems.

from Jamaica Gleaner Ballot machines on order

The House of Representatives on Tuesday (March 1 [2005]) amended three Bills paving the way for the electronic voter identification system to be introduced to the island's electoral process.

...

The system, which depends on finger print identification, will issue a ballot paper once the fingerprint has been applied and is found to be the appropriate fingerprint for the elector, who has presented it. Voting will then take place in the normal way.

The Bill also makes allowances for the presiding officer to revert to the original system in situations where the mechanism malfunctions and in such a case, the individual will be required to prove his identification by other means.

from House Clears Way for Use of Electronic Voter System

A senior Australian election official will attend a conference this week on electronic voting to be organized by the National Election Commission, Korea's top election watchdog.

The Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, ..., will share its experience at the "E-voting and Electronic Democracy: Present and the Future" conference in Seoul, March 17-18 [2005]

from The Korea Herald Australia to share e-voting skill.

Note: The ACT is the only Australian jurisdiction to use electronic voting for parliamentary elections.

An experimental online vote for the parliamentary elections will take place on March 20 in 50 different Bulgarian towns.

An initiative committee will start a campaign for popularizing the e-vote among the people aged 16 to 25 across the country, the initiators announced Monday in Veliko Tarnovo.

The March 20 e-vote will begin 7.00 a.m. to end 7.00 p.m. and more than 1,000 young people are expected to cast their vote. The experimental vote will be organized although there is no e-vote law adopted in Bulgaria.

It was earlier announced that building Bulgaria's online-voting system will cost at least BGN 4 M.

Bulgaria's MPs have introduced a bill for e-voting in general and presidential elections, as well as in the election of Bulgarian members for the EU Parliament. According to the bill, those who want to take part in the vote online would have to file applications three weeks earlier. A few days later, they would receive user name and password in a registered letter.

Lawmakers hope that introducing the e-vote can boost polls turnout.

from Bulgaria Launches Experimental E-Vote March 20 [2005]

If you want to increase voter turnout, make it mandatory to vote.
Don't undermine your democracy, while incidentally spending money that could be better used elsewhere.

Comfidex Corporation of New York, New York will introduce a secure, Web-
based e-voting system that provides paper-based audit trails for
recounts while preserving the anonymity of both the vote and the voter.
VoteFiler is implemented using commodity PCs, and is designed to
transparently coexist with traditional voting systems so that it may be
adopted at a pace acceptable to the voting public.

from ... e-Voting ... Among New Technologies at FOSE 2005, April 5-7 in Washington, DC

secure, Web-based, using commodity PCs?

Um, that's unpossible.

The Nagoya High Court on Wednesday declared void a city assembly election held in Kani, Gifu Prefecture in July 2003 after finding a temporary malfunction of electronic voting machines had gravely affected the election result.

According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, the ruling is the first to nullify the result of an election using an electronic voting system.

...

A total of 189 electronic voting machines were set up at 29 polling places for the city assembly election held on July 20, 2003.

But the voting system was halted temporarily for between nine minutes and 83 minutes due to overheating of the servers and other reasons.

...

Prof. Shigeki Yokoi of Nagoya University's graduate school said the Kani municipal government did not hold a trial election to verify whether the voting system properly worked. He said it was necessary for municipal and prefectural governments planning to employ electronic voting to test the system thoroughly. He added the central government should provide financial help for the introduction of electronic voting system because they are expensive.

Electronic voting: it's expensive, it's untested, and it doesn't work.

Court nullifies e-voting election result Daily Yomiuri On-Line March 10, 2005.

A review of voting machines used in Maryland's most populous county for the November elections found that 7 percent of the machines had problems such as frozen screens or failed to boot up.

An additional 5 percent in Montgomery County had vote tallies that were considerably lower than other machines used in the same precincts, causing elections officials to deem them ``suspect,'' according to the report released Tuesday. It was drafted by the county in December for the local election board.

But state officials disputed those figures, saying a review of the county's machines conducted by the state and the equipment's manufacturer showed that only 0.4 percent had significant problems in the Nov. 3 election.

from Report shows problems with some Maryland e-voting machines March 9, 2005

The municipal government of Niimi, Okayama Prefecture, which held the nation's first elections using electronic voting, will return to the traditional handwritten voting system for its April 24 mayoral and city assembly elections, following a merger with four neighboring municipalities.

The municipal government, which used the electronic voting system for its past two elections, proposed the electronic system for upcoming elections to the four municipalities that will merge on March 31.

However, the plan was rejected on the ground that there was not enough time to prepare for the next election.

...

The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry's election department said 10 municipalities had used e-voting in 12 elections and predicted that the system would become widely used in the future.

from Daily Yomiuri On-Line

Is it better if you can inspect the code for voting machines?
Yes.

Can you solve the problem of providing that the code you inspected is actually running on the machine on election day?
No.

Anyway,
Senators Clinton and Kerry Submit Open Voting Bill

DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005 [PDF]) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public.

Slashdot comments also point out that "open code inspection" is quite different from "open source development".

This is not really an e-voting story, but you will sometimes see reports on "$22 million failed Ugandan e-voting project" so I thought I would link a good report. It was actually a registration system that failed for various reasons.

Failed Electronic Voter Registration in Uganda

Voting machines, we are told, "save money" over unreliable humans.

Ok, imagine I make to you this proposal:
In order to save money, we're going to spend millions of dollars on machines.
That will be used for one day.
Every few years.
Oh, and by the way, for all of the hundreds of days between each use, they will need to be stored. And you can't just stick them in a warehouse somewhere and forget about them. Because they must work perfectly, on that one day. Working perfectly means NO ONE has made unauthorized changes to them. And none of their systems has been damaged due to sitting in a freezing warehouse, or a leaky warehouse, or any kind of warehouse that doesn't keep them all nice and snugly protected from any possible harm.

So now I hope you're thinking: hmm, not so much with the saving money.

RTE News (Ireland): PAC discusses cost of storing e-vote machines

The ongoing cost of maintaining electronic voting machines was discussed again at the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee today.

Questions were raised about the big variations in the cost of storing and insuring the machines in different parts of the country.

The total cost of maintaining the machines is likely to run to €1 million each year for the next 20 years.

Not needed in cases where the ballot is simple, spokesman says.

Despite the recent decision in the U.S. to use printed records to improve the credibility of electronic voting, it seems unlikely that electronic voting will be used widespread in Australia, according to a spokesperson for the Australian Electoral Commission.

...

Tim Evans, the director of elections systems & Policy for the Australian Electoral Commission, does not believe that widespread electronic voting will be useful in Australia

...

"First of all, for electronic voting to spread throughout Australia, there would need to be an amendment to the Australian Commonwealth Elections Act. This will only happen if Parliament is persuaded that it would create advantages to voting, and the security of each vote would be maintained or improved.

...

Despite electronic voting trials being successful in the Australian Capitol Territory, Evans, believes that this is only because the region is different to the rest of Australia.

"ACT has a very complicated voting system. Many people cannot access many of the 100 voting stations in the region and the electoral process has complicated layers attached to it, so it takes a long time to count the votes. So electronic voting is useful for this region. However, there are over 8,000 polling stations in the rest of Australia, which are within easy access to populations.

"It would take a much bigger effort to transform 8,000 polling stations into electronic voting stations, than it took to build these systems in ACT.

from E-voting unlikely to spread through Australia
Image and Data Manager Online - Feb 7, 2005

The good news is that Ireland is handling things properly.
The bad news (for e-voting enthusiasts) is that when you handle things properly, it immediately becomes apparent that the real costs of electronic systems are very high.

To analyze them, store them, certify them for each election...

Compare this with paper. How much analysis do you need to trust the paper voting system?

The Sunday Times - Ireland
E-voting study costs spiral

An independent assessment of the electronic voting system has cost the state €640,000 in less than a year.

The Commission on Electronic Voting was set up last March to advise the government on the safety and accuracy of the system. It has run up a bill of €640,000 up until the end of last year and its final cost is likely to be substantially higher. The group is planning to hire experts to run extensive tests on the voting system — which could take nine months — before it will be able to determine if it is usable. The technical work is likely to be costly.

Computerised voting was set to be rolled out last June in the local and European elections but was withdrawn at the last minute amid concerns over its accuracy. The government was attacked for failing to assess the reliability of the €52m system fully before purchasing it.

The 6,200 electronic voting machines are now being stored in warehouses across the country at a cost so far of €660,000.

“The system is flawed and will always be — the government should cut its losses. Spending more and more money on it may not be a wise thing to do. It has already cost a fortune and it doesn’t make any sense to keep throwing money at it in the vain hope that they will be able to use it in the future,” said Joe McCarthy, a chartered engineer and a strong critic of electronic voting.

April 2004 - Interim Report
December 2004 - First Report

The risk analysis identified 5 material risks in connection with the use of the system at the June elections:

* error in the system as a whole;
* error in voting machine software affecting all machines;
* tampering with software to alter election result;
* tampering with ballot modules during transportation;
* damage to machines before elections.

Remember, e-voting proponents, risks are ACROSS THE ENTIRE LIFE OF THE SYSTEM.

That means it's got to be secure when designed, it's got to be secure running in the polling place, and it must be secure between elections. If you cost these security requirements out fully, there is no way electronic is cheaper than paper. Paper needs security at the polling place and until counted, and that's it.

Incidentally, the Irish name for the commission is
An Coimisiún um Vótáil Leictreonach

The prototype that Diebold Inc. is now touting is exactly what some critics of the ATM-like machines have been demanding for several years.

Even so, paper records alone are not enough to satisfy computer scientists who say transparency in the electronic machines' design and software must complement paper backups.

...

Critics of North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold say the AccuView Printer Module is a step in the right direction but doesn't address the potential for buggy software or malfunctioning hardware that could misrecord votes or expose voting systems to hackers, deletions or other disasters.

...

Computer scientists also are concerned that the handful of private laboratories licensed to certify voting equipment, including the printer module, still operate in secret and without any federal guidelines.

"It's a very, very small step forward in terms of security of elections," said Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute of Johns Hopkins University and co-author of a scathing report on Diebold machines.

ABC News - AP - Feb. 3, 2005
Prototype E-Vote Printer Fails to Satisfy
the story is in three pages, or you can view the one-page printable version

The issue, as most of these computer scientists well know, is that it is impossible to create a "transparent" computer system.

lists.stdlib.net

E-voting
E-voting_announce
E-voting_press

Ireland On-Line Dept officials to face questions about e-voting fiasco Feb. 3, 2005

Officials ... are due before the Oireachtas public accounts committee today to answer questions about the electronic voting debacle.

The department spent around €50m on the initiative, which was then shelved due to security concerns.

The Government was planning to introduce the system nationwide during last year's local and European elections.

However, this plan was abandoned six weeks before the vote after an independent commission expressed concern about the accuracy of the voting machines and the possibility of electoral fraud.

ElectricNews.net Ireland faces EUR50m e-voting write-off - Thursday, February 03 2005
UPDATE 2005-02-09: This article has been corrected by the publisher. I have included corrections in bold.

A lack of public confidence in e-voting means that the Government may be forced into writing off its EUR50 million investment in electronic ballot systems

...

The government was due to introduce e-voting at local and European elections on 11 June 2004 but had to abandon its plans following the publication of an interim report of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting (ICTE) [Ed. note: should be CEV] which raised doubts over the accuracy of the software used in the system.

According to the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting (ICTE) submission to the CEV, the chosen Nedap/Powervote electronic voting system had a fundamental design flaw because it had no mechanism to verify that votes would be recorded accurately in an actual election. Consequently, results obtained from the system could not be said to be accurate, claimed the five-member independent body.

Other flaws in the system identified in the ICTE submission included possible software errors and the use of the graphical user interface programming language Object Pascal for a safety-critical system.

Although the commission's remit was advisory, the government abided by its recommendation that the system not be used until further testing had established just how secure it was.

However, Michael Noonan told the Irish Times that even if the system was found to be safe, few ministers would give it the go-ahead because the public would have little trust in it.

...

"The criticisms contained in the report of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting make it clear that this was a fiasco of the highest order," said Fergus O'Dowd TD., Fine Gael's spokesman on the Environment. "Considering all the information that is available to him, Minister Roche needs to fully explain the findings of these inquiries."

The above article unfortunately seems to have attached the acronym for the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-voting (ICTE) to the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting (CEV). An easy enough mistake to make.

You know what's easier than spending millions of taxpayer dollars on an insecure, unnecessary system? I suggest spending the money on things the taxpayers actually need and want instead.

This article has useful content but a misleading title.
Standards aim to secure e-voting systems
CNet News - January 31, 2005

Um, standards won't secure jack.
Standards may help you to evaluate how good or how bad a job of security is being done.
That being said, it is essentially impossible to design a real-world electronic voting system that is not vulnerable to a vast number of potential problems.
This is the fundamental point: if there is stuff happening inside the machine that I cannot see, there is no way I can trust the machine.

The Voting System Performance Rating (VSPR) project ... [will provide] a set of tests will be published that will let e-voting systems be evaluated in areas such as privacy, accessibility and accuracy.

Diebold Election Systems, a target of many electronic-voting critics during the 2004 U.S. election, announced Thursday it has completed the design for a printer that would give its e-voting machines a paper trail.

I imagine that must have been quite the piece of design work, considering the voting machines already have internal paper printers, and Diebold has been producing ATMs that give paper receipts for years.

Fortunately, Diebold has the ITAA to explain away the need for a paper trail.
You know what I think about industry lobby groups?
I think they should shut up.
Why don't they just lead into all their statements with "we are stating the following for the financial gain of corporations".

Here's my enhanced version of the report

The Information Technology Association of America, which has defended e-voting machines as accurate and safe, says

the following to help protect the financial gain of corporations:

Diebold's move appears to be focused on the demand for paper-trail ballots. "It's a situation where companies are going to provide what their customers want," says Bob Cohen, executive vice president of the ITAA, which counts e-voting machine makers among its members.

ITAA officials have questioned if voter-verified paper trails will provide a significant benefit while adding costs to e-voting machines. Though the ITAA maintains that widespread attacks on e-voting machines are unlikely, officials there suggest that programmers smart enough to change ballots inside e-voting machines could also manipulate the printouts.

"Our point all along is that paper-based solutions are one alternative," Cohen says. "It gets to be as much an issue of peace of mind for the voters as anything else."

Oh yes those silly voters, they shouldn't worry their pretty little heads.

Mr. Cohen, that is an idiotic statement.
An election is the transformation of a collective act of voting into confidence that the government was fairly selected. Why is that important? Well for example, in the US national government, a few hundred elected officials decide the policies for THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE. Elections give a tiny number of politicians power over the lives of millions. Without the confidence of those millions, the system falls apart.

As for this voter-verified paper, it's fixing the effect, not the cause.
The cause is that you can't trust the computer.
I say, cut out the middleman. Vote on paper. Count the paper. See how easy that is?

Story is from PC World - January 27, 2005.
Diebold to Market Paper-Trail E-Voting System

On a related note, I'm thinking of buying a new book that just came out:
Your Call Is Important to Us : The Truth About Bullshit.

"It's amazing to see people's faces when they drop the ballots in the box ... Many have waited their whole lives to vote," said Copeland, who also described Iraqis dancing and singing in the Maryland hotel parking lot. "People were clapping when their families voted."

Unlike the high-tech electronic voting and short paper ballots seen in November's U.S. election, Iraqi ballots were four 8-inch-by-11inch pages that listed 111 political entities and more than 7,000 candidates, Copeland said.

Oddly, we never hear the descriptions of people's pride in voting when they touch a button on a computer screen.

from the Washington Times, January 30, 2005
Iraqis head to vote in the United States

Does voting by any method other than traditional polling booths and paper ballots jeopardize either voters' right to privacy or their guarantee that their vote will be counted fairly? Not only has it been debated, but the issue has been settled for several municipalities right here in Canada.

Talk to John Hollins, the chief electoral officer for the Province of Ontario, and he'll give you the story. "It started back in 1976 when East York and Mississauga brought in punch card voting and evolved in the eighties with the optical scan in places like Etobicoke and Scarborough. At the time they used a centralized optical scan where you brought all the ballots into one place and the machine scanned them."

By the 1988 elections Toronto and North York went with the optical scan at the polling level because they didn't like the idea of ballots travelling from the polling locations. "They started with one machine for every three or four polls, but they ran into a few problems, so by 1991 they brough in scanners to all the polls."

By 1996 the experiment was working well enough to encourage the Ontario government to advance things... During the voting on Metro Toronto's amalgamation the City of North York used telephone voting. They had so much success that other municipalities followed suit."

but wait, it gets better

Why did Ontario decide to forsake the tried and true for something that, almost by defintion, has a margin of error? ... Elections -- at least the operational side -- are about credibility. So why did Ontario municipalities opt for systems which were, if only slightly, less credible?

According to Hollins, the quality of the people who were staffing the polling stations was not what it had been, or what it should be

That's right. John Hollins believes that unverifiable machines are BETTER than people. And apparently would rather buy machines, than try to fix people problems (if indeed any such exist). And so we continue

The feeling was that by introducing new voting techniques and technology into the mix they could weed out incompetent staff, thereby increasing the quality and accuracy. In addition, voting by mail or phone would improve accessibility. Finally, it would be more efficient.

I try to remain fairly objective about what I report, but this is bulls--t.

(All emphasis in above extracts is mine.)

in Summit "Canada's magazine on public sector purchasing" (in annoying locked PDF format) October 2004

Special: Focus on IT section
More on e-voting - Coming soon to an election near you - David Eadie