Paper Vote Canada

This cautionary documentary exposes the vulnerability of computers - which count approximately 80% of America's votes in county, state and federal elections - suggesting that if our votes aren't safe, then our democracy isn't safe either. Premieres Thursday, November 2 [2006] at 9pm.

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/

indirectly via Slashdot Diebold Demands That HBO Cancel Documentary /.

In one week, more than 80 million Americans will go to the polls, and a record number of them--90%--will either cast their vote on a computer or have it tabulated that way. When that many people collide with that many high-tech devices, there are going to be problems. Some will be machine malfunctions. Some could come from sabotage by poll workers or voters themselves. But in a venture this large, trouble is most likely to come from just plain human error, a fact often overlooked in an environment as charged and conspiratorial as America is in today. Four years after Congress passed a law requiring every state to vote by a method more reliable than the punch-card system that paralyzed Florida and the nation in 2000, the 2006 election is shaping up into a contest not just between Democrats and Republicans but also between people who believe in technology and those who fear machines cannot be trusted to count votes in a closely divided democracy.

Can This Machine Be Trusted? - Time - October 29, 2006

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands Voters in Amsterdam and 34 other Dutch cities may be using paper and pencil instead of computerized voting machines in national elections next month.

The government on Monday banned the use of one common type of computer voting machine, fearing that secret ballots may not be kept secret. It ordered a review of all electronic machines after the Nov. 22 election.

Government Renewal Minister Atzo Nicolai said the move was necessary after an investigation found the machines made by Sdu NV emitted radio signals that a technology-savvy spy could use to peek at a voters' choices from a distance of up to several dozen meters (yards).

"What can be detected is the image on the screen that's visible to the voter, by which his voting could be monitored," Nicolai said in a letter to parliament.

"In short, the machines made by the company Sdu can now be tapped, and there are no technical measures that can be taken before the upcoming elections that would prevent this tapping and guarantee the secrecy of the ballot."

He said he had revoked the permits for all the machines, about 10 percent of all voting machines used in the country.

A sample of the other machines used in next month's vote will be tested before the results are certified to ensure against fraud, Nicolai said.

The turnabout came after a group called "We Don't Trust Voting Computers" protested the vulnerability of electronic voting to fraud or manipulation.

Dutch government scraps plans to use voting computers in 35 cities including Amsterdam - IHT - AP - October 30, 2006

via Slashdot Voting Machines Banned by Dutch Minister /.

Daytona Beach -- Early voting was delayed in Volusia County for about an hour and 15 minutes Saturday morning after a transformer blew and knocked out power to the City Island Library in Daytona Beach.

Elections Supervisor Ann McFall said the polling place was closed after the electricity went out about 9:55 a.m. The power didn't come back until about 1:30 p.m. but residents were allowed to vote after about 11 a.m. Elections officials opened windows to let in light and checked voter registrations by calling the elections office in DeLand using cellular telephones. The site remained open later, as well.

Officials discovered another problem Saturday night -- the ballot count was off by 20 votes.

McFall said votes cast during the power outage were stored in one compartment of the vote-collection box, where they were supposed to be held until they could be fed into the electronic-vote counter. Twenty ballots likely spilled into another compartment, where counted votes are kept.

She said she plans to recount those ballots Nov. 5, when she also will recount ballots cast on Thursday at the DeLand elections office because the vote count there was off by one.

Now imagine a power outage say, in the middle of US voting day.
With thousands of people waiting to vote on exciting modern touch-screen electronic machines. None of which, I can pretty much guarantee, have power backup.
Plus which, I'm guessing the machines handle a sudden power outage with all the grace of most computer systems - damaged files, corrupted databases, errors on memory cards.

Power outage delays voting - Orlando Sentinel - October 29, 2006

as midterm [US] elections approach this November [2006], electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries.

from Will The Next Election Be Hacked? by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the October 04, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone (issue #1010).

On October 24, 2006 the Chief Electoral Officer of Quebec released a report (in French only) "Report on the Evaluation of New Methods of Voting". In a press release, three root causes of problems with electronic voting machines in the 2005 municipal elections were identified:

* an imprecise legislative and administrative framework
* absence of technical specifications, norms and standards
* poor management of voting systems (especially lack of security measures)

He has recommended that the current moratorium on the use of these systems be maintained, and leaves it up to the provincial legislature to decide whether or not to use electronic voting in future.

(Above information copied from my additions to Wikipedia - Electronic voting in Canada.)

This was reported in the Canadian press starting on the 24th, see e.g.

RDI (French) - Des scrutins à jamais entachés - October 24, 2006 (includes links to videos)

CBC (English) - Electronic voting blamed for Quebec municipal election 'disaster' - October 25, 2006

In a new report on problems with Quebec's 2005 municipal election, chief electoral officer Marcel Blanchet targets the electronic voting system used to collect and count the votes.

The election was an expensive disaster marked by errors, which produced inaccurate numbers and unreliable results, the report said. And the new electronic system is to blame, it adds.

The full report (French only) is Élections municipales de novembre 2005 - Rapport d’évaluation des nouveaux mécanismes de votation (PDF, 3.2 MB). There are also Appendices (PDF: 3.4 MB / 120 pages).

There are more links at DGEQ News - Report on the Evaluation of New Methods of Voting.

Previously:
November 27, 2005 Montreal's electronic vote: what went wrong
November 13, 2005 articles about the Quebec election / articles concernant l'élection au Québec
November 13, 2005 Electronic counting fails Quebec

Lou Dobbs has been doing a great job of reporting on the dangers of electronic voting. Unfortunately it's difficult to find most of the reports on CNN.com, but as luck would have it, the transcript of his one-hour special "Democracy at Risk" is available.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/29/ldt.03.html

He and his team covered all the major angles, exposing the many risks.

I was interested to hear that Montana insists on either hand-counted paper ballots (the best option) or optically-scanned paper ballots (the second best option).

In a deeply misguided move, Peterborough Ontario will be providing Internet voting in the 2006 municipal election.

I quote:

Internet Voting = No long line-ups, no traffic, no bad weather days!

Hmm, my slogan would go more like:

Internet Voting = no proof that people have voted, no ballots you can recount, plus I can stand with a gun to your head as you vote!

Oh also, I can potentially easily tell who voted for whom even if I'm not watching you, thanks to the convenient online voter database that is needed.

http://www.peterboroughvotes.ca/

They will be using Dominion Voting Systems.

via Electronic voting in Canada

After the 2000 US presidential election and its scads of hanging chads, election officials across the country began casting about for solutions. One proposal included getting rid of those pesky paper ballots altogether and going with electronic voting machines. It sounds good in theory, but as a friend of mine once said, "do that and we'll find out who hackers want to be president."

A group of computer science professors are joining the forces critical of electronic voting machines as they are currently deployed. Eugene H. Spafford, a computer science professor at Purdue University and chairman of the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery has expressed his concerns over the security of electronic voting machines used in the US. "As experts in computing, we have grave reservations about the safeguards in place with many of the computerized voting technologies being used," said Spafford in a letter to Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), chairman of the Committee on House Administration.

Ars Technica - Computer scientists weigh in on e-voting - July 20, 2006

http://www.usenix.org/events/evt06/
August 1, 2006, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

EVT seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines, ranging from computer science and human factors experts through political scientists, legal experts, election administrators, and voting equipment vendors. The workshop will include short paper presentations as well as vibrant panel discussions with substantial time devoted to questions and answers. Attendance at the workshop will be open to the public, although speakers and presentations will be by invitation only.

CFP deadline April 3, 2006

EVT '06 will be co-located with the 15th USENIX Security Symposium (Security '06), July 31–August 4, 2006.

I mentioned in previous postings about the Quebec 2005 municipal electronic voting problems that Bell was also a supplier (although, AFAIK, not implicated in the issues that were reported). (For more info on that situation, see previous postings list of voting machines used in Quebec municipal elections 2005 and Montreal's electronic vote: what went wrong.)

I couldn't find a Bell link at the time, but I finally ran across one. Quite a splash they have across their page. Starts with a teaser



that leads to a full page of info. I particularly liked their list of e-voting benefits

Electronic compilation of results

The electronic compilation devices used by Bell Business Solutions ensure efficiency, thoroughness and integrity throughout the voting process, whether for a municipal or school board election, referendum or any other consultation.

Simplified functions

* Simple and quick voting process
* Objective counting of ballots (with no human involvement)
* Major reduction of electoral staff
* Fewer duties for electoral staff
* Fast disclosure of results

Let's see, so in summary: it's fast and there are fewer people. Ah. Efficiency! How we worship you! Our voting must now be PRODUCTIVE! Maybe we should eliminate humans from the voting process altogether, and let the machines objectively decide our fate.

Objective with no human involvement?
Um, so the machines programmed themselves did they?

What you mean is, some computer code written by humans you don't know, in the United States, not reviewed by any humans in Canada, will decide the results of the election according to their programmed whims, with no humans to verify the results.

Ah, progress!

They used the Accu-Vote ES, which is a mark-sense reader

Accu-Vote ES electronic ballot box

The Accu-Vote ES system uses an optical reader to record votes on a memory card as ballots are being cast. It considerably simplifies the electoral process for everyone involved and guarantees that the final results will remain secret until the polls close.

In Québec, since 1995, more than 120 cities and municipalities have successfully used vote counting devices. More than 4 million ballots have been recorded by voters during these elections.

The Accu-Vote is made by everyone's favorite reliable, trust-worthy electronic voting machine company: Diebold. Here's a look at their Accu-Vote OS scanner.

Unknowns:
- are there any Canadian standards these machines were tested against?
- were these machines tested against any US standards?
- does anyone test these machines at all?
- are these machines Bell owns, or do they lease them from the US?
- who guards these machines when they're not in use?

Bell: Elections made simple

Err, simpler than humans marking an X on paper and then humans counting it?

Who said elections were complicated?
How about elections maintained completely trustworthy and accurate?

I leave you to contemplate the shiny map of electronic vote-counting progress

Workshop on Electronic Voting and e-Government in the UK
27 February, 2006 09:00 AM - 28 February, 2006 05:30 PM
e-Science Institute, 15, South College Street, Edinburgh

Mass-scale systems intended to deliver e-Government in a democratic context pose a range of under-explored design problems. In particular, we are far from having identified a core set of requirements for such systems. The need for confidentiality, privacy, transparency, accountability and user control are all critical to the success of such systems yet we are still far from determining how to implement such requirements and how the design of such systems will affect user behaviour. In this workshop we aim to address these very broad issues in general together with a more focused examination of e-voting as an exemplar of e-government systems.

Turnout in Jan 2006 Federal election was 64.9% according to current results on http://enr.elections.ca/National_e.aspx

According to http://www.elections.ca/scripts/OVR2004/23/table4.html the turnout has been:

2006 64.9%
2004 60.9%
2000 61.2%
1997 67.0%
1993 69.6%

My idea of office voting wouldn't work due to people being from many different ridings, too complicated.

I say:
1. Make it a holiday
2. Make it mandatory to vote

A Canadian federal election has been called for Monday January 23, 2006.

More information at Elections Canada.

For background info on this 39th general election, see the Wikipedia entry Canadian federal election, 2006.

Canadians, GO VOTE.

I was interviewed by PC World Canada for a piece on electronic voting.

E-voting: Death of the ballot or ticking time bomb?

I don't think I gave a great interview, I should have written some talking points, I was kind of all over the map with needlessly complex or vague explanations.
I think the article accurately reflects what I said.

I do completely disagree with a statement by Joe Church, president of CanVote.

When asked about these issues, Church points out that their systems have been thoroughly tested and that mock elections, held by municipal officials prior to the actual election, have proven to be 100 percent reliable. Aside from these, Church also points out that the convenience and increased voter turnout overcome the security concerns that some people may have.

Um, yeah, I can make my voting machine 100 percent reliable in a mock election too.
The pseudocode looks like this:


if (mockelection) then
  produce correct results
else
  produce desired false results


Elections aren't supposed to be convenient. We're not election consumers. Elections are a CIVIC DUTY as CITIZENS. Making getting to the polls easier is fine - have advance polls, polls in people's workplaces, that's all good.

If you want increased voter turnout then
1. try to figure out why voter turnout is low, then fix that
2. if that doesn't work, make voting mandatory

I don't at all like this "young people vote in Canadian Idol, why not make the election like that?"

Um, because the election is not supposed to be some easy, meaningless act of consumer entertainment.

Whatever happened to the evoting experts blog?

It was announced with great fanfare, and then managed postings at a rapidly declining rate:

Sunday December 12, 2004
Tuesday December 14, 2004
Wednesday December 15, 2004

Monday January 31, 2005


Tuesday March 08, 2005

HAD it not been for the almost accidental discovery of an anomalous piece of software, Venezuela's parliamentary election might have passed off on December 4th in relative normality. True, fewer than 30% of the electorate might have voted, and there would have been the usual cries of fraud. The opposition has grown hoarse over the past couple of years alleging malpractice by the electoral council (CNE), which is supposed to be independent but is dominated by supporters of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftist president. Nevertheless, all but the radical fringe and the no-hopers were planning to take part, albeit under protest.

Less than a week before the poll, six parties, representing nearly half the opposition candidates, pulled out. ...

The pull-out was prompted by a routine audit of electronic voting machines, watched by international observers. An opposition technician discovered a file that allowed the voting machine to store the sequence of votes cast. Polling stations were also to have electronic finger-print machines, so each vote could, in theory at least, be matched to an individual. That the ballot might not be secret matters in a country in which the government has used voting data to deny jobs and government services to opposition supporters.

The CNE suspended the audit. The opposition parties held an urgent meeting with observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS). According to a diplomatic source, the head of the OAS delegation told José Vicente Rangel, Venezuela's vice-president, that the opposition would pull out unless the finger-print machines were withdrawn. On November 28th, Jorge Rodríguez, the CNE's president, said this would happen.

But the message from the opposition's activists was overwhelming: their voters would not turn out for an election organised by the current electoral authority. So the opposition leaders called for the election's postponement.

Economist - Venezuela's legislative election: Technical hitch, political stand-off - Dec 1st 2005

Now let's think about those paper ballot scanner vs. ballot boxes.
I had to use a scanner in my last municipal election.
In a ballot box, your vote gets all jumbled around.
But in a paper ballot scanner, all is nice and tidy, one paper ballot stacked on top of another. That means if I keep track of the order in which everyone hands over their ballot for scanning... I KNOW WHO EVERY SINGLE PERSON VOTED FOR.

On behalf of voter rights advocate Joyce McCloy, the EFF has filed a complaint against several government agencies in North Carolina, requesting that the Superior Court nullify the certification of proprietary electronic voting systems that failed to meet the state's selection critera.

North Carolina established strict new voting machine requirements after system failure led to the loss of 4,000 votes in an election last year. The Public Confidence in Elections bill requires that all voting machine manufacturers disclose their proprietary source code for review by government technology experts. When Diebold was given an exemption last month, the EFF took the matter to court, where Diebold lost. The government of North Carolina proceeded to certify Diebold anyway, despite revocation of the exemption. Certification of technology that fails to meet the legal requirements established by the Public Confidence in Elections bill is essentially illegal, and the EFF wants the government to be held accountable for their disregard of a critical law.

Arstechnica - North Carolina faces lawsuit over voting machine certification - 2005-12-09

techmocr@tie.org Un blogue sur la démocratie à l'ère électronique.

Library Boy: History of the Right to Vote in Canada