Paper Vote Canada

The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development is now working on a plan to test the possibility for allowing Norwegians to cast their vote from the home PC at the municipal elections in 2011.

The Minister of Local Government, Magnhild Meltveit Kleppa, is eager to introduce reforms which will increase the interest for elections and for voter participation.

The Norway Post - Electronic home voting next - July 7, 2009

Labels: electronic voting, internet voting, norway

The Toronto Star (CP) reports

Allowing Canadians to vote electronically may be the remedy for the ever-dwindling percentage of voters who bother to exercise their democratic rights, Elections Canada suggests.

In a report released late Friday, the independent electoral watchdog says it will push this fall for legislative changes that would allow it to implement online registration of voters.

And it wants parliamentary approval to conduct an electronic voting test-run in a byelection by 2013.

Elections Canada backs online voting - June 26, 2009

(It's not actually clear to me if they're talking about electronic voting machines, or voting online. Both approaches have huge flaws.)

As readers of this blog will already know, I favour the traditional in-person enumeration, and voting on paper in public. These are simple processes that are critical to the integrity of our democracy.

I've already written a critique of the idea that electronic voting will help with voter turnout - citizen engagement and e-voting. I have also outlined many, many times the security risks associated with electronic voting.

Electronic voting is a very bad idea based on incorrect assumptions.

And if you don't think having total confidence in the results of an election is important, check out the current situation in Iran. Elections matter.

This blog started in 2004 before the days of hashtags and such, but I'm suggesting hashtag #evotecan and tag evotecan for this issue.

There are also a few searches that should pull up references to this particular article:

Twitter - Elections Canada backs online voting
Twitter - bit.ly link to Toronto Star article
Google News - articles related to "elections canada" electronic

Labels: canada, elections canada, electronic voting, evotecan

I've removed the QuickTopic discussion space (which only ever got used by spammers anyway) and made a FriendFeed room to discuss this issue instead

http://friendfeed.com/electronic-voting-in-canada

Labels: meta

For some reason the linkroll bookmarks I'm displaying on this site are full of spam - I am investigating.

In the meantime if you want to see the actual, non-spammy e-voting links, they're at

http://www.linkroll.com/index.php?action=links&user=papervotecanada

UPDATE: Linkroll is displaying spam links when you pull their RSS feed or use their JavaScript widget. Goodbye Linkroll.

Labels: meta

This 1957 video promoting mechanical voting machines is beyond awesome.

I tried to embed it, but the embed code was too complex, you can see it at

http://www.archive.org/details/Behindth1957

For those of us not experienced with US elections, it's also a reminder of their incredible complexity.
My favorite part is when they talk about how the machine cannot make an error, and is protected by the incredible security of... a key.

Another gem from the Prelinger Archives, the video was on the front page of Archive.org today.

Labels: video, voting machines

Minnesota uses optical scan systems and a small amount of hand counting.

Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State: Voting Systems map (PDF)

When a recount is necessary:

* You can see the ballots.
* You can determine for yourself whether they are being unfairly accepted or rejected, and how they should be counted.
* You can determine, therefore, whether you think the results fairly reflect the will of the people.

This is important because the current Senator-Elect, Al Franken, is certified as having won by 225 votes. Out of over 2.8 million votes cast in the 2008 US Senate election in Minnesota.

Voting systems matter because elections can be very close,
which means they will be challenged,
which means you must have VISIBLE EVIDENCE of the votes that can be counted by anyone,
so that the public can determine if the results are fair.

CNN: Minnesota canvassing board certifies Franken win - January 5, 2008

Labels: recount, usa

Before you work on the solution, you must first decide upon the problem, about what is important to you.

For many people concerned about democracy and about electronic voting, the problems we consider are:

* preserving the secret ballot
* retaining the right to an uncoerced vote
* the integrity and accuracy of the vote count (all votes gathered and correctly counted)
* the simplicity of the system (can voters understand how the entire voting system works?)

I call the above "The Democracy Requirements".

You will very rarely hear advocates of electronic and particularly Internet voting talking about any of the above concerns. What they talk about is:

* efficiency
* modernity
* convenience and customer service
* voter turnout (# of votes cast, % of eligible voters who cast votes)

You will notice this is a completely different set of problems.

I call the above "The Voter Engagement Requirements".

So in a sense, we're talking at cross-purposes.
The computer security experts say "electronic voting can never be secure, and you can never know that your vote was counted properly" and they say "we think security is a non-issue because (other technology with unrelated requirements) is 'secure', and e-voting is modern and convenient and young people will use it".

The Democracy Argument Against Electronic Voting (and some paper voting too)

It should be mentioned, the first set of issues applies to many, many other voting options. As soon as you compromise chain-of-custody and the private-in-public vote, you risk all except simplicity.

For example: mail-in voting.
1. If I can identify the sender (by watching the mail they send, by identifying their handwriting, by some unique identifier on their ballot), then no more secret ballot.
2. There is a huge chain-of-custody issue - anyone in the mail stream can intercept and destroy, replace or alter your ballot
3. Your enemies can stand beside you and force you to vote the way they want

These are not abstract issues and rights. People are injured and even die every year in countries where voting is taking your life into your own hands.

Even just advance voting introduces chain-of-custody issues.
(Battlestar Galactica showed a simple fictional scenario for compromising a paper-based election, by having collusion in the chain-of-custody so that an original ballot box was changed with one stuffed with votes for a particular candidate.)

So let me make it very clear: voting on one day privately, in public, on paper, with a hand-count of ballot boxes that never leave the polling station, with scrutineers from all parties watching the count - this is the most elegant solution I can think of to the key issues of secrecy, non-coercion, integrity, accuracy and simplicity.

A machine-mediated vote, or a machine-mediated count CANNOT do this, because you CANNOT (as in, technologically impossible) know what program the computer is actually running. You cannot meet these requirements with an electronic system. I know this is a world where there are few absolutes, but trust me, any computer security expert can tell you this.

The Voter Engagement Argument for Some (non-voting) Use of Electronic Systems

Ok, assuming you want to engage your citizens in some meaningful way, and not in some Canadian Idol illusion-of-convenience superficial way, then I thought it came out quite clearly in the TVO discussion that you need:

* leadership
* engaging issues
* a real connection with voters, particularly young voters

Do you see any mention of technology in the above three items?
There is no website that is going to make you a leader, there is no social network that is going to make your issues engaging, there is no blog posting that can substitute for actually listening to your constituents. IF you already have addressed those issues, then you can reach your voters using...

* radio
* television
* and maybe you've heard of this Internet thing?

Technology is not a solution. Technology is one channel to communicate your message. You have to have an interesting message, first.

If you want more people to vote, give them something they care about to vote for, convince them that their vote matters, and connect with them before and AFTER the election, to demonstrate that you value them for their opinions, not for their increment to your vote count.

If you do that, they will wait in lines for hours. Voting technology doesn't matter. It doesn't solve a problem that Canada has.

Labels: citizen engagement, electronic voting, internet voting, politics

The classic Canadian example I usually use is the last Referendum on Quebec independence where it was 50.58% "No" to 49.42% "Yes".

There is another great example going on right now in the Minnesota senate race.
According to Daily Kos, "Today's latest results show [Democratic challenger Al Franken] is now trailing Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by 204 votes."

Wikipedia currently shows the tally at

Popular vote Coleman:1,211,562 Franken:1,211,356 Barkley:437,389

If you want that in percentages that's Coleman 41.988%, Franken 41.981%

That means if your voting machines have even a .01% error rate, they've already thrown the election. And the high-tech threat to Minnesota's optical mark-sense scanners? Dust.

Undecided Minnesota Senate Race Used Machines that Flunked Accuracy Tests - Wired - November 5, 2008

In an earlier posting, Wired writes

The problems occurred during logic and accuracy tests in the run-up to this year's general election, Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson disclosed in a letter submitted October 24 (.pdf) to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The machines at issue are ES&S M-100 optical-scan machines, which read and tally election results from paper ballots.

Johnson worried that such problems -- linked tentatively to paper dust build-up in the machines -- could affect the integrity of the general election this week.

ES&S Voting Machines in Michigan Flunk Tests, Don't Tally Votes Consistently - Wired - November 3, 2008

Say what you will about human failure modes, but dust usually isn't one of them.

Given that
1. Elections are often surprisingly close
2. Integrity of the count is paramount (your vote must be correctly counted)
3. Machines have many failure modes
4. A paper count by humans can be open and easily verified and rechecked

Then the best option to ensure confidence in election results is: hand-counted paper ballots.

(I don't know whether the Minnesota recount will require hand-counts.)

Labels: election, electronic voting, optical scan, usa

If you want to find stuff from the last four years of this blog, the search button in the upper left is probably the best bet, e.g.

http://papervotecanada.blogspot.com/search?q=cbc
http://papervotecanada.blogspot.com/search?q=toronto

Labels: meta

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