Electronic voting machines suck, the comprehensive 2016 election edition

[sfsdfd]

it works most of the time for banking for a set of reasons: financial interest, the verified identity of the parties, and the fact all transactions involve three more parties ( woohoo! no, the other kind. ) each party ( the store, the bank, the consumer ) is watching the other closely.

As opposed to voting, which has (a) intensely strong interests in the outcome, (b) verified identities of voters, and (c) multiple parties (specifically, competing candidates) watching the process closely?

there is fraud and there are data breeches all the time. it’s part of why credit interest is high, the fraud calculation is built into the system. it’s why you’re more protected when you use credit than directly linking your bank account for transactions.

You’re talking about transactional fraud - stuff like: “the seller never shipped me the product,” or “somebody swiped my credit card number and then charged a bunch of stuff to my credit card.” Yes, there’s a ton of that - all generally involving dishonesty in transactions between people - and it has no relevance to voting.

What’s relevant here is the amount of hacking fraud - people breaking into banking systems and stealing money. Compare the volume of banking, e-commerce, and stock transactions that occur online - we’re really talking something like $20 trillion a day - with the amount of hacking fraud that occurs in those fields. The ratio is vanishingly small.

we are not yet to the point where we should give over voting to devices.

How do you propose that we get there?

Electronic voting systems will not magically evolve all on their own to a point where we can trust them: they improve through incremental improvement. If an election got hacked, we could investigate, figure out why, and make sure that particular vulnerability doesn’t happen again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That’s how technology works - always! We endured hundreds of rockets and spaceships exploding, and today we have SpaceX. We endured decades of terrible home computing hardware and OSes, and today we have machines that are… well, pretty good. Cars, telephones and networks, mobile phones - really, what area of technology doesn’t have this story?

It’s amazing to me that Corey Doctorow and BoingBoing readers, people generally steeped in technology and futurism, exhibit this anti-technology, luddite viewpoint when it comes to voting. It’s like going to a medical conference and finding an enclave of anti-vaxxers.

[anon17141263]

@sfsdfd

Sure. Works great if you have a small number of people - let’s say three - and you expect to receive three results and receive a result.

Not relevant to voting for several reasons.

First - it’s very difficult to imagine using those kinds of techniques when you don’t actually know who’s going to vote.

Second - it’s readily prone to manipulation. You have to trust that everyone will follow the rules and not inject random noise into the process.

Oh fuck. I wasn’t offering that as a voting model. It was supposed to be a baseline to see if you even read any of the cryptographic literature. Have a nice day friendo.

[gatto]

@sfsdfd

really, what area of technology doesn’t have this story?

right. hence, i said “yet”.

i don’t, if it helps, purpose anyway to get there. it’s a strawman if you think i did. technology for technology’s sake… it’s great for the fun and interest of it… but if you want to be rational about things, don’t adopt technology just because newer is somehow better. it’s not always. and that’s okay.

to your point, there are public databases which are and have been hacked. we have a crazy hard time tracking down who’s been doing the hacks.

( you’re right most banks have good histories re: direct hacking. we have them, and their self reporting to trust. )

we already know the current voting machines have reporting, transparency, and verification errors. you proposed some mechanisms to make it better.

where i think we disagree is with a) why would we want to, and b) can we do so to the degree we need.

give it time. spend as much in research as banks do. just don’t use tax money in the process. not when we already have a solid solution already at hand.

@sfsdfd

It’s amazing to me that Corey Doctorow and BoingBoing readers, people generally steeped in technology and futurism, exhibit this anti-technology, luddite viewpoint when it comes to voting. It’s like going to a medical conference and finding an enclave of anti-vaxxers.

if you like.

[LDoBe]

@sfsdfd

It’s amazing to me that Corey Doctorow and BoingBoing readers, people generally steeped in technology and futurism, exhibit this anti-technology, luddite viewpoint when it comes to voting. It’s like going to a medical conference and finding an enclave of anti-vaxxers.

Yeah, except voting machines have been shown beyond the shadow of a doubt numerous times, right up until this very day not to be “safe and effective”. They’ve been shown over and over to be unreliable, often gamed, and almost entirely unfit for the claimed use. They may, in the future be a good option, but they’re definitely not ready for prime-time, as they suffer from lack of transparency, reliability and are usually full of piles and piles of undisclosed unpatched vulnerabilities.

It’s more like going to a medical conference and seeing an enclave of public health guys recommending a higher age for a woman’s first mammogram, because the current schedule isn’t doing any better than if they raised the age by five years.

[anon17141263]

I’m beginning to think @sfsdfd works for diebold.

[LDoBe]

Didn’t Diebold have to fold after all the fraud and convictions and shit? Didn’t it have to get renamed into some other bullshit like “vector tallying” or something?

[anon17141263]

“Premier Election Solutions”. I still remember Diebold as the company that built crappy ATM machines running Win XP way past its prime. They did make some decent safes back in the day, from what I’ve heard.

[Wanderfound]

As a datapoint, this is what an Australian ballot for the House of Reps looks like:

You get one of these and a pencil; number the boxes in order of preference. They’re counted entirely by hand; no machines involved at all. It seems to work just fine for us, despite having twice the per-capita voter turnout of a US election.

OTOH, this is one of our ballots for the Senate…

Still hand-marked and hand-counted, though.

It’s traditional to have a whinge about the size of it, but that isn’t really a problem. People who can’t be bothered filling out the whole thing just mark their preferred party at the top (“voting above the line”), and their preferences are distributed according to a list published by the party in question.

[Jorpho]

On the other hand, the data must be secure if it can only be transferred using outdated media that’s tricky to get hold of.

The image of the nuclear arsenal running on 8-inch floppies springs to mind yet again.

[L_Mariachi]

Electronic banking transactions are reliable because everyone involved has a financial stake. If your checking account is suddenly $10,000 lighter, you’re going to notice, and you’re going to raise hell. If your paperless touchscreen vote isn’t counted, you have no way of even knowing you’ve been disenfranchised, much less have any recourse.