November 18, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Trust But Verify
November 19, 2008 at 3:20 am
The main problem with technological electoral system is the quorum of corruption. Every election on a national scale is a complicated transaction involving millions of people. It can be assumed that based on our crime statistics that there are some untrustworthy people involved in each election. The saving grace with paper electoral system is that the limit of these is very small. I an election system with two parties one can assume corruption on both sides cancelling the other. The only corruption that persists is where there is no counter corruption to negate it. 🙂 . In order to win an election beyond this ‘normal’ static white noise corruption is to have an organization that would needs to span many people across many geographies and many persuasions and many walks of life. Such an enterprise would be almost impossible to hide hence the paper votes generally work and are as corruption safe as possible. The quorum of corruption to win a paper election is so huge we can consider them safe.
Electronic voting system could reduce the corruption quorum to just one. This is unsafe knowing that we know that there are corrupt people among us. It is particularly a problem for political elections where corruption could be sourced not only from selfish monetary gains but from altruistic and ideological motives. Individuals that would normally be considered trust worthy could change their attitudes just for elections.
The efficient nature of technology is not welcome for political elections. We need an inefficient political election process with a high corruption quorum.
November 19, 2008 at 4:52 am
I think this is an area that really needs a technological solution applied. What about those registered voters who are confined to bed in a hospital or without transportation?
I believe the US voting process can be better by using the technology we have today and I thought of an idea while waiting in line...Use electronic machines that provide an authorized printed receipt of your selections. I agree we need the ability to "trust but verify".
November 19, 2008 at 6:03 am
The electronic voting machines we use here in Amherst, OH (west of Cleveland) tally electronically, but also literally print your selections on a paper tape that is captive in the machine, but visible behind a clear window for each voter to read and verify before finalizing the voting "transaction." The voter cannot walk away with the paper, but it is available to the Board of Elections if needed in a recount. It seems like a good compromise.
November 19, 2008 at 6:08 am
I am amazed at the problems they are having with the new electronic machines. Plenty of people handle banking online and through IVR systems with a very low percentage of real problems. It may just be the press the voting machines get, but they seem extremely unreliable - and they are conceptually very simple machines.
What amazes me even more is how unreliable all of the US voting systems have been. Here is Connecticut, they moved us to paper ballots similar to the "fill in the bubble with a #2 pencil" tests we all used to take. Some tests were done of the scanning machines that read these ballots and sending the same group of ballots through 10 times yielded 10 different results. Most of the differences were in ballots being readable on one pass, but not another pass.
The old systems of paper ballots and manual counts were obviously going to be a 2-3% issue in just human error (minimum). I cannot believe any vote counting system we have ever had is much better.
So, although the new machines are unreliable, are they more or less unreliable than the old systems? Is it just that we know how unreliable the new ones are and we did not know the problems with the old ones?
Regardless, I think it is only a matter of time before there is a "Google Vote" application built and we can all just adopt that. It will be able to trend the voting statistics right next to the flu spread trend (which they were able to predict faster than the CDC). And eventually they will make an iPhone application for voting directly from your phone - but the app will probably get stuck in the app store waiting for approval and never get released.
November 19, 2008 at 6:51 am
Problems with voting systems are only visible during close elections. The assumption is that there is error in every system. Figuring a 3% error in voting systems means that any election within 3% will show the problems. The press will magnify them and everyone will be pointing the finger at someone for cheating. All human systems are flawed including voting systems. Some method of verification is essential.
The idea of having the voter receive a paper receipt of their choices is bad. Fake copies will proliferate making the problem worse.
November 19, 2008 at 7:10 am
In Canada, we put an X in the box beside the name of our candidate still. But I don't really understand why the voting system in the US is such a problem. I use ATM machines to get money out of the bank and deposit money. There are millions of people using these machines every day and expecting them to work well, and for the very most part, they do. I also use my banks online system to service my transactions. I don't understand why the financial sector can do it and the voting system can't.
Mia
I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.
-- David M. Ogilvy
November 19, 2008 at 7:19 am
What you don't realize is that ATM machines do have some of the same issues. Transactions are lost and misdirected all the time. In some recent consulting, I was shocked to learn that an international banking related firm was (and as far as I know still is) manually dragging files from an FTP server that had ATM transactions that needed to be applied.
I keep my money buried behind my house.
November 19, 2008 at 7:22 am
Michael Earl (11/19/2008)
I keep my money buried behind my house.
Gee then, where exactly do you live? :hehe:
I know that the ATM system isn't perfect, but I still trust it - that was more the point.
Mia
I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.
-- David M. Ogilvy
November 19, 2008 at 7:24 am
skjoldtc (11/19/2008)
The idea of having the voter receive a paper receipt of their choices is bad. Fake copies will proliferate making the problem worse.
If you're referring to the comment by Timothy Beight then you misunderstood. The voter gets to see the receipt, but the voter doesn't receive it. We had the same thing in Utah. You are asked to verify your vote was recorded correctly by looking at a printed receipt which you can see behind a plastic cover. But you can't actually touch the receipt and you never get a copy. I really like this idea as it satisfies the ability to verify the vote through an audit. I was very confident my vote was correctly recorded.
November 19, 2008 at 7:47 am
Hmmm...we just had a national election here in Canada, and we just used pencil and paper. Granted, ours is a parliamentary system where we did not elect a President separately, but the election was pretty much straightforward and has usually been so on the past.
That being said, as the U.S. has 10x the population we do, what's wrong with using the old fill in the dots and feed into the machine to verify? If you have a complex touch screen that crashes all the time or doesn't print a paper record of your vote, you're asking for trouble. With the ballots which are scanned afterwards, you have verification your vote could be read and if not, fill in the dots properly.
Gaby________________________________________________________________"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." - Albert Einstein
November 19, 2008 at 8:22 am
Ok, no matter what system you have to count the votes, if a machine does it, there will always be a certain percentage that will not be counted as the voter wished. I assume in Canada the voter gets a ballot with all the candidates, all the resolutions on the same piece of paper. Every selection is read from one ballot. If the machine reads every selection correct except one, is the voter satisfied? There will always be issues with machines interpreting votes as there have been with humans interpreting votes. It all depends on how much trust you have in the system. Verification doesn't add any more trust to the system(s) I have been using. IMHO.
November 19, 2008 at 8:41 am
The idea of the ballot being scanned immediately after voting even if just for immediate readability validation sounds good, but I haven't heard of that actually being used in the US. Where I vote in Ohio, we have the option of an optically scanned ballot or the electronic voting machine. The electronic voting machine prints a confirmation of your votes behind a viewing window so you can verify what it recorded and there is a hard copy record "on file". The optical scan ballots are simply taken to a central location for scanning and counting. I am pretty certain it is the county board of elections. But at this point the ballot counting is not significantly better than the punch ballots because only then is it known if there is a problem recording the votes cast on the ballot.
I don't agree with the suggestion that votes cast on paper ballots are harder for one person to manipulate than votes cast on an electronic voting machine. The paper ballot still get recorded electronically via software, just at a different location. I am assuming that the suggestion that one person could manipulate the results is based on that person being able to inject their own code into the programs that either record the votes or tally the votes. Based on this, if there isn't a printed confirmation of votes, then that might be possible. But in the presence of a printed confirmation that could be manually verified later, then the paper ballot are no more corruption safe than an electronic voting machine. The only difference between a paper ballot and a voting machine with printed confirmation is where the electronic recording of the vote occurs. With paper ballots the recording occurs at one point in a region. With electronic voting machines the recording occurs at each voting station. In both cases the tallying occurs at one point in a region.
November 19, 2008 at 8:41 am
I actually think it is amazing that we cannot vote on-line. I pay all my bills on-line, I submit my tax return on-line, and can even do my taxes on-line. Granted there will be issues that need to be dealt with, and it may be difficult because there are always state\local issues so the electronic ballot would have to be able to handle that as well.
Why not have electronic voting machines that record the results, print out a scannable receipt that is the voter can review and then submit for scanning that verifies the electronically recorded votes. You could even do the voting from home and if the scannable ballot is correct you mail it in or choose to "trust" the electronic system.
Jack Corbett
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November 19, 2008 at 8:56 am
In Canada our ballot is only for electing a person into office. We don't have resolutions to vote on. This year's ballot was about 6" x 8" and had 4 circles with 4 names beside them. Show your ID, Pencil an X in the circle for your choice and push the ballot in a box. Took about 10 minutes. USA has a higher volume of voters but I would imagne a higer volume of ballot counters as well.
In short though, I'd want to see a printout behind the plastic window as well. Even in Canada. As much as I trust computers (when they work), it's the people running the computers or manipulating the data that betrays the trust. And it is much easier and faster to adjust 100,000 electronic votes than to falsify 100,000 paper verifications. I also wouldn't reccommend voters get a copy to take home as previously stated these can be subsequently falsified. What about employing an electric medium in the voting machine that is write only?
Jb
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