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Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

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Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#621

Post by lmm »

erichocean wrote: post #490
pessimizer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in a place that requires you to carry identification papers at all times, I can understand your shock. The US does not have national ID, and doesn't even require you to show identification to the police when asked.

Though it does require an ID to buy alcohol. So I guess we're talking about people under 21 who (a) don't drive, (b) have never needed an ID for any other purpose, and (c) can vote but for whatever reason, are too poor/disadvantaged/etc. to get an ID. And those people get a provisional ballot anyway. I guess I don't see the problem with requiring ID; we require for far less important things already.

Don't forget people over 21 who don't drink, e.g. muslims. I can well imagine that poor muslims who don't own a car constitute a significant constituency, and with a significant Democratic preference; it seems plausible that keeping them from voting would lead to a noticeable shift in the overall result.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#623

Post by pbhjpbhj »

MartinCron wrote: post #439
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't prove how you voted (i.e. so you can't sell your vote). // I assumed that if anything it was to prevent people being pressured in to voting a particular way (eg an abusive spouse) - what' wrong with selling your vote, surely that's still democratic: you've chosen to accept a particular candidate based on the outcome for you.

what's wrong with selling your vote, surely that's still democratic Besides just being distasteful, just handing over powerful positions in our society to the highest bidder seems like a formula for brazen abuse.

But it would only be handed over to the highest bidder if the individuals chose to hand it over ... which is how democracy is supposed to work isnt it? Arguably the current system favours a cadre of the super-rich already. People now can vote for whichever party will make them individually richer. It just seems to me like a logical extension of capitalist economics.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#624

Post by streptomycin »

zero_intp wrote: post #601
streptomycin wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's some cute pedantry, requires some very creative reading to come to that self-righteous interpretation. I find semantic pedantry more vapid than data, though. So check the 2012 results: http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president?hpt=... Yet again, the Republican candidate scores his highest vote share among college graduates, and the Democratic candidate scores his highest vote share among people w…

You have yet to inform us as to how or why this pedantry is useful, relevant, or rewarding. If my interpretation of your connotation or intent is somehow incorrect, your arguments have not materialized. Re-iterating your mouth noises does not show for the depth of the thought that originated them. While I critiqued your lack-of-thought construct, you immediately countered with both an ad hominem and appeal to authori…

The guy I replied to asked for a source for the statement,

Someone who votes Democrat is equally likely to have a college education as a Republican.

I provided a source showing that this is at least close to true, and possibly it tilts a bit towards the Republicans rather than being equally likely. I also provided an interesting tidbit that, while the college educated demographic is best for Republicans, the no high school degree demographic is best for Democrats.

Are you offended that I answered the guy's question by linking to some data, or that I added a sentence about an interesting tidbit of information from that data? Because immediately after I posted, you replied with unnecessary insults and ridiculous straw men. I hope you can understand why your post elicited a facetious response from me, which you self-righteously deem "ad hominem".

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#625

Post by flyinRyan »

Why doesn't the US just buy the system Brazil uses? In Brazil 1) everyone must vote and 2) they have strong reasons for wanting to make sure that no vote can ever be tied directly to the person who cast it.

They have such a system in place for over a decade, it works perfectly. Just buy that and use it instead of reinventing the wheel poorly.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#626

Post by specialist »

cantankerous wrote: post #517
specialist wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. There is exactly no way to ensure the secret ballot (voter privacy) or public count (auditable results) with any form of electronic voting.

This is actually not quite true. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf

Skimmed that paper. Thanks for link.

Nice to see Civitas would use a tamper evident log file (rolling temporal hash). Alas, generally, encoding the order of the ballots cast destroys voter privacy.

I stand by my earlier comment (cross thread): These crypto based voting systems rely on hash collisions to hide individual ballots within a herd of ballots. Because Civitas encodes votes as ranked preference (to support winner takes all, Condorcet, approval voting), there's even more information contained within each ballot, decreasing the likelihood of a hash collision, increasing the likelihood of inferring each voter's unique ballot.

Something did occur to me, however. Right now, all races are encoded onto a single ballot. Making it more likely that every ballot within a precinct is utterly unique.

But if each race was split onto its own ballot, then a crypto based voting system might be workable.

Hmmm.

As loathe as I am to validate a crypto-based scheme in any way, these schemes aren't going away, no small part because the geeks keep pushing technological fixes for perceived societal problems. So I'm somewhat resigned that I should make the most of it, help make sure the worst parts are mitigated.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#627

Post by michaelt »

cpeterso wrote: post #190
cloudwalking wrote: post #80

I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine. That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable…

What problem do electronic voting machines actually solve ? The US didn't seem to have problems counting millions of paper ballots (save for some hanging chads) until the "solution" of electronic voting machines appeared.

As I understand it the intention is to solve:

1. Allowing people with disabilities to vote. For example, headphone voice prompts for blind people, large print/high contrast for the elderly etc.

2. Making sure voters understand the voting procedure - particularly if there are multiple offices and issues on the ballot, multiple ballot papers and so on.

3. Ensuring voters' intent is recorded unambiguously. For example, you can't put marks in multiple boxes (intentionally or accidentally) and you can't leave a dimpled or hanging chad.

4. Perfect counting (assuming the data is entered correctly and the software works right) as opposed to manual counts where papers sometimes end up in the wrong pile.

5. You can offer voting in multiple languages.

6. You can randomise the order of candidates on the ballot, to evenly distribute any impact being at the top might have.

7. Ability to take backups for transit or deliver results electronically, avoiding boxes of ballots going missing.

8. Reduced counting costs and faster results, allowing more polling stations to be operated and allowing the polls to stay open later for the same result delivery deadline.

Whether it succeeds at offering these benefits, and whether they're worth the obvious cost in trust is debatable.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#628

Post by Riesling »

skrause wrote: post #82
pnathan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. (2) We are OK publicizing it. (3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about. --- But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)

I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion. In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines…

I just looked it up on wikipedia and they are not banned completely. Still, effectively they are, since the court said that

> "verification of the result must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject."

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#629

Post by dbaupp »

njs12345 wrote: post #160
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #140

If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time. If enough people cry foul to ru…

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan for an example of one such system which preserves the secret ballot property.

Wow! That is a really elegant solution.

I wonder what (if any) pitfalls it has, other than the increased complexity and less obvious correctness (i.e. it would be hard to convince a non-mathematically inclined person that it works properly).

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#630

Post by DennisP »

danielweber wrote: post #413
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm disappointed that the LA Times story doesn't include my favorite anecdote from the Franken/Coleman recount: the person who voted for "lizard people" http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/23/so_w...

I often vote for LIZARD PEOPLE as a write-in if there's one race where I don't know anything about the people in it, because of that guy. (I didn't know he had come forward until I searched for that story today.)

Douglas Adams had something to say along these lines: http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html
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