Remember the Diebold voting machines?

[Bob Schroeck]

The ones that were at the heart of a controversy almost ten years ago when it turned out the CEO of Diebold promised to deliver Ohio to George W. Bush in an upcoming election? And which were discovered to be vulnerable to a number of hacking attacks?  The ones whose reputation was so tarnished that the entire division was renamed to escape it?
Well, it turns out that they're even more insecure than was determined in the middle 2000s -- according to researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory, any idiot with $25 worth of spare parts and almost no technical know-how can subvert them.
Maybe it's time to give up on electronic voting stations and go straight to smart-phone-based voting apps...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

I've got an idea - why not print out pieces of paper with the candidates' names on them, give one to each voter, let the voters mark an "X" beside the name of the candidates they like, and put all those pieces of paper in a box where everyone can see that they aren't being tampered with?

Or is the way everyone else in the world carries out elections too low-tech?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

It's too obvious most of the time when someone steals an election.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[CattyNebulart]

Voting machines could be made secure, you just need to engineer it right and to have efficient oversight. Look at how Las Vagas oversees the one-armed bandits for an example.

However no election machine is subjected to such scrutiny and no-one seems to care. It's depressing.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Black Aeronaut]

I kinda like how they do it in some countries - you are given the ballot with boxes for each candidate, and you use a thumb print to mark your choice. Makes it pretty tough to stuff the ballot box when each vote is supposed to be marked with a unique signature.

[Bob Schroeck]

However no election machine is subjected to such scrutiny and no-one seems to care. It's depressing.

There's more money in being able to steal an election than there is in making sure they're honest.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Werehawk]

To tell the truth I've never felt comfortable with e-voting and I live in Maryland which uses diebold machines.

Quite frankly the way that the entire 2000 mess in Florida was used to justify the rushed implementation of electronic voting systems. Typical case example of politicians trying to fix a problem only to make it even worse.

IMO if you are going to implement electronic voting do so in a way that you have a paper trail.

A few things I'd have in place:

-Have the voting machines print out a copy of the voters ballot choices which is then deposited by voter in a sealed and locked case that is linked to that specific machine.

-Said ballot should include a tag that identifies which machine was used by the voter.

-Downloading of data from voting machines should not lead to data being erased.

-Do random audits of poll totals from different machines comparing the results with the printed out ballots.

-Have voting machines tested by outside groups competing for a cash prize to those who succesfully and replicable find ways of hacking voting machines.

At least I'd start with that. I'm sure you can add a few more ideas to the setup.

An additional note speaking as somebody who grew up abroad the U.S. for most part is very loose about verifying the the identity of voters. If somebody wanted to steal an election there are older ways of doing so than hacking into a voting machine.

WMD
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."

[CattyNebulart]

An additional note speaking as somebody who grew up abroad the U.S. for most part is very loose about verifying the the identity of voters. If somebody wanted to steal an election there are older ways of doing so than hacking into a voting machine.

That is generally known as 'retail' vote fraud, a few votes here and there might swing an election, but the 'great' thing about the voting machines is that it allows wholesale vote fraud, for-instance diebold machines send all the data to a central machine that uses MS Accsess to tabulate the votes. At least one of the tabulating machines was infected with malware and had a backdoor. So instead of going through the trouble of compromising dozens of local election centers you can just attack one windows machine that is connected to the Internet and dictate what the election results for that state should be. Isn't Diebolds commitment to security wonderful?

Also if maryland actually followed it's own rules on the election machines the diebold machines would
a) Have undergone a rigorous third party audit. (Something diebold forbids in their eula)
b) not count the votes from the machines where the 'tamper-proof' stickers have been breached, so if you don't like the way a certain district votes you can just go there and when you are alone with the machine to cast your vote run your fingernail along the seam, supposedly disenfranchising everyone who used that machine. It's just as well that maryland ignores their own security rules, especially since the tamper proof stickers are anything but.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[ECSNorway]

CattyNebulart wrote:

b) not count the votes from the machines where the 'tamper-proof' stickers have been breached, so if you don't like the way a certain district votes you can just go there and when you are alone with the machine to cast your vote run your fingernail along the seam, supposedly disenfranchising everyone who used that machine. It's just as well that maryland ignores their own security rules, especially since the tamper proof stickers are anything but.

Yeah, see, this is another excellent argument against e-voting. It's too easy to fuck with.
If you're going to have 'tamper-proof' stickers, then have them set off an alarm when they're broken, so that observers can tell who's doing it and arrest the fuckwit in question.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.