Thoughts and Theories From Roger Andre
for the curious, and people getting to grips with computing and computers.
Tuesday 21 October 2008, 11:50 PM
Electronic Voting Is Audit free!
I listen to digital planet via a BBC world service podcast every week, and last weeks version was an eye opener and yet it wasn't!
One of the Items during the program was about trials of electronic voting in the UK that had taken place last year and two years ago. The trials were observed by a chap called Glen Whittle.
Glen is a programer and an officialy acredited election observer,and what he saw worried him. He found that his biggest problem, being an election observer after all, was that there was no way to tell if the machines where doing there job properly. He said that there where no means of auditing the system, and thus no way to tell if the system was being compromised.
So, unlike lets say online banking there is no tracking built in to the system, no auditing trail. At least with the paper system you can go back and recount the votes. So; there is no actual way to tell that the electronic system used on the day by the voter is the same one that is going to cough up the results at the end of the process.
Interesting ommisions I must confess, and as Bill Thomson pointed out, The prizes for compromising the system are so great (like running the country) that atempts will be made.
Lets not forget that in 2005 over 250 fraud allegations where made against the postal voting system. All this in the United Kingdom, the supposed mother of all democracy, although I would like to point out that in this country, we are not actually british citizens! No, in the eyes of the officialdom and of course the monarchy, we are subjects of the queen. Got a problem with the erosion of civil liberty and the ever increasing security measures trying to poke their way into our lives? Well don't be bothering the politicians about it. Oh no! Take it up the queen and good luck to you!
PreviousComments on this post
Yes they did manage to butcher my name when they pronounced it. :) If you want the full report of what went wrong in the electronic voting trials in the UK.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/
"The manual recount had netted 56.1% additional votes when compared with the number of ballots counted electronically." Page 37
"E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud. The Government has prioritised the introduction of e-voting because of the perceived convenience of new technologies, ignoring other vital considerations such as confidence and trust in the electoral system. ORG considers that the problems observed and difficulties scrutinising results delivered by e-counting systems bring their suitability for statutory elections into question." Page 1
and the London 2008 report is here.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/07/02/org-verdict-on-london-elections-insufficient-evidence-to-declare-confidence-in-results/
"there is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared in the May 2008 elections for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly are an accurate representation of voters’ intentions."
Glyn Wintle.. thanks for replying and sorry about the misspelling!
What has really struck me after following your links, was to read the most utterly shocking sentence
"London Elects admit that the system was likely to be recording blank ballots as valid votes"
And to quote again from the article:
"E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud."
I thought things like this where serious crimes in our "democracy". The police do have the power to act on their own in this kind of situation, and I hope they go and seize the evidence i.e. the black boxes. I hope that this information can hit the big time again and end up being sorted out once and for all, because even if no fraud is committed and every one involved behaves with integrity, what happens if an election is disputed, or is the machines decision final?
The end result was the Electoral Commission’s report into the London Elections called for the Greater London Returning Officer to carry out a cost benefit analysis of options for counting ballot papers at the 2012 elections "as a matter of urgency" (mirroring the key recommendation from ORG’s recent report), and to start from the assumption that the vote will be counted manually.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/07/29/next-election-for-mayor-of-london-to-be-counted-manually/
I think you might be interested in quite a few of the things ORG does.
http://blip.tv/file/574494
And who can forget knitting, Doctor Who and ORG.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1461891/glyn_wintle_of_the_open_rights_group_at_mashed08/
Glyn, I've got as far as your talk with the audience on blip TV. I was not aware of the internet vote being cross scripted! The voting log being changed without anyone recording it, or the fact that in Scotland the electronic vote scanning machine was not even looked at by humans.
And what's this? governments not listening to experts that say don't do electronic voting. And an electronic vote counting machine turned out to miss over 50 percent of the votes (I couldn't make out where).
It sounds like the whole process is open to being hijacked and even cross hijacked by goodness knows what or who. Who knows, it may even be the start of the first civil cyberwar between banks, governments and big corps! It's all a big dissapointment, I'm still reeling after hearing your spot on the radio! Hell...even the electoral commision said leave it alone.....it would be nice to know who the designers of this whole system are, and what their paymasters are playing at!!
Later on in the talk, it was good to hear you mention that software will have warning stickers relating to DRM content damaging peoples computers. Rootkits are awful to remove and generally beyond the lay person to sort out. Lets hope it isn't deceptivley worded!
I think you would have a very interested audience if you were to do some bloging here!
All the best Rog.
