eVoting

[andygates]

Here's a nice piece describing one of the current US electronic voting systems' apparently weird vote-flipping behaviour. In a nutshell, "We should not blame voters when the real problem lies with poor usability engineering of electronic voting machine."  Jeez, don't these guys test their kit with non-computer users?  *facepalm*

Comments

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

They do not test them at all, as far as I can tell. Their security is at best laughable, and they have a pretty rotten track record regarding frequency of puzzling assertions spewing out of them (which the famous Liberal Media seems to miss entirely), and there is flat-out no auditing method for them that isn't essentially asking them to repeat what they just said. "The machine says McCain won." "Can you get an audit for that?" "I did the SQL query manually, and it says the same thing." "Good enough for me!"

And, as I expect you've seen, xkcd makes a reasonable objection to the machines' basic design philosophy.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

They don't test them at all? Dear hooting gods, no wonder they're fubared. I'd be insisting on a representative sample and getting that sample in the street (slow and expensive, but reliable).

The audit trail is scandalous and exposes them to cries of foul -- again, if I was in the voting machine market, I'd be getting people like Rebecca Mercuri in to consult, and then trumpeting that as my USP. "MunkyVote[TM]! The one IT people trust!"

It can't be hard to do right. Under the hood you've got a disk-encrypted device in a locked box, it does write-only transactions based on open-source checksummed code so we know it's running what it says it's running. Etc, etc. And part of that is that you test the screen templates with the general public so that you know they understand it!

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

list of candidates on a piece of paper
put X in the box.
Pencil is supplied.

The easier, more open, and verifiable the process is, the better.
The eVoting setup sounds like something people should be able to practice before hand.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

American voting is more complicated than it is here because they vote for so much stuff -- police chiefs and mayors and all sorts of public officials as well as the big political cheeses. There's a lot of boxes to tick, but fundamentally yes: it shouldn't be complicated.