A quick question about the recent American elections.
As the Democrats seem to have won does this mean that it is now they that know how to fiddle the Diebold machines?
Diebold Machines.
In
10 responses
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Get with the program, Worstall. You’re only supposed to ask questions like that when Republicans win.
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Nah, perhaps you’re confusing them with the party that doesn’t give a toss about democracy.
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The really sad part is that we wouldn’t know if somebody tampered with a Diebold machine. That is the whole point, or as Bruce Schneier put it (Nov 2004): “An election without any detected problems is no more a proof the system is reliable and secure than a night that no one broke into your house is proof that your door locks work. Maybe no one tried, or maybe someone tried and succeeded…and you don’t know it.” http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_wit.html
Then again as Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) put it: “here’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?
“Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish… Call me an optimist, but electronic voting machines make me feel good about my country.”
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/electronic_voti.html -
Following on, here’s a comment by a computer scientist who’s followed the whole voting machine stuff for some years, remarking on the impossibility of having a proper recount in Virginia and touching on the absurdity of this in this particular critical situation.
Time after time after time people like Rubin and Schneier point out how essential it is to have proper audit trails, both to reassure voters of the integrity of the systems and to allow for close election resolutions while Diebold and their ilk don’t listen and the state officials generally haven’t a clue about the problems anyway (and, yes indeed, exactly comparable to the UK’s ID card nonsense). -
Well, in Maryland the Republican governor (who lost re-election) fought the Diebold machines and wanted either paper ballots or at least a paper trail. The Democrats who controlled the Legislature disagreed and insisted upon the Diebold machines.
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Murdoch, thanks for the link. That grownup people re-print totals from the machines and then recount those is idiotic beyond belief.
One thing I’ve never ever understood about e-voting without paper trail is that every single computer scientists, heck everyone who has serious working experience with computers thinks this is a disastorously stupid idea. No government official would commission a bridge without consulting construction engineers, or order a vaccination program without consulting doctors… yet when it comes to computers everyone is an expert.
Relevant question for us in Europe is what can we do to nip this to bud here. -
“Teme”… We may disagree about global warming, but I agree with every word of what you’ve just said. I reckon though, that the only thing that’s going to “save” us from some of these massively intrusive government computer projects is the stupifying incompetence of those outfits selected to implement them, aided and abetted by political interference at all stages.
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…when it comes to computers everyone is an expert.
Quite so!
I guess there’s a variety of factors at work which, in the end, come down to Leonardos being very few and far between.
The dependency complexity has become so enormous that understanding the potential risk becomes enormously difficult if not impossible. Related to this is that so much coding is essentially restricted area grunt work done by legions of trolls in cubicles overseen by managers who themselves generally don’t have anything like an overall view while as you get further up the chain the technical understanding (except perhaps in very specific areas) lessens enormously. Add in politicians and civil servants who have entirely different agendas to the managers or technicians (and don’t understand things either) and complete the mix by introducing the influence of finance and marketing, whose concerns are primarily company profits, and it’s perhaps not surprising that such a mess occurs. Every single large-scale government IT project has seriously overrun its budget, often failed to deliver completely, and the large companies involved (Accenture, EDS and so on) typically make four to five times more in implementing changes to the basic and agreed specs than on the original contract work.
It’s not primarily technological, though – look at the fiasco of Prescott’s recent attempts to improve voting turnout by allowing anyone who wanted to have a postal or proxy vote. That was a failure both of management and of social understanding and the same issues affect eVoting and other IT stuff with the likes of NPfIT (the English NHS computerisation project, the largest civil IT project in the world) at risk on account of its grandiose, all-encompassing approach necessitating major wrenching of the way medical staff, hospitals and others directly affected work. -
Murdoch, there was an excellent report by an UK association of computer scientist or something like that on why IT projects tend to fail, which I can not locate. One of the points they made is that software has a visibility problem. Not even the dumbest advertising agency manager would commision a hundred meter long horizontal concrete pole suspended only from one end, because people have natural understanding of basic physics.
But when it comes to computers, the equivalent to basic physics is basic computer science. Even to pros a program is mostly a black box, that is the internals are not visible, but they have basic understanding of how code works in general and what it can and can not do. But an official or an executive usually has no such understanding, thus they tackle the issue as what _it does_, aka features, aka business benefit. And how the system does what they want, and how it may fail, is ignored. Result is dysfunctional crap.
A perfect example is copy protection. The idea of a bit that can not be copied is like water that is not wet (to quote Schneier again.) And concequently this stuff simply does not work. Yet copyright holders keep buying this stuff, wasting billions of dollard in direct costs, and a magnitidue more in opportunity costs lost due to not developing new business models. As a bonus they have ended up in a historic situation where the original is actually worse than an unlicensed copy because the copy can be used with lot less hassle. -
Pogo, it is actually the other way around, dysfuctional government can be masked by the fact that it is small. I recently attended a tax conference over here in Finland, where one of the economists mentioned that our tax system keeps getting more complicated (more deductions, more VAT rates and so on). Other one countered that it is in international comparison remarkably simple and efficent, particullary if you compare to the byzantine chaos in USA. To which the first replied that lower rates in USA limits the damage, that is they can afford to have a disfunctional system while we with a higher tax rate can not. I’d make it a general point that you can live with a relatively small and disfunctional government (think USA), or a large and efficient one (think Nordic states), but a large disfunctional govenment is a complete disaster.
E-voting done badly undermines the whole democratic process, that is it has huge potential costs. Yet at the same time benefits are at best non-existent (what exactly is wrong with paper and pen?) I am not that worried about political corruption, at least in the USA or Western Europe, but I am concerned about simple bugs.
Suppose it turned out that the data (vote count) was corrupted by a bug, say a firmware bug in disks or whatever storage is used to name something particullary nasty. And there is no paper trail. What happens, re-election? Even better, suppose the bug is discovered after the current government has been in power for few years. Do we cancel all legistalation done? These are huge risks, and I would somehow stomach taking them if there was a considerable reward, but I just don’t see any.
I am not quite sure if this is falls under EU competences or is something that belongs solely to member states, but if there was a need for a directive this is it. Just pass one that says that in all elections in EU the official vote medium is paper. If someone wants to use computers to produce that paper, fine. I am particullary conserned about the new member states where political corruption is still unfortunately high.
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