Essays in the Category "Elections"
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Voting Security and Technology
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Voting seems like the perfect application for technology, but actually applying it is harder than it first appears. To ensure that voters can vote honestly, they need anonymity, which requires a secret ballot. Through the centuries, different civilizations have done their best with the available technologies. Stones and pottery shards dropped in Greek vases led to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths and punch cards replaced paper ballots for faster counting. Now, new computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and remote Internet voting promises even more convenience…
Insider Risks in Elections
Many discussions of voting systems and their relative integrity have been primarily technical, focusing on the difficulty of attacks and defenses. This is only half of the equation: it’s not enough to know how much it might cost to rig an election by attacking voting systems; we also need to know how much it would be worth to do so. Our illustrative example uses the most recent available U.S. data, but is otherwise is not intended to be specific to any particular political party.
In order to gain a clear majority of the House in 2002, Democrats would have needed to win 13 seats that went to Republicans. According to Associated Press voting data, Democrats could have added 13 seats by swinging 49,469 votes. This corresponds to changing just over 1% of the 4,310,198 votes in these races and under 1/1000 of the 70 million votes cast in contested House races. The Senate was even closer: switching 20,703 votes in Missouri and New Hampshire would have provided Democrats with the necessary two seats…
Voting and Technology: Who Gets to Count Your Vote?
Paperless voting machines threaten the integrity of democratic process by what they don't do.
Voting problems associated with the 2000 U.S. Presidential election have spurred calls for more accurate voting systems. Unfortunately, many of the new computerized voting systems purchased today have major security and reliability problems.
The ideal voting technology would have five attributes: anonymity, scalability, speed, audit, and accuracy (direct mapping from intent to counted vote). In the rush to improve the first four, accuracy is being sacrificed. Accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted; it’s how well the process maps voter intent into counted votes and the final tally. People misread ballots, punch cards don’t tabulate properly, machines break down, ballots get lost. Mistakes, even fraud, happen…
Technology Was Only Part of the Florida Problem
In the wake of the presidential election, pundits have called for more accurate voting and vote counting. To most people, this obviously means more technology. But before jumping to conclusions, let’s look at the security and reliability issues surrounding voting technology.
Most of Florida’s voting problems are a direct result of “translation” errors stemming from too much technology.
The Palm Beach County system had several translation steps: voter to ballot to punch card to card reader to vote tabulator to centralized total. Some voters were confused by the layout of the “butterfly” ballot and mistakenly voted for someone else. Others didn’t punch their ballots in such a way that the tabulating machines could read them…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.