Electronic Voting Machine Fraud
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PC in Hardware, Other Tech, tags: Voting machine
Why is it so difficult to produce a trustworthy electronic voting machine? I know Maryland has had electronic voting for quite a few elections, but it seems that many places can not make it work. I have seen examples of machines that count the votes wrong during testing, favor one candidate over another, or are vulnerable to having their data compromised.
It is actually more difficult to produce a voting machine that is capable of losing votes. What is so hard about i = i + 1? Favoring one candidate over another would be even more difficult as the system would have to recognize the candidates as more than just an arbitrary variable before the system could favor the candidate that the programmer wanted it to favor. Vulnerable to having data compromised is always going to be an option when people have physical access to a machine, however it is no different than paper ballots that can also be modified or even damaged when read over and over again in recounts.
Anonymity is one of the reasons why electronic voting machines have issues. It is desirable to make it impossible to authoritatively connect a vote with a voter. This protects the voter from all sorts of fraud, extortion, and even persecution. It has the side effect of making recounting and voter legitimacy issues possible.
Ballot design is also apparently an issue, or at least it is cited as having been partly responsible for a 3% error rate in tests of electronic voting machines.
Hardware or software malfunction has been alleged to cause up to 20% of voting machines to fail on election day. I highly doubt that a 3% error rate would be acceptable, so I can’t imagine that has any basis in reality, but there it is adding to the negative stigma.
Still, it just makes no sense to me why people fear this technology and why no one has been able to produce a voting machine without this stigma. Your computer is much more complex than a voting machine and performs many additional tasks. Your computer is connected to the Internet, most likely, which makes it even more vulnerable. Voting machines are not (usually) connected to the Internet, so that attack vector is not even possible. Even a single piece of software on your computer is more complex, or should be, than the voting software on a voting machine yet when was the last time you sent an email to your mom saying you appreciated her cooking and she got the email saying the opposite?
There is just too much passion and incompetence in this field for me. Passion because if one candidate loses his or her supporters immediately blame something, and the electronic voting machine is an easy target. Incompetence because i = i + 1 is too simple to accidentally have it subtracting votes instead of adding them, or favoring one candidate over the other.
Unfortunately this will be the last year that Maryland has electronic voting. Apparently it wasn’t as easy to recount the electric votes as it was to recount paper votes. Never mind the fact that if the electronic voting method followed the KISSS model (Keep It Secure and Simple, Stupid) there would never be a reason to do a recount.
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This is something I never understood either. It does seem that the companies that make these defective machines are almost going out of their way to make them unreliable. Wouldn’t it be better from a business perspective to take the complaints into consideration and work to remove the errors and make them efficient and functional?
But no, instead we have examples where a voter will go to vote for one candidate and the machine registers it as a vote for the other candidate, or the machine will come up with different results every time it recounts the same number of votes.
Here’s hoping some of these issues are addressed and remedied before the next election.
Fraud of electronic voting machine since the machine is depend on the human if the human give the wrong informations the machine also fake
since it is depend on human beings
@sumathi
Paper ballots have the same failing. A human fills it out. A human counts it. A human re-counts it. There are three separate events (at least) where the element of human error can enter in. The electronic voting machine should eliminate two of those if programmed competently. Any first-year programming student should be able to successfully write the basic logic of a voting machine without introducing any of the errors we’ve read about.