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  • From: Jeremy Portzer <jeremyp AT pobox.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Can You Count on Voting Machines?
  • Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:06:17 +1100

Roger Austin wrote:
Christian Stalberg wrote:
January 6, 2008 Can You Count on Voting Machines? By CLIVE THOMPSON
<snipped>
specter of partisan hackers throwing an election. But the real problem may simply be inherent in the nature of computers: they can be precise but also capricious, prone to malfunctions we simply can’t anticipate.

This is not true. You can anticipate most errors, or at least you can
estimate where most of the errors will come from during testing. Any
capable analyst will understand the weaknesses of a system if they are
paying attention and have the budget to address them.

This is because computer scientists understand, from hard experience, that complex software can’t function perfectly all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. Myriad things can go wrong. The software might have bugs — errors in the code made by tired or overworked programmers. Or voters could do something the machines don’t expect, like touching the screen in two places at once. “Computers crash and we don’t know why,” Felten told me. “That’s just a routine part of computers.”

This is a very stupid statement and the reporter should have challenged
this Felten person about it. I guess it fit the reporters agenda so they
didn't bother.
Touch screens and the software subsystems are more robust that that.
Try it the next time you are at the Teeter checking out and see what
happens. Those grocery store POC systems are much more complicated than
any voting machine should be.
It is easy to blame the programmers.

[sorry for horribly delayed response]

Having worked at the 'Teeter, and been involved in the maintenance of those machines, I can tell you that sometimes the self-service machines DID crash and we didn't know why. :-)

But seriously, they crashed because they were running Windows NT 4.0 - a robust operating system for its time, but hardly up to date, and also not really designed for embedded systems type work. There are plenty of ways to harden things that weren't necessarily used on these machines. (This was about 3 years ago so things may be upgraded now.)

Also, the presentation layer was the only part that crashed. The "back-end" servers and databases carefully guard the transactions - what really matters in a grocery store. When the system boots back up, you can continue your order exactly where it left off when it crashed - you don't have to re-scan anything. But I think this does underscore the point - computers are complex enough systems that you can't control everything - you can't find ALL bugs - and thus you must put in contingencies to deal with anything and everything.

I do think the voting machines have to be more complex, and more fault-tolerant than the grocery store systems. As Tanner pointed out, they require a careful balance between anonymity and robustness to preserve data. In a POS system, you can rely on a myriad different ways to preserve data, with tracking by transaction references, VIC cards, credit cards, etc. - anonymity is not important when you're a duly authorized person accessing the database. Also, the costs of failure are not particularly high. If a POS machine crashes you can just go ring up the order on another one. It's a pain, but not a political isssue. Even if you're not sure if your credit card has been charged, there are ways of verifying that later - you can check your statement and see if you got charged twice or not. This kind of check-and-balance exists throughout the financial world and is much more challenging in voting machines.

I agree that fundamentally optical-scan machines seem to be the best of all worlds.

I'm living in Australia now where voting machines are banned, and have been for years. All balloting is done by paper, with hand-counting. They do have various mathematical systems for allocating the counting so that some groups of ballots are counted twice for verification. This helps catch any errors introduced by humans. There have been arguments that machines would be more cost-effective but this actually turns out to be difficult to justify in the long run, given the high capital and maintenance costs for machines that are only used once every few years. A much more versatile resource - the human being - has few capital costs, low training requirements, etc.

The actually tallying of the ballots is fully computerized, of course, made especially necessary by Australia's complex preference system.

--Jeremy Portzer




  • Re: [internetworkers] Can You Count on Voting Machines?, Jeremy Portzer, 02/05/2008

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