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Comments: 117 + - Linux: Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State on Wednesday March 10, @06:19AM
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daria42 writes "The Electoral Commission in the Australian state of Victoria has made plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux in the next state election in November of this year. But it appears to be a little confused: the documentation states it will be using the '2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.' Huh?"
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A couple of things (Score:4, Informative)
I live in Victoria and as far a I know there is only one electoral commission in Australia and that is the national one. Maybe the AEC [aec.gov.au] is trialing something in Victoria?
Voting here has always been manual. You write a number in the box. I write it backwards. Gun nuts get the highest number, the greens get the lowest (which is 1), but I accept that other people go about it their own ways.
I have never seen a computer of any kind in a place where we vote. The process is obsessively manual and works very well.
Re:A couple of things (Score:5, Interesting)
I have never seen a computer of any kind in a place where we vote. The process is obsessively manual and works very well.
This is what surprised me. I was involved in the last election giving out the ballots and counting at the end. There were only 3 of us at our booth and we were paid something like $200 for the day. The process went very smoothly and everyone knew what to do. I think introducing computers here will be more expensive and cause more problems than it is worth.
Hah, as a nerd I never thought I would say something like that.
Parent
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I live in Victoria and as far a I know there is only one electoral commission in Australia and that is the national one
http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/ [vic.gov.au]
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Oh okay so we are talking about local elections. Last time I checked they were all done by post. I still have (unopened) voting slips addressed to:
Brett A Needham
Martin J Spratt (twice)
Marlene J Valentine
Catherine A Spratt
Ian J Valentine
Venessa Sayers
...at my former address in South Croydon. I imagine they were test data inside the former voting system. I am holding on to those letters, just in case.
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Some of it depends on the state, WA local elections can be run by the WAEC [wa.gov.au] or they can be run by the council itself. It's usually a cost issue. Local councils can run them in different ways. Most are now postal elections. Turnout is pretty poor.
As for odd letters, some political party programmer needs a course in logic. Just because my brother and sister live at the same address and share a last name, they are not Mr and Mrs.
Re:A couple of things (Score:5, Informative)
As for odd letters, some political party programmer needs a course in logic. Just because my brother and sister live at the same address and share a last name, they are not Mr and Mrs.
Had you replaced WA with Tasmania, I would have disagreed with you right there.
Parent
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Haha ... you got an informative mod for this :D
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Obviously the mods are from TAS and think it's normal. :-)
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Thanks. I didn't know that.
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Every state has its own Electoral Commission. ECs are a retirement grounds for out to pasture politicians who want / still need a salary - but not much work - and very hard working and independent minded public servants. I was fascinated by the process that creates new electoral boundaries and trust it a lot more now.
The AEC and the state ECs compete to run the local council elections. Local councils run elections not for democracy (for which most don't care about), but instead as a method of making quite a
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There is precisely one correct answer to getting out of the fine, but don't use it too often as you won't be believed on your second or third attempt.
Oh great, a riddler...
FINE, ill ask, what is the word ?
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The AEC and the state ECs compete to run the local council elections. Local councils run elections not for democracy (for which most don't care about), but instead as a method of making quite a lot money, as most folks don't bother to vote and thus get a fine.
The AEC doesn't do local elections. Local government elections aren't compulsory. Anything else you need corrected?
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You write a number in the box. I write it backwards. Gun nuts get the highest number, the greens get the lowest (which is 1)
Oh, I get it. I was wondering why you wanted people to have to hold your ballot up to a mirror to find out what you wrote.
The counting down technique is exactly how I do it too. I call it the "who do I hate the most" principle. And never vote above the line for the senate, always fill in every single box. It is the same principle as wanting to see the source code. If the parties don't publicise how your vote will count if you give them a tick above the line then they don't deserve the vote.
Finally, I don't
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Don't know about Victoria, but we've had a electronic voting option here in the ACT for both the last Federal election and the last Territory election. Having said that, most people still prefer the paper ballot because it's what they are used to, I suppose.
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Some information about the ACT electronic voting system here: http://www.elections.act.gov.au/elections/electronicvoting.html [act.gov.au]
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From the article:
The state first started using the machines in a limited trial during the last state election in 2006. It appears as if the machines were used for voting for the vision-impaired, as well as for military personnel.
Yeah, I'm in Victoria too and I've never seen an electronic voting machine. Maybe next election...
A woman I work with works for the AEC on election day. Its pretty interesting how they run the polling places. All the votes you see on the night are counted by the same people who run the polling place, right after they close up.
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Australia has instant-runoff voting. Your proposal won't work here, nor is it necessary.
With 95% voter turnout at each election, and four different parties currently in the Senate, I think our current method gives us plenty of say.
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Mwahahaha! (Score:4, Funny)
Now we get to control the Oz elections, and install Linus Torvalds as dictator (benevolent, that is) for life!!!
Mwahahahaha!!
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Oh, crap, I just got a message saying I wasn't actually supposed to leak that to world.
Well, maybe we can install RMS as dictator.
Now I'm giggling at the thought of a country run by RMS.
"That's GNU/Australia to you!"
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Sounds like the Whittlam government all over again.
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static char shellcode[]=
"\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90"
"\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90\0x90PaulineHanson++"
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I was more concerned that CowboyNeal would win in a landslide, due to it being the none-of-the-above option. Of course, this whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Pah (Score:5, Funny)
2.6/Gentoo RHEL is nothing compared to my Damn Small Yellow Dog DebuntuSE with FutureKernel 6.4
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I think... (Score:3, Funny)
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Well, since Debian can run on FreeBSD, there's no contradiction there!
Still funny, though!
Open, or not ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Still wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Spread the word to fellow voters : if YOU can't understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !
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How can we check paper votes are counted right? How can we check the ballot results are added correctly? Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes. Political parties and organizations who are concerned with elections must evolve with the times and develop new ways of checking election results in an electronic world.
Those concerns about ele
Re:Still wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's difficult to stuff a paper ballot box (which in most systems is never to be left unattended from when it's sealed to when the votes get counted) without it being fairly obvious.
OTOH, there are plenty of places to hide an electronic vote stuffer on most electronic systems and it's a often a lot harder to verify that nobody's tampered with them.
Parent
Re:Still wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
you can't track or verify your vote after you've cast it obviously - to suggest any voting system is flawed due to a lack of tracking flys in the face of the secret ballot and is for retards.
Parent
Re:Still wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Yes I did. I am not sure of the US system but here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes.
It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.
Parent
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here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.
I can attest to that. Every time I go to vote I'm asked if I would like to help with the counting, despite the fact that I don't vote for the usual majority in my arrondissement, and that the old guy asking me does. I usually can't help, though, because of other time constraints.
I also personally know several people who regularly help with the counting. Some of them are involved in their local politics, and some of them aren't.
So basically, every time we get the election results, I am highly confident tha
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"if YOU can't understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !"
Now that's an acurate description of how best to look at it.
Thing is, there's nothing inherently wrong with electronically supported counting of votes, as long as the votes themselves are each seperately available in physical form.
Here in the Netherlands we've recently switched back wholesale to voting with a red pencil instead of voting computers precisely because it's the only way to have those votes available for a true recount. Funny thing is, right after the most recent election officials started compl
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Get off my lawn! (Score:4, Interesting)
Converting to Linux for voting machines is a big shift from the VEC of old. Color me impressed.
I remember many years ago (1998-1999) working at the VEC. I was a system admin in my first security consultant job.
DEC/Microsoft was helping the VEC create a Microsoft-only COM+ based voting system called EMS 2000. Previously, it had taken 3+ months to organize an election, despite laws allowing the Premier to call an election within a month at any time. So they had to be prepared a long way out, which was costly. EMS 2000 was essentially a way to roll out an election within three weeks. I believe it was used in at least a few elections. I wouldn't be surprised if EMS 2000 has been maintained and is still in use - it was a lot of $$$$$$ to spend on a project.
EMS 2000 used every single part of the Microsoft stack. One thing I remember was how slowly Outlook 98 opened when it had 4000 tasks. EMS 2000 created Outlook tasks using COM+ custom queuing components over very slow modem and ISDN lines to all parts of the state. Surprisingly, this was still better than the previous system, which was primarily a manual system.
It was a full MS stack with basically every single possible MS product at the time (NT, COM+, Exchange, SQL, queuing components using pre-release NT 5.0 / Win2K, and lots of custom VB code), it hung together well and ran fairly reliably considering the shaky comms at the time.
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Switzerland ... has a manual voting system, holds elections at very short notice and announces the complete result usually within 5 hours of the polls closing
Why do we need electronic voting again?
Penguinitis (Score:2)
the documentation states it will be using the '2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
How tragic - another case of Mad Penguin Disease.
Will nobody think of the children?
Today Australia (Score:2)
Good God...
I see that Linus wasn't kidding when he was talking about world domination!
Victoria Police IT, myki... e-voting? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Australian state of Victoria is home to some of the worst IT-related projects in the history of IT.
Victoria Police Business Information Technology Services: fraud, kickbacks, blowouts, leaks... the list is long
myki: most expensive ticketing system in the world, years behind schedule, too complex, doesn't work... the list is also long
And now they want to fail spectacularly - again - with the introduction of e-voting?
I've got a special slot reserved in my "top IT project disasters" list for any e-voting s
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Its a bit of a stupid article:
One of the last stand-out Linux desktop deployments in Australia was that found at Kennards Hire.
Can't be much going on at Kennards. Where I work we've got maybe 200 linux desktops and thousands of linux systems which run our product. Maybe I should tell this Delimiter thing about it.
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Yes, after all, desktop deployments are not really the sort of thing you trumpet about with press releases, etc. Who knows how many large-scale Linux desktop deployments there are.
I'm more curious about what's running on top of Linux, though. Any free software OS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) is going to be great simply because it'll save the taxpayers licensing fees. However, as we've discovered here in the US, it is usually the voting software itself that is problematic.
The Linux thing is nice, but it'd be mo
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Are you seriously asking someone to RTFA for you and tell you what it says?
Seriously, I think some people are seriously confused about Linux and programming. The problem with voting machines isn't whether they run Linux or Windows (though it is a problem of cost of the OS) it's whether or not the source code to the processes is open and available and the ability to verify that the binary running is in fact compiled from that same source. If this happened in a Windows based machine, there would be fewer co
Re:What about the rest of it? (Score:4, Insightful)
With paper-based voting, someone can look in the ballot box at the start of the day and see that it's empty. They can then watch each person put one ballot paper in, and they can watch them get taken out and counted. It is, and always will be, much more easily verifiable than any form of electronic voting.
Parent
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If there was a secure way to make that happen, I'd agree. However, how do you determine who is trustworthy enough to supervise the process? Do they supervise the entire process (empty box -> add votes -> count votes -> report votes) or just a part of it? If you have two, three, four political parties, do you have observers from each party? What happens when votes from a precinct just "disappear" on the way to whereever they're counted (or stored)? How many people need to be subverted in order
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