Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State 117
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?"
What about the rest of it? (Score:1)
Is the software open source and based on verifiable voting, too?
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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.
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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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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?
You count the votes in place. No transport. Boxes are supervised at all times. You have a committee with representatives of each candidate present. Anyone want to give me odds on a committee rigging an election? I doubt it would get past the first meeting. :)
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It's not impossible to see what the computer is doing, and done correctly, electronic voting is both a superior input interface AND can provide faster counts AND can provide better audit trails. I agree this isn't what we see done with typical voting machines, but it's hardly impossible task you make it out to be.
You could in make the computer output a human-readable receipt. That could be on paper, it could be emailed, it could be laser-cut into a hunk of steel -- the output mode doesn't really matter. And
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No, I already *read* the article and I was commenting on what was *missing* from the article.
Perhaps *you* should have read the article before making yourself look foolish. Had you actually read the article, then my comment, then you would have known that I, too, was essentially saying that the Linux thing is only one small part of the bigger picture.
Oops.
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.
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I think introducing computers here will be more expensive and cause more problems than it is worth.
If it aint broke dont fix it.
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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.
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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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Years ago I tried to hitch hike up the east coast of Tas from Hobart to Devonport. I camped in Bicheno and looked for a lift to Launceston. Nothing. I was there for hours. This was in the days of the Franklin river controversy and people with back packs were unpopular.
So I got out of Bicheno but I got stuck in the next town and I thought this is really bad when along came this old VW van. They stopped for me and I jumped in.
Inside the van were six people with quite amazing facial deformities. They looked li
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Thanks. I didn't know that.
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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...
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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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Article say in Victoria, not of.
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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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Mum.
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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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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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If you can't vote for multiple parties then you don't have a real democracy. Your coin-voting system just serves to keep out the minor parties.
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It's not "100% fraud proof", as it's vulnerable to simple sleight-of-hand. All you need is a dozen more ball-bearings up your sleeve. Furthermore, he doesn't mention any way to ensure that the election officials are themselves trustworthy. If votes from lots of different polling locations need to be aggregated at one central location, there's no mention of any chain of custody procedures for the ballot box, nor any way to ensure that the contents of the box, while untampered with, haven't simply been misrep
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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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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.
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Linus Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State
That's should give Steve Ballmer something to think about.
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As an Australian I welcome our new OSS overload, as a sysadmin of some influence I may be useful in gathering developers to toil in his underground coding caves.
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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Are you running the KDE variant of Gnome on that, and the Reiser/EXT4 filesystem?
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I prefer CocoaExplorer, Metacity Edition.
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nothing compared to my Damn Small Yellow Dog DebuntuSE with FutureKernel 6.4
Bah, showoffs. I prefer to get real work done with my computer, so I stick to GNU/Hurd.
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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)
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With a felt tip marker. Because they can't trust us with a ballpoint.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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So basically, every time we get the election results, I am highly confident that they do in fact represent the wish of the majority of my fellow citizens. They usually elect the wrong guy.
That's how I verify voting results too: if the wrong guy is voted in, I know that no significant tampering occurred.
The day an intelligent, honest, moral politician (I know, oxymoron) wins an election is the day we need to rethink our voting system!
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The old fashioned manual voting and manual or semi manual voting system have had many attempts at subverting them and all are now protected against
You cannot swing an election (unless it is a very narrow margin) when a properly run manual count election is in place
With electronic voting of any kind it is not as transparent as it could be and it is possible to influence the outcome
SEVERAL single points of failure. (Score:2)
Bingo!
But it introduces not one but several single points of failure, of which the manufacturer is just the most obvious. In addition there are, at least:
- The distribution channel for software updates (OS, voting app, ballot configuration entry, .
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Paper ballots are put on a table and representatives from all the political parties start sorting them into stacks. When they are all sorted the reps swap stacks with each other to check and throw out those which they think are incorrectly sorted or unreadable. Rinse and repeat until all reps have inspected all stacks. The discarded ballots
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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?
In Australia, and I'm sure most other democracies, we have a position known as a "scrutineer", appointed by the candidates who are allowed appoint one per polling place. The scrutineer watches the voting process and watches the counting process after the polls close.
I've been a scrutineer, so yes I have tracked the paper votes and how they are counted.
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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?
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... and Saddam had a 100% turnout ....
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?
GNU.Free (Score:1)
does it matter ? (Score:1, Insightful)
I have to be honest. In the end I don't care one bit about what operating system the voting machine is on. Not at all. What I do care about is that it works and works well. Prove that to me and I would be fine with it running on OS/2
The core problem is unchanged by this (Score:1)
Computer assisted voting is possible. (Score:1)
Actuallly the OS & voting program and databse does not matter that much. What is important is that there is a verifiable paper trail. The voter should be able to check what he voted (on a paper). A manual recount should be possible. And remember a vote should be secret (not to be traced back to who voted what). You cannot trust that the (open) source code of the program is the same that is actually running on the voting kiosk. (And i probably am forgetting some important specs here)
Y
A open source system
Hats (Score:1)
Anyone noticed how the australian icon and the redhat one look so close to each other?
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Take a look on the icons next to the article.
Personally, I found the connection interesting
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Issue? (Score:1)
I don't know why everyone has such a problem with this - the act of voting, manually or electronically is rather simple and not an overly difficult task.
Have a touch screen/keyboard overlay that displays the candidates and the computer records the order you tick the boxes.
Then prints on paper in fixed locations to match the screen overlay numbers that represent the order a box was chosen (Look at a lottery quick pick, or a machine readable ticket) print a barcode at the bottom that encodes the time, date, l
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An alternative, have the whole lot done by a couple of programmable microcontroller - in this day and age there's no need to build a whole software system to do this.
The week before polling a manufacturer can burn verified programs to microcontrollers, these can then be run through second and third parties to test the code burnt for verification, drop them into chip mounts inside the booths and again test by second and third partys - build the booths in such away as you need 3 keys to open it one share them
Today Australia (Score:2)
Good God...
I see that Linus wasn't kidding when he was talking about world domination!
Bad People = Electronic winners (Score:1)
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
wait-for-it (Score:1)
My incredible and perfect solution (Score:1)
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Any system that allows you to show your vote outside the voting-booth runs the risk of vote-buying. "I'll give anyone $20 each if they show me they voted for the FLM Party."
The Fact that it is confusing ... (Score:2)
No surprise here. *NIX is deliberately confusing. Understanding the nuances of it are what seperates "us" from the hoi polloi.
At least they weren't confused enough NOT to choose some version of FOSS.
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Mod Parent into the ground, please.
It belongs in the XKCD thread.
However, I don't take back what I said.
*grumble*
--
BMO