Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic? 254
whoever57 writes "Ed Felten is showing a scan of the summary from a Sequoia voting machine used in New Jersey. According to the paper record, the vote tallies don't add up — the total number of Republican ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Republican primary and the total number of Democratic ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Democratic primary. Felten has a number of discussions about the problems facing evoting, up to and including a semi-threatening email from Sequoia itself."
Update: 03/20 23:30 GMT by J : Later today, Felten added an update in which he analyzes Sequoia's explanation. He has questions, comments, and a demand.
Minor correction: (Score:2)
It's "Felten".
</pedant>
Re:Minor correction: (Score:5, Informative)
Count from Zero (Score:5, Funny)
On the bright side at least the error will vanish as the number of votes approaches infinity
Re:Count from Zero (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Republican tally was heavy one vote, while the Democratic tally was light one vote. Thus, your proposed explanation doesn't wash.
On the bright side at least the error will vanish as the number of votes approaches infinity
That's assuming that the error is due to the cause you postulated, which cannot be the case.
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Is NJ an open primary state (like MI)? Why couldn't a Dem have voted for one of the Republicans? That "option" (counting the number of Ds and Rs) might be a tally of the party of the voter rather than a total of the votes for candidates in that party.
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I've moved around a lot in the past few years and I'm fascinated by the differences in how each state votes. New York has these huge mechanical voting machines with levers. California just had computers. Pennsylvania had this big board with soft plastic covered flat buttons, like the buttons on some coffee vending machines. It was electronic I guess, but the board was gigantic; a sort of pr
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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I live in NY (still using the old level machines, which I love
The upshot is that, unless you're dedicated to voting for your party, you can ofte
Re:Count from Zero (Score:4, Informative)
What county do you live in? Here in Broome County they give us colored cards (green for the Democrats, pink for the Republicans) that we had out to the voters after signing them in. The voter then gives that card to the person operating the machine who sets the primary lever accordingly before hitting the entrance button that allows them to vote.
I've been running a polling place since 2004 and I've never had that mistake happen in a Primary Election. If you've seen it happen more then once or twice you should probably inform your local Board of Elections so they can address the problem. It just isn't supposed to happen that way......
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Unfortunately, what they do down here is have us sign in, then take the cards and flip them over themselves and send us to the booth right next to the table.
I'm not sure if its just laziness on the part of the poll runners, the fact that I usually vote soon after the polls are open so they aren't awake yet, or due to the fact that there are multiple districts all scrunched into one polling place (school/church gym), but its been the same everywhere I've voted (three of the five counties in t
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I'm not sure if its just laziness on the part of the poll runners
That's possible. I've come close to pulling out my hair during past elections trying to get the other three people in my polling place to follow proper procedure.
As a random example, we aren't supposed to sign in more then two or three voters at a time. If you sign in more of them then that you'll invariably wind up with someone standing in line at the machine who realizes that he needs to be somewhere and decides to duck out of line without voting. Since we've already signed him in this screws up ou
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I can't speak for the GP but it works the same here in Saratoga county. After I signed the registration book the nice elderly lady shouted my party affiliation across the room and the fellow manning the both toggled the lever on the back of the machine.
That's odd. I was under the impression that the card requirement was actually part of the Election Law, which is generally pretty specific (sometimes to the point of absurdity) about the procedures that we have to use at the polling place. Guess I'll have to look that up when I get home later.
Maybe its just on account of us Upstaters being smarter.
Umm, I am an upstater, unless Binghamton doesn't qualify ;)
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If that's the case, that's amazingly poor coding. I can code better than that.
It'd be illuminating to test the machine with the order reversed, or with three candidates, and see what it does.
That it would. It would be even more illuminating to see the damned code. It's ridiculous that we're being told we have to trust our votes to a black box.
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Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
it's like the Kempelen's chess machine (Score:3, Funny)
Re:it's like the Kempelen's chess machine (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe they should try running KDE instead?
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot prove correctness at all (Score:3, Interesting)
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Arbitrary program code cannot be proven correct, true. However, program code can be designed to be provable.
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maybe the problem is they're using floats rather than ints.
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Computers cannot prove correctness at all (Score:2)
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For all we know, the machines could be programmed to work perfectly, except on election day when subroutine X is used (on that day only).
But, we also know that thanks to compiler trickery, even studying the source code isn't enough.
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the size of the discrepancy is 1/60 or so. That's 1.6%, which is enough to change the outcome of some recent US elections [wikipedia.org]. So is it of a significant size? Yes, it is.
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I suppose that if this were the case, the representative of the voting machine company might have done better damage control by pointing this out.
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Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
He used the "look at the vote totals the machine printed" method.
Seriously, it has a picture of them. Did you RTFA and somehow didn't notice it, or do you like making uninformed comments? (Okay, that is a bit inflammatory. The first time I went to TFA, the pictures didn't load. But it still says in the text.)
Re:Minor discrepancy...MAJOR problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, I know!!! (Score:2)
Yea, that's the ticket, fuzzy logic!
Lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
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Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the double-standard here. The government wants to invade the privacy of it's citizens (discussed several times over on these very forums) and one of the typical responses is "Well, if you don't have anything to hide...".
But when an independant third party wants to verify that an important piece of hardware used in our political process can actually do the very simple math that it's required to do, the corporation who produces is has laws that it can throw in one's face to prevent verification of data. Shouldn't someone be pressing Sequoia with the "if you don't have anything to hide..." mantra?
Does anyone else here see the obvious double-standard that we've created for ourselves?
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But, then again, I'm from Canada - land of paper-based voting.
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But when an independant third party wants to verify that an important piece of hardware used in our political process can actually do the very simple math that it's required to do, the corporation who produces is has laws that it can throw in one's face to prevent verification of data. Shouldn't someone be pressing Sequoia with the "if you don't have anything to hide..." mantra?
Yes and no. It appears that this is a contractual issue. The State of New Jersey signed licensing terms that does not allow an independent party to review the code. The state should not violate that contract.
Thing is, there is a limited market for voting machines in the US. There are only 50 states, it seems to me the states are in a pretty good position to negotiate the licensing terms. Why is it that New Jersey didn't specify in the terms that the code and hardware had to be reviewed by indepe
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, I disagree. When it comes to elections and verifying voting machines, the state has every right to verify, the clause on the contract is irrelevent. Proper voting is more important than a contract between business and government.
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When it comes to elections and verifying voting machines, the state has every right to verify, the clause on the contract is irrelevent. Proper voting is more important than a contract between business and government.
The relevancy of the terms of the contract is for the courts to decide - which is what will happen if NJ sends the machine to an independent review source, but I can't say I agree with you.
A state, or any entity, cannot, and should not, sign a contract and then just ignore the provisions of the contract. Proper voting is very important, and it's up to State authorities to ensure the voting is correct. This decision should have been made PRIOR to signing the contract. If the terms of the licensing
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There's no double standard. Anything that favors the powerful over you is what they do.
oh dear. (Score:2)
duck and cover, they are reaching for their lawyer.
sounds like this story is a might fine basis for some good ole' fashioned DMCA action. Pffffft, that was the sound of sequoia credibility dying a death...
Re:oh dear. (Score:4, Interesting)
What credibility are you talking about?
After all those neato stints that just about every voting machine company tried to pull their credibility is somewhere between a San Francisco Tenderloin crack hooker and a timeshare salesman for quite some time now.
Thinking about it the hookers credibility is probably a lot better then the ones of those voting machine vendors.
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Yes, because whether she does the job right or not, either way you got screwed
Software bug (Score:4, Insightful)
print array.lastIndex.indexNum
instead of
print array.count
The real concern here is not that it has a bug. All software has bugs. The concern is over what kind of QA was performed to guarantee our votes. If such a simple and obvious test case was not performed, how on earth are we to feel good about this machine?
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What stupid thing the programmer may have done is irrelevant here.
This is supposed to be a secure machine for tallying votes. Either it is capable of counting, and providing a verifiable audit which matches the results it reports. Or, it's fundamentally broken and can't actually be used to count elections. I don't see how there is any middle ground.
There simply is no room for trying to acco
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Maybe the votes were not placed? (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh, why does this have to be so difficult. We can conduct trillions of dollars of business electronically, but we still don't have an effective digital voting system? I think the conspiracy here is by someone who hates technology likes to kill trees for paper balloting, not that digital voting is being rigged.
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1. Land government contract
2. Do little or nothing.
3. Profit.
Re:Maybe the votes were not placed? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to believe this is even an issue. The problem is that the people making voting machines (like Diebold) come from Banking sectors, where privacy and private, proprietary systems are the modus operandi.
Seems to me a good way to fix this would be to get some high-profile Non-Profs and top-brand CS schools (I'm thinking MIT, Apache Foundation, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, etc) all working together to gather some grant money, build the hardware and software solutions, open everything up for scrutiny, and produce a working product.
We can wave our arms over what somebody SHOULD build, but if we had a compelling alternative ready to go, it'd be a lot easier to pressure governments to do the right thing.
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If thats true that shows the machine was tested ZERO times.
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I'm not a big fan of the argument that Open Source = Always Better and Closed Source = Always Worse, but in this case I think it applies. The voting machines' inner workings are hidden from view from everyone, including the government running the election. If y
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If those trillions of dollars had to be transacted via "secret ballot", I'm pretty sure that hundreds of billions of them would have disappeared. Somehow it's a lot harder to write error-free code when you know that nobody's going to be able to do something as simple as checking their bank statements to catch your errors.
Enough Already! (Score:5, Insightful)
On the whole of it, I have a big problem with the "Winner takes all" system anyway, with the majority giving the power to a handful to beat up on us all. Not even getting into how the Republicans and the Democrats systemically shuts out all other parties.
But if we are going to have voting, at least make it fair. Give equal time to ALL parties, not just the D-R club, and use paper ballots under tight security. At least make "Democracy" less of a joke than it already is.
Re:Enough Already! (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree with you, I just have to point out that it's not all that hard...after all, the recent presidential election in Mexico was stolen the old-fashioned way.
Re:Enough Already! (Score:4, Insightful)
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The real difference is that undetectable forging is a whole lot more difficult.
With a paper ballot, there are a couple hundred years of forensics that you can throw at the sample to test whether they were all filled out by the same person, for example. Modifying existing ballots is even harder, if you want to do it in a way that stands up to any kind of investigation.
In pure electronic voting, one bit is for all purposes identical to another bit, and
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Evoting can work if the source and hardware design of the machines are completely open to the public.
That isn't enough because you have absolutely no guarantee that the hardware and software you vote on is equal to the hardware and software design that was published. And also you would still have a voting process that is basically a magical blackbox for 99.9% of the population, some experts might be able to verify it, but not the voter and this is a big deal, since a voter should be able to understand and verify the voting process. Good old pen&paper based voting does that, eVoting doesn't even get cl
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The more control one party has over the voting process, the more likely it is that voting fraud takes place.
By all accounts the anomalies in 2004 for Black and Hispanic votes were quite substantial.
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I tend to take a different point of view. For example, if amazon can track the millions of customers, purchases, orders, etc., with minimal errors (most folks tend to get what they ordered and charged the proper amount), why can't evoting on the same scale work?
Yes, there are architectural differences, etc., but my point is that we can make evoting about as reliable as paper voting---there's nothing fundamentally `bad' about machines adding up the votes.
A Common Problem. (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Polls (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Slashdot Polls (Score:5, Funny)
The interesting question is... (Score:2)
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Corporate Death Penalty (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end for closed source code in government elections. Here is the perfect o
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This is Jersey, we don't need fair elections! (Score:2, Interesting)
Barbie the voting machine designer says... (Score:2)
Guaranteed results (Score:2, Funny)
Open source how? (Score:3, Informative)
If Sequoia really were ready to commit mass voter fraud, I doubt they would have too many moral issues with violating the principles of open source while they're at it.
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Everyone keeps saying that a solution to the problem of potential voter fraud would be to open-source the code.... what guarantee does anyone have that the code they've published is the same as the code on the machines the day of the election? It would be absolutely trivial to cut out the naughty bits before publishing.
If the code on the machine is not the same as the publically released code, that in and of itself would be tampering with the machine. It is not necessarily easy, but nevertheless it is possible to verify that the compiled code on the machine is the same as the compiled version of the released source code. If they are not, then you have evidence of a crime-- you don't need to figure out what the code on the machine does, you only need to show that it's not the code that the voting commission purchased.
Sequoia vs..... Us ( Me and you, not the USA) (Score:2)
Or --more likely -- are they putting out the legal contract mumbo-jumbo to threaten NJ in order to avoid that exact sc
It's quite obvious what happened (Score:3, Funny)
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Here in England, each polling station has a list of registered voters. They tick you off the list when they give you a poll card. I guess it must be the same in Australia where you get fined for not turning up at your polling station.
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In the places I've voted at, you have to sign a preprinted list before you get your ballot. It sounds like the people in charge of that polling place weren't trained properly.
That still doesn't diminish the voting machine problem. If voting machines are not 'honest', then both legal AND illegal votes could be redistributed via machine count errors.
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Daily WTF. (Score:2)