[LINK] Schneier's CRYPTO-GRAM on e-Voting

[Rick Welykochy]

This month's CRYPTO-GRAM provides from insightful if not frightening
reading regarding the progress (de-progress?) of e-voting at the coalface
in the USofA:

Excerpts lifted from <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0611.html> ...


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1. Voting Technology and Security

Last week in Florida's 13th Congressional district, the victory margin was only 386 votes out of 153,000. There'll be a 
mandatory lawyered-up recount, but it won't include the almost 18,000 votes that seem to have disappeared. The 
electronic voting machines didn't include them in their final tallies, and there's no backup to use for the recount. The 
district will pick a winner to send to Washington, but it won't be because they are sure the majority voted for him. 
Maybe the majority did, and maybe it didn't. There's no way to know.
[SNIP]


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2. More on Electronic Voting Machines

Florida 13 is turning out to be a bigger problem than I described:

"The Democrat, Christine Jennings, lost to her Republican opponent, Vern Buchanan, by just 373 votes out of a total 
237,861 cast -­one of the closest House races in the nation. More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, or 13 percent 
of those who went to the polls Tuesday, did not seem to vote in the Congressional race when they cast ballots, a 
discrepancy that Kathy Dent, the county elections supervisor, said she could not explain.

"In comparison, only 2 percent of voters in one neighboring county within the same House district and 5 percent in 
another skipped the Congressional race, according to The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota. And many of those who did not seem 
to cast a vote in the House race did vote in more obscure races, like for the hospital board."
[SNIP]


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3. The Inherent Inaccuracy of Voting

In a "New York Times" op-ed, New York University sociology professor Dalton Conley points out that vote counting is 
inherently inaccurate:

"The rub in these cases is that we could count and recount, we could examine every ballot four times over and we'd get 
-- you guessed it -- four different results. That's the nature of large numbers -- there is inherent measurement error. 
We'd like to think that there is a "true" answer out there, even if that answer is decided by a single vote. We so 
desire the certainty of thinking that there is an objective truth in elections and that a fair process will reveal it.

"But even in an absolutely clean recount, there is not always a sure answer. Ever count out a large jar of pennies? And 
then do it again? And then have a friend do it? Do you always converge on a single number? Or do you usually just 
average the various results you come to? If you are like me, you probably settle on an average. The underlying notion is 
that each election, like those recounts of the penny jar, is more like a poll of some underlying voting population."

He's right, but it's more complicated than that.

There are two basic types of voting errors: random errors and systemic errors. Random errors are just that, random. 
Votes intended for A that mistakenly go to B are just as likely as votes intended for B that mistakenly go to A. This is 
why, traditionally, recounts in close elections are unlikely to change things. The recount will find the few percent of 
the errors in each direction, and they'll cancel each other out. But in a very close election, a careful recount will 
yield a more accurate -- but almost certainly not perfectly accurate -- result.

Systemic errors are more important, because they will cause votes intended for A to go to B at a different rate than the 
reverse. Those can make a dramatic difference in an election, because they can easily shift thousands of votes from A to 
B without any counterbalancing shift from B to A. These errors can either be a particular problem in the system -- a 
badly designed ballot, for example -- or a random error that only occurs in precincts where A has more supporters than B.

[SNIP]



cheers
rickw



-- 
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Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

Terkel has long suffered from ommatophobia (fear of eyes).
      -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studs_Terkel