US government warns UK that e-voting is finicky

If there's anything we can appreciate, it's the irony of the United States trying to tell other nations how to run their e-voting setups, you know, considering that America can't even hire competent companies to run quality assurance tests on its own machines. Nevertheless, the US Government Audit Office (GAO) has warned in a recent document document entitled "All Levels of Government Are Needed to Address Electronic Voting System Challenges" that e-voting setups could cause some problems when it came to issues of integrity. Specifically, Randolph Hite, director of IT architecture and systems at the GAO, stated that "no voting technology, however well designed, can be a magic bullet that will solve all election problems," and even went so far as to suggest that e-voting technology "merits the combined and focused attention of federal, state, and local authorities responsible for election administration." Still, friendly advice typically sinks in better if the presenter tends to practice what they preach, so we'd suggest the Brits do everything they can to just, um, not do what we've done. [Warning: PDF read link]

[Via Inquirer]

[John Doe @ Mar 11th 2007 3:47AM]

*shrugs* I don't consider it ironic. Just that they are stating the blatantly obvious. remember: Do as we say, not as we do! :-P

[Julian Bond @ Mar 11th 2007 4:43AM]

You know, there's a lot to be said for bits of paper with pencil marks, held in locked strong boxes and counted by humans.

Maybe the USA should go and find out how India does electronic elections and just outsource it.

[Jeremy Wade @ Mar 11th 2007 5:01AM]

I don't think it's a matter of "we're not good enough to run an e-voting system", but more of a "we CHOSE an e-voting system so that we can maipulate the results".

[Finite @ Mar 11th 2007 5:01AM]

Hmm.. well, honestly, after reading the pdf, it seems more like the US is saying something along the lines of this:

"Yeah, we know what you're thinking, that e-voting will be great in removing human error and other troublesome effects of manual systems, but in actuality, it's not quite what one imagines, trust us, look at what happened to us and try to make sure similar things don't happen to you... here's what you can do."

I didn't find it nearly as negative in tone as the poster, more of a helpful tip, but, eh, I suppose it could have been read differently.

[wade_reese @ Mar 11th 2007 9:00AM]

ah...

when you learn to properly type your stories, maybe you can evaluate the performance of others ("...in a recent document document entitled...")

What the hell is a document document?

[Edward @ Mar 11th 2007 11:09AM]

"All Levels of Government Are Needed to Address Electronic Voting System Challenges"

kinda reminds me of

All Your Base Are Belong to US

[paul34 @ Mar 11th 2007 11:29AM]

good. The GAO has always produced quality reports, but unfortunately it seems not many in Washington are willing to listen to the few levelheaded folks in the government...

[farfisa @ Mar 11th 2007 2:13PM]

I do think it's ironic that he said "magic bullet"--when yer talkin' democracy, maybe avoid terms associated with the Kennedy assassination?

[Jeff Lewis @ Mar 11th 2007 6:08PM]

I've found myself having to learn about how the USA electoral system works at all levels from the Presidential to the municiple elections and to be honest, I think blaming the e-voting system is like blaming a broken shoelace for the blisters on your feet.

It's absolutely true that some of the systems are faulty - but most electronic ballots aren't done by touch screens - they're done - surprise - by a machine scannable paper ballot.

The real problem is the immensely and perversely complex voting system the US uses. The lack of consistent standards even between counties in a given state makes developing a reliable and cost effective system nearly impossible - but even at that - there are subtlies to the system I suspect not even the *voters* understand.

Case in point - in Washington state - there's a system which lets a voter 'preselect' their preferred party. After that, if you vote for enough people of the opposite party - it doesn't switch - it *invalidates your ballot* - ALL of our ballot.

That's not something the voting machine people designed - that's what the government did.

Another case in point - in the infamous 2000 Florida election, it wasn't errors in the vote tallying system - it was the design of the ballots - not done by the e-voting - that messed things up. And let's not forget Katherine Harris - who was fund raising for Bush, who was also in charge of managing the balloting system.

Yes, evoting has problems and they should be addressed - but let's look at the big problems first: badly managed and run elections, electoral systems which are designed to be antagonistic to the voters, piling too many unrelated ballots together to save cost, inconsistent rules (like some states allowing pardoned felons to vote while others don't) politicians who are operating in a conflict of interest and so on.

I compare it to other countries (like my home, Canada) where the rules are kept very simple: one citizen, one vote and the ballots don't try to pile a dozen different unrelated ballots onto one to say buck, and there's ONE agency which defines the rules. Fix these problems first and the electronic voting problems will mostly take care of themselves.

[DavidSwe @ Mar 12th 2007 4:30AM]

@Finite:
The reason I feel pissed is because it's not rocket science. It has been done before and I'm confident that UK will hire intelligent ppl. The thing is that U.S.A tells everyone that they are bound to make the same mistakes which is just wrong! If UK really think that they will make the same misstake then they will ask for help from India or some other country (maybe even USA). 'till then USA should not let their goverments tell other countries what to do, or even how to do things! Leave that up to real scientists with no bias whatsoever. USA needs to control their politicans more properly.

[Genome @ Mar 12th 2007 8:58AM]

Quote: "USA should not let their goverments tell other countries what to do, or even how to do things!"

Based on the track record, I doubt thats gonna happen.

[Genome @ Mar 12th 2007 7:56AM]

Is it really wise to go with e-voting, considering all the exploits, and dodgy IT contractors shenanigans?

Oh yeah and can anyone say Quantum computing? Whatever security that can be implemented for this e-voting system isn't really going to stand up to that is it?

Maybe this is why a system thats been around for 100s of years(voting) shouldn't be relying on one thats only been popular for 45 years.

Hopefully the only quantum computers in operation will be held by our good friends the US government, oh and D-wave