German court finds 2005 e-voting was unconstitutional, uncool
By Laura June 
posted Mar 4th 2009 1:09PM
posted Mar 4th 2009 1:09PM
Oh, e-voting machines... ever since they arrived on the scene to challenge old timey lever-laden beasts of yore (not to mention pencils and paper, if you remember what those are), there have been numberless examples of their hackability, their unreliable software, and the general mayhem caused by not having a paper trail in elections. It's been a fun ride, but one that's causing a ruckus in Germany... almost four years after the fact, anyway. That's right, the country's highest court has ruled that the 2005 General Election was, in fact, unconstitutional, after the use of e-voting machines was challenged by a father and son team. The ruling states that while the voting was unconstitutional (read: illegal) because the software used on the machines is unreliable, they have not proven that any mistakes were made, nor do they rule out the possibility of using such machines in the future, when stuff will be cooler and work better.
this is how hitler was elected
yes and too Bush Jr.
Actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but he was *appointed* chancellor, and then abused emergency powers to become dictator. He was never elected.
Actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but he was *appointed* chancellor, and then abused emergency powers to become dictator. He was never elected.
BOOM!
yea it was kinda like that ^^
You don't elect a president or chancellor in Germany. You elect parties!
Oh and shouldn't be Batman president and Robin the vp? Why would batman be superman's vp???
Here is a picture of what they look like in Germany: http://www.welt.de/politik/article3307640/Einsatz-von-Wahlcomputern-war-verfassungswidrig.html
@Sora
Yeah, this is exactly like it happened in Star Wars!
History repeating...
no he was "selected"
It's interesting that Hitler's reign of Germany was completely legal. He did some horrific things, sure, but for some reason he made sure he was always on the right side of the law. They even bothered to renew the enabling act (Ermaechtigungsgesetz) every 4 years, even though they certainly didn't need to.
Also, Germany doesn't have a constitution. It has a 'base law' (Grundgesetz).
And yes, voting in Germany (and much of Europe) is by party, not by person. There are typically 3 or more parties represented in parliament. It's rare to find a two party parliament in Europe.
an Bush jr too.... ;)
Magallanes said it right
1) Create or take advantage of major domestic security incident to whip up a frenzy:
= Reichstag Fire / Sept 11
2) Use frenzied mix of fear and patriotism to create broad and unprecendented new legal powers of the state to "protect the citizens" that abolish the concept of freedom and individual liberty. Encourage the idea that dissent is unpatriotic and characteristic of "sympathizing with the enemy".
= Enabling Act of 1933 / Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act
3) Replace key positions in the local and federal government with sympathizers of the movement/government entity -- particularly those that involve creating, maintaining, and defending the powers of the central government.
= 1934 Germany - 2005 USA .. Take a look at this week's released documents
---- luckily Bush only got this far ---
4) Ban all political parties and trade unions and setup secret police
5) declare yourself leader for life
loosely_coupled @ Mar 4th 2009 6:52PM
1) Create or take advantage of major domestic security incident to whip up a frenzy:
= Reichstag Fire / Sept 11
2) Use frenzied mix of fear and patriotism to create broad and unprecendented new legal powers of the state to "protect the citizens" that abolish the concept of freedom and individual liberty. Encourage the idea that dissent is unpatriotic and characteristic of "sympathizing with the enemy".
= Enabling Act of 1933 / Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act
3) Replace key positions in the local and federal government with sympathizers of the movement/government entity -- particularly those that involve creating, maintaining, and defending the powers of the central government.
= 1934 Germany - 2005 USA .. Take a look at this week's released documents
---- luckily Bush only got this far ---
4) Ban all political parties and trade unions and setup secret police
5) declare yourself leader for life
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
So what is Obama's role in this "theory"?
@Magallanes
In 2000, there were no electronic voting machines. It was all paper. Don't you remember your CHADs?
So you dont vote! For the machine cant tell the right person switched probably the meaning of the hope, ha!
What a load of bullshit. Electronic devices are much faster, easier and more reliable than paper ballots.
Brazil has been using them for a decade now, and it's been working great down there.
Likelihood of human error is orders of magnitude higher than machine error.
2000 U.S. Election anyone?
Electronic devices are reliable.
Programmers are not.
@ sektor: Gosh man, Bush won. Sure it was close but the final count put him ahead. On the topic of voter fraud we always assume the winner was using it, but the loser easily could have been as well. And even if both sides had guilty supporters they were acting outside of the will of the candidates themselves.
I am personally for the new machines that use paper and also electronically track votes. This is a fail safe. If the electronics are lost there is a paper trail. Accountability is the goal, it just makes sense no matter who you vote for.
@Magallanes: So what? It's not like there is one single programmer responsible for making the code for all those machines.
@Sektor: This is not about "human errors" or speed. This is about the auditing of votes in general. With the regular paper ballot anyone can make the recount. ANYONE. With electronic voting machines the problem here in Germany was a) The source code isn't published -not verifiable what it does, b) the result of the vote is printed by that unverified software onto a thermo paper copy and a backup -no recount of single votes possible, c) the machines that were bought to be used under highly secured circumstances were in some cases stored in party leaders garages before the vote -not safe against manipulation, d) the EEPROMs of the machines can be replaced within 60 seconds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtiqwAWu-DU), e) the seals verifying the machines had not been manipulated were standard paper stickers with the word "seal" written on them in some cases, f) the security procedures around checking the seals and verifying the software were not kept, g) there was no examination of any actual voting machines just sample machines that the manufacturer NEDAP submitted for testing, testing was done behind closed doors with no public access to testing procedures let alone devices
The whole electronic system is prone for manipulation and in case there is actually fraud going on NO ONE can ever prove it with such a system since you can't do a re-count. You can push the button on the manipulated machine again and re-read the manipulated EEPROM but does that count as a transparent verifiable voting process for you? To me it doesn't and I'm really glad that after all that struggle they finally got rid of these silly machines. Honestly, what do we need the "speed" benefits for anyway? I'd rather get a verifiable vote result the next day then something black-boxish the same night. If you think the democratic process is compatible with black boxes you should check your priorities.
The only way you can devise a safe system is an electronic one that spits out a paper trail for every voter and every voter needs to be able to verify both the digital and the paper vote. No use if the computer shows Kang and the paper says Kodos or the other way around.
see: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Brazil started using them and got the leftwing Lula Da Silva, a guy that works for businesses not for people.
I love when the left is usually more corporate that right wing.
Electronic machines are not faster, easier, or more reliable. Talk to any worker that has to deal with calibrating a few thousand touchscreens.
Sektor, it's not about the human error or something like that. The court ruled, that every german citizen has the right to watch over the counting of the ballots. The Voting machines that were ruled unconstitutional just printed out a receipt at the end of the day, which just showed the accumulated votes for every party. Besides of that there were numerous proof of concept hacks for the machines.
The german electoral law was completely newly designed after WWII as a direct consequence of the nazi takeover. It tries to even out imbalances between different regions and is explicitly designed to mitigate winner-takes-it-all effects (as in US electoral college system) and reduce the possibility of absolute majorities of one party.
I think Washington was strong, but voting against Dr. Evil seems like a bad decision... tough election.
I'm thinking the Superman/Batman duo would make a pretty awesome executive branch.
In Idaho, they still vote on paper ballots with a felt tipped pen. For real.
that's nothing; in alaska they still use colorful pre-printed party ballots, scissors and glue to construct your ballot
Craft times with Palin? Sh!t, I'm taking my kid out of that school.
in fact, the main reason for the ruling was not the hackability or unreliability of such machines, but rather that it is a consitutional right in germany that every official has to be transparent. that means, that every citizen has the right to check for himself if the votes are counted right. this was not given with the machines used, because every vote was saved inside a 'blackbox' and the machine only gave out the total counts. this prevented from checking the votes manually and made the whole process intransparent
"that every official" + vote
Still sounds like a lot of bullshit to me. "Blind faith" in technology?
What the heck does a political scientist knows about electric engineering and computer science?
There is nothing "blind" about digital systems. People bitching and moan about electronic ballots but I bet they all have and rely on electronics (cell phone, computer, car, everything f**** thing) for their daily lives.
@sektor: you sound like a Diebold shill. We don't vote in our daily lives, and the few occasions as the years pass when we do, we expect a clean, transparent, accountable system in the event of a problem, which amusingly ALWAYS seems to happen when these machines are used. As long as there is lobbying, secrecy, and discrepancies with these machines and/or their manufacturers, they are not to be trusted with political systems.
If you have a problem with that (the common hardworking honest man/woman will not), then I smell some kind of bullshit here.
hemmy,
OR he might just be a guy (or girl) with a different opinion than you.
Surprisingly (to you), that doesn't make them a shill, or mean that they work for Diebold or Halliburton or whichever is your favorite evil corporation.
It means they have a different opinion. Stop attacking the person and address the issue, which you managed to do after your little "shill" dig.
I do agree that we need to have more open and accountable elections, because I'm pretty sure there have been exactly none in American history up to this point.
I find it amusing how a so-called third world country (Brazil) has successfully implemented a electronic voting system while the so called "first world" countries can't put their shit together, and there is always whining about lobbying, secrecy, blackbox et cetera et cetera. It seems like the "lobbying" doesn't come from the companies that manufacture these systems, but from people like you, who have a backward mentality.
My point of saying electronics are part of our daily lives is, if they are so unreliable, why bother using them. Go back to stone age. There is always people who go against the flow of progress.
Paper ballots are just as easy, if not easier, to be manipulated. Throw in a whole bunch of "votes" for candidate A and then how are you going to prove it? If the count is wrong, will anyone bother to recount them? Isn't it much easier for a human to "misread" the vote for candidate A and give it to candidate B? What if there is ambiguity, as in, the whole is punched not exactly where it should have been? What if whole boxes containing boxes are swapped?
You need to realize that any person with an IQ above room temperature can manipulate paper ballots. A digital voting system will have cryptography, which will require a lot more effort to crack. And that's the whole point of not disclosing the source code. If they did, it would be easy to generate fake vote counts and swap the memory.
@coffee: You're absolutely right, he may not be a shill for Diebold (Premiere). He may be a shill for ES&S. Sorry, when someone is arguing (and he's not even arguing so much as making backhanded remarks, ie "whining" about the "whiners") for the machines without once addressing their obvious flaws, he is nothing but suspect in my opinion.
everybody always does it in for the libertarians! honestly, who's gonna vote for harry browne over superman, dr. evil, and george washington?
It's not the machines that are the problem, it's the proprietary code inside that no one gets to validate or check for inconsistencies.
When you have large companies (like these e-voting machines) whose entire existence depends on someone winning the election who favors your industry, it's not hard to imagine that greed or self-survival can make someone do things they shouldn't.
It's not like they haven't already been caught doing so in several elections.
Even with paper trails present, it has been shown that what is printed for the voter's view is not necessarily what was actually recorded to the disk.
The only way to have true transparency is to have open-source software on these machines where the code can be verified and vetted. Or at least some form of secure access to verify the code.
Before we go chastising other countries for their problems, let's clean up our own back yard.
Evidently, the German court system is even LESS reliable...
Its a good time to have a second name with double consonants in German politics right now.
Yes, i know, an obscure allusion to an obscure film.
It's a good thing we have such simple and reliable paper ballots in places like Minnesota. Think of all of the mistakes avoided!
In other news, a shocking revelation: e-voting has been used for the past 10 years in Brazil... and nothing wrong has happened.
How would you know? If the elections have been manipulated, there is no way to prove it.
Also, an argument that is often overlooked: Even if an electronic voting machine actually prints a receipt for every vote, which could THEORETICALLY be recounted - why would it ever be done in reality? Because it is possible to manipulate the voting machines in ways that are impossible to notice without REALLY close inspection, noone will ever see the need for a recount. The only secure system is one where recounting of the paper receipts is mandatory. But then the advantages of electronic voting disappear.
Another advantage of paper voting: You could theoretically bribe some election tabulators. But there are hundreds of them throughout the country. It would be difficult to have impact on a federal election that way. On the other hand, in the case of electronic voting, you only have to manipulate the software once. Much easier.
It should NOT be a touch screen. It increases the likelihood of errors, increases the production and maintenance costs.
It could be done like it is in Brazil, where each candidate has a unique number. Then you input his/her number.
So what happens after the number is typed in? How's the keypad? Large enough for those with poor eyesight to avoid mistyping? Braille for the blind? Bugs are a possibility too; miscounted votes, etc.
Yes, the buttons are large enough and with big numbers writen for those with poor eyesight. Special keys (the "Accept", "Cancel" and "Blank Vote") are also color coded to help, tho not the only code to avoid problems with color-blind people. There are braille inscriptions for the blind. After a vote, a very clear and unmistakable sound is played, without identifying the exact vote to keep privacy, together with a *very* big message on the screen.
Could there be problems with that? Sure. But all voting sections have people from the many, many parties (too many IMHO) we have involved in our government, so I'm sure if anything looked even slighly fishy, there would be many crying foul.
With the frequency we hear the media and politicians complaining about corruption in Brazil, I don't believe any problems with our voting system would go unoticed. The silence is quite reassuring in this case.
Gee guys, come down. They didn't outlaw electronic voting but the way the electronic voting was done. If we ever voted in Germany, you would know that the paper based voting system works perfectly fine and that the overall process is noway near the chaos you have in many US elections.
In fact normally there are no(!) lines whatsoever.
Then you might like or dislike the electronic process but it remains a fact (for the German system) that paper based votes are cheaper and more efficiently implemented (yea hard to believe but that's what independent studies found out). In the end the question remains: why change a perfectly working system, for something that is more expensive and can't be independently validated by experts, let alone the concerned voter?
I'm a quite a geek in my life but I like the decision because it is not a "ah, its new and electronic thus it is better" reflex but as a matter of fact a well founded, well thought through decision.
"The ruling states that while the voting was unconstitutional (read: illegal) because the software used on the machines is unreliable, they have not proven that any mistakes were made, nor do they rule out the possibility of using such machines in the future, when stuff will be cooler and work better. "
This sentence, perhaps accidentally, sums up everything that's wrong about the evoting debate. There's no proof any mistakes were made - yet because it is *possible* some have, they're bad. Meanwhile, no one seems to wonder why the mistakes in all of the other technologies are overlooked, *even when proven to have errors*.
Hand count you say? Guess what - we have really simple paper ballots in our federal elections up here in Canada - the kind that should be brain dead simple to count and get right - and you know what, when there's a recount, every time they recount the same ballots - *they get a different number*, sometimes by quite a bit.
Yet, I don't hear anyone calling for the elimination of this provably unreliable technology...
But paper ballots are hard to hack.
Uh.. they're written on with a pencil. If I worked as an elections tabulator, I could *easily* change them, or insert new ones in the system.
And so on.. and so on.
This is the danger of 'crusading'.. you only see the one thing in front of you want to see.
Then again, it does make it easier for the real cheats who know what to avoid.
Thanks guys.
hilarious. i guess it's the fast paced nature of the internet itself, but people just skim through the page and ignore arguments that have been posted before. it's always easy to pick the cherries out of context. same goes for Sektor, btw who seems to be immune to discussion. people have particularily mentioned, that the whole point IS NOT UNRELIABILITY. the court didn't rule out electronic elections, but the WAY THEY WERE MADE.
something that is as important as elections must be VERIFIABLE. that's pretty much it. if you guys would like to put your future in the hands of some closed "da vinci" proprietary code, which is unaccessible to the public, that's a matter of taste.
and you know what? paper elections at least CAN be verified.