<http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/e-voting-fixes-will-get-us-nowhere-without-statistics.ars>This piece is notable, first, for its revelation that the US legal system evidently has no interest in the problems of e-voting. So notes Arlene Ash, a biostatistician at BU's School of Medicine, who is quoted here. Such indifference is appalling, although no surprise to those of us who've been contending on this front.
The piece below is also notable, however, for its tacit point that the solution to the problems of e-voting can be solved through--i.e., solved only through--the "statistical tools" that Ash recommends. There is, of course, another option, which would be not only safer but a whole lot cheaper, and that is to dump all computerized voting systems, which have no place in a democracy. MCM <http://www.truthout.org/022509VA>E-Voting Security Fixes Will Get Us Nowhere Without Stats by: John Turner, ARS Technica Steffanie Holdsbrook, left, and Sue Alvey, right, examine electronic voting machines in Farmington, Utah. (Photo: Robert Johnson / The Standard Examiner via AP) http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/e-voting-fixes-will-get-us-nowhere-without-statistics.ars or <http://www.truthout.org/022509VA> http://www.truthout.org/022509VA At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, a statistician made a forceful argument that her field can help us do a better job of ensuring fair and representative elections, but only if we decide to let it. The recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting included a session entitled "Science for Public Confidence in Election Fairness and Accuracy" and, as might be expected, computer science made a significant appearance. Ed Felten of Princeton, whose work in the area we've covered extensively, spoke and emphasized the limits of what computer science can do, and how the ultimate goal should be to ensure that electronic voting systems are verifiable and auditable. Of course, that raises the question of what you do with the auditing information, which is where Arlene Ash, a biostatistician at Boston University's School of Medicine, came in. It turns out that we already have excellent statistical tools for detecting problematic patterns of voting - the legal system just chooses to ignore them. Felten and his fellow Princetonian Andrew Appel have been at the forefront of efforts to explore the security of e-voting systems, and Felten's talk was largely a recap of past news that we've covered extensively. When it comes to the equipment itself, it's mathematically impossible to verify that the code they run will behave properly under all circumstances, which means that the best we can do is provide a verifiable and auditable record of the vote, allowing problems to be identified retrospectively. Even that's difficult to reconcile with our expectations for anonymity; in describing the challenge of creating an algorithm that simultaneously encrypts and anonymizes the votes, Felten said, "we've reduced this to a previously unsolved problem - we're really good at that in computer science." Until that problem is solved, many states are opting for optical scan voting or printing voter verifiable receipts, which can allow a post-election audit to identify significant problems. But running these audits raises a whole new series of issues, some of which are less a technical challenge than a matter of how carefully we want to listen to what an rigorous analysis of a vote tells us. Arlene Ash hasn't limited herself to medical statistics; as the conference was taking place, she published a statistical analysis of voting in a specific Congressional district, Florida's 13th, which encompasses Sarasota and several interior counties (a PDF of the paper has been posted). In a 2006 Congressional race in which approximately 240,000 votes were cast and the margin of victory was only 369, e-voting machines in Sarasota recorded a staggering number of undervotes - the machines failed to register about 18,000 votes in that race, a rate of 15 percent. Typical undervote is in the range of two to three percent. A quick look at the ballot screens that appeared on these machines indicates an obvious cause: the Congressional race was presented on the second page in a manner that suggested it might be a continuation of the list of candidates in the Senate race taking place at the same time. Ash described how various statistical tests suggest that the losing candidate wound up being cost somewhere around 3,000 votes by the problem, easily enough to wipe out their opponent's narrow lead. She also said, however, that the judiciary had refused to intervene, and allowed the election result to stand. This, from Ash's perspective, represents the crux of the problem. We have sophisticated statistical tools that we rely on for everything from medical research to verifying the flow of money through Las Vegas casinos but we simply haven't chosen to mandate that they be used to verify election results. Even in cases like the elections in Sarasota, where they were deployed, the results were deemed legally irrelevant unless they provide an indication that election results were distorted by malice or intent. Sloppiness or incompetence, apparently, is acceptable, despite our country's promise to respect the intent of the voters. There are cases where post-election audits are rigorous - the American Statistical Association's collection of election-related materials calls New Jersey's law "the most 'statistical' audit procedure enacted by any state." But, of course, this is the same New Jersey that has failed to act on a court order that would ensure that its voting machines actually print something that would allow an audit. The clear take-home message of this session was that optimizing the computer science aspects of building a better voting machine is a really hard challenge, and it won't ever eliminate the sorts of UI design issues that regularly cause election results to reflect something besides the will of the voters. We do have tools available to us that can help us recognize when there is a disconnect between voters' intent and results, but we haven't taken them seriously; we don't ensure their use, and we don't legally demand that their results be considered. Until we see that change, it appears that our commitment to accurate elections is superficial. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. 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