Last Sunday
in our beautiful country local elections were held. This day citizens chose
mayors, councilor and representatives of theirs local areas. Unfortunately, the
election turned out to be an embarrassing defeat.
image source: google grafika
The first
problem before the election day was the incorrectly created system of counting votes called “Kalkulator wyborczy”. The system is full of
errors, buggy and poorly protected. Everyone can log into the system and
make changes, because its author did not
protect the system against decompiling and the source code leaked into the
network. So complicated system was created in three months and
this time is not enough to create a good system.
The second
problem which, in my opinion, is more serious is the number of invalid votes.
It is strange that in some constituencies the number of invalid votes increased
to about 40 percent, e.g. in Wejherowo. It is almost one in two votes, while in other constituencies the number of invalid votes was only a few percent. A similar situation was during the in election in 2006 and 2010 when in
Mazowieckie the number of invalid votes was higher than in
the rest of the country. I do not think the people of Mazovia could not vote correctly. Janusz Korwin-Mikke from KNP filed
a notice to the prosecutor office that in those years the elections were
forged.
image source: https://www.facebook.com/wipler
Questions:
Do you think that the unusual results in the Mazowieckie is a fortuity?
Do you think that you should look at the hands of politicians?
Sources:
http://wpolityce.pl/spoleczenstwo/222759-tak-wyglada-program-ktory-mial-obslugiwac-wybory-hakerzy-wykradli-link
http://www.rmf24.pl/fakty/polska/news-korwin-mikke-podejrzewa-przestepstwo-wyborcze,nId,363667
For as programmers it is so easy to find bugs in the created system. As we can guess the company took a lot of money and delivered absolutely un-useful. I heard about problems like impossibility of sending data to PKW servers. One of the software versions enabled sending protocol with mistakes. What is also funny the source code was released at GitHub. It turns out that the author is 23 years old student.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a secret that great majority of elections in our country proceeds dishonestly. The best option would be to select whole government from the very beginning. The same with results in Mazovia, it is so hard to believe who won.
First of all people at the local elections don't read card which is huge problem with Polish people.
ReplyDeleteSecondly all of the cadidants for this elections are not really someone who I would like to vote.
Thirdly in this election it was huge proble with counting votes.
I'm don't really feel good at the politican topic because it makes me too much nervous.
I've heard a story about a candidate in some small local area who got 0 votes. She filed a notice that there must have been some mistake, because she had voted for herself - there must have been at least 1 vote. They counted the votes again and it turned out she had about 50 votes.
ReplyDeleteI think that this year's situation was ridiculous. I hope people responsible for that fiasco will learn their lesson.
Katarzyna, I have similar feelings towards politics – I try to avoid news about polish politicians and the current political events – it makes me angry too.
ReplyDeleteBut his time, when I heard about problems with the software I got really interested because I am studying information technology. As soon as I saw the source code I nearly cried laughing :)
Half of the system is bugged with occurrences of so called "empty CATCH".
The student girl, who developed the system made almost every textbook programming mistake.
The worst of them was connected with the most important, security-related element- authentication. The SSL certificates that, by principle, base on the trust relation to the issuer were verified only by date and not the issuer information (!!!).
What is more, the company configured their development system in a way that it was freely accessible from the Internet and got indexed by Google. It all happened BEFORE the elections so on Saturday (the day before) the code was published on GitHub (!) o_O
Here is the proof:
https://github.com/wybory2014/Kalkulator1/blob/master/Kalkulator1/printProtocol.cs
After all of these unnacceptable situations which goes around this year's elections, I have one reflection - average citizen can lose the trust for reliability of our country. I'm afraid of next local elections and frequency in the future. And I have question in my head: the previous system had made no problems, so why this time it's changed?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, some part of voters is a little bit poorly-educated - if they are going to ballot boxes, they should know what is region council etc., of course, commission must be responsible and offer informations - they dissapointed. There were lot of things which went wrong, It makes me sad.
I don't know it was fortuity or stupid people. I can imagine that system is totally useless and full of bugs but it take votes which was counted by committee empoyees. However if we accept that anybody don't falsify that votes ( but it can be possible too ), that number of invalid votes it's impossible. Moreover attendace below 50% is terrible. For me if somebody get a piece of paper and on the page have instruction to make X in ONE box, with description how should it look and do something different, that person does that specially or is idiot. Simply.
ReplyDeleteI think that election were rigged. In my opinion in our country we don't choose people to the government, in our country they do it by themselves. In our country something called "democracy" never exist. You can learn more about it here and here . I want also add than in our country we are blinded by political surveys and here you can learn something more about it. In government we can see the same faces since 1989 years or even more in some cases. After system change from communism to pseudo-democracy every single man who were involved in previous system should be removed from any public position.
ReplyDeleteI think it was not fortuity. I have heard that most invalid votes were votes with PiS candidates. Maybe peolpe just made a mistake, but in my opinion someone just made those votes invalid, by marking additional candidate. The elections should be redone and be held by someone independent.
ReplyDeleteAs Jasiek mentioned, most of invalid votes were for PiS. It was 5/10 of invalid votes, for PO 3/10 and for PSL only 3/100. These numbs give food for thought.
ReplyDeleteI saw a source code of this application to calculate votes. It was totally horrible. A lot of cardinal mistakes. To create that kind of system developers should have much more time than 3 month. It was almost impossible to create that system in 3 months which would be stable and reliable.
ReplyDeleteThe voting cards used in Mazovia during the elections of 2010 were made in a shape of a book. During the recent elections those cards were used in the whole country. This could be the reason of the fact that a high number of votes was recognized as invalid. Many people also wanted to show their aversion to all candidates that is why they gave invalid votes. This, however, is a bit disturbing.
ReplyDeleteAs Jan, I also think it was not fortuity. There is a lot of reported cases, that someone voted for himself and the results showed 0 votes.
ReplyDeleteI also saw a source code of "Kalkulator wyborczy" and It contains many basic errors that every programmer should be avoided. Another problem is security, security that are not there! Certainly 3 months is not enough that one person wrote such applications.
I think this is a very difficult topic. Judging from irregularities and erros in the system there might be some fortuity.
ReplyDeleteBut I also symphatize with the commision. It's unfair that everyone blames them and their hard work.
Do you think that the unusual results in the Mazowieckie is a fortuity?
ReplyDeleteGuys, I think that You don't really see the big picture here. Noone care who you vote for. The guy/woman with the best connection is gonna win. As You could see from some of the comments, the number as well as voter - they don't matter. It matter who does the counting.
Do you think that you should look at the hands of politicians?
Like if they have clean, trimmed finger nails? I don't really see the point...?