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Fixing digital elections
COMMENT
Fixing digital elections How to check the voting machines being used in India’s election is contentious. Better statistics could be the answer, says Edd Gent
JOSIE FORD
THE biggest election in history is under way. Machines have the responsibility of counting the votes in India, but how should the results be checked? A neat statistical test could be the best way to guarantee that everyone can trust the outcome. Polls opened earlier this month and, with 900 million eligible voters, the election will take more than a month to complete. Since 2004, people in India have cast their ballots in national elections using electronic voting machines (EVMs) by pressing a button next to their chosen candidate’s name. However, everyone from opposition parties to security researchers have raised concerns over how reliable these devices are. Local media has reported large numbers of faulty EVMs having to be replaced during the first phase of voting, and previous research has suggested that it is
Consensus of care New advice will help to reduce conflict over desperately sick children, says Mike Linney MODERN medicine has the power to enhance and prolong the lives of seriously ill children. This is clearly good news, but sometimes it leads to ethical dilemmas. If health professionals and parents cannot agree on what is in a child’s best interest, the decision may be taken to court. Recently, there have been several high-profile 22 | NewScientist | 27 April 2019
treatments – some robustly tested and available in the UK and some not. This extends hope to families, which can be helpful. But it can also make matters worse when parents want their children to have treatments that doctors consider inappropriate or likely to cause more harm than good. Where such conflicts occur, they can have profound mental and physical effects on all involved. In some cases, we have even seen protests on hospital
disputes, such as the one between the parents of Alfie Evans and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, UK, over whether or not to withdraw life support. The rise of the internet and “We have even seen social media has made conflict protests on hospital sites more likely by giving families in and abusive messages desperately sad situations easy directed at clinicians” access to information about new
possible to hack the machines. As a safeguard, every EVM is now connected to a device that prints a slip with the voter’s choice, which the voter can view before it drops into a secure box. Some machines will have their tallies and slips compared. How many should be checked is contentious though. The electoral commission planned to audit one randomly selected EVM in each of the 4125 electoral divisions, but opposition parties petitioned the Supreme Court of India to up this to half of all the machines. The commission said this would delay the result, so judges settled on five machines per division. But another option, a technique called a risk-limiting audit, offers a compromise between speed and reliability. An RLA can provide very high confidence in a result or indicate if something may be amiss and further investigation is
sites and abusive messages directed at clinicians – actions that have sent shock waves through the medical community. In an attempt to address the problem, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has published Achieving Consensus. Among other things, it recommends assigning a lead clinician to be responsible for overall care of the child and to ensure communications with the family are clear, consistent and transparent, avoiding building inappropriate expectations. It also advises making psychological support available both for families and
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Edd Gent is a science journalist based in India
for health professionals, and recognising disagreements and communication failings early. Of course, this advice won’t prevent every disagreement, but it is likely to de-escalate some. A hospital in Perth, UK, saw conflict incidents drop by 64 per cent when piloting a similar approach. Staff also reported increased confidence in managing conflict. Parents and clinicians won’t always agree, but Achieving Consensus puts the child at the centre of every decision. And that is what everybody wants. ■ Mike Linney is lead author of Achieving Consensus and registrar of RCPCH
ANALYSIS Fires in historic buildings
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/GETTY
needed, after just a few thousand ballots, much less than other methods. And Vishal Mohanty at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and his colleagues have recently shown how the method could be used with EVM slips. With an RLA, first you must decide how confident you want to be of the result. This, along with the margin of victory, determines how many ballots need checking. Random ballots are pulled out and a statistical test sees if the votes fit with the result called by the EVMs. If it doesn’t, more ballots are checked until the chosen confidence level is reached. The benefit of an RLA is that it is self-correcting. This means that initial counts are generally small, but if these don’t fit the expected vote distribution, the approach automatically triggers an extended count until the desired confidence level is reached. One drawback is that you don’t know how many votes need to be checked until the results are in, hindering planning. And major disparities will trigger a full recount that could delay results. But when democracy is at stake, the right answer is worth waiting a little longer for. ■
Notre Dame could be rebuilt in five years Sam Wong
says Guillermo Rein, a fire engineer at Imperial College London. Unfortunately, fires in historic buildings often start during renovation work, when such precautions may be set aside. While the media has speculated that ongoing renovation work may have been to blame for the Notre Dame fire, the company doing it has said that none of its employees were on the site when the blaze broke out at around 6.45 pm. Once it started, there was little to stop the fire from tearing through the timber roof. And although the stone walls, vault and flying buttresses aren’t
MANY Twitter users expressed dismay last week at the “loss” of Notre Dame following the blaze that engulfed the top of the Paris cathedral on 15 April. But, thankfully, the situation isn’t as disastrous as that: most of the building is still intact thanks to its clever design, and hundreds of millions of euros have already been pledged for restoration. It took around 17 hours, and the efforts of 1000 firefighters and a 500-kilogram robot, to extinguish the fire. Although the spire was destroyed, the Gothic cathedral’s timber roof was built above a stone vault that medieval “UK politicians warn that architects had designed to stop fires the Houses of Parliament from spreading to the rest of the could also face a serious building. That made it more resilient fire without renovations” than cathedrals with timber ceilings such as York Minster in the UK, which suffered a fire in 1984. flammable, they may have suffered When it comes to protection structural damage. “The masonry against fires, engineers think about may have heated up and expanded, six elements, including prevention, which it can do without collapsing. As detection, evacuation and the masonry cools down and shrinks, it suppression. Notre Dame used only may deform,” says Robert Bowles from prevention: keeping ignition sources, the Institution of Structural Engineers. such as work by electricians, away The water used to extinguish the fire from flammable parts of the building, could also have caused damage.
French president Emmanuel Macron has pledged to rebuild the cathedral in five years. As New Scientist went to press, the amount pledged for such efforts by firms and wealthy families was expected to surpass €1 billion. Bowles thinks Macron’s deadline is possible – it took a similar length of time to fully repair Windsor Castle in the UK after a fire in 1992. The reconstructed roof should have extra protection built in, says Rein. “We do this with iconic buildings all around the world.” Options include smoke detectors, barriers in cavities and possibly sprinklers, although they would be costly to install. The shock of seeing a historic monument in flames has prompted questions about other vulnerable buildings. UK politicians are warning that the Houses of Parliament could face a similar fate unless renovations are carried out urgently. The building’s antiquated heating, lighting and power systems raise the risk of a serious fire. However, following a catastrophic fire in the 1830s, the building was designed so its extensive timber panelling isn’t structural. “If it burns, the building will not fall down,” says Bowles. But fires in buildings that are less globally iconic can arguably be even more devastating. When fire hit the National Museum of Brazil last year, the majority of its 20 million artefacts were burned – a loss that will forever impair efforts to understand human history and the natural world. ■ 27 April 2019 | NewScientist | 23
Fixing digital elections How to check the voting machines being used in India’s election is contentious. Better statistics could be the answer, says Edd Gent
JOSIE FORD
THE biggest election in history is under way. Machines have the responsibility of counting the votes in India, but how should the results be checked? A neat statistical test could be the best way to guarantee that everyone can trust the outcome. Polls opened earlier this month and, with 900 million eligible voters, the election will take more than a month to complete. Since 2004, people in India have cast their ballots in national elections using electronic voting machines (EVMs) by pressing a button next to their chosen candidate’s name. However, everyone from opposition parties to security researchers have raised concerns over how reliable these devices are. Local media has reported large numbers of faulty EVMs having to be replaced during the first phase of voting, and previous research has suggested that it is
Consensus of care New advice will help to reduce conflict over desperately sick children, says Mike Linney MODERN medicine has the power to enhance and prolong the lives of seriously ill children. This is clearly good news, but sometimes it leads to ethical dilemmas. If health professionals and parents cannot agree on what is in a child’s best interest, the decision may be taken to court. Recently, there have been several high-profile 22 | NewScientist | 27 April 2019
treatments – some robustly tested and available in the UK and some not. This extends hope to families, which can be helpful. But it can also make matters worse when parents want their children to have treatments that doctors consider inappropriate or likely to cause more harm than good. Where such conflicts occur, they can have profound mental and physical effects on all involved. In some cases, we have even seen protests on hospital
disputes, such as the one between the parents of Alfie Evans and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, UK, over whether or not to withdraw life support. The rise of the internet and “We have even seen social media has made conflict protests on hospital sites more likely by giving families in and abusive messages desperately sad situations easy directed at clinicians” access to information about new
possible to hack the machines. As a safeguard, every EVM is now connected to a device that prints a slip with the voter’s choice, which the voter can view before it drops into a secure box. Some machines will have their tallies and slips compared. How many should be checked is contentious though. The electoral commission planned to audit one randomly selected EVM in each of the 4125 electoral divisions, but opposition parties petitioned the Supreme Court of India to up this to half of all the machines. The commission said this would delay the result, so judges settled on five machines per division. But another option, a technique called a risk-limiting audit, offers a compromise between speed and reliability. An RLA can provide very high confidence in a result or indicate if something may be amiss and further investigation is
sites and abusive messages directed at clinicians – actions that have sent shock waves through the medical community. In an attempt to address the problem, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has published Achieving Consensus. Among other things, it recommends assigning a lead clinician to be responsible for overall care of the child and to ensure communications with the family are clear, consistent and transparent, avoiding building inappropriate expectations. It also advises making psychological support available both for families and
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Edd Gent is a science journalist based in India
for health professionals, and recognising disagreements and communication failings early. Of course, this advice won’t prevent every disagreement, but it is likely to de-escalate some. A hospital in Perth, UK, saw conflict incidents drop by 64 per cent when piloting a similar approach. Staff also reported increased confidence in managing conflict. Parents and clinicians won’t always agree, but Achieving Consensus puts the child at the centre of every decision. And that is what everybody wants. ■ Mike Linney is lead author of Achieving Consensus and registrar of RCPCH
ANALYSIS Fires in historic buildings
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/GETTY
needed, after just a few thousand ballots, much less than other methods. And Vishal Mohanty at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and his colleagues have recently shown how the method could be used with EVM slips. With an RLA, first you must decide how confident you want to be of the result. This, along with the margin of victory, determines how many ballots need checking. Random ballots are pulled out and a statistical test sees if the votes fit with the result called by the EVMs. If it doesn’t, more ballots are checked until the chosen confidence level is reached. The benefit of an RLA is that it is self-correcting. This means that initial counts are generally small, but if these don’t fit the expected vote distribution, the approach automatically triggers an extended count until the desired confidence level is reached. One drawback is that you don’t know how many votes need to be checked until the results are in, hindering planning. And major disparities will trigger a full recount that could delay results. But when democracy is at stake, the right answer is worth waiting a little longer for. ■
Notre Dame could be rebuilt in five years Sam Wong
says Guillermo Rein, a fire engineer at Imperial College London. Unfortunately, fires in historic buildings often start during renovation work, when such precautions may be set aside. While the media has speculated that ongoing renovation work may have been to blame for the Notre Dame fire, the company doing it has said that none of its employees were on the site when the blaze broke out at around 6.45 pm. Once it started, there was little to stop the fire from tearing through the timber roof. And although the stone walls, vault and flying buttresses aren’t
MANY Twitter users expressed dismay last week at the “loss” of Notre Dame following the blaze that engulfed the top of the Paris cathedral on 15 April. But, thankfully, the situation isn’t as disastrous as that: most of the building is still intact thanks to its clever design, and hundreds of millions of euros have already been pledged for restoration. It took around 17 hours, and the efforts of 1000 firefighters and a 500-kilogram robot, to extinguish the fire. Although the spire was destroyed, the Gothic cathedral’s timber roof was built above a stone vault that medieval “UK politicians warn that architects had designed to stop fires the Houses of Parliament from spreading to the rest of the could also face a serious building. That made it more resilient fire without renovations” than cathedrals with timber ceilings such as York Minster in the UK, which suffered a fire in 1984. flammable, they may have suffered When it comes to protection structural damage. “The masonry against fires, engineers think about may have heated up and expanded, six elements, including prevention, which it can do without collapsing. As detection, evacuation and the masonry cools down and shrinks, it suppression. Notre Dame used only may deform,” says Robert Bowles from prevention: keeping ignition sources, the Institution of Structural Engineers. such as work by electricians, away The water used to extinguish the fire from flammable parts of the building, could also have caused damage.
French president Emmanuel Macron has pledged to rebuild the cathedral in five years. As New Scientist went to press, the amount pledged for such efforts by firms and wealthy families was expected to surpass €1 billion. Bowles thinks Macron’s deadline is possible – it took a similar length of time to fully repair Windsor Castle in the UK after a fire in 1992. The reconstructed roof should have extra protection built in, says Rein. “We do this with iconic buildings all around the world.” Options include smoke detectors, barriers in cavities and possibly sprinklers, although they would be costly to install. The shock of seeing a historic monument in flames has prompted questions about other vulnerable buildings. UK politicians are warning that the Houses of Parliament could face a similar fate unless renovations are carried out urgently. The building’s antiquated heating, lighting and power systems raise the risk of a serious fire. However, following a catastrophic fire in the 1830s, the building was designed so its extensive timber panelling isn’t structural. “If it burns, the building will not fall down,” says Bowles. But fires in buildings that are less globally iconic can arguably be even more devastating. When fire hit the National Museum of Brazil last year, the majority of its 20 million artefacts were burned – a loss that will forever impair efforts to understand human history and the natural world. ■ 27 April 2019 | NewScientist | 23