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You know it works.

http://openvoting.org/

Support the Open Voting Consortium.

It's been done.

http://www.openvoting.org/

Now please go and support them.

It is at this point that I would normally point people to the Open Voting Consortium, but unless I'm missing something, the project stalled some time back in 2006. Yet they're still taking donations...

Am I missing something or is it time for a fork? Because I think we definitely need an open, easily verifiable voting system.

I don't even think it needs to be a LiveCD as the current project seems to have. What is so difficult about making a paper trail?

There is now quite a movment for the voting thing:
http://www.openvoting.org/

Already some legislation for this in a few states...

In practice coercion in a first world country is irrelevant and there are laws in place to protect you.

Whereas corruption of votes is a real and ongoing threat.

Verification of votes is important and there are ways to reduce chances of the already irrelevant coercion:
the physical copy contains two sheets that seperate to in effect obscure the result, but can still matched up for verification.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/25/21 3206

An explanation with pretty pictures here

Though there are concerns:
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/No vember.2003/0126.html

Really you should support the Open Voting Consortium.

Support -

http://openvoting.org/

Not only open voting, but open source for the firmware that takes your vote.

They have been doing good things in California.

1. Headphones (and a distinguishable braille ballot itself compromises anonymity: how many blind voters are there per precinct?)
2. Good interface design (not excluding pre-printed instructions
3. Default screen has button in large font reading "Press for large fonts".
4. The OVC design does use a normal ballot box, padlock and all. The machine is just a way of printing out a prepared ballot to cast into the ballot box.

Bev Harris and BlackboxVoting are certainly doing great work in exposing fraud and corruption among DRE voting machine makers (and other types, for that matter).

But the real solution to the problem, long term, past the current election, is to get electronic voting machines based on open source code, and that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. It just so happens that there's an organization for that purpose that could really use some assistance (financial and otherwise) right now: the Open Voting Consortium.

Just to be extra-sexy, our reference system uses Linux and Python :-).

BTW. Some readers will think: "What's wrong with plain old paper and pencil?" Actually, there's not so much wrong with that. I just used a pencil to vote in Massachusetts yesterday, and it worked great. Paper ballot. Zero line at the polls. Perfectly transparent. Great security (just look at that padlock on the ballot box).

But electronic machines do have a few good things, as long as their source code is open and the print out paper ballots after selections are made: Multi-lingual; blind accessible (using audio interface) and special interfaces for motor-impaired voters; large fonts for vision impaired voters; prevent overvotes and unintentional undervotes.

Yes, these things take time. States take years to certify voting systems. The Open Voting Consortium has been at it since November 2000, has a prototype system built, with a web demo and publicly demo'd, which the San Jose Mercury referred to as The touch-screen holy grail.

The goal is to have HAVA funding enable the Open Voting Consortium to finish the system in time for the 2006 elections. Feel free to help out the the project.

I find this to be a well written article, especially for non-Indians who want to understand India's country-wide voting stations. The other likes India's EVMs, with some justification, I think, despite the absence of paper ballot.

However, India's EVMs are not really applicable to a US context. While the idea promoted of "make it as simple as possible" is a good one (violated by Diebold in many ways), the author seems to forget the "but no simpler" corollary. The design of the Open Voting Consortium's system (see http://openvoting.org and http://evm2003.sourceforge.net) strikes the correct compromise.

In fairness, in an Indian context, the idea of having elections with dozens of different races, each with a dozen candidates, plus a bunch of initiatives, might seem strange. But that's what we have in some US jurisdictions. Some US cities have even begun to use ranked preference voting (so far, usually scored as IRV, but maybe Condercet, Burda, Weighted, etc. someday).

The requirements for casting one vote for one MP are rather simple, and India's EVMs add no extra complexity to that.

"I was assuming that there was a human-readable part"

There is. Go look at the demo on the OVC site and take a look at the printed ballot. The ballot has both a plain text record of your vote and a barcode.

The ballot looks like (bad text art ahead):

Ballot 6160

Official Ballot, General Election
Santa Clara County, CA Perdinct 2216

H President ---> George Washington
H Vice President Abraham Lincoln
H Senator ----------> Jane Addams

Ballot 6160

The '6160' is the ballot number, which is a unique number for each printed ballot, and the H's represent a barcode running down the edges of ballot.

The barcode allows for rapid tabulation of the votes, but in the case of an audit or recount the plain text determines the vote.

We've just linked in an online demo of the voting system as it will operate in a polling station. You can go to the Open Voting Consortium web site, and click on 'web demo'. Or go straight to the ballot if you're impatient.

Please keep in mind that we're not proposing voting through web browsers, or across the internet, because of the numerous security issues. This web demo is intended to let you see what you'd see on our demo on April 1 in California, for people who can't be there.

What you'll see is a ballot formatted for a large screen (1280x1024). You fill it out, then click 'print ballot'. What would happen in a polling station is that the ballot is printed out. In the online version, you can get the ballot as a PDF, Postscript, or JPEG image.

In the stand-alone polling station you will be able to take your paper ballot to a validation station that will read your vote back to you, so that you know that the paper ballot accurately represents your vote.

You then take your ballot to the tabulation station, where a poll worker will scan the ballot and store it in a locked box, where the paper ballots are available for recounts, audits, etc.

As it happens I discussed Chaum's system just today on the Voting-Project mailing list. I guess I might as well quote myself:

Re: securing electronic ballots

From: David Mertz %lt;voting-project_at_gnosis_dot_cx%gt;
Date: Tue Nov 25 2003 - 12:16:05 CST
|I found [the Chaum paper] here in case anyone wants to read it. |http://www.vreceipt.com/
Thanks Clay, for looking up this paper. It is consistent with what Mercuri described more briefly, but I found reading the white paper to contain additional interesting details. Btw. for other readers: the press release at that URL is fine for a summary, but look at the linked white paper for real information.
Reading the paper, I see that Chaum's system really is flawed in practice. The reason it is flawed is precisely because Chaum is TOO smart--he's great at math, but misses the real world of elections.
One weakness of the system is the one I've raised a couple times. Voters cannot understand how the system works (in any meaningful detail). For example, imagine I were a voter who did not have any graduate-level mathematics training (a large majority of voters, I think... probably a majority of this list, in fact). Now imagine that I was not entirely trustful of "the experts", and worry that someone can puncture the anonymity of my vote by properly analyzing my receipt. Sure it doesn't contain a visually readable vote, but I know in a general way that there are barcode scanners, and clever things that mathematicians and CS people do.
In answer to my concern, all I really get back is the Diebold-style answer: "Trust us, we're very smart, and we wouldn't let any errors exist in our voting system." I don't think this answer inspires general voter confidence. I personally happened to have already known about Chaum before hearing about this system, and basically trust his motives and intelligence... but how many voters can say that; how many LIST MEMBERS can say that, even?
The second weakness is the real world of voting places--typically a hastily arranged room in a church or a community center, staffed by well-meaning, but amateur volunteers. Imagine that prior to the election some guys with brass knuckles stop by my house, and let me know that they would appreciate a vote for their candidate (or equally, for example, a coercive or manipulative spouse or relative). As a gesture of good faith, they suggest, I should keep both layers of the voting receipt so that it remains clear how I voted. According to Chaum's system, the poll workers are SUPPOSED TO shred one layer on my way out. Anyone who has been to a polling place knows that it would not be of great practical difficulty to "forget" to place a layer in the shredder prior to leaving the building. Even should I make such an omission, the electronic vote was already recorded when the receipts were printed.
+++
Btw. With the EVM2003 system, a related forgetfullness is possible. Voters might forget to place the printed ballot in the ballot box. Their electronic ballot is still recorded on the machine, but only a subset of electronic ballots will be matched by corresponding printed ballots in the ballot boxes. Hopefully, this will generally be a large subset (98%+ say), but a certain discrepency rate must be expected.
Placing cryptographic codes on the printed ballots allows us to assure that every such ballot is -legitimate-, hence preventin

dang. linked to wrong page. try this instead: openvoting.org