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E-Voting Companies Answer Critics With ... Spin
Whammy666 writes "Wired has a follow-up article which tells of how Diebold and other E-Voting machine manufacturers have enlisted the Information Technology Association of America (a trade public relations and lobbying group) to 'generate positive public perception' of the companies and to 'reduce substantially the level and amount of criticism from computer scientists and other security experts about the fallibility of electronic voting systems.' It seems the concerns about the lack of an audit trail are finally being heard as the industry is reconsidering its opposition to giving the voter a paper receipt of his vote. Of course, a paper receipt given to the voter still doesn't allow for a manual recount should an election dispute arise unless the receipts are collected and secured by election officials." Reassuring PR is Stage Two; remember that Stage One is silence your critics.
Dill said, however, that the design of a voter-verified paper system is not a trivial undertaking and that the usability and security aspects of such a feature need to be thought through carefully so companies design systems under standards that meet both these criteria.
Yes, trivial. Done. Completed. In use nationwide in Brazil.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
No!
It's not that _we_ want paper receipts!
It's that we want the voting infrastructure to maintain an audit trail.
Voters getting receipts directly allows for vote selling, which as another poster pointed out, is not limited to monetary compensation but includes anything people are willing to sell a vote for (health, job security, etc.)
The purpose of an election is not to determine a winner but to make everyone agree on who lost. If the losing side can say, "Sure, people voted for Bob, but it was under duress and thus didn't count", people fail to agree and fealty does not transfer.
Since we have elections precisely to avoid the violence that normally accompanies a transfer of power, this is not a small matter.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
We seem to have forgotten something here. The paper ballot system isn't broken. What failed wad the punchcard system, and more specific efforts to explain proper operation of it.
The ideal ballot is one that results in a piece of paper that is both human-readable and machine readable. There hasn't been many problems with the "fill in the bubble" system of balloting, even though that system is open to a risk of users who don't understand that an X or checkmark in the bubble doesn't work.
The place for touchscreens is to help the user create a perfect ballot that is machine readable for speed counting, with the votes also in human readable terms for manual spot checks and recounting, and the most important spot check: The one the voter does before walking over to the ballot box. If the printout doesn't say what they thought it did, they hand the spoiled ballot to the officials and go try again.
The idea of having any form of electronic memory conduct counting within the in-booth devices is crazy. It opens the system into too much risk of data loss or data manipulation. There needs to be an audit trail, and that trail belongs in the ballot box.