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Can America Trust Electronic Voting?
A anonymous reader writes: "The Sacramento Bee wrote an excellent article about the issues surrounding electronic voting. It was written by the Yolo County clerk/recorder and a professor of law at UC Davis. They quote sources such as Peter G. Neumann and Diebold's president Walden O'Dell."
... But the only e-voting situation I would trust would be an open source one. Even with paper reciepts, there's still an unprecidented oppourtunity for fraud.
Maybe I'll be a little 'off-topic' but I would like to add some reflexion to this article.
E-Voting and its problems are a clear example of what is happening: we are giving to our computers and networks more and more 'power' over our own lives. This wouldn't be a problem if security was some exact science.
We still have big problems with computer security and while we didn't fix them yet (anyway can we really fix them ?) the overall 'value' of the data that goes through our networks is fast increasing.
This, I think, will be even worse in the near future because the software, systems and networks we use will be more and more complex and it will be harder and harder to maintain a good level of security on them.
You could argue that the problems exposed in the article are not related to security. I would say 'not yet'.
But something really interesting is said: "These machines leave no 'paper trail,' that is, no voter-verifiable record allowing a retrospective audit of the votes recorded as cast for each candidate or ballot proposition.".
Everything in these system is 'virtual'. It makes it easier to loose, to replicate (to steal) or to alter information. I'm quite afraid about that.
Maybe the E-Voting system is not connected to Internet, which increase security of course, but maybe one day it will...
Iraq: war to save the U
at least not until proper and proven security measures have been put in place and that there is at least a paper trail to follow in the event that the votes are tampered with (a.k.a. Diebold).
The problem is not the technique, the problem is the fraudulous mentality of the management of these companies...
... for their next election, which seems to be the best option to me. Voter gets a piece of paper (anonymous) which records his/her vote. The slip has to be left at the polling station in a sealed container, and in the event of "it screwed up", the slips get counted...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
To hopefully fixing this problem. This week, the state mandated that all voting machines print a human-verifiable paper ballot. This is good, but the regulation is supposed to take effect in 2006.
While it's a step in the right direction, it's also ridiculous. A voting technology that is unacceptable in 2006 is also unacceptable today. I certainly hope they push up the deadline to before the 2004 election. There's plenty of time to fix it by then.
If you live in California, please bug the appropriate government officials about this.
Frankly, I am not as concerned about electronic voting as I am getting Americans to actually vote in the first place.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Yes, if the greedy corporations are removed from the process, and an OSS solution based on an openly auditable platform like Linux or FreeBSD is adopted. We are not too far away from this eventuality.
Most people I know vote straight Democrat or straight Republican, and rarely actually do any homework about "the issues" or what the candidates they are voting for actually represent.
Obviously, my own experience isn't necessarily reflective of the whole of the US voting pool, but I have trouble believing that the majority of people actually do research every candidate before a vote...
evil adrian
I think its pretty clear that there is a lack of faith in e-voting and also some mistrust of traditional forms of voting after Florida. I therefore propose that all voting be scrapped and the adoption a Supreme Leader to rule. Since its my idea I will be the first leader. My aides will be dilligently selected for their intelligence and integrity, if that just happens to be my old mates then so be it.
Obviously leadership is a great honour and a burden which I feel I can best fulfill if resident in a luxurious villa on a tropical island paradise surrounded by nubile native girls, with regular entertainment provided by Britney, Beyonce, Kylie etc. and a large collection of expensive playthings (Gulfstreams, Ferraris, Merc's, helicopters, speedboats etc).
My first order of business will the public execution of the SCO board of directors in a very public and painful manner.
And remember, we all love the Leader and are dedicated to his happiness.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I don't want open source voting machines any more than I want closed-source ones. Okay, we can all see the code and look for trickery, but how do I know that the machine I'm about to vote on is actually using that code?
Granted, I'm not going to vote electronically without an open source system in place, but this _really_ isn't that hard.
As an example implementation.. When you register, you get a plastic card with a magnetic stripe on it. It has two 32-bit numbers on the card, with your name, picture, and address. One of the 32-bit numbers is your personal identifier, and the other is your signing key.
Now, for the ballot, every candidate also has a 32-bit number. When you want to vote for your candidate, you swipe your card, then select the candidate on the screen. Your pid is appended to the end of the candidates pid, and then it is hashed with your signing key. At the same time, a publicly available signing key from the government signs the 32-bit pid of the candidate. Two slips are then printed out, both with one barcode indicating your hash of the candidate + your pid, and a barcode with the hash of the government signed pid.
One slip is given to the poll people, and you keep the other. Also, a copy of the slip is sent over some network to the vote counting place. If you doubt that your vote has been tallied correctly, all you have to do is search for your signed 64-bit candidate + personal id in some government database.
Paper trail. Verifiability. Randomness. What am I missing? Was t overly complicated? Input, please!
P.S.: Want to vote for someone not on the ballot? Do a write in. They're rare enough that counting by hand isn't an issue.
This statement is false.
While people were worrying about people who had mistakenly misvoted in Palm Beach County, Diebold delivered -16,022 votes for Gore in Volusia County, Florida. Do you suppose that might have had an effect on the election?
http://blackboxvoting.com/
According to all the "media recounts", Bush won the election unless you counted the votes against methods prescribed by Florida law -- much like Johnny Carson's Carnac. I don't know if you understand US Presidential Elections, but our President is elected by the Electoral College not by the popular vote. Bush won by 2% in the Electoral College.
Bush and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The UN does not dictate to the United States because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Bush to allow the UN to dictate to USA. The US does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention terrorists that have attacked or are plotting to attack the US or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of Gitmo, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in America and brought it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Germany and Japan.
I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Bush main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The real issue with the Florida 2000 election wasn't the ballots. There election wasn't tainted by bad ballots - the paper ballots were all countable. After the fact, we all found out who really would have won, had all the ballots been counted.
The real problem was the United States Supreme Court, which handed the election to George W. Bush.
Once all of the ballots had been counted, it was found that by a slight margin, Al Gore actually won Florida - meaning that he won both the popular and electoral vote.
Perhaps we can work on replacing the US Supreme Court with machines? Or, at least, with non-partisan judges - who are elected by the people of the USA, not appointed by Presidents (and therefore subjective in their opinions of presidential candidates who just happen to be the son of the man who gave them their job).
That is really Step #1 to getting a fair, balanced presidential election in 2004 - ridding the Supreme Court of the current judges, and allowing the American People to vote for new judges.
Most people are missing the point. An election must not only be fair but it must be seen to be fair.
I have no idea why the US has such problems with their voting. In the UK everyone votes on paper..... with a fucking pen. (No dimpled chads crap!) It is counted by hand and is never out by more than 10 votes in 30,000. We also have the result by the early hours of the morning.
The point is if you want to go and count all the votes yourself you can. The whole idea of an election is that it is open. For this there must be a paper trail. Why complicate the matter? The other point is that it is secret. Who I vote for is none of anyones bussiness. I would always be nervous with electronic voting for two reasons. I want to know that my vote has really bean counted and I want to know that I am anonymous.
As regards election fraud it is easier to imagine someone messing with an electonic count than someone turning up with a few suitcases of paper and trying to stuff them into a ballot box in fron t of the election officals.
.
I think that the voting companies will eventually lobby to regulate out any scrutiny of their process. Will every attempt to investigate the security of such systems by an average citizen be dealt with as a "hacking" crime eventually? With today's fear of the "terrorists" exploiting things, the time for this type of legislation is ripe.
How's the weather in Ontario? Is rent cheap?
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
"Bush is by far the worst president ever appointed by the Supreme Court. --maddox.xmission.com "
Whether or not he is the worst president, you are accepting someone's lie as fact. The Supreme Court did not appoint him. The Electoral College did, however, through the usual process of election.
All the Supreme Court did was refuse to bother with a frivolous appeal filed with them. They in effect did nothing and let the real results of the election stand.
In Diebold America, the vote rocks YOU!
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Why can we trust computers to handle hundreds of billions of dollars in international business, but not voting?
The problem in the equation is the involvment of our government, who have failed to earn our trust in the last few decades, not the concept of electronic voting itself.
-Z
how about we vote for which ballot system to use?
Hi all,
With more and more surprise I am reading all those articles about how the USA (nr 1 in IT in the world) is struggling with E-voting.
I am 30 years old now, the first time I voted was when I was 19 or 20 yo (first chance), and that was electronical. I have never casted my ballot on paper, ever. At the time, we are talking 1990, about 50% of The Netherlands was using voting machines, a few years after it was 100%. The first machines were installed in 1985.
Agreed, no fancy touch screens (how would that work?? 15 parties, up to 40 candidates per party - that can never be shown on one normal touch screen, thereby giving an advance to the party first shown of course), though a reliable, robust, and secure way to vote it is. It uses a panel with a huge number of buttons (one per candidate), a display to tell which candidate you are about to vote for, and a "Vote" button. That's all. No Internet connection (what is that good for other than allowing hackerse to access the machine). Never, ever has there been a dispute on voting security with these machines.They work, everyone is happy with it, and they are a great improvement on the paper voting.
USA is making a true fool of themselves.
How come they can not even design something simple (not easy, but simple as in few functions needed) as a voting machine? How can we ever trust their electronic "smart bombs" and whatnot? And their computer based aeroplanes? And more computer software which has to be tamper-proof and absolutely safe.
Electronic voting is not rocket science. Ask the Europeans about it, there the technology can be bought in from the shelf. Not fancy, though tested in several elections and found good.
Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held.
Wouter.
"Maybe they need another election disaster like Bush to realise it is time to have a look across the border and see how a real election is held"
You are right. The Mexican system is the best example in the world in how to run things.
You know, I passed the Crest Theater here in Sacramento the other day when they had the citizenship swearing-in scheduled. There was a line a block long of immigrants excited to become US citizens and in a way I felt bad for these people. How many do you think would turn back if they saw how much people born here took it for granted and, in doing so help create the corruption they always complain about?
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Then again, I've never had trouble filling out my absentee ballots in WA. You just draw a line to complete an arrow next to the option you want to vote for.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
We dont live in a democracy though. The vote of the people is only considered by the electoral college.
The electoral college votes are really the only ones that matter. They dont necessarily have to "agree" with the peoples choice.
A true democracy elects its officials by the people. We, do not do that.
I wish we were as concerned about who we vote for as we are how we vote for them.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
If the race is probably going to go to one side or another, fewer people are likely to turn out. What does "probably" mean? Well, just turn on CNN, or Fox, or... and they'll tell you.
See the problem?
And that's before you get in to less subtle ways of, um, freelance electioneering.
Allowing any knowledge of how an election is going while it is still happening gives people an opportunity to undermine it.
I forget what 8 was for.
Yeah, except Clinton really is a Rhodes scholar and a damned smart chap, whereas Bush really is a C-student who barely scraped through college. And is also extraordinarily inarticulate most of the time (wonder how long he rehearsed his address to the U.K.)...
Pretty Please?
By the way, if you say No, I'll become Leader of the Disloyal Opposition. And will do my best to visit upon you an appropriate Fall From Power. If necessary, I'll tell the rulers of Iraq that you possess Weapons of Mass Destruction.
<joke>This is why I think we should either annex a new state of kick Florida out of the country. Once we have an odd number of states there be a greatly reduced risk of a tie!</joke>
But seriously, I think the parent poster is dead on here - no system is going to be perfect, and so it's important to have a system that's as tamper-proof and traceable as possible to minimize errors.
E-voting provides neither of these reliably. Even if the software was open source, how can the public be 100% sure that the binaries installed in the machines are made from the available source? There's still potential for tampering.
Granted, at least there will be much less potential for random errors and the like, so if anything goes wrong it would be more likely to be a deliberate tinkering than a typo!
But still, I don't see what the problem is with paper ballots.
"Here's a sheet cardstock and one of those Bingo card markers. Make a dot next to the name of the guy you wanna vote for and stuff it in the slot."
A 6-year-old can probably handle that. Hell you should probably put little photos of the canidates on there too, just in case the voter can't be arsed to read... they seem to vote for whoever looks the best anyway. (And with the choices in canidates, it's really just as good a system as any!)
=Smidge=
We Americans do not trust our government. We are very proud of that. It's an intentional act of will, and we believe in it more strongly than just about any other founding principle of our nation. Our very government is constructed in distrust of itself. We are taught by our parents, by our media, and by our government-run schools that government is a necessary evil and not to trust it.
But in spite of that, no, because of our distrust of our own government, we refuse to yield our national sovereignty to the U.N. or anyone else.
The question of whether we should use electronic voting or more laborious hand-counting also devolves to our basic distrust of government. Will it help or hurt? That's the question.
Saying we should hand-count because we don't trust the government misses the point entirely.
sigs, as if you care.
With atm's you have 3 forms of Paper Trail that are not available with the electronic machines as stated...
1. You have your money...
2. You have your receipt...
3. Later you get your statement.
Electronic voting provides NONE of these protections, which is precisely the problem. An ATM provides simple user level auditing of the transaction, which for the most part works well. With "Electronic" voting, there is no paper trail, no audit method... Votes can appear and disappear, and change without anyones knowledge.
The answer is obvious, Electronic voting should result in human readible paper that is placed in the ballot box to be counted. It can be counted on the fly, like they currently are in Washington State. But more importantly the results can be audited and hand counted. The very fact that they can, massively lowers the possibility of fraud, or conversly the fact that you can't massively increases the possibility of fraud.
Shocking as it may be, the US Constitution protects only US citizens and legal residents. What happens to others is a matter of foreign policy goals and international agreements, which may or may not coincide with the consitution, but are certainly not required to.
Government IS the problem.
Since its my idea I will be the first leader.
I call next!
at http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/198
... but how do you know that those choices are actually tabulated? The answer: trust the companies that make the machines. But that attitude, if it ever made sense, has been shown to be not just wrong but foolhardy in the past several months... "
Electronic Voting Debacle
Grave concerns over the security of electronic voting machines in the United States means the heart of American democracy is at risk.
[snip]
"...The Big Issue: Security
So, how do you know that the machine actually counted your vote? You don't! Oh sure, you may see a screen at the end of the process that shows you what you selected
ie: Australia has full preferential voting. You can say I vote for A. If A loses, my vote transfers to B. Then E. Then back to C. And finally, I vote for D, but hopefully someone else has won by then
Recounting that, and redirecting those preferential flows is a PITA. I've done poll clerking, and counting. Its long.
I believe America has a x marks the spot first past the post system. Electronic counting there not so important or diffucult.
Yay me!
Yeah, too bad so much of this vitrol is true. Take a look at this article on ZDnet. Its about that guy at Intel that got arrested, and the "evidence" that let the US hold him for over a month in solitary confinement (check the date on the article and the date in the story). He was a Citizen of The United States. A citizen. You know, the people who make up this country, live here, and who are guaranteed certain rights such as due process, a speedy trial, and representation? You? Me? Note also the end of the article:
So he's not an isolated case.
According to what was released by the government (who has recently felt an unusual need to hide the truth from its people on a lot of things, such as trials, so its entirely possible they have other charges they're neglecting to let us know about) Mike's crimes were growing a beard after the sept. 11 attacks and visiting China during the same time that a group of other people arrested the year before had visited. Ah, sweet justice.
Did you know that Bush said he doesn't read the newspapers? Yeah, thats right, he "trusts" his advisors to tell him whats worth knowing in the news. These are the same people that brought us nukes in the middle east, magical disappearing WMDs that nobody has found yet, and our current foreign policy of "piss everyone off".
As for Bush's belief in "democracy", he'd rather be a dictator. Out of context? Joking? You decide.
Nobody "underestimates" Bush. The fact is, the poor man is an idiot and a puppet for the people pulling his strings and whispering in his ear who we didn't vote for and who we have no control over. Your examples of Germany and Japan are great ones, too bad they shine brighter than the US right now.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The org is on the ball: http://www.verifiedvoting.org
Since 2000, municipal elections here are counted with a mark-sense reader.
Voters get a letter-sized ballot, and they mark their vote with a sharpie. Then, they insert the ballot in a carrier-envelope.
Each ballot has a detachable stub with a sequential serial number, which is initialed by the scrutineer. When the voter returns, he tears-off the stub, and hands it to the scrutineer; this way, everyone can be sure it's the same ballot that was given (instead of a telegram, where you put in a pre-marked ballot, and prove you did it by bringing back the blank ballot).
The ballot is then passed though a mark-sense reader which tallies the counts, and drops into a sealed box, along with the other ballots.
This way, the results are known within seconds when the polls close, AND you STILL HAVE the paper ballots to be recounted, if the need arises.
The machines are not open-source, but starting tomorrow, I am pursuing the matter with the authorities.
NO FUCKING SHIT!
NO GODDAMMED FUCKING SHIT ON A STICK!!!
Do you FUCKING REALIZE the EXTREME TERMINAL STUPIDITY of what you're saying???
Why the fuck do you think that VOTING IS SECRET and HAS TO BE SECRET?
It's to frigging MAKE SURE VOTERS AREN'T BOUGHT OR INTIMIDATED into voting for a given candidate!!!
Sheesh! One wonders what goes through the heads of those youths nowadays!!!!
On Friday, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich from Ohio requested that the House Judiciary Committee take notice of Diebold's misuse of the DMCA:
From Kucinich's press release:
Write your own Congressman, and ask him or her to call for this hearing!
Furthermore, each voting system should have a secret key. On the recipt there should be a hash (ala MD5) of the information and the secret key. A recipt with this hash would be *proof* that a vote was cast, on which machine it was cast, and what you voted for. This way there would be no way for someone to come in later and change votes in the database without that change being evident. Voters could punch in their recipt code into a web interface and have the system automatically check that their vote was cast and counted correctly.
The central votes database would need to record:
- What voting machine cast the vote
- The unique ID of the vote
- What was voted for
Things not recorded in the central votes database:- What time the vote was cast (this would be too easy to tie to who came in and voted when)
- Weather the recipt was printed (If that was in the DB someone could go in and only change votes where there was no proof of what the original vote was for)
- The voting machines secret key (this should be a well guarded secret.)
The recipt should have:- The id of the voting machine used
- The unique ID of the vote
- The MD5 of what was voted for, the uniqe ID, and the secret key
- (Voter Optional) A printout of what the votes were cast
The voting machines would need to disable themselves if for some reason it's printer didn't work. The key to not being able to tamper with the votes is that verification must be possible. Without that, votes could be altered with impunity.set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
The only thing they really need electronic voting for is speed. They want the results faster than manual counting would allow. If you want a system at least as good as what we had, all you need is a system that produces machine+human-readable ballots.
When you vote, the machine when finished prints out a ballot with both machine-readable (barcode, perhaps) and human-readable versions of your vote. You confirm that it matches your vote, then drop it in the ballot box. The voting machine can hold an electronic tally internally which can be read after close of polls for a fast result. If there's a question of validity, you machine-scan the machine-readable portions of the printed ballots. As a check, you can compare the human-readable and machine-readable portions of a sample of the printed ballots to make sure the two really do match. If you select the sample randomly, it'd be statistically improbable for the voting machines to deliberately put incorrect machine-readable versions down without getting caught at it.
You can use smart-cards or whatnot for enabling a vote on the machine, and the traditional methods work for spoiled ballots. A one-use magnetic card like the airlines use for tickets would be even cheaper.
Given that it's not all that hard to design a system like that, I have to wonder why Diebold and the rest are so adamant about not doing it.
ever watch the morons try to check themselves out at the grocery store? i actually avoid those lanes now, because there is always some low/normal load ahead of me, inventing new depths of illiteracy and stupidity, and it's faster to wait in a line with a human cashier. now transfer this whole scenario to the voting booth.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
There is, as I suggested above, an exception (you're not on the roster index, you are at your "new polling place", haven't reregistered, have moved (there's some time requirement), but are still in the same county as before.... then you can vote provisionally, and asking for ID is cool in that case.
But, yes, in general, if I know friend Fred dies a few miles away, I could go over to his polling place, say I'm him, and vote as him. The catch there is the poll workers might know I'm lying, and there's gotta be some mechanism to deal with that potential, but....)
And since a copy of all the voters is posted, and even marked a few times during the day with marks indicating who has voted, you can come in late in the day and make sure you pick someone who hasn't voted yet. Nifty, that.
I'm a nature photographer.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
But there is no such commensurability between the false vote tallies that electronic voting systems might yield when things go badly, and the benefits of speed and efficiency that they might offer when things go well.
Why are there benefits to speed and efficiency?
My understanding is that the people who work at the Polls are either volunteers or temporary employees who earn a 'civic duty' stipend for providing their services. Efficiency is something you worry about at a hamburger stand, not at a polling place.
As to speed: why the hell does it matter that we get a 'speedy' result. The whole obsession over 'speed' seems to be driven by the 'news' media and their incessant need to report results. In actuality, it is always weeks or months before the result of the election is put into action.
Screw speed. Screw efficiency. Let a bunch of community volunteers tally the paper ballots. Fine any news organization that 'reports' official results before they're posted by elections officials. The vision I get of a group of old ladies saying 'hold on and we'll have the numbers in a few hours' to some yuppie fuck journalist is wonderful, and should be the reality.
A Good Intro to NetBS
We would invest heavily in Sharpie markers, and return to the 'ol ballot box until this sorts itself out, preferably via an open source solution of some sort...
Sometimes low-tech is the only tech that is 100% effective.
Why do we need to change? Like I have said before.
Paper Ballots are about as fool proof as you are going to get.
If some fool spoils their ballot too bad
Keep the paper ballot even if it's just a scantron.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
What I don't understand is why there is not a combined system put into place where the voting machines prints a ticket that can be verified by the voter and then placed in a standard ballet box.
Afterwards take the total from the electronic system and randomly select a number of areas to be hand counted. This would make it much more difficult for anyone to fix the results as they would need to change both the paper ballots and the electronic count to ensure that their vote fixing is not picked up.
37 - what does it stand for really...
One may argue that the public has only to gain if the public official brings his expertise into the private sector. My concern is, however, that the public official will use his expertise in side-stepping regulations or choosing the way of minimal resistance, to maximize profits at the expense of following rules and regulations.
Kind of like a hardware vendor optimizing their wares for benchmarks as opposed to real life situations!
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Until the software and hardware is totally open for scrutiny, the answer it no.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Note page 15 of this PDF'd election manual. (The document is an election workers manual from the County of San Francisco, I've worked polls in Santa Clara County myself.) Note that it does not state that ID is illegal to ask for, but does say that "Voters are NOT required to provide proof of identity or residence."
I will add that many voters do bring their voting booklet, or present an ID, and it definitely helps poll workers when you do that, it's somehow just slightly quicker to look something up when you have a nicely printed version fo what you're searching for, particularly with hard-to-spell names.
Here is the text of a proposed law, from February 2003, to require IDs to be checked by precinct workers.
I can't, in the few moments I've looked today, find an explicit prohibition, although I believe I've seen one, I'm willing to drop the assertion that it's directly illegal until I can find direct proof of that statement. I will note, however, that if it's not required, it'd be a pretty bad idea to demand it of voters, since it'd be a direct opening to charges of discriminatory, selective checking of IDs.
On the other hand, a mistake by a polling worker on this point is far more likely to be a mistake than a serious attempt at fraud, poll-workers don't get a ton of training.
I'm a nature photographer.