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Electronic Voting in the News
heymarcel writes "After a negative review of the Diebold voting machines by the State Gaming Control Board, it looks like Nevada has gone with a competitor for the upcoming election. And Secretary of State Dean Heller is requiring paper receipts. According to the Associated Press story, Nevada is the first state to do so." There's another story about Nevada voting machines as well. zapf writes "It appears that the major e-Voting machine vendors have banded together to form the 'Election Technology Council.'" Reader SemperUbi writes: "Demand for a voter-verified audit trail is really gaining momentum these days. The Voter Verification Act, introduced yesterday by Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), would require a voter-verified paper audit trail, ban the use of 'undisclosed' software and wireless communications for voting machines, and require mandatory surprise recounts -- all in time for the November 2004 election. Rep. Holt's HR2239 in the House requires much the same thing. Resistance to both bills may focus on the aggressive timetable, but the effort is worth it -- as Warren Slocum once said, democracy ain't cheap. Take that, Diebold!" And finally, a Maryland newspaper dredges up an internal Diebold email that recommends gouging Maryland if the state wants paper printouts for its Diebold voting system.
Must be anonymous and verifiable...
the best Scheme(method) I have heard involves a unique key assigned to each vote and given to each voter... Each voter can then check up on that vote at any time to ensure that it is counted... Further, the list of votes could even be published and publicly browseable... such that each citizen or perhaps restricted to voters could identify and verify the vote.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
For a good source on the electronic voting issue in general and the push for Rep. HR2239 in particular, see Verified Voting.
Diebold's attitudes toward their voting machines make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines were demonstrated to be.
Now why would you worry about Diebold ATM's?
Oh, you mean the Diebold ATMs that got infected earlier this year? No, don't worry, they're completely secure. Just like their voting machines.
A paper receipt would be retained by the polling station and used to verify the electronic results. There are a number of ways they could implement this, but c'mon--didja really think that they'd design a system where, in the event of a dispute, they had to call everyone up and say "Hey, could you bring your paper receipt down to the voting office on Fifth and Elm? Anytime before five today will work. Thanks!"
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
If people got to keep their receipt, it would do away with the secret ballot system that American democracy is founded on. Others posters have mentioned the practical consequences of eliminating the secret ballot system.
"...is requiring paper receipts. According to the Associated Press story, Nevada is the first state to do so." Actually, AP says that Nevada is the first state requiring paper receipts "in time for the 2004 elections." Previously (in November) California's Secretary of State Kevin Shelley "ordered that all new machines purchased after 1 July 2005 must have the functionality, and existing machines must be retrofitted by 1 July 2006." (from the Register article, at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34142.html
Actually, Graham's Voter Verification Act requires openly available software. from the pdf of the proposed legislation:
Sec. 4:
(C) SOFTWARE AND MODEMS.
(i) No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software. Any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen.
ANNAPOLIS -- An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased.
The e-mail from "Ken," dated Jan. 3, 2003, discusses a (Baltimore) Sun article about a University of Maryland study of the Diebold system:
"There is an important point that seems to be missed by all these articles: they already bought the system. At this point they are just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts."
"Ken" later clarifies that he meant "out the yin-yang," adding, "any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive."
The e-mail has been cited by advocates of voter-verified receipts, who say estimates of the cost of adding printers -- as much as $20 million statewide -- have been bloated.
"I find it appalling," said Del. Karen S. Montgomery (D-Dist. 14) of Brookeville, who plans to file a bill mandating a voter-verified paper trail.
"I'd really like to have [yin-yang] explained to me anatomically, with the assumption that almost any place it would be would be painful," she said.
Montgomery said that the price to add printers should be much lower and that she thinks it is being high-balled in part to keep people from talking about the printing system.
Diebold spokesman David Bear would neither dispute nor confirm the accuracy of the "yin-yang" e-mail on Monday, saying it is "at best the internal discussion of one individual and does not reflect the sentiments or the position of the company."
Last week, Diebold dropped threats to sue voting rights advocates who published the e-mail and other reportedly stolen documents or linked to an online archive of Diebold files from their Web sites.
According to news reports, a hacker broke into the Ohio company's servers using an employee's ID number and copied a 1.8-gigabyte file of company announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails dating back to January 1999.
The purloined files include discussions of the security of Diebold's voting machines, which has been a contentious issue in Maryland and other states.
State Board of Elections Administrator Linda H. Lamone told The Gazette last month that Diebold had given a preliminary estimate of $1,000 to $1,200 per machine to add printouts, or up to $20 million for the state's more than 16,000 machines. She said last week that she could not recall whether she got the figure from Diebold or media reports.
Lamone, who said she had not seen the e-mail and did not know if it was accurate, also said she believes that a clause in the contract requiring that Diebold give Maryland the lowest hardware price of any state should guard against price-gouging if the General Assembly mandates voter receipts. But some portions of the contract still would have to be renegotiated, she said.
Bear said he did not know the particulars of the contract.
The issue of voter-verified paper receipts continues to gain momentum nationally, with California's secretary of state announcing that all electronic voting machines there must include paper printouts by 2006. The cost cited by one of Diebold's competitors, according to news reports, was about $500 a machine.
Aviel D. Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who wrote a report earlier this year that found the Diebold machines to be riddled with potential security holes, has advocated for voter-verified receipts. Without such a check on the machines, he said, errors or fraud could go undetected. Rubin's report prompted Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) to ask for an independent investigation by SAIC Corp., which affirmed that the system was "at high risk of compromise."
Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Elections Systems, decli
No, the idea is that the machine would spool the printed votes through a small window, so you could see a hard-copy of your vote, then it would be spooled up ad stored if there needs to be a recount. It wouldn't give YOU the reciept, that's not auditable on a massive-scale. Maybe it should keep one paper AND give you a copy?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
You make a very valid point here. Robert Cringely makes this same point another way in I, Cringely:
I, Cringely linkage...
Seeing the story of Diebold wanting to gouge Maryland for adding printers & an audit trail to their voting systems makes me think that Diebold did not just forget to put in a printed audit trail, but they deliberately do not want one.
I'm all for your suggestion. REQUIRED open source software in voting machines, with an extensive audit trail, not just of the machines, but the servers, protocols, etc. Competent crypto should be used extensively to protect the systems' integrity.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
http://sourceforge.net/projects/free/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vote/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevote/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/votesystem/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kbvote/
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
In California the ACLU has been opposing a paper trail claiming it will negatively affect the experience of blind voters.
Well, personally I don't doubt that it would probably be a negative for blind voters.
Myself, I have a slight case of cerebral palsy and I'd certainly be upset that I had been inconvenienced at the polls, but I would at least have the fortitude to understand that I shouldn't put my one need above the needs of the many.
I can hardly see the justification behind supporting a fairly small proportion of the popilation while causing the rest of us to suffer.
Fix the system for the larger population and then work on it for the handicapped among us.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Ok, how about:
Article on Salon...
Harpers...
Bradenton Herald...
Harvard U. School of Gov't Reseach Paper...
One or these days, they're going to declare it treasonous to be so criminally ignorant. Wise up before then.
You're forgetting: the duty to produce a list of voters who should NOT be allowed to vote because of their ex-felon status was delegated to a private firm.
This firm was hired in 1997 as a result of Florida Statute Section 98.0975, which mandated the use of a private firm to provide the names of potentially ineligible voters who remained on the voter-registration rolls. They were hired by the Florida Director of Elections, Ethel Baxtor (a Democrate), before Harris was even in office.
This firm produced a list and gave it to Harris saying 'hey, this list is over populated and needs to be rechecked by your officials - who should know who really IS an ex-felon in your state.' KH said 'No problem, just make it as "comprehensive" as you can, we'll sort it out!' So, the overloaded list was handed to KH... what did she do? She turned around and distributed it to the counties and their polling places, as is, and claimed that it was carefully reviewed before being put in to use.
That's what she was required to do by Florida State Law. The legislature, not the Department of State, required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was incorrect.
End result? Hundreds, if not thousands, of eligible voters were turned away at the polls.
The US Civil Rights Comission struggled to find 5 such people (and 4 of the people they did find were eventually allowed to vote).
By the way, most modern industrialized (and even some not so industrialized) nations have realized that blocking ex-felons from voting is just another way of disenfranchising a class of voter - akin to poll taxes and the like. Reconstructionist bullshit, to put it nicely.
This isn't isolated to just Florida. 9 states have a lifetime voting ban on convicted felons, and another 32 states have some sort of restriction on felons voting. This is hardly something that can be blamed on those evil republicans.
Article on Salon...
Guess you missed this correction.
Harpers...
Here is Katherine Harris' response to the garbage the Palast published.
You might also want to read the USCCR Report, which states in part:
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities..
The Dissenting Statement is also a worthwhile read on the subject.