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.

Comments

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[The Mad Hawk]

For a good source on the electronic voting issue in general and the push for Rep. HR2239 in particular, see Verified Voting.

Re:Absolutely amazing

[badasscat]

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?

Re:Absolutely amazing

[frankie]

make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines

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.

The voter doesn't get to keep the receipt

[brokeninside]

The receipt goes into a locked box (similar to a ballot box) in case that particular district is selected at random for one of the audits required by both of the bills currently before congress.

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.

Re:Source code to the people!

[sandyjensen]

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.

Incompetent? Or something else...

[meldroc]

You make a very valid point here. Robert Cringely makes this same point another way in I, Cringely:

Now against this backdrop of failure, I can't help but make one technical observation that I think has been missed by most of the other people covering this story. One of the key issues in touch screen voting is the presence or absence of a so-called paper trail. There doesn't seem to be any way in these systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the numbers that went in. There is no print-out from the machine, no receipt given to the voter, no way of auditing the election at all. This is what bugs the conspiracy theorists, that we just have to trust the voting machine developers -- folks whose actions strongly suggest that they haven't been worthy of our trust.

So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't create a paper trail and so couldn't be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves? The answer to this question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for one of my readers to enlighten me. If you know the answer for a fact, please get in touch.

Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to have been a bad move on somebody's part, whoever that somebody is.

Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.

Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?

This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

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.