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Demo of Free Software Voter-Verifiable Voting
Lulu of the Lotus-Ea writes "The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is holding a demonstration of its Free Software voting system in Santa Clara, California on April 1, 2004 (yeah, I know the date, but it's not a joke). An announcement on the OVC homepage has further details. The Sourceforge hosted EVM2003 project of the OVC has produced touchscreen and vision-impared interface voting systems that produce visually inspectable (or machine-aided audio verification) paper ballots. As well, OVC will demonstrate systems for reconcilliation and reporting of precint results, and provide handouts and a presentation explaining the virtues of a publicly inspectible system with a tamper-proof paper trail."
I guess there are plenty of examples of doing nothing leading to the undesirable. Go for it you people. Stand up and be counted (Accurately :-)
With Diebold's flaws being exposed, it may be a good time to effect some real change. What are the chances of this being actually adopted for some election?
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
It'll never catch on.
Diebold: I quote: fraud-prone, blackbox, proprietary, expensive, idiosyncratic, unreliable
OVC: I quote:technically sound, accurate, secure, inexpensive, uniform and open voting system
That really sums it up.
If you don't believe me try a demo of the Diebold voting system
DIEBOLD: Boldling rigging where no man's rigged before
(Well... Let's not talk about the presidential election 2004)
Nothing to see here
I had been thinking that there would need to be an open standard and rock solid set of validation tools to test potential software.
OSS voting soltions is not an option that sprung to mind, but it's neat.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
I don't think i could ever trust voting if a computer is involved to count "virtual" votes
this is just way too easy to abuse by a rogue government either now or in the future.
creating an OSS voting software actually reinforces the argument for digital voting.
"publicly inspectible system with a tamper-proof paper trail." What do they mean publicly inspectible.. Does that include source? Renski
On their site they required that you attend the demo in a pink dress with fairy wings on your back.
Do these people have the attention of legislators and governors? There are a lot of legislators who are keen on the idea of including a voter-verifiable paper trail, and several state governors have expressed concern as well with the voting systems that have debuted so far. This is (should be) as much a PR project as it is a coding project.
Will China adopt it?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
With all the bitching and moaning going on about electronic voting systems, one would think that this would have been the first idea to mind, but, apparently, the average citizen can only complain and deliver shit for alternate ideas. This is fantastic that someone has organized this into a feasible possibility to demonstrate to the public. With a few public showings, this might even break into the mainstream voting arena, and, while I don't believe it will assauge all worries that people have, it should help with most, and the others will be ironed out eventually.
Thanks to all those that helped with this.
Does that mean every polling station gets to compile their own source?
if ($vote eq "GWB"){
&flush($vote);
}
else{
$othertotal++;
}
I would never trust a computer voting system, even postal votes dont seem like a good idea.
The problem (as i understand it) in the states come from the hanging chads etc that resulted in baby bush been in the whitehouse. Computer voting is been touted as *the* solution, but i would think that no matter how good this software was, putting a cross in a big box (like the UK and Europe) then having someone count the crosses is still the best solution.
Don't get me wrong, I love computers too, but what exactly is wrong with paper ballots? They work reliably, and have been for a long long time. They are cheap, simple, tamperproof - and the beauty is, the technology scales wonderfully ;)
Just 'cause you can automate something doesn't always mean you should.
no taxation without representation!
Whilst right thinking intelligent people (everyone reading this of course), realise the benefits of such an approach to voting, the people who choose voting systems (i.e. Politicians) will ask one question:
"Who is accountable?"
Because it's not a company developing this system, (who after all, always act in an appropriate, legal, and fully accountable manner :-|), politicians will believe that such 'communist' philosophies are not to be trusted. "Surely if it's an open system, it can be exploited by ne'er do wells?".
I'd liken it to companies who always buy MS - "because, hey, MS is a reputable company. They're accountable for their software". It's a mentality which goes along the lines of "Companies are better than a gang of hippies, doing it because they want to make the world a better place man."
Same old same old - whilst this will undoubtedly be technically better than anything Diebold can come up with, politcal motives will bury this initiative I fear.
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
But then, I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's Discworld continent XXXX: They put politicians in prisons immediately they win elections, because it saves time later.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
They will use a system called Demotek that is made by four basque companys (Ibermatica, Ikusi, Hunolt and Euskaltel), and uses a really curious way for voting, half analogic, half digital. The voter uses a normal paper for voting, but the ballot paper has a bar code that is read when it is inserted in the ballot box.
The results are available in the moment that the ballot boxes are closed. But, they are not official until the ballot papers are counted.
- It's a easy way because there are no skills necesary (it's not necesary to know using a computer). My grandmother can use it.
-It's a safe way, because there are always the ballot papers for testing if the system was ok and no one has cheat the results.
- It's a fast way for knowing the results. No more Florida like recounting needed.
Sorry for my awfull english
Marcus Ramius
Electronic voting has been used in parts of Belgium for over a decade, with little fuss or controversy.
The system is simple, robust, secure and verifiable. Each voter gets a smart card (magstripe card in the older days) when they present their papers; they take this smart card into the voting booth and insert it, much like using an ATM (and everyone knows how to do this). The voting machines use a touch screen like an ATM (in the older days, using a light pen), and let you select your candidate/party. The vote is registered to the card, which is then ejected, and inserted into a ballot box that counts the vote as the card is entered.
The ballot boxes are locked, so tampering with the cards is impossible. The card readers in the box cannot write to the cards. The voting booths are stupid, with no memory or network connections.
So what's the big deal in the US?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
What are they trying to do? Make Bush lose the election?
Does everything include nothing?
Something like this:
Step 1: Walk into the booth, and identify yourself (Probably in the form of some number that the voting place keeps track of.)
Step 2: Select candidates in a nice, easy-to-read format.
Step 3: Print out a filled-in ballot.
Step 4: Ask you to verify correct votes.
Step 5: If you say yes, place the ballot into the slot underneath the printer. This slot wouldn't open until you have verified your votes. (clearly labeled in nice, bright letters again). If not, go back to step 2.
Step 6: When the issue of verification comes up, there's a paper trail that every voter is supposed to have looked at. If they didn't, well, that's their business. Looks like their vote didn't count.
So, in the spirit of trying to find flaws in order to preserve democracy for all, who is in charge of loading the open-source software onto the machines? This is, IMO, a crucial problem with machine voting. It's fairly easy to imagine a scenario where an "updated" version of the software gets slipped in to the computer by a zealous poll-worker who is, after all, a registered member of one or the other parties. Vote fraud with paper ballots is so hard because members of both parties verify the results. Vote fraud with e-voting would be easy, once you figured out the right trick.
Don't get me wrong; I think open-source e-voting is better than proprietary e-voting. But I would still rather have paper ballots and wait a couple of days for the results. The problems in Florida in 2000 are chump change compared to the potential fraud possible with e-voting.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
See earlier posting
yep.
Honestly, if somebody is not intelligent enough to punch a stylus through a paper card, they probably have no business voting anyway. All these touchscreen voting systems are a bunch of unnecessary razzamatazz.
You only saw the headline, then made a stupid unfunny joke that's been done to death a million times before.
Fuck off you rat-infested clusterfuck. FOAD.
What is the advantage of electronic voting except its more expensive, more complex, and more vulnerable to manipulation.
Any sort of voting machine, chads, or plastic doohickies just add to complexity. The old fashioned pen and paper method works fine.
If it ain't broke, dont fix.
you mean the fifth continent? I cannot remember such a qoute, but maybe I should reread it then.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Something somewhat similar to this has been done in Louisiana for many years (for those who are unfamiliar with the state's statistics: La is known for the worst drivers, close to worst education, etc. -- almost everything is close to the worst). The voters sign an afadavid (sp?) when they enter the voting facility, and the booth number is noted. Inside the booth, there is a very simple interface with buttons next to each candidate's name, and there is a brief description of the candidate's platform. Before submitting the vote (a light is illuminated by the pressed button) the voters are asked to confirm.
Any way, back to the 5-step process:
1. Identify yourself (the afadavid as in Louisiana) -- Most states' driver's licenses have some sort of electronically readable media. That part seems easy enough -- scan the card.
2. A nice, easy format is WAY too easy to do, unless it's for Florida residents (or so it seems)
5. Not quite -- the hard copy ballots should be automatically dropped (or printed in a long strip like a cash register receipt?) within the machine, and only printed after the voter has confirmed his/her choice.
Also, there should be a database of local users at the voting points of only the local registered voters. If a scanned ID (if that is the chosen method) does not match, the voter is denied. The information of voters is kept separate from too easily attaching a name to a vote, but not ipossible in case someone somehow successfully votes twice (another reason for theinitial database check), which would invalidate the person's votes. Of course, this could be modified and expanded for many types of possible fraud detection.
nt
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Do it like in australia. We have a balot paper where you have to mark 1st preference, 2nd preference etc etc and if us aussies can do it, surely the yanks can do it.
Or failing that, this way
First, you select the votes on a touch screen or similar.
Then, it prints out a small reciept showing in human-readable (and also machine-readable perhaps by a barcode or OCR) your vote.
Then it can be read by the machines to provide a count. But, if there is a dispute, hand-counting it is dead easy.
Because its a physical bit of paper in a physical tamper-proof box, its not possible to tamper with the vote. Plus, its easy to see that you the voter made the selection you thought you were making. And to see that your vote is definatly being counted.
And, it has the advantage of being fast to count (of course, the counting machine could be fixed but thats why its printed in human-readable form also, to allow recounts to manually recount with no doubt as to who each voter voted for)
the machines for doing this woulnt need to be particularly good. In fact, the hardware found in some supermarket Cash Registers (the kind with the screen not the kind with the little LED display) is probobly sufficient.
Basicly, all you need is a touch screen (or a regular screen and some buttons/a keypad), a reciept printer to print the actual votes and some chips to control it.
You could easily do control logic on a simple embedded system. And, its possible to make an embedded system very resistant to code modification. (just ask any arcade emulation guru about e.g. the Sega System 16)
Plus, because its printing a physical ballot paper, if the code doesnt print the correct stuff, someone will notice that what is printed on the paper doesnt match with who they wanted to vote for.
Of course, my idea will never happen since it might mean that the voters actually have some (GASP!) control over who gets elected (and of course those men in their suits with their black briefcases full of green bits of paper with past presidents on them wont like that since those bits of paper wont have as much affect on what laws get passed)
Ok, this post was not a pure troll post as such, but who would rate it +5 ? It's a summary post, and not a particularly good one. I think this is a whole ring of mithuro spammers who mod each other up. They seem to be about to break through the moderation system.
Mods please keep an eye on any mithuro posts. :-(
If Natalie Portman ever runs she will get an instant win.
If
Candidate 1=Natalie Portman
then Winner=Candidate 1
End If
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
The more complex the better. It effectively reverses female suffrage without having to deal with the political fallout. Huzzah!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Your first point requires people to have a drivers license to vote... not very all-encompassing ;)
All of the software for the system is GPL.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Sorry for such a boring post, but I have to say this is the best news I've heard in a long time. Hopefully this will reconcile those who understand the importance of a layperson-visible, inspectable, monitorable, open, recountable system, and those who are concerned about the rights of the disabled.
The clear presentation of a working alternative should make a real difference in the political dialog surrounding the issue.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In a system where the voter gets a receipt, voters can now cash in their votes for money. Say hello to an election where "courting" the homeless and insane is more important than putting ads on TV.
It would, perhaps, increase voter turnout.
This can be solved if voters are not allowed to carry their receipts out of the booth, but have to deposit a paper stub of some sort in a traditional box.
What about ballet boxes that have a set of paper tapes (the old teletype type would do) .Each ballet would be recorded on one of the tapes at random (so that the order of the votes could not be matched with the order people voted.)
Then for counting or recounting the box could be connected to a system at could read the tapes through a window (or they could be read by a person). But the box would never be unsealed.
(Of course if a tape was broken or something like that there would have to be some kind of process for fixing it. but that would be rare and could be done in public view or under the eye of a judge.)
Charles Puffer
Open source doesn't necessarily mean no charge. The Open Voting Consortium should set themselves up like Red Hat. Give the code away for free but charge for support and services. Part of the deal will be that OVC will be held accountable for the system. That should assuage any election officials and the money can be used to fund more development.
Our money is thrown around the globe every day in bit form and few of us have ever been the victim of fraud. There is fundamentally no difference between your vote as a tally in a database and your money as a tally in the datbase.
In fact I once worked on a project which had a direct pipe to the Fed's ACH system. I could have easily dropped a transfer from your account to mine and it would have gone through wihtout ANY authorization on your part. Why wasn't I ever tempted to loot anyone's account? Paper-trail. There was absolutely no way I could have taken the money such that the system would not know who had submitted the transaction and who received the money (and moral grounds, thank you very much). If fraud was committed, my company would catch hell and you can be sure I would be sure to follow.
P.S. - Here's a clever idea. Let's privatize voting. How about we allow electronic voting, but it costs $5 to do so with a private firm electronically (think tax submission software). Firms compete with each other for voters. That way, it's in each company's financial interests to keep the vote secure because any company who fucked up an election would surely lose all it's customers. Perhaps each company is required to publish it's vote datbase before its votes can be tallied. Capitalism works!
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
It seems most (all?) election schemes are "choose at most N from this list". But what about support for "Instant Runoff Voting"? By that meaning, this is my first choice, this is my sencond choice, etc. And you tabulate the votes multiple times (using each voters' most viable candidate, eliminating candidates who fare poorly each time) until you get a clear winner.
It helps to avoid the problem of the third party spoiler.
e.g. you have 3 candidates say: bush, kerry, nader.
bush gets 45% of the vote
kerry gets 45% of the vote
nader gets 10% of the vote
no clear winner yet. Eliminate nader
of the people who voted for him as their first choice... 4% voted for bush as their 2nd choice. and 6% voted for kerry. retabulate
bush 49%, kerry 51%
(of course, then you send it to the electoral college, and they hand it to bush... but that's another reform)
Election Fraud is all in the registration of voters, not in the counting of votes. You want fairer elections, fix it so that people can't register more then once at several precincts, and that dead people stay in their graves.
There's only one problem with that system. I can force a re-vote by inserting a fake printout.
The paper printouts should be kept behind a window. This guarantees that (if the system is functioning properly) the paper and electronic ballots match.
Life is too short to proofread.
If the presidential election is within 10% either way (and from the current polls, that would seem to be likely), we are going to see a firestorm of lawsuits. With all the experts claiming electronic voting systems are insecure, both sides are already gearing up for legal battle.
Don Campbell at USA Today has an interesting op/ed piece on the subject.
Berzerkely has collected a large amount of information on this site. Lots of interesting data.
By the people, for the people.
The electoral process is supposed to be transparent. Can't be transparent if we don't get to see how the machines work, now can it?
Does other more established and related lobby groups know this, who can possibly help with PR? How about EFF?
MoveOn.Org has, in the past, had a significant impact - maybe we can get them behind this?
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.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
The software is a good start, but you can't walk up to a city/county/state government and sell them a CD-ROM full of software and claim, "This is your voting booth".
Diebold's software is almost completely irrelevant. They're the guys who make safes, ATMs, and other high-physical-security objects. The fact that the software makes the machines unreliable...well, what state/county/city ever actually looked inside the mechanical voting machine to see if it worked properly? The machines were supposed to be physically tamper-reistant.
There's also the "blame" issue. Companies have some sort of identity that cn be held responsible. (The fact that corporate structure generally hides the actions of individuals is...a nice benefit, especially if you're in the business of rigging elections. But I digress.)
So the only way for this to work is to become the enemy. Build a physical infrastructure (a hell of a lot more expensive than banging out some software) and find a progressive city willing to use it instead of Diebold. Pick up a track record, and perhaps you can compete. Then, perhaps, the conspiracy theorists will have something to point to when the state of Florida chooses Diebold at twice the price.
This sounds like a first step in that process. There's no point getting peoples' attention if your software is flawed (and if, in addition, you don't have money to lobby congress). If you're trying to produce an open voting system, you must first prove its reliability on technical merits. Doing so in a public building seems like a great way to get attention. Then they'll build on that attention as Diebold's flaws get reported more and more widely.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is holding a demonstration of its Free Software voting system in Santa Clara, California on April 1, 2004 (yeah, I know the date, but it's not a joke)
That's what someone pulling a joke would say!
CVBS
free ipod and free gmail!
The problem with all existing voting system is that the ballots are open to interpretation. We Canadians are rather smug about our manual voting system compared to the circus in the U.S., but close votes reveal the problems in all systems. For example, in an election about twenty years ago, ballots were rejected because they were marked in ink rather than using the supplied pencil; this changed the outcome of the election for that riding and is rather similar to the hanging-chad situation. Paper ballots have the advantage that the system is completely open, unlike a computerized system where the workings of the programs are hidden; but ballots are not necessarily counted the way voters intend with both types of systems.
What we need is a system where a voter knows that their ballot is counted correctly. I think a computerized system is the only one that can possibly give this feedback. If a voting machine prints out a receipt, the voter can use it to verify that the vote was counted correctly. If the receipts are collected, there is a paper trail that can be used for recounts. We can be confident that the paper ballots will be read accurately (either by a machine or a person) because they are machine-printed and not marked by hand.
A computerized system with a paper-trail is better than any current voting system. I wonder why the Americans don't see that, but instead are intent on creating a new system with exactly the same types of problems as the existing system.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
I feel very strongly that OVC would be chosen by the people, if given the chance to vote for OVC or any other voting system. However, only OVC would be able to prove that... the votes for "we don't want OVC" weren't tampered with.
Lets say a major national news station such as CBS/ABC announced that there will be a national vote where democracy can choose between an old voting system or OVC as the standard of all political voting systems.
Do you think that if OVC wasen't necessary, that the results would be OVC?...
It's entirely possible to give people a receipt that certifies that they voted for someone, but not specify who. This lets groups that want to reward voters do so, and keeps people from blackmailing/extorting voters by making sure they voted for the "right" candidate or the candidate that promised them $20 if they just vote for him.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Amidst the rise of viability of auditable electronic voting, Athan Gibbs, the pioneer of paper-trail machines, is dead in a suspicious car accident.
--
make install -not war
She would win only if her Vice Presidential running mate was "HOT GRITS"!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Neilette: "We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?"
Rincewind: "Why?"
Neilette: "It saves time."
--Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
Link here.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I worked for five years in politics, and never encountered any major official who was involved in such a thing.
Then you must not have worked in California. Or had anything to do with the US Congress' dabbling in voting rules.
Absentee ballots without excuses and perpetual absentee ballots. (Several thousand at one address, too, and I'm not talking about a nursing home or general delivery at a post office.)
Motor-voter. (A recipie for fraud, even when NOT combined with perpetual absentee ballots.)
Illegal alien voters. (And: rules against checking ID at polling places, helpful people teaching migrant workers and child-only welfare families (i.e. mommy's not a citizen) how to register and vote, "get out the vote" vans taking people from precinct to precinct - where the riders ALL go in at each precinct).
Floating ballot box tops as a hazard to navigation.
I could go on.
Yes, most of the poll workers are honest and hard-working. But it doesn't take many bad apples to spoil the barrel, since one fraudster can generate thousands of votes - and swing a close elections with millions of voters.
Once or twice, a local party official, it's true, has cheated-- and they're looked down upon and attacked, especially by the ones they 'help'.
Because they cheated? Or because they got caught, making the candiate and party look bad?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Chalenge:
1) Allow a voter to verify if his vote was counted in the final totals and as intended.
2) Verify that no voter gets more than one vote.
3) Verify that there are no votes in the results that were not placed by a voter himself.
4) Preserve the voter's right to secrecy in the voting process.
Doh! If it only wasn't for that pesky #4 maybe I could come up with a solution. Any Crypto-Geeks out there that can devise a plan that will accomplish all of this?
Bush will find some way (buy out???) to through it out.
That's "throw it out", you Canadian Crackpot!
The topic surely includes ballot-stuffing.
Wikileaks, no DNS
The ineffable jim march will be orchestrating a voting fiasco skit starting one hour before the demo (skit at 9am, demo at 10am)... so show up early!
So, in the spirit of trying to find flaws in order to preserve democracy for all, who is in charge of loading the open-source software onto the machines?
It doesn't MATTER if the software is corrupted. (Except that it delays that's precinct's election until it's fixed.) The software only exists to collect the voter's vote and print the filled-in ballot - which he can read - for him. If it doesn't do it correctly, he gets to try again until it DOES do it right - or fall back on another machine or a manual ballot - meanwhile raising a stink to the elction officials, press, and if necessary, courts.
The machine printed ballot that he read and checked is the official ballot. It may be the one that's machine counted. But even if the voting machine computes the tally as a convenience, the hardcopy is one that's counted if there is ANY question of the election outcome.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"...It's better than great! Is there a word better than great? No, there isn't...it's GREAT!"
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
I was watching 'Real Time with Bill Maher' the other night, and he had Gore Vidal on. Gore brought up the point that only one company does all the exit polling for all the news media nationwide, and there is absolute secrecy in how they do their polling. They could really say anything they want, and as long as it was close to the vote tallies, no one would question anything.
So we have the capacity, through Diebold and others, for massive vote fraud. And only one secretive company doing exit polling to verify things. Scary combination.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A few interesting notes on how the ballot works:
Not that any of these things actually matter, but it would have been amusing to follow the discussion leading to these decisions if the system was designed by a group.
with bits of paper with crosses on? Really, the present debate makes Americans a laughing stock. Too fat and lazy to put a cross in ballot box? FFS. Bits of paper allow a perfect audit trail. What is wrong with you people?
a lot of people in Europe think that the fact the American is given only (in reality) the choice of an ultra-right wing party and a super-right wing part a bit *absurd* as well. Coaltion government are fine in so far as, with regards to their ability to push through legislation, they allow the representation of the democrtic desires of the electorate. Americans don't often realise that European countries are far more diverse than in their constituency. (Hint: The recent situation in Spain should have hammered this home for you). Don't judge us by the system that works best for you, you live in totally different circumstances to us.
OK, the Diebold system is obviously one of the worst solutions. And high-tech should be able to help an election. But the problem with any system that prints a receipt with vote information or allows verification of a voters selection on-line, is that it facilitates the buying and selling of votes. With the traditional paper system you don't have that issue. It's hard to sell a vote if you vote on a private paper ballot, alone in a voting booth where no one can see what you marked, simply because people will not be wiling to pay for what they cannot verify. But any verification system proposed so far opens itself to verification of votes to third parties, which opens the doors to vote buying and selling. Our political system has more than enough problems now, I would just as soon stick to paper ballots rather than use electronic systems until this problem is addressed and resolved.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
'ear me now, rude boys.
What strikes me the most in the announcement is the emphasized importance of having a paper trace of your vote.
In our age of E-Inks and such it shows one thing: paper is not gone yet !
No. As custodian of the Terry LePore Fan Page, I must correct this misstatement.
Ms Lepore was technically a Democrat by virtue of checking that box on her voter registration form. Her reason for doing so was entirely non-ideological: Palm Beach County is overwhelmingly Democratic, so the best way to win elected office there is to be the Democratic nominee. Prior to her first campaign for Elections Supervisor, she was either Independent or Republican (sources conflict on this) but definitely not a "lifelong Democrat" as some stories have claimed.
In 2001 she officially switched to Independent, and is running for reelection as such this year. It's true she has claimed to prefer Gore over Bush, but plenty of registered Republicans (me, for instance) feel the same.
to admit that my opponents are as earnest and well-intentioned as I amWell... they're not! Given that one of the few publically-known topics in Cheney's energy task force was how to divvy up Iraq's oil fields... c'mon, think about it for a second. Well-intentioned?
Where the heck are you getting your news from. All the total state recounts, like Bush wanted, came back for Gore.
It was only the recounts of the three counties that Gore wanted recounted that came back for Bush.
Ironic when you think that Bush was originally pushing to recount the whole state, which would have given the election to Gore.
From Liar Liar:
Fletcher: Your honor, I object!
Judge: And why is that, Mr. Reed?
Fletcher: Because it's devastating to my case!
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I would suspect that the next step is to find one (or more) companies that can sell and support OSV based systems across the nation.
Have there been any moves in that direction?
plus-good, double-plus-good
All for the problem of "hanging chads" of mechanical punch card machines!
True, true - there was also the issue of the thousands of african-american voters being denied thier right to vote in FL because of being dropped from the rolls (or something) - I don't want to make that sound like it was a minor thing (it wasn't), but that was caused by something outside the polling place - electronic machines wouldn't fix that fiasco.
No, it was all about hanging chads - those little dots of card that are punched out by the machine to mark when a candidate is selected, they didn't get fully punched out (thus, they "hung" in the card), so no one could be certain whether those were supposed to be holes, or not to mark the choice. So - why did this happen?
Well, there are two possibilities: 1) The holes weren't punched cleanly because the hole punches were dull, or 2) The holes weren't punched cleanly because the trays the chads were supposed to fall into were full, and thus the chads couldn't fall out.
Now, we all know that in a lot (all?) of the situations in FL were caused by number 2, and I am sure situation number 1 could also occur. Other than that, though, the machines (in general) work, right? I mean, it wasn't until 2000 that there was this major of a problem, right? Such machines had been in use for decades prior, correct? So, why did this occur?
I can only think of a few reasons, but the greatest reason seems to be laziness (and perhaps money, to a lesser extent). First off, the people who are supposed to be doing their jobs, and emptying the trays, FAILED TO DO SO! Furthermore, it was laziness on the part of engineers of the machines for NOT PROVIDING A DEEP ENOUGH TRAY. A ten gallon bin (instead of a tray) could have easily accommodated all of the users of each machine, without becoming clogged. Lastly, if the hole punch/anvils are replaced with new ones prior to the vote (make them easily replaceable, so that the machines wouldn't need recertification each time they are changed), that would close that issue.
Let the rest of the states use whatever method they feel best with (machine, vv electronic, butterfly ballots, scantron, etc) - and get on with it.
We are talking a very simple "upgrade" to existing equipment. Oh - and "fire" those damn lazy bastards who didn't empty their assigned trays!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
People interested in computer voting systems should read the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project's reports.
that Dubya will win Ohio?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
And high-tech should be able to help an election
Keeping it low-tech has one advantage: a hand count is done by people who are in the presence of others. Automated vote-counting can be rigged by programmers and excused by businessmen. An excerpt from Bev Harris' book Black Box Voting details over 100 incidents where automated voting went wrong, and has an extensive list of sources. Read it!
curiouser and
It seems that people are too obsessed with getting election results quickly rather than looking to methods that are more secure but may take longer. I'd rather spend a few days tabulating votes than get results in an hour but be stuck with someone who didn't win the majority vote for the next four years.
Could be because it's late, but I didn't see anything on the website about the proposed system being verifiable (note: leaving the polling place with a reciept is not verification that the votes were tabulated correctly). I think many people miss this point - it's imperative to have OSS if we're to have e-voting, but what we want to get out of voting should guide our decision to use e-voting or not rather than compromising certain aspects of voting because we feel we need to make everything use computers.
That is not to say that there are not problems with paper ballots, but it seems that unverifiable computer vote tabulation merely lowers the barrier to vote fraud on a large scale.
Until they have a verifiable electronic voting system (something kinda like David Chaum's idea a while back but with a few changes), I'd rather have paper votes that are counted locally by any resident who wants to be a counter and under the observation of anyone that cares to observe the process.
If you remove large nodes of influence, you reduce the ability for fraudsters to rig an election.
Just because there isn't (proof of) ballot-stuffing doesn't mean our election system isn't broken.
Why can't I write in Knuth and Lessig?
I love the ballot choices, by the way--they're witty, especially the Libertarian presidential line. You have no idea what I'd give to have choices like these in real life--or maybe you do.