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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."
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
"publicly inspectible system with a tamper-proof paper trail." What do they mean publicly inspectible.. Does that include source? Renski
Yes, not a bad idea. Here in Ireland they've snuck in a full blown e-voting system, kicking off soon. The first anyone knew about it was when ads on TV started appearing declaring that "we're already doing it" comparing e-voting to turning on light switches and kettles. I've already published a few articles in both local and national newspapers here, speaking out strongly against the lack of an auditable paper trail, but there seems to be no stopping the beaurocratic wheels once they start spinning. Still, it'll be nice to have an alternative to hand once the funny numbers and scandals start rolling in.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
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.
Paper ballots are expensive, not tamper proof and subject to other forms of non tamper based fraud, like ballot stuffing.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
and is why it will not be adopted by the United states in any state.
sorry, but Even though most of the citizens of the USA (me being one of them) prize honest and fair elections, there is no way in hell that Diebold or any State will allow this to be used in elections.
The fact that it eliminates any chance of ballot stuffing or other hokey pokey that the Powers that be rely on has doomed it to death.
Yes I know, there are NO reported cases of ballot stuffing here int he states to back up my claims, but many MANY citizens feel the same as I do... we are all looking at the fiasco that is lforida and how it looked that the Bush Brothers made sure there was a win there that really hit home with many americans...
I would absolutely love a 100$ open system with verifications and audit trails voting system...
It's just a sad reality that the USA needs to be called the United Corperations of America...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well the software that is installed on the machine is signed off by scrutineers from all parties involved in that polling station (electorate). How do they sign it off, well there are a number of ways I can think of. For example, the electoral commission (or who whatever the organising authority is in your jusrisdiction) PGP signs the binary(s) and then publishes their public key and then each parties scrutineer does the same when the kiosk arrives at their station would be one way.
Really, if you really wanted to have the "secure" solution there is only one way, get everyone in a room and then shuffle about until the right candidate is elected right in front of your face. Paper ballots are just as easy to screw up.
What you have to realise is that there are two fundamentally different forms of election (and some systems of government use a hybrid of them both). The "representative" based election where a group of people nominate the candidate to represent them and the "proportional" election where the elected candidates are selected from a pool based on the proportion of total votes received by the party with which they are affiliated. In the case of "representative" elections, the overall result is decided by a very small number of electors since the vast majority of electors live in seats that are considered "safe". The proof of this is when a "landslide" result occurs. Basically when one looks at % of the vote, a landslide victory where there is a dominant party with a huge majority of seats, the actual vote % is much closer to 50-50 than the actual representation in government.
This is the reason why many advocate the "proportional" system. I dislike "proportional" voting in the primary legislative forum because I think that it is very important to have a connection with _my_ representative in the legislative house. People who think that the representative method discriminates against smaller parties fail to recognise that there are means by which you can devise elections that protect the vote for smaller parties, without disproportionately representing them in the house. Which leads to the absurd coalitions that you get in many continental European democracies. Methods like two preferential voting where one continues to eliminate the least successful candidate and reallocate their votes according to the preference of the electors until one candidate gets 51% of the vote.
However these methods are complex to count, an electronic system would actually reduce the risk of error and improve the accuracy and therefore reduce the stress on the scrutineers.
So, do presume that paper ballots are either secure, efficient or best.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Two points spring to mind:
(A man can dream, can't he?)
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
True, a bit more difficult to control is when the voter wants to be able to prove who they voted for.
Would a jaded population be driven to vote if they got paid $5?
The Belgian system is crooked, last time they used it, there were several mistakes, in so far as that they decided that for the coming elections a paper trail is not desired. Read about it here in dutch and french .
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)
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.
Alan Dechert, the founder of the Open Voting Consortium, has been working on this since late 2000. The result is a project that has tons of members, some very credible people on board, and has produced a working voting system that's being demonstrated publicly on April 1. (The theory is that April 1 is a slow news day, so something "weighty" like voting should get good coverage)
To quote from the web site's "about us" page:
The Open Voting Consortium has broad national and international participation. In addition, the following are our Directors so far.
Alan Dechert, President and CEO
Alan Dechert has been a software test engineer and application developer for the past 15 years. In 2001, with Dr. Henry Brady of UC Berkeley, he co-authored a voting modernization proposal for California. This proposal was designed as an in-depth study of the voting system, including development of reference open source voting software. In 2003, along with Dr. Douglas W. Jones (Univ of Iowa) and Dr. Arthur Keller (UC Santa Cruz), he founded the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). He currently serves as President and CEO of the OVC.
Arthur Keller, Vice President and COO/CFO
Arthur Keller is a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dr. Keller has taught computer science at Brooklyn College (CUNY), University of Texas (Austin), Helsinki University, University Blas Pascal (Cordoba, Argentina), as well as Stanford University. He is an expert in database systems and computer security. He is a successful entrepreneur having been involved with a number of startups. He also has experience with national media: For example, he was recently on the Lehrer News Hour talking about wireless security issues. Professor Keller serves as the OVC's Vice President, Chief of Operations and Chief Financial Officer.
Doug Jones, Vice President and CTO
Douglas W. Jones has been a Professor of computer science at the University of Iowa since 1980. He has gained considerable expertise in the area of voting technology having served on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems since 1994. He chaired the board from Fall 1999 to early 2003. This board, appointed by the Secretary of State, must examine and approve all voting machines before they can be offered for sale to county governments. His expertise in this area has put him in great demand since the election mess in 2000 - frequently quoted in the national media. Professor Jones serves as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Open Voting Consortium.
Amit Sahai
Amit Sahai is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He has a broad range of interests throughout theoretical computer science -- strongly interested in fundamental problems relating to security, as well as those relating to complexity theory, algorithms, learning theory, and the theory of error-correcting codes. Dr. Sahai has served on program committees for conferences in Europe as well as North America involving computer security issues. He is leading the security assessment group for the Open Voting Consortium.
Peter Maggs
Besides being a law professor (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and a member of the District of Columbia Bar with expertise in intellectual property law, Peter Maggs is a pioneer in computer interfaces for vision-impaired users. In the early 80s, he worked on speech interfaces for PCs and Apple Computers. He also oversaw the development of text to Braille software. He is helping the OVC to navigate the potential intellectual property minefields related to our open voting system development and deployment.
And the web site's "history" page:
History
The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) began with Alan Dechert's November 2000 idea for correcting the voting system. It has grown from a proposal to develop a pilot project in one county in California to a proposa for an in-depth nationwide study. Beyond that, the OVC
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Yes, just keep eating whatever the American media offers up for you to feed on.
If you believe that there's NO WAY that a candidate with inside ties can affect their outcome in close races, then you just keep thinking that, and just keep thinking that politicians would maybe be corrupt in other ways, yet draw the line at fixing votes because of their steadfast patriotism.
And how does your statement "The disputed system in Florida, for example, was designed by a Democrat-- one who fully supported VP Gore." prove that a system cannot be circumvented, flawed or corrupted? Just because he was a "Democrat" doesn't mean he wasn't an idiot, corrupt, or mislabeled by the media.
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