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EFF Announces 2004 Pioneer Award Winners
Christopher Soghoian writes "In an announcement earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed the winners of the Thirteenth Annual Pioneer Awards.
Focusing on the area of electronic voting security and accountability, they have highlighted the work of Kim Alexander, the president of the California Voter Foundation, David Dill, a Stanford Professor and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, and Avi Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the highly publicized Diebold report of 2003."
Anyone who is really wants some great info on Dibold, and the many flaws with electronic voting should IMO check out the following sites...
.com site has a free PDF version of a great book called blakbox voting by Bev Harris PhD. (I'm shocked the EFF did not mention her.)
blackboxvoting.com, and blackboxvoting.org.
One of the sites is alwys up, one is often down because Dibold has been doing everything that it can to shut down the sites.
The
Note: this has been posted by r.future (a person who spends way to much time on the internet!)
The problem with this is that you get very large receipts since they have to be human readable.
The receipts are no larger than today's paper ballots, which have, for the most part, served the purpose in elections. I think we can handle generating paper receipts and storing them.
People don't have perspective on e-voting; they expect it to be perfectly secure and foolproof. The system will never be wholly secure. Just like an election of entirely paper ballots will never be wholly secure; there is always room to manipulate the results, no matter what system is used. We always have to have a level of trust in the integrity of the people (the little old ladies parent wrote about) and the machinery (both in its fairness and technical soundness).
The key to improving the integrity of e-voting is to have verifiable paper trails, and perform sampled audits of all electonically counted races. If the numbers match in every race, that constantly reaffirms both the integrity and technical soundness of the electronic process.
The worst thing for e-voting is to advocate UIDs and audit trails that allow votes to be tied to specific voters, even if you try to sell it as not being name-specific. People don't react well to the idea of having their votes monitored, and in the long run it will only hurt the cause of trustworthiness.
Further, all the secure electronic technology in the world is useless if you don't enforce the rules before voters ever reach their polling place. Florida in 2000 was a clear indicator that misapplication of official powers can swing the outcome of an election (cutting people off the eligible voter list because they are wrongly identified as felons, etc.). We haven't solved anything until we ensure that things like that don't happen.