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Open Voting at OSCON
fmclain writes "The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) which has already been mentioned
here
will be demonstrating its
open source voting system,
which includes a voter verifiable paper trail, at this year's OSCON in Portland. The
Mercury News
(free reg.) describes this as the touch-screen holy grail. Given Diebold's
troubles
in California this can't come too soon. The OVC
has already demonstrated a working system in Sacramento."
Of course, that is exactly what I said here as well. But that didn't fly to well with the slashdotters then either.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
For a second there I thought it said Open Voting at SCO.
Of course, the most important aspect of this system is that it creates a voter-verifiable paper trail and thus more accountability.
This is all implemented on a state level. Call your local representatives NOW. This is something you personally can get involved in. Chances are, particularly if you live in a backwater state like I do, that your state senators have never heard of open source. It's your responsibility to educate them.
If you wanna make sure your vote doesn't get hacked, get involved!
If it isn't a crony corporation of the government, can this even fly?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
but there are so many ways this can go wrong. I think that we should just stand in a big crowd and raise our hands.
Until pressing a button is as secure as writing (or punching) your vote on paper and dropping it in to a box, e-voting won't be mainstream. You can't hook up a wire to a box to change all the votes inside can you?
Is true democracy. (If you don't know what it is, inform yourself. I'm busy.) Perhaps with these machines we could vote with Condorcet's method.
I'm all for open source... love it.
And I don't trust Diebold anymore than the next guy.
But is open source really appropriate for this situation? Especially for a voting system that works on "very inexpensive PC hardware".
Wouldn't it be very easy for someone to patch the software in a bad way and recompile it before installation?
I assume this has been thought of already, but I can't figure out how to prevent that kind of danger.
Is at least as important as a paper trail. Since we already have systems that have a paper trail (i.e. paper ballots), computers could be better used to improve the accuracy and reliability of the voter registration process. This would reduce tampering by hostile insiders *and* outsiders.
I hope it isn't running Debian. I don't think Debian even has printer support yet, so a paper trail would be tough.
Traditional software companies hate open-source software because no one owns it or collects royalties for it.
sigh... They really don't get it. Unlike Windows XP, or Adobe Photoshop, voting software requires very limited runs, and typically needs to recover its cost on its first sale. There's no need to make revenue on a per copy basis. There is probably only going to be a single customer who will have precise demands. If it was closed source, the amount of work would be the same, and the amount and so that you could charge would be the same.
Companies really need to get over the idea that because code costs money to produce, it must have value. Sometimes it is the case. Often it isn't.
The Federal Election Commission has a FAQ About The National Voluntary Voting System Standards. The FAQ indicates that to meet the standards, an election system must satisfy either "FEC's voting system standards" or pass tests "by independent testing authorities (ITAs) designated by the National Association of State Election Directors."
The National Association of State Election Directors has, among other things:
(1) a List of NASED Certified Systems;
(2) an Updated List of NASED Certified Systems; and, most importantly,
(3) an Overview of the Certification Process.
Has the Open Voting Consortium made any attempt to get their software certified?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
It's too late (200 days left) to manufacture new voting machines for the 2004 election. We're probably stuck with the touchscreens peddled by Diebold, SIAC, Sequoia and ES&S, all of which have had severe field problems (some of which seem deliberate). But we've got enough time to install OSS voteware on these machines. And to test them as deterministic, reliable and accountable by paper trail.
Now you can help, in standard "Open Source Community" fashion. Email stories about this OSS voteware, and the serious problems with the proprietary voteware it replaces, to your local newspaper, TV station, and elected representatives. Keep your tone serious, professional, and no-nonsense about your intolerance of votefixing in the status quo. You have about 75 days left in which to be heard - after that, there's no time to do anything but whine. And soon after that, even whining will be out of the picture.
--
make install -not war
We at Diebold appreciate the efforts of those that have created OVC. We plan to release version 2.0 of our voting system next month, for a nominal upgrade fee. Diebold Electronic Voting System 2.0 will be based entirely on OVC.
Thanks again. Suckers!
If we have a voter verifiable paper trail, that means a vote can be traced back to the person. Wouldn't that sort of defeat the purpose of voting in private?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
One of the arguments against adopting this in some states is that they've already dumped a bunch of cash on proprietary systems, notably Diebold's.
But Diebods's system appears to be based on a hardware/OS platform that, at its core, is Wintel. No doubt the same is true for many, perhaps even all, of the others. (Even if they're not, Linux and the GNU toolset already has ports to many other processors/platforms, including essentially all commonly available current-generation processors.)
Perhaps it might be possible to port the Open Source voting software to the Diebold and/or other voting machines that have already been purchased?
The bulk of the machines you need are the ones in the booths. Plug an off-the-shelf printer into a Diebold and you're all set there. (No security issues on the printer itself, beyond making sure it's working.)
For the remainder, you only need one (plus maybe a spare) with a working OCR reader, sound card, and modem - for the blind readback and the uplink scan. Put that scanner on the exiting voting machine with the modem (as Diebold does on one of the machines for doing the final uplink to the state's database). Or put it on a cheap desktop, since the touchscreen is not necessary.
(Heck: Put the software for THAT machine on a bootable CD-ROM and you don't even need a special machine. Just borrow one from the school library for election day. Even if some BIOS-based malware managed to get activated and save the data, there's no confidentiality issues with what is on that machine. Any corruption of the data by malware would be detected in a manual recount, just like corruption in any other part of the total system.)
For future instalations you could go with generic touchscreen systems - or stick with the major vendors if their prices come down into the sanity range or if you want to pay a premium for ironclad hardware (like byers of "True Blue" PCs from IBM). The voting machine vendors could even make money as vendors of ruggedized commodity hardware if they don't have to maintain all that proprietary voting software.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This might be enough to make millions of geeks to leave their CRTs and LCDs, and go vote.... just to check out the new system :)
When it comes to something as critical to the welfare of the public and to our form of government as the assurance of fair elections, open source software should be encouraged vigorously.
Software does not become more secure by hiding the sourcecode, and election results are not made more secure by entrusting the results to a corporation. These facts, compounded by the rampant infiltration of corporate interests in the US government, and, at the same time, the vast amount of public scrutiny sure to be given an open source voting system like this one, make the choice IMO a no brainer.
True, you can't change paper votes by wire, but there are lots of traditional methods for interfering with paper votes:
A fair and free vote requires confidence in the mechanism, but also in the count, and the officials, and the register, and lots of other parts of the process.
In some countries, hacking electronic machines might be one of the harder ways to steal an election :-(
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
You are funny! Due to the high-security requirements of our customers, we at Diebold do not release the source code to any of your ^h^h^h^h our software. We appreciate your enquiry as well as your software.
"Given Diebold's troubles in California this can't come too soon."
This system isn't any better than Diebold's if you tell it to use the wrong ballot. That's what happened in CA because volunteers weren't properly trained. This isn't to say that Diebold systems don't have flaws, but using the CA election is a bad example.
This seems more usable than that Dibold thing. The added security of paper is very appealing. After all it was all this chad crud that started the mess. Should not the improved version be way to make an easy to scan and tabulate ballots in a way that cant be mis-cast so easily. This method is exactly what is needed, paper ballots and realtime electronic tabulation followed by a comparison check with an automatic counter. Now the real question is is this the system to do it.....
The new features...... Bush [ ] Kerry [ ] Random [ X ] Go with the flow [ ]
Article Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3 4424-2004Apr22.html
Pretty much, California's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel decided by a UNANIMOUS vote of 8 - 0 to block counties from using Diebold machines for the November elections.
I'm normally very cynical when it comes to politics, but it's nice to see my state get (somewhat) of a clue.
Or we could just go back to older methods, e.g. paper ballots. These may be harder to count, but they are absolutely reliable.
We do not have time to make the current machines have valid paper trails without sacrificing either security or anonymity, since their printers suck.
All electoral methods (indeed most forms of government) represent a tradeoff between different considerations.
For voting methods, criteria of "goodness" might include this list [wot I mostly nicked]:
- The voting system should always give a result
- If a voter improves the ranking of a particular option, that option should not be disadvantaged (monotonicity criterion)
- Removing a candidate should not change the winner of an election unless that candidate is the winner (independence of irrelevant alternatives)
- Every possible outcome should be achievable
- Non-dictatorship (i.e. more than one person's vote matters)
- The number of seats won by any party should be in proportion to votes cast (Proportionality)
- Simplicity of process, and accessibility to largest range of voters
- Speed of election and count
- Reduction of potential for dispute after the fact
In fact, Arrow's impossibility theorem has shown that the first 5 of these cannot be simultaneously met if there are more than . So pick one with disadvantages you can live with.See this interesting Wikipedia article for further discussion of these ideas...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Now all we need are people you care enough to vote!
I'm not sure if it's because of me (a /.er who's been doing a "Chicken Little" impression about electronic voting for a couple of years now) or because of Ben Cohen's (as in "Ben," the founder of Ben & Jerry's, tho' he's no longer working there) organization, True Majority, which has been sending her e-mails about e-voting, among other issues, but my mom has gotten into this issue. She lives in Maine and sent me an e-mail about an act recently passed in the Maine Legislature entitled An Act to Ensure the Accurate Counting of Votes. Note: navigation is a bit weird on the linked site-- if you go to the text of the Act, the whole text of the bill will not appear on a single page. You will have to use the arrows at the top and bottom of the pages to navigate around through the Act. You can also download a copy in M$ Word format.
Oh yeh-- there's an amendment. To see it, click on the "Amendments" link on the "Bill Text and Other Docs" page, or click here.
This is a sweet little piece of legislation. My favorite parts: it prohibits networking the voting machines, requires the voting machine software to be open source, and requires the voting machines to print paper ballots that are inspected by the voter and then placed into a ballot box. I am deeply impressed with this, and with the sponsor, Maine State Representative Hannah Pingree.
Here's a question: does anybody other than the OVC have a product that meets the criteria specified in the Act?
Responding to the parent post, I'll say that Maine can be considered a "backwater state," and its legislature has produced what appears to me to be a kick-ass piece of legislation on e-voting that explicitly requires open source software. Do big, rich, important states like California have such good legislation? I think not. Score one for the backwater states!
--Mark
PS: if you're near a Ben & Jerry's scoop shop, go there next Tuesday, April 27, and take advantage of Free Cone Day!!!
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
The EVM2003 Spec states: "The resolution of the touchscreen hardware will be exactly 1280x1024"
which makes sense if you look at their sample ballot in a 1024x768 window -- not pretty.
Anyone know the hardware specs on the Diebold kiosks?
How about using smart cards with a gpg or some other key pair system? this key would just be used for voting. once the voter swipes the card a server or servers then authenticate and sends the appropriate ballot based on that users precinct. Two keys, the voters key and say a judges key could be used to generate a third key to encrypt or sign the ballot. this key could then be stored for ballot verification purposes while preserving anonymity. I would rather have the ballot printed out encrypted. This would force them to scan it in using OCR and decrypt it using the key eliminating any possibility of skullduggery.
Perhaps it might be possible to port the Open Source voting software to the Diebold and/or other voting machines that have already been purchased? We could, but it wouldn't do any good because the Diebold machines don't have page printers. Running the code for paper ballots and then not printing the ballots would leave us up the creek, and a few cards short of a deck besides. *%-{]}}}
"A knot!" said Alice, ever ready to be useful. "Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
Till these topics die.
... when you get your first job. If you are a mandatory voter (literate person from 18 to 65) you have to go to Electoral Court and register to vote. In the process of registering, you receive the "Título de Eleitor" (voter id), in which you have the number of you voting section. To change jobs, and specially to get a government job, you have to prove you are a registered and regularized voter (you voted in the last election, or regularized your voting situation after it).
I live in Brasil. We have had voting machines in the last 12-14 years (yes, twelve to fourteen -- it depends the size of the city you are in). Brazilians here: the first election here in Belo Horizonte to use the machines were the mayoral (and city council, state representation, governor, house and senate) before FHC was elected (as I count it, 2 years + 8 years + 1 1/2 = 11,5 years). I know it, because I was "mesário" (election "table" official? election "clerk"? what is a good English translation?) in the previous election, and in the two subsequent elections). IIRC, there were electronic ballot boxes in Rio and Sao Paulo in the election before that (the only two cities larger than Belo Horizonte).
Our voting machines are mainly of three different (internally) models: (a) the old ones, that use VirtuOS (*) as the OS, (b) the new ones, that use WinCE as the OS, and (c) the newest and deprecated ones that have the second printer to print your vote, show it to you inside a clear acrilic case, and mix it with others inside the machine.
Externally, all of them look roughly the same: a box similar to the old "portable computers" of the eighties, with a 5-6" diagonal LCD and a big numerical keypad in the right side of the screen, that has, besides the 0-9 keys, "confirma" (ok), "erro" (cancel), and "branco" (white).
The electoral process (from the point of view of the voter) begins
In the election day, you scan the newspapers (or the Superior Electoral Court website), search for the address of your section, and go there. No, there is no transit vote, you can only vote at that address. If you can't get there, you'll have to "justify" your absence.
At the section, you will present your voter id to one the "mesários", and if you don't have it on you, you can still vote (you can show other valid id), but will be delayed. The mesário will search for your name in the vote-ticket sheet, and annex it to your id while you vote. You will sign a receipt in a sheet, and proceed to the voting "booth". Another "mesário" will type your voter id # in a remotely connected keypad, setting the machine in the "ready to vote" mode.
The voting "booth" is really only a desk with the voting machine over it, facing nobody else in the room, and sometimes with a cardboard "cover" around it. You will "dial" the numbers of the candidates, in order. when you dial all the digits of one candidate, a star-trek-like chime rings, his/her face will show up in the screen, and if you digited it right, you hit "ok". otherwise, you hit "cancel" and start over. After typing all the candidates, you hit "ok" one last time, the machine chimes again, and goes to "stand by" mode. You have voted. If you don't want to vote for nobody, you can hit "white" instead of the candidate ## (accounted as a "white vote", or "none of the above" -- this is the equivalent of putting your paper ballot in the box without marking anything), or if you really want to protest you can type 9999 or other non-existent-candidate-#, and your vote will be accounted as a "null vote", or "I'm really pissed of" (the equivalent of drawing pictures or writing "improper expletives" in a paper ballot)
Then, you get your id back, your ticket (keep it together with your voter id!!), and you go home. Ah, bars do not open (theoretically) in the election day, so hope you have bought your beer in the day before).
From the point of view of election officials, things are more complicated. The machines
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
We could [run the software on Diebold machines], but it wouldn't do any good because the Diebold machines don't have page printers.
But do they have a serial or parallel port, or any kind of expansion connector for a printer? Even internally?
I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers. If the interface for that is standard one might come up with a cheap adapter to bring out a cable for an off-the-shelf printer, suitable for use with your software. (Unlike the machine itself, the printer interface doesn't have to be bulletproof because the voter checks the result.)
Also, according to one of the stories I've seen on them, at least some of them have a modem, to upload data after polls close. If that's standard, rather than an extra cost option present on only a few of the machines, it might be used to feed a printer - or a plain-paper fax machine!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Diebold is trying to hide the code AND the vote, this system is open, isn't that what elections are all about?.... This system is open, and free, err, kinda like beer?
Has anyone ever considered that we can bipass the dangers of electronic voting entirely by using electronic voting machines only as a rough estimate? There is no reason why a complete and total hand count can not be required. Elections do not need instant results (only the Network News channels need "instant results" so that they have something to report). There is no reason why votes cannot be counted by hand with human supervision at each polling place, results combined and processed only after they have been hand verified. Sure, use OCR scanning or something similar to give an instant rough estimate, but don't ever use those totals for a definitive result. Democracy is too important to allow any black box to be involved.
This is neat and all, but IMHO what this country really needs is a new holiday, the first tuesday in November, so nobody has any excuse not to show up and vote.
;)
Granted, I probably won't vote for the president, but I may vote in my local congressional and state/local races, if I can get home from work in time.
Then again, what this country needs is a TON more holidays
Any American who truly believes that democracy is highly important to this country should be worried about the trend in voting systems. The ballot box is where the rubber hits the road in a democracy. It should almost be sacred in a democracy. It should be easy to understand it's operation, and it should be implemented completely without involvement from special interests.
I think it's almost ABSURD that a closed-source partisan company is building the ballot boxes. Even if there is no malicious intent, the system is totally open to malicious intent in the future.
This is not a technical issue, it's an idealogical one.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Wow, that's great. That's pretty much exactly what we're trying to get passed here in NM. Congratulations!
"I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers."
Supposedly they all have a printer inside them. This is because the HAVA law reuires that they print out a record of the votes. Strangely, they decided that it was sufficient to print a total when the polls close, and not a continuous record of votes cast, so there's no way to prove that the total printed is correct, and thus no value in printing it.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
That's fantastic.
Please, tell your mom, to let the League of Women Voters know just how important this issue is.
Their leadership is all head-in-the-sand about it ("there are many more problems with our electoral system, blah blah blah..." Sure, but... this one kinda takes the cake, no? Speaking as a woman... it's downright embarassing. (Just as bad, if not worse, than the objections of the blind and handicapped about the re-lost privacy. I mean, yeah, sure your vote remains private... but if it just isn't counted...! Sheesh.))
"I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers."
Supposedly they all have a printer inside them. This is because the HAVA law reuires that they print out a record of the votes. Strangely, they decided that it was sufficient to print a total when the polls close, and not a continuous record of votes cast, so there's no way to prove that the total printed is correct, and thus no value in printing it.
I just found Cringely's March 11 Column which also says that, and suggests replacing the locked cover with one with a slot and using that to print a reciept. Several other documents available on the web (such as Maryland's report on the system) mention this printer without describing it as clearly as Cringely does.
The printer in question is a "tape printer", printing on a roll of tape like that of a cash register reciept. (Likely it IS a cash register / ATM machine printer.) The roll, according to Cringely, is large enough to print reciepts for all the votes that might be cast on a single machine in a day of voting.
So (in advance of obtaining replacements with a slot for the locking cover) just unlock the cover and print voter reciepts on the tape, as an initial emergency measure for the next election. They'd be too floppy to machine-recount, but they'd be more than adequate for a hand recount.
There we have it: Yes, we COULD use the Diebold machines (or probably any other brands, since the printer is federally mandated) with the open source software and NO additional hardware (except eventually the cover-with-a-slot), obtaining the printed audit trail we want.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I haven't seen the Open Voting Consortium listed on the OSCON site but I do know the Australian open source system from Software Improvements is on the Security agenda and they are presenting a paper on Confidence in Elections System Software. And a correction - OVC has not demonstrated a working system. They have demonstrated a concept demo of something they want to build if they can get funding. The Australian system has been in actual use since 2001.
In Oregon, all recounts are required to be done by hand, as opposed to machine. Since you can't count electrons by hand then all voting machines have to produce a paper record. This I found out when listening to an interview of our Secretary of State the other night. Then again, here in Oregon, it would be rather hard to use computerized voting since we vote entirely by mail. Oregon has also gotten rid of all punchcard ballots. Our ballots now look more like standardized tests where we fill in the bubble next to the canididate we want to vote for. I really don't see why anyone would want or need to use computerized voting at all.
Yes, you can mess with the paper ballots, but that would leave you with one count in the computer, and an entirely different count in the ballot box, which would raise a huge red flag and initiate a big investigtion. People who like to stuff ballot boxes don't usually like to see things like that happen -- It makes exposure and identification that much more likely.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Fireproof does not mean it can't burn. But making something from explosives makes the problem worse. Its fine if there is no fire...but if there is always smokers hanging around and few ash trays...
Computers in elections are the same thing. They make the problem much larger should anything happen. Stuff DOES happen.
I don't care if you open source and use military grade security. If its a computer and a party has billions of dollars of power on their side, like we have at stake in every national election in the USA...(both "sides") even if the system is not compromised in a few terms, it will be at some point by people within the party.
And this is assuming you could even securely install the systems in the first place.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I just have to ask, what's the point? At what point are we deploying computers just for the sake of deploying more computers? How do these votes get counted? The same old-fashioned way?
Computers are good at counting, and even storing massive records of votes. This is something they are good at, and in trying to avoid the system getting corrupted, we've now removed from the proposal anything and everything for which the computer is needed/wanted, and we're left with nothing but a glorified voting card.
Save my tax-paying money, I'll just check a box with a #2 pencil. If our system is so fucked up that we can't deploy networked machines to tally our votes in a fashion that's at least as secure as our existing voting system, we've got bigger problems to worry about.
Like what I said? You might like my music
If you do that, can I sell erasers to the government for hundreds of dollars a pop?
Not a bad idea, but don't underestimate the cost to make the changes. Just because its free software doesn't mean it's cheap to install. I work for a government department, and on large projects the cost of the hardware being installed is often less than the cost of the guys who go out and install it. You can't ignore what it would cost to have guys reconfigure every voting station, especially since you would want to make sure those guys are reliable to avoid uncertainty of tampering.
The point is that there must be a "paper trail" to permit recounts, or you'll get situations like Florida 2000, where Al Gore's vote total went DOWN by just over 16,000 when the votes from Volusia County were added, and there's no way to do a recount because there's no paper trail in the Diebold machines used in Volusia County.
Separate scanning machines could be used to read the paper ballots and count the votes, and I wouldn't have a problem with it, as long as the paper ballots are available for recount, and as long as there's a random testing program built in-- in 1% or a couple of percent of districts chosen at random at the last moment, a parallel manual count is done and the results compared to the electronic count. If there's a difference of more than some small pre-defined percentage, or if the root mean square percent difference is larger than the percent difference between the top two candidates, all the ballots for that race are then hand-counted, with the counting done with representatives of the top vote-getting candidates' parties or campaigns observing.
All of this is to avoid somebody (a voting company, supporters of a candidate, or people wanting to disrupt the democratic process for whatever reason) invisibly modifying the vote count and subverting the will of the voters. This is something very easy to do with insecure, inaccurate, and completely un-auditable machines like the ones Diebold makes.
Maine, with Hannah Pingree's really nice piece of legislation, and California, with Thursday's unanimous vote to block Diebold machines in a few California counties (with a vote on 10 more counties coming), have taken important steps to protect their voters' rights from potential tampering.
Given all the security concerns of a single machine like Diebold's or Sequoia's, and given the many additional security concerns of having them networked, and given the danger of easily-hidden fraud or even of inadvertent errors in counting machines, it's just too risky to use no-paper machines and network them "just because we can." It may be blasphemy to say this around here, but more technology is not necessarily always better. In this case, using more technology (e.g., Diebold memory sticks instead of paper ballots, networking machines, etc.) introduces more possibilities for votes to be counted incorrectly.
It's worth mentioning that a computer with a printer with a recently replaced toner or ink cartidge can produce a less-ambiguous ballot than a person with a pencil. That said, I'd be perfectly happy with using pencils to mark paper ballots, but Diebold, Sequoia, and politicians presumably salivating over the fraud opportunities have led the push for electronic voting machines. They use the problems from the 2000 presidential election as justification, but the fact is that electronic voting machines (that, as the parent post would have them do, record no paper trail and are subject to massive error and easy fraud) were part of the problem in Florida in 2000, not to mention in every other election where they've been used since.
A great (awful?) example is the 2002 election in the US state of Georgia, where all the polls-- media-sponsored polls, polls from independent pollsters, Republican and Democratic internal tracking polls, and even the exit polls on the day of the election-- said the Democrats would win the Georgia gubernatorial and Senate elections. Unauthorized patches were applied to the Diebold machines in Georgia after the machines had been certified by Georgia election officials, and by some "miracle," the Republicans won.
I want to be clear about one thing: I have cited an example where the Dem candidate had votes subtracted and one where two Repub candidates scored victories that even surprised their own pollsters and strategists, but I do not want to suggest that voting machine-based fraud is a Repub thing. In
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
What I've been saying for a while now is we need ...
Good summary. I like it so much, I've posted it to my blog.
-kgj
-kgj
They don't have a system to get certified yet - they have just built a prototype. If you went to the demo in San Jose or read the stories on them it becomes clear this is a proposal for a research project with the eventual goal of actually writing code for a system.
But OVC's EVM 2003 system uses Python... I guess if you don't get your candidates names perfectly aligned, the whole ballot gets thrown out!
If you want to get an idea why some mechanical/electronic system of voting takes place here in America, consider the history of the United States Census Bureau, and then compare the complexity of a typical ballot in the USA on a general election.
To sum up the history of the U.S. Census Bureau, they took almost 12 years to complete the 1880 Census, the last U.S. Census done entirely by hand. The census of the USA is required by the constitution to be completed every 10 years, so they (the Census Bureau) knew they were in deep trouble. In fact, it was a result of trying to tabulate all of the information in the census that the Hollerath punch cards were invented (they were the size of a U.S. Dollar Bill at the time). Some of the very first Univac computers were purchased by the Census Bureau simply to count the number of people in America. I know they were used in the 1960 Census, but (somebody more knowledgeble than I am needs to confirm this) I think they may have even been used in the early 1950's as well. Some of the earliest computing systems were designed around 1900 (yes the date is correct) to help with the tabulation.
While it is certainly interesting to be able to have the results available by midnight of the night the election is held, the real reason for mechanical/electronic voting is so the results can be in before January 20th (in the case of Congress and the U.S. President). I'm not kidding here either. The process of trying to count up all of the votes for as many as 40 different offices up for election, together with a pile of referendi, bond approvals, and sometimes simple "official" public opinion poll questions, it can be a huge mess for people trying to keep all of these individual "elections" (but the votes are all cast at the same time) seperated. Really, it is an amazing thing that it even gets done at all.
I'm using the Census to show that even full-time professional counters can be overwhelmed with data, and the fact that the mostly volunteer election judges (my wife earns a whole $50 per election for sitting there for 12 hours + polling place setup & takedown + training meetings... not even minimum wage in the US) even are able to keep up with everything thrown at them usually is a remarkable testament that sometimes people know they are serving for a greater good.
Going back to some of the experiences my wife had, there was a very simple municipal election with only two offices up for election and no other issues on the ballot, so the city decided to use strictly paper ballots. Our voting precinct has only about 1500 people, and that election had about a 25% turnout. It still took her almost 4 hours to count up all of the votes, and with three election judges independently counting the votes, they still couldn't come up with identical totals. They did a recount twice and gave up splitting the difference in the results because they were within three votes of each other. It didn't really inspire me that my vote counted that much.