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."

Comments

Re:Paper trail

[persaud]

The most imporant aspect of the voting computer is that it generates paper?

Maybe we should have computers count paper instead of first counting votes and then generating paper.

A real improvement in accountability would be a computer system that audited the *humans* who audit the *process*.

Re:Who Gets the Profit?

[persaud]

Diebold is one animator away from being a cartoon villian. Gerrymandering is at least equally destructive to democracy. From America as a One Party State:

"... We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.

Those federal courts? They have a little something to do with copyright law (see other stories on Slashdot today).

Re:Questions...

[ignorant_newbie]

>I assume this has been thought of already,
>but I can't figure out how to prevent
>that kind of danger.

1. design the system to run from a cd ( knoppix ?).
2. have the bios checksum the cd during boot, display te result on the screen
3. the poll-workers verify that the check-sum is correct
4. profit!

Um.....

[MoneyT]

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?

Modest proposal: Run it on Diebold's hardware?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.