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Who's Blocking Verified E-Voting?
ClarkEvans writes "The NY Times has a great editorial today calling out the League of Women Voters for their counter-productive lobbying against verified voting. The article states that Diebold voting systems has given lots of dough to these opposition groups." There's an AP story about the issue as well.
It was on the Man Show on Comedy Central. Some of the women who came up to the booth were REALLY outraged too. It was hilarious. Only one of them (that made the edit) actually said "you're trying to end women's rights to vote?!?"
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
No, there isn't any kind of permanent audit trail that can be verified (at any time). That's the whole problem.
The problem with an elecronic-only voting system is that without a tangible piece of evidence that you voted for candidate A over candidate B, any audit trail could potentially be just as corrupt or inaccurate as the initial vote was.
By including a tangible confirmation mechanism that's not electronic (like a paper confirmation), then the system can still be audited "by hand".
It's the same reason that financial companies are still required by the SEC to keep paper records of a lot of their activities.
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
The nice thing with a paper ballot or vote record is that the voter can verify that their vote has been recorded correctly and we know how to secure those ballots to prevent tampering so that if there is a need for a recount it can be done.
GA is, you will recall, 100% Diebold voting machines. Which is why the loss of Max Cleland is suspecious. Leading in the immediate pre-election polls, but lost the electronic vote.
The Disability Lobby and Voting
I'm a software developer with close to 20
years of experience. I was pointed to your position paper on VVPT.
Please accept my comments on your position paper.
Electronic Voting Machines and Voter-Verified Paper Trails (VVPT)
League of Women Voters
http://www.lwv.org/join/electionshava_dre- vvpt.htm l
The League of Women Voters strongly supports full and equal
voting rights for all eligible Americans, including persons with disabilities. The League also supports voter verification of ballots, including the requirement in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) whereby the voter verifies the ballot before it is cast and counted. However, the League does not support proposals for a new requirement for paper-based voter verification - the voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) system that would require Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines to provide an individual paper confirmation for each ballot for each voter to verify.
A VVPT requirement undermines voting access for people with disabilities or limited English proficiency, raises costs, fails to guarantee security, unnecessarily complicates the voting process, undermines federal certification standards, and slows the replacement of outdated voting machines.
To be clear, VVPT would require DRE equipment to print out a physical paper receipt that the voter could review and then stuff in the ballot box. These printed ballots would then be the official record of the election.
These printed ballots would:
- be printed out when the user has completed selecting all
of their choices via the DRE's touch screen interface
- would only print out the individuals selected, and thus
is very simple to understand and uncluttered
- would be printed in the language used by the DRM machine,
cross-language support on paper is quite easy
- be in large font for reading impaired and could be handed
to an election worker to read for those who are blind
- would have an encoded version of the votes via a bar-code to
make scanning in the votes for semi-automated recounts easy
- would be printed on card stock using your average laser
or inket printer; thermal paper does not last long enough
To be more concrete about this, and to make it absolutely clear what
we are discussing, there is an open source application [1] with an
on-line demo [2] that produces this sort of printed receipt [3]. Be
advised that the user interface for making the selections is not
important to this discussion, the only thing that is salient is the
final receipt printed.
[1] http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
[2] http://gyaku.pair.com/~vote/ballot2.html
[3] http://clarkevans.com/tmp/ballot-receipt.pdf
With this background, let me address your specific concerns. Before
you continue with this statements, I ask you to download the
referenced PDF file above and print this so that you can see exactly
what is being requested by the VVPT community.
* The voter-verified paper trail requirement undermines voting access. DREs make it possible, for the first time, for persons with visual disabilities or limited manual dexterity to cast secret and independent ballots.
The VVPT does not replace DREs. People would still use touch screens
to make their choices. The printed 'receipt' would be in the
individual's language and printed in a large enough font so that it is
absolutely clear.
Because DREs can be programmed in multiple languages, voters with limited English proficiency can participate fully and equally. The millions of Americans who face literacy challenges also can take advantage of the audio features of DREs to cast independent votes without embarrassment.
There is no reason why the printed receipt cannot print out results in
the voter's choice of language. During an official manual recount, it
wou
Not wanting to register to read the New York Times editorial, I searched on Google to see what I could find. I was surprised to find many news articles about how this is a real issue withing the League Of Women Voters. [google.com]
You're misuderstanding what the verifiedvoting people seem to advocate. They advocate a piece of paper that the voter verifies BEFORE putting it in the ballot box. The idea is that we have decades of experience securing paper ballots in ballot boxes, so if the voter can verify that their paper ballot is correct, they've verified that their vote is correct.
This is not the same as advocating a receipt that the voter takes home with them and later uses to verify their vote was counted correctly. As you correctly realized, this makes vote coersion possible, and was already realized to be a BAD IDEA. That doesn't keep some people from advocating it anyway.
a receipt which the voter can take out of the polling area opens many doors to new abuses
Agreed. It is important to understand that when we talk about a paper receipt we are talking about a piece of paper that the voter can look at and verify and then place it into a ballot box. In some systems, this ballot is behind glass and is never even touched by the voter.
Verifiable voting is not at odds with anonymous voting. Both are essential to ensure a free and fair election.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
This has been hashed over so many times guys.
The paper ballot is printed, the voter reads it, confirms it is correct. Then they turn it in.
Nobody goes home with the paperwork from voting. You go home with one of this "I voted" stickers.
The machine counts up the votes. In the event of an error or challenge to the electronic vote the paper ballots are then the authority. Since they are, in theory, verified by the voters themselves their authority really can't be questioned.
If a voter can't verify their own vote for some reason then some allowance will have to be made, agreed, but scrapping the *entire* verifiable voting system because of a minority case doesn't make sense.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
It ain't astroturfing. If you'd, y'know, read the article, you'd notice that local chapters of the LWV are up in arms about this, and there's a very real chance that this issue is gonig to cause a change in leadership.
This is a case of Diebold buying the president of a nonprofit, and the members becoming outraged that their views aren't represented. Luckily, they can change that, and that's just what they're doing now.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Smart chicks are hot.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
But getting a verifiable receipt that shows how you voted, and when its put in an old fashioned ballot box its priceless. You can then go back and do a manual recount of the paper and establish if the machine count was accurate or not.
As long as there are truly random recounts of at least a percentage of all votes cast you will most probably catch rigging or machine errors. I don't care how careful you are in making sure the machines are certified and locked, a paper trail is the only way to make them reliable.
I read an interesting observation the other day. It does appear the Bush administration has a life or death reason to make sure they win the next election, both the White House and the Congress.
It appears the Bush administration has, at the highest level, violated the Geneva conventions and U.S. law against torture, perhaps not against Al Qaeda since they are in a legal gray area but most certainly they tortured people in Iraq who were under Geneva protections.
It is extremely important to the Bush administration that they win the election so they can white wash the investigation. If someone truly independent did the investigation and found them guilty and it appears there is a pretty big paper trail and a lot of people involved, both in recently unveiled memos in which the DOJ and the Pentagon were engaged in a failed attempt to give a legal basis for torture and in revelations about Copper Green which suggest this program of torture was approved at the highest levels by Bush, Rumsfeld and his deputy Cambone.
Today it was revealed that dog handlers who were used in Iraq to scare prisoners were in fact doing so under orders from military intelligence officers which debunks the Bush administration's BS that the torture was just a bunch of rogue army reservists. If the investigation isn't a sham its nearly certain the torture will be traced to the Pentagon and the White House. It simply was a war crime to authorize to the Bush administration has a life or death reason to make sure they win the next election at all cost.
If you want to see the latest thing in torture look here.ts Its the U.S. military's Active Denial System developed by Raytheon scheduled to start trials this fall. Its a millimeter wave beam weapon designed for non lethal crowd "control". Volunteers at Raytheon subjected to it described it as "unbearably painful, saying they felt as though their bodies were on fire". It should put an end to any unauthorized demonstrations against the U.S. or any of its allies. Its not entirely clear what happens to your eyes if you take the beam in the face at close range, or if it will cause cancer long term. I'm wondering if they are working on an indoor version since it is a perfect tool for torture, it leaves no marks. The victim wouldn't even know what was happening to them. It appears I now have a good reason to where a tin foil hat, or really a full body suit like everyone keeps telling me I should when I propose the possibility that the Bush administration is, in fact, on a fast track to dictatorship.
@de_machina
I believe the LWV is well-intentioned, but a bit misguided in this matter. A few thousand folks pointing this out may help considerably. They may be contacted at:
1730 M Street NW, Suite 1000,
Washington, DC 20036-4508
Phone: 202-429-1965
Fax: 202-429-0854
They also have a feedback form at:
http://www.lwv.org/forms/contactus.cfm
Here is a copy of the note I sent them.
I recently learned of LWV's opposition to use paper audit trails in electronic voting. As a computer professional I can assure you that this is a grave mistake, which will result in elections where the true winner may never be known. The prolems are myriad, from buggy software to willful, and untraceable, manipulation of the results from people within the company running the election, local officials or skilled hackers from the outside. My specialty is "software quality assurance", which means I am a specialist in finding "bugs" in software. The very first axiom of software quality assurance is that all software containing over a few dozen lines of code contains bugs. Some are never encountered, others cause your computer to crash or corrupt its data. The most serious are those which leave computers wide open to intruders. Even the best software, written by highly skilled professionals contains serious bugs which may not be discovered for years, sometimes because it is discovered that someone is taking advantage of the problems for their own gain.
The most serious problem, I believe, is the possibility of an insider manipulating the results. If an election is entirely electronic insiders can and will make changes, despite any attempts to secure the systems through encryption, digital signatures and other technologies. Let me give you a quick example. A couple of years ago I worked at a company where people could purchase web services online. Customers were told that their transactions were secure because their connections were encrypted. Anyone in our company who had access to our main database had access to the full details of all of our customers credit cards, address, name, expiration date, phone number, etc. Definitely enough information to commit substantial fraud, if done carefully. The only barriers to this fraud were the honestly of my company's employees and the credit card companies fraud-detection systems.
Your concern for the rights of disabled citizens to vote in laudable. All I would ask is that each voting machine have a printer attached to it which would provide a backup copy of the votes for a recount. This could be easily done in time for the fall elections.
For the long term, we should look at standards for electronic voting machines, developed with input from the public and computer professionals. Such standards should include public review of the computer programs running within election machines, to ensure accuracy and security, as well as digital signatures at every stage of the vote-counting process, paper and electronic. This more extensive process could be completed in time for the 2008 elections, but the key is to have a paper audit trail for this fall, which will be counted along side the electronic results to produce a results the will can be counted on to be tallied correctly by the American public.
I love computers, but I do not believe that they are a panacea for the problems which we encountered in the 2000 elections. Please reconsider your position. There is no real conflict between having truly auditable elections and protecting the rights of the disabled.
Thank you very much.
The VerifiedVoting.org Web site explains the issue of mission-critical computers versus electronic voting machines. Basically, voting machines are not designed and built with the same care as mission-critical systems. Also, voting machines have to be able to resist deliberate tampering in addition to accidental crashes or failure. (Electronic vote tampering could come from inside individuals or those close to the voting systems, as opposed to an attack by someone outside.)
With respect to financial systems, security expert Bruce Schneier has talked about financial transactions versus electronic voting. There is a difference in securing the two because financial transactions have identifiers associated with them but votes have to be anonymous. With respect to electronic financial transactions, both parties know (or can find out) the identity of the other to resolve the issue if something does go wrong.
The ability for votes to be counted accurately and to represent the will of the voters comes close to affecting the existence of a democratic government and freedom for the people.