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Smooth Paper-Backed e-Voting In Nevada
LVRyan writes "The AP via Yahoo is reporting on Nevada's new touchscreen voting machines that also leave a full paper trail. They were used in Tuesday's primaries with few problems. I had a chance to use the machine myself, and was happy with the clear verification the paper trail provides for the voter and in the case of a recount. No hanging chads here!"
Because of gambling. Nevada's got so many video gaming machines/slot machines that they're rather adept at investigating and regulating such machinery as a state.
Or so I'd imagine.
Basically, the knowledge required to run & regulate the gambling industries electronics honestly would be useful for voting machines.
Paper trail verifiable instantly by the voter? I'm all for it!
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I can't see anything wrong with this system if a person can verify their own vote was cast for the candidate they wanted. Emachines always have the potential of fraud if someone who programs it biases towards a candidate. Not to say there isn't anything else wrong with the system. www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
I'd be most comfortable knowing that the machine doesn't actually count the vote - it produces a ballot which is clearly marked, easy to read and is, in turn, fed into a ballot box. This makes voting easy, the immediate user audit of the ballot easy, and a trusted recount of those clearly marked, paper ballots easy.
On the other hand, that's a good point - Nevada probably has the expertise ready at hand.
Why isn't this on the front page of Slashdot instead of that Michael Moore article?
That's why I'm a fan of Hannah Pingree, a Representative in the Maine State Legislature, and the sponsor of LD1759, "An Act To Ensure the Accurate Counting of Votes," now the law in Maine. The Act prohibits networking the voting machines, and requires that they print a paper ballot that the voter inspects and places in a ballot box. It originally required the machines' software to be open source, but that part got lost in the negotiations with the Maine state Attorney General. Still, it's a pretty nice piece of legislation.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
My definition would be roughly: "Any candidate can request a recount of the paper trail from any voting machines", which (assuming the candidates weren't forced to pay for the recount cost unless they requested a large fraction of machines to be recounted and didn't find any major discrepancies) would make it extremely hard to cheat the system.
... requires county registrars to randomly select a small percentage of machines -- from 1 percent to 3 percent of a county's total -- and compare printed records with the vote totals taken from computers' memory cartridges after polls close." That's just as good, as long as that "random selection" is made either by a provably tamperproof random number generator (hard to do right) or by each the candidates submitting random numbers to be XORed (easy to do right).
Their definition appears to be "Nevada's system
an optical scanner system. You get a paper ballot handed to you, take a pen or dark pencil, and darken in an oval. These ovals are far apart I would be difficult to accidently spoil your ballot.
You take your ballot and put it into an optical scanner that tabulates your ballot then and there. Any recount has a paper ballot clearly marked with your intent. Every election they randomly choose some precincts to count by hand to audit the machines. Its a good system.
Why couldn't we have something like that?
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
as I simply do not trust a fully electronic voting system; data is just too mallable.
Personally, I would like to see a system where both electronic and printed ballot votes are counted. It could then be used to verify that no manipulation or error is occurring.
I'm a resident of Nevada and have also used this voting program. I believe it will be the wave of the future. You can actually read the paper 'ballot' as it prints out your results and can double check them against your own choices. The ballot is behind protective glass and when you press "submit ballot" the vote is added electronically and the paper ballot is sucked into a steel ballot box like Augustus through the chocolate tube in Willy Wonka! I definitely recommend this system!
If it wasn't for those of us in the IAP pushing Sec. of State Dean Heller for this paper trail, it wouldn't have existed. Thanks to people like Janine Hansen, we've managed to make that trail to keep the elections more honest. Of course, Dean later came on the record trying to claim credit for it... but what can you expect from a guy who has managed to upset every county clerk in the state with his ineptitude? With all the mess here from ballot questions, we'll be lucky to be able to vote in November.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
"If we can't ever read it, we'll use the paper trail as the backup," said Nye County deputy clerk Laura Zubia, who helped recover the data shortly after midnight. "That's the whole point of the paper trail, isn't it?"
Of course the write-in ballots would have been particularly entertaining.
sulli
RTFJ.
From the article:
Computers should never be used to tabulate voting results in the first place. If the computer's reported results don't trip someone's suspicion, they can still be wholly wrong and hand victory to an unelected candidate (particularly in close races). Computers are wonderful for preparing a voter-verified paper ballot (for instance, there are significant advantages to using a computerized machine which grant blind and illiterate voters anonymous voting power). But any computer tabulation of votes can lead to what Bev Harris is demonstrating in the Diebold tabulator machines (she has pinned the story to the top of her website because it is so important). The equipment machine used by the voter can be done excellently, including running on free software. But if the votes are passed to an unaccountable system where recounts are meaningless, elections can easily be subverted. I understand that people want results quickly, and I know that quick returns is one of the promises of electronic voting. However, I prefer results that can be verified meaningfully and I'm willing to wait to get those results. Therefore, I think the best way to count ballots is to get rooms full of people at tables hand-counting ballots. In my opinion, a knowable error rate is better than a unknown error rate.
I'm on the committee to recommend voting machine equipment to the County Board in Champaign, IL. A number of us on the recommendation board get together once a month (more often if there are pressing issues before us including field trips to see various machines and ask questions of people in the field using the equipment) and discuss these issues with a goal of arriving at something we can stand behind and recommend.
Digital Citizen
Producing a paper-based VVAT is half the problem. The next step is, what data source is considered authoritative in the event of a recount or a detected problem? In other words, what happens when the paper trail disagrees with the electronic record?
Logically, the paper trail is the authoritative record. But this needs to be explicitly specified as such, otherwise vote administrators may choose to take the easy way out and perform an "electronic recount" -- in other words, simply recomputing the existing, bad, electronic voting record and calling that a recount.
This message from David Glaude of PourEva notes that this has already happened in Belgium:
Three hours after the close of the polls here in Vegas, we still had single-digit reporting of precincts. It wasn't until this morning (presumably while I slept) that the county clerk had 100% reporting. It makes me wonder if they made the machines out of pocket calculators. Even a 286 could tally that stuff faster.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Fianlly, someone did the right thing. Viva Las Vegas!