NIST Wants To Hear Your Ideas On Election Equipment

Joseph_Daniel_Zukige writes "I'm still trying to figure out who is doing what here. It looks like the typical bureaucratic mess, but it looks like NIST, operating under the Help America Vote Act has set up a Technical Guidelines Development Committee to advise the 'independent bipartisan' United States Election Assistance Commission. So, the TGDC is going to hold some public hearings, and they've invited members of the public to help them out: 'One hour will be reserved at the conclusion of each day for members of the public to provide up to five minutes of testimony.'" Read more below, including how to register (today is the deadline) for the meetings, which will take place in central Maryland later this month. Update: 09/15 18:04 GMT by T : Irvu writes "You can submit online comments to NIST's Technical Guidelines process. The link is here. Just click on the link marked 'Submit Comments or Position Statements.' Alternately you can e-mail your comments to vote@nist.gov."

Joseph_Daniel_Zukige continues "I can't make it. (Very long drive across a very deep ocean, or plane tickets I can't afford.) Twelve people per session is not going to allow a lot of people to testify. I'm sure Microsoft has someone going to sell a MSWxx based voting machine. I hope somebody from the EFF is going. Think it would be possible to pack this thing with enough Slashdot geeks to convince the government at least that electronic voting absolutely requires a human-readable ballot to be produced?" The meetings are taking place on the 20th through 22nd of this month; you have only until 5 p.m. today to register, though. From the linked PDF: "The meetings will be held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology North Campus, 820 West Diamond Avenue, Room 152, Gaithersburg, MD."

Comments

If technology is a key role in future

[tod_miller]

then yes, usability and human factor issues are paramount, if a colour of an alert box can sway the vote by a percent, then we need to be careful.

PAPER BALLOTS!

[leftie]

The only election equipment I want to see are the sheet of paper theballot is printed on and a pen.

Canada gets it's paper ballots counted extremely fast. They need to hire some election consulatants from Canada and find out how they process paper ballots so quickly, and follow their recommendations.

Re:PAPER BALLOTS!

[Jordy]

Actually, there is a easy compromise.

1. First, take a paper ballot that can be read by a DRE machine (similar to a scantron).
2. Next, build a electronic voting machine that has a nice menu system, comes in whatever languages you need, supports all those nice blind accessible features and allows people to preview their vote before commiting it.
3. Insert paper ballot into machine.
4. Have electronic voting machine print the vote onto the paper ballot. This can be as simple as using a LED printer or as fancy as using special paper that reacts to intense light or heat to make a mark.
5. After a person takes out their paper ballot, have them actually *look* at it to make sure there isn't anything evil going on.
6. Next, insert paper ballot into DRE machine for electronic count.
7. At the end of the day, take a random sample of the ballots and tally them by hand to make sure what the DRE machine says and what your hand tally says are close statistically.

This method has a lot of benefits. First, if your electronic voting printer machine breaks, people can still vote with pens. If your DRE machine breaks, people can still tally by hand. If you want to do a recount, you have paper ballots. The voter still has access to a nice paper ballot that they can check before they drop it off. Plus you get all the benefits of an electronic voting machine when it is working properly.

Its biggest drawback is that you need two machines instead of one. However, your voting machine has just been turned into a rather dumb printer with a screen and a DRE is nothing more than an optical recognition system that is nice old reliable technology that a lot of counties already have invested in.

Am I missing some reason why the current crop of electronic voting machines aren't as simple as this?

Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation

[ericspinder]

Yes a 'voting reciept' would be a bad idea; I don't believe that under any circumstance a voter would be allowed to leave the polling station with the paper. However a 'paper trail' is needed to hedge potential (eventual) problems with an electronic vote. The idea is usually to have them drop it back into a ballot box.

I think that this box should accept the ballot kinda like a vending machine accepts a dollar bill. This way both the touchscreen system and the ballot box will keep a tally, if the results are different then the poll workers will 'flag' those results and note the difference for that race. If a recount is done then what's in the hopper of the ballot box would be considered offical.

Recorded, voter-verifiable printout...

[StevenMaurer]

Really folks, this isn't so hard.

All you need to do is have the voter machine print the voter's response on a cash-register-type tape roll that is visible under glass (but not accessable - so as to prevent the kind of dirty tricks that Bejing is putting on Hong Kong's pro-democracy advocates). That way you have a hard, difficult to falsify record of every voter's preference.

The software to do this is almost immaterial, but the source code needs to be accessable to anyone for review.

Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation

[nine-times]

One thing I am opposed to is a "voting receipt" that the voter gets to confirm that thier vote has been cast.

Yes, I think a voting recipt that the voter leaves with is a silly idea. However, I would be in favor of some kind of window that lets the voter see the paper copy as it's printed out. I mean, what if someone tampered with the code in such a way that you could vote for candidate A, it would get counted for candidate B, and the printout said you voted for candidate B?

So, not only should there be a paper trail, but the voters should be able to visually confirm that the printout was correct.

Re:paper trail / receipt

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the paper ballots be destroyed? Isn't that a risk in all elections up until recently?

How is printing a paper ballot a risk to the secrecy of the vote, any moreso than it is now?

How is printing a receipt with a checksum of some random token (user-generated passphrase, some unique identifier of the user, etc.) + their vote choices, and allowing the user to keep that receipt a vulnerability? By "checksum" I mean a cryptographically secure hash like SHA1. Maybe you could reverse it with NSA hardware, but doing it for any reasonably large set of data would take billions of years.

Whole debate missing the point

[fiannaFailMan]

Excuse me, but has anyone actually stood up and listed the benefits of electronic voting? I have yet to see any tangible benefits. The only advantage I can think of is that the news networks get the result a little earlier. Potentially losing democratic control is a bit of a high price to pay for satisfying the impatience of.... whoever it is that wants to see the election results a few hours sooner. What's the ruch to see the results so soon anyway? It's more fun to sit there overnight watching the results come in as they are counted by hand. Hell, election night in the UK is great entertainment. I remember getting the beers in and holding an overnight vigil with my brothers, watching the 'safe' Tory seats drop one by one as tony Blair was swept to victory for the first time. Nice!

However, I digress.

Electronic voting does not encourage more people to vote, they still have to get off their backsides and go to a polling station regardless of whether they are greeted by a CRT or a pencil and paper. This idea that electronic voting is better for democracy is nothing but a myth.

Re:Whole debate missing the point

[fiannaFailMan]

It's a nice idea, but it brings its own problems. There was an experiment at the last local elections in the UK where some councils were elected exclusively by absentee ballot. There was anecdotal evidence that some people (mostly Indian/Pakistani women) were pressured by male family members in which way to vote. The advantage of a polling booth is the privacy of it.