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

plain old paper-ballots

[PerlDudeXL]

I'm all for new techologies, but I don't trust electronic voting. I'm happy to live in a country where voting is done with a ballot made of paper and a pen to make a cross-mark.

You have a paper-record with valid or un-valid votes that are easy to count. No interpretation of punch-cards needed because the voting machine was too complicated or otherwise flawed.

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

[goon america]

Verifiable binaries - Election inspectors must be able to verify the binaries installed on the machine by generating an MD5 (or equivelent) hashcode and comparing it to the published source.

How can you be sure that function hasn't been tampered with? If the machine has it's own "self-check" program, if you were going to tamper with the box, wouldn't that be the first thing you'd fix? The only way to be sure is to have a computer engineer with hardware-level access manually check the thing out.

Electronic voting, while more "new fangled" is just not worth it. All of the "comprimises" -- we'll have a $4,000 box that just prints your ballot for you! That you could have done yourself with a $0.89 bic pen! -- just reveal how infeasible the whole idea always was. But, so long as the public is willing to make decisions based on the right cue word "Newer! Better! Gets tough! Thinks of the children! Now with 54% more Riboflavin!" they'll be no stopping this kind of nonsense.

Re:Whole debate missing the point

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

Totally agreed. Oregon's on a much better track- if we ever have electronic voting, it will be over an SSL connection, because we already have no polling places left. Yes, folks, all the voters of Oregon are on the equivalent of permanent absentee voting; ain't no such thing as a polling place in the entire state, and we get two weeks to vote (ballots start going out October 13th). In the comfort of our homes, as Bill Bradbury says. And guess what- no discernable problems as of yet except for a few hanging chads in Washington County where they hasn't switched to scantron forms yet (they have now- our last two elections were scantron based).