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."
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Although I bet if it were possible, vote by TV would increase the quantity of votes, but I can imagine TV ads running through the day, with scantily clad women with 'press the red button to vote for bush, and see *her* bush!'
Seriously, getting people to vote for the right reasons.
IT is less of a concern, I would preffer people vote responsibly, than use funky technology.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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.
- Publicly accessable source - Whatever licening terms you use, the source code must be easily available to anyone and everyone who wants to read it.
- 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.
- Paper Trail - The voting machine must keep a human-readble printed record of every vote cast. This is the only meaningful way to do recounts. In case of a discrepancy, the paper record should act as the real ballot...the electronic vote is just a fancy method of counting.
One thing I am opposed to is a "voting receipt" that the voter gets to confirm that thier vote has been cast. While this sounds good in theory, it's too easy for powerful organization (unions, corportations, etc...) to sway elections by paying people for voting by having them turn in thier voting receipts after an election.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.
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.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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.
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.
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.
We'll formalize this later but in "rough draft" form, here's our recommendations:
1) Open source. Not necessarily GNU licensed, but the source code of all voting systems must be publicly available on the vendor's website plus at least one gov't website if not multiple - choices include the county elections department's websites, the Federal Election Commission, state SecState sites, etc. ALONG WITH the compiler and operating system makes and versions under which the code was compiled; that will allow us geeks to do our own compiles and generate our own hash results so that we can compare with "in the field" binaries. (I have to disagree with Dr. Dent on his point #2 in that I don't want to have to trust somebody else's hash numbers...I want to roll my own.)
2) Voter verifiable paper trails. The best such schemes are similar to the one Avante developed - your vote is printed on a paper strip "behind glass". You get to look at it, make sure it's OK and if you like it, hit "OK" on the touchscreen. A "robot snipper" clips off that piece of paper, it drops to the bottom of a sealed bucket and it's the official vote of record in case of recount. You don't use a take-up reel because then you can cross-ref the voter order with the vote order and figure out who voted for what. The voter cannot later prove who they voted for (it's not a "reciept") - that way "Guido" can't breaka you legga for voting "wrong" or pay you for voting "right". Oh, and the paper vote of record has an encrypted bar code strip to ID false "extra bits of paper", and minor mistakes in the dot-matrix print that are hard to spot but form their own second tamper-code.
3) This is the major piece that Bev Harris has contributed. Harris used to be a forensic accountant, meaning she dug into financial fraud for a living. In any accounting system, there are auditing procedures and steps at EVERY step of the way as cash is handled. Votes need to be handled the same way - there's documentation every time they change hands, there's a REAL audit trail, and similar steps that need to come from the CPA community. As one example: in a real audit trail, if data entry was done wrong and needs to come out, it isn't erased. It's MARKED (and datestamped) as "not valid" but it's still in there so you can see what happened. None of the current systems do this, with the possible exception of Avante (I'd have to take another look on that point.) Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S and Hart sure don't!
4) Mandate Read-Only-Memory storage of votes at the terminals! This is another thing Avante got right - and no, they ain't paying me or BBV.org a red cent. Their voting terminals burn the vote data to CD-ROM. Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia burn data to PCMCIA memory cards...which can be stuck in a laptop, encryption cracked and the data messed with as happened in Volusia County FL, Nov2000.
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This is PRELIMINARY and should be viewed as such, but it's a pretty good guide to where our heads are at. Blackboxvoting.org (not just a website, we're a non-profit public interest educational/research foundation) will be meeting to discuss a formal proposal ASAP.
Jim March
Member of the BBV.org board of directors (Bev Harris is our Executive Director)
I'm also a co-plaintiff (with Bev Harris) in the current lawsuit against Diebold in California which State Attorney General Bill Lockyer just joined.
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.
Drill baby drill - on Mars