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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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.