Building Tools to Track Election Problems

grugnog writes "The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of tools to assist Election Protection Organizations and their members to record and react to election day incidents and irregularities. Volunteers are needed to both code the EIRS system (which is based on open source systems: AdvoKit, PHPSurveyor, MapServer, and geocoder.us) and to volunteer technical expertise to logic & accuracy testing of voting machines and poll watching through the Verified Voting Foundation."

Comments

Some independent observations...

[w3rzr0b0t5]

... would be welcomed. There's too much knee-jerk reaction against electronic voting. If we tackle this as a technical issue and try to eliminate some of the reactionary mistrust from the process, I think we can come up with a way to satisfy everybody of the efficacy of electronic voting.

I agree that there are some issues here, and perhaps you need a paper trail to begin with. In the future, there's not going to be a paper trail at all. But we need to get confidence in the process before that happens.

From what I see so far, the left is against this, and the right is for it. The left in this country is traditionally seen as doing the most ballot-box tampering (i.e. Mayor Daley, dead people voting, etc.), and the right is traditionally seen as doing the most voter intimidation (i.e. misinformation campaigns, pointing people to the wrong precincts, etc). What will an electronic voting system do to these stereotypes?

What remains to be seen is what safeguards can be put in place to guard against tampering and data loss. I'm curious to find out what sort of tamper-proof designs have been put in place, and are issues like battery-backup and power surges being dealt with as well?

Re:Some independent observations...

[Thing 1]

How about an open-source alternative to voting? It would obviously require quite a bit of funding, but here's the general idea:

1. A website where people can record the way they voted.

2. There needs to be a way to keep people from voting more than once; this is more difficult. We don't want to be able to keep track of the individual votes, merely who has already voted, and the Social Security Number "should be" a unique identifier for each citizen, but of course there are issues with using that for anything other than its intended purpose (reporting income). Then again, when you rent a truck from Budget they need your SSN even though they're not reporting any income for you, so it may not be as much of a hot potato. But there are other ways; perhaps the voter registration card has a unique number on it. This is the biggest "how?" in my idea.

3. The votes will be tabulated by district, and will then be compared to the "official" vote to better identify fraud.

4. Not everyone has a computer, so the count might be heavily weighted toward the tech side. This is where the funding comes in: we would want to set up "voting stations" so that anyone could walk in off the street and use our computers to cast their votes. These polling areas could be set up right next to the actual polling stations, with of course big signs saying "this is not the official polling location, go next door and vote then come here and record your vote anonymously" or something to that effect.

This would do one of two things: either the people would see that Diebold is honest and calculating fairly, or they would see that we need better accountability from the group that counts the votes. (Of course, people could attempt to "poison" the count by voting then recording a different vote in our location, but that's not really something we can do anything about since we cannot be inside the polling place.)

Re:Some independent observations...

[AuMatar]

No, you will ALWAYS need a paper trail. Period. If you don't have a paper trail and if that paper trail is not counted, then you have no way of making sure that the electronic vote is correct. You can make the software on the machines open source, you can put in all the encryption you want. It won't matter. The people interested in hacking it have access to the physical hardware.

If you have physical access to a machine, you win. There is no way to make a machine unhackable if you have physical access- with physical access you can change the software, and remove any encryption chips and whatnot. To ensure the vote is counted correctly, something the voter can verify needs to be printed out.

To make voting secure, there's only one way of doing it. The same way mainframes do it, the same way NASA does it- redundancy. You need multiple ways of counting the votes, to ensure that the ways match. Have an electronic system, and have it print out a paper receipt. Have the receipts OCRed for a second count. Have the receipts hand counted for a third. Have the 3 counts done by separate groups. If all 3 votes match within a reasonable error, we have a winner. If 2 match and the 3rd is off, the off count is rejected and the 2 matching counts are used. If all 3 are off, the election is invalid and must be redone. With a system like this, you need to break not 1 but two separate counting groups. This kind of redundancy is the only way you can make vote counting secure.

Re:Some independent observations...

[DLR]

I'm all for electronic voting, but there needs to be accountability built into the system. My vision is something like this:

Go into voting booth, key in votes, voting machine spits out two (or three, depending how redundant you want to be) identical bar coded pieces of cardstock or material of similar thickness, maybe plastic.

Leave the voting booth and go to the next station, insert one bar coded piece of card stock. This machine counts your vote and files your paper vote.

Go home or to public library.

VoteCreator(tm) is made by one company, it's hardware and software specs are available to the public down to the source or bit and component level.

VoteTabulator(tm) is made by another, completely unrelated, company, specs available as above. The bar code printed by the VoteCreator and read is an open specification for each election.

All computers at the public library will have a bar code reader and VoteTabulator (or open source equivelant) so you can check that your vote was recorded properly. Recounts must be performed by a "VoteTabulator" from a different company than the original.

I don't think the above system is flawless, but it introduces accountability and redundancy, something current electronic voting systems lack.

Re:Some independent observations...

[epcraig]

By what definition is Richard M Daley Jr. (or his late father) "left"? Is conservativism a purely Republican vice now, not allowed for Democrats? (Not allowed by whom?) Neither are all conservatives Republican nor nearly all to the left of Bush Democrats.

Unless all source code on any voting device is available for examining and compiling by any requesting voter, I think any voter is justified in mistrusting the enumeration of votes.

Unless the ballots are available for re-examination, there is no way of determining that the voters actually voted as reported.

The rumor that all votes are rigged can only be contradicted empirically, by keeping the electoral process in the open, not hidden away behind Intrellectual Property secrecy.

Re:Some independent observations...

[w3rzr0b0t5]

You're right about Daley. I should have phrased it in terms of Democrats and Republicans, rather than "left" and "right".

Re:Some independent observations...

[AvitarX]

We do somwthing a lot like that now, it's not as expensive or techy, but it works.

We call it exit polling.

Re:Some independent observations...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Voter Identification Numbers could be usefull here.

Does it really need much ?

[Crashmarik]

Electronic voting machines the print out a ballot that is human verifiable and machine readable should resolve about 95% of the problem. With this type of setup and random recounts of the ballots in a small portion of locations, A high level of confidence should be able to be achieved. You also gain the added advantage of not worrying about what goes on inside the voting machines as long as you can verify that they are all running identical versions, MD5 summing their roms should take care of that as well.

I have two tools

[Pan T. Hose]

I have two tools not to track but to solve the election problems:

1. pen
2. paper

Novel idea, isn't it?

Re:I have two tools

[drlake]

Umm, we tried that in this country. It doesn't prevent election problems, just shifts their nature.

help?

[gabe]

From what I understand they're already finished developing EIRS, they just need to test it now.

Volunteers

[Anonymous Coward]

My friend Chad and I will hang around to help!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

just use a ruler

[joss]

oh.. election problems.. sorry

Mod Parent offtopic

[Crashmarik]

Why In Hell hasn't the parent been modded offtopic ? It has nothing to do with election tracking. This is an important subject that doesn't deserve to be spamned. I don't care if you are conservative,liberal,other or whacko, A good election should be important to you.

We Already Have Tools In This Election

[Omega1045]

Developers: Building Tools to Track Election Problems

We Already Have Tools In This Election. The tools I refer to are the Republican and Democratic parties!

RE-ELECT GORE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush cheated.

Re:Election "tool" source code

[Anonymous Coward]

if(winner=="Republicans") {
for (years=1,years=4,years++) {
civil_liberties--;
outrageous_deficit++;
international_credibility--;
environmental_destruction++;
job_creation--;
}
}