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...

[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.