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...

[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.

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.