NY Times Endorses Open-Source Election Software

jdauerbach writes "On its editorial page today, the New York Times called for election system reform, saying among other things that 'Congress should impose much more rigorous safeguards, including a requirement that all computer code be made public. It should require that all electronic machines produce a voter-verified paper trail.'"

Comments

Unfortunately, too late anyway

[targo]

The coming election is probably one of the most important ones in the last few decades, and nothing can really be done to save it from abuses any more.
And after the vote is over, the topic will probably disappear from public consciousness anyway.

Re:Some thoughts

[eln]

The fact of the matter is that, in large part because of the CEO's comments, Diebold systems will always be suspect, and any election that a Republican wins using Diebold systems will be looked upon with suspicion.

Since the controversial company seems to favor the side that controls the entire government at this point, they have no real motivation to change things. Meaningful election reform won't happen until we have a split government. That is, when one party controls the presidency and the other party controls at least one of the houses of Congress.

Hopefully, in 2004 we can either bring in a Democratic president, and/or give the Democrats control of the Senate. The overall impact of getting away from the one-party-controls-all system we have at the moment will be a move back toward the center, where all the good compromising gets done. As it is now, we have one party pushing the country clear over to their side, with no meaningful compromise going on. No matter what party is in control, that sort of thing is bad for the country.

Computer Code Be Made Public...

[datastalker]

...is not the same thing as Open Source. If you doubt me, Microsoft has made their code "public" with shared source. This doesn't mean that Joe Hacker will get a chance to look at it, just that someone outside the voting machine company will.

Granted, I'd prefer if it were truly open source, but I suspect that we're a bit of a ways away from GPL voting code.

Re:Nevada is ranked the best voter system

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a surprise? That state that houses the Nevada Gaming Commission would have the most stringent requirements for electronic voting machines?

Re:One more thing...

[dnoyeb]

There should be no lock in /wrt vote processing.

The only thing I could imagine being ok to sell with respect to voting, is facilitation. But the act of vote counting MUST be transparent. As a result the US government MUST OWN the code that counts the votes. This can never be proprietary.

They can buy communication and data storage and data security products from diebold to protect the voting data and its transmission. But the vote processing portion must always be open for complete public scrutiny.

Re:Some thoughts

[Jason Earl]

The only safe paper trail is one that can be checked by the individual voters. If you are going to tamper with the electronic record so that every third vote for foo goes to bar then it is a trivial matter to make sure that the paper that you spit out at the end of the day matches the fiddled vote tallies.

That's why the only sane way to do electronic voting is to use whatever fancy dan front end you want, I couldn't care less, but at the end of the voting session you spit out a human verifiable paper receipt that is the official vote. This vote gets put in the ballot box and if anyone questions the integrity of the vote then you open the ballot boxes and count the votes by hand. In most cases the electronic count of the vote will be the one used. However, in cases where fraud is suspected there is a verifiable paper trail that can be followed.

This gives the voter a chance to read his ballot and make sure that his or her vote was cast correctly, and it makes it much more difficult to "hack" the vote.

sometimes low tech is best

[myc]

I really don't understand the infatuation with high tech voting. For something as critical as voting in a democratic election, I think the engineer's mantra KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) applies. Use paper ballots with the name and picture of the candidate in large print. Above their name, have a big checkbox, and indicate "Check here to vote for candidate". Count the number of ballots issued at each polling station, count the number of ballots that go into the box, and and count the number of ballots that come out of the box. Sure, it will take longer, but how hard is it to screw that up? It could be argued that using a simple enough ballot, anyone who fucks their ballot up is not "disenfranchised", they just fucked up, and it would rightfully be their own fault.

Re:sometimes low tech is best

[MillionthMonkey]

A high-tech voting system that is properly designed and deployed should be easier to use and more secure then a paper solution.

I put bold tags around your enormous qualifying assumption, which you seem to gloss over as if it's a given. It is extremely difficult to create a properly designed high-tech voting system. The network of bluescreening touchscreens that lie in wait for many of us don't even come close.

Paper ballots have problems with hanging chads (if they're the punch-out type) or improper erasures (did he intend to erase "A" and vote vor "B", or did he vote for both of them?) or faint markings that may or may not have been intended to be votes.

Feh. These are sources of random error, which although undesirable, affects the outcome nowhere near as much as systematic error. In general systematic error has partisan effects, whereas random error in general does not- it mostly cancels itself out. 10000 votes affected by random error affect the election about as much as 200 votes affected by systematic error.

See this post and the reply to it for details. I don't want to keep repasting it in every thread. Maybe I'll start a journal.

And you're going to have errors when you start to count millions and millions of paper ballots by hand.

Like I said before, unless you hire outright partisans to count votes, these will be sources of random error.

Any candidate who lost by a narrow enough margin is going to demand a recount,

Good. I hope they do.

A recount for the Presidential election would have to be completed before January 2nd. Limited time means people rushing, which means more errors...

Not if your Daddy appointed a few Supreme Court justices. They can stop the recount and choose you as president before the outcome is even known.

These are not public tests!

[gad_zuki!]

> systems have been scrutinized, including at a source code level, by independent authorities

These machines are tested in secret and because of IP law and NDAs you will never know the results. The Australians have open source voting machines. Its not that hard to pull off, that is if you CARE about elections. Seems many in power see fraud as par for the course in the US.

So, please excuse me for not trusting my one lousy vote to the CEO of some company which is more secretive with its machines than a 16 year old girl with her diary. Pardon me for taking his partisan comments ("I will deliver Ohio for Bush") as just that: an inapropriate partisan comment.

No conspiracy theories needed. If you keep things secret, someone will find a way to abuse them.

>and that there is also a paper record

Err, people want paper tickets they can verify and put in a box for recounts. Attaching a printer to a voting machine at the end of the day is hardly a "paper trail."

Re: Paper Trails Should be Mandatory

[ClarkEvans]

What is "Despite the inherent liberal bias" for? This issue has nothing to do with liberal or conservative viewpoints, although I might add that I've yet to see a conservative news source spend any serious time on election issues.

Also, I'd hardly call the Times "liberal", it's been pro-Bush for most of the Bush's administration and during the Clinton adminstration it attacked the sitting president on a daily basis - on the front page. Perhaps you are referring to Dowd or Krugman? These arn't part of the NY Times Editoral board, they are OP-ED contributors, pushing one position or the other, in the same manner as William Safire (Nixon's Speech Writer) and David Brooks are there to push so-called conservative positions. The NY Times is far less "liberal" than you think -- perhaps if you stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh for a while you might realize that news papers should be free to explore all sorts of positions, popular or not. A "liberal" news source would be the American Prospect.

Annonominity

[ClarkEvans]

The most important aspect of a voting system is that how one voted remains anonymous. If it is possible for an employer, spouse, parent, or anyone else to have someone 'prove' that they voted red or blue, then organized coersion is likely.

Another important aspect is that the person's vote should not be "sellable". If this mechanism admits the possibility of a card to be sold, then it is a non-starter.

Politics shifting left

[cbr2702]

The democrats have completely alienated much of their base, and that is why the republicans have gotten so far ahead.

Look at the 2000 election. Look at current presidential polls. The country is pretty much evenly split.

Those of us on the right have been feeling the Republican party jump left for quite some time now.

The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are. The Democrats are traditionally the US's progressive party, trying to change things. The conservatives hold back the progressives so they don't adopt too many short sighted ideas while the progressives keep society adapting to new problems. So Democratic ideas get slowly adopted by the culture and the Democrats of 40 years ago are Republicans today.

Re:Politics shifting left

[demachina]

"and that is why the republicans have gotten so far ahead."

The Republicans have their power because talk radio, FoxNews, 9/11 and a general confluence of events have made it fashionable and trendy for Americans to be right wing fanatics again. The Republican's have also become VERY good at milking the politics of fear to build that coalition. Remember the rhetoric, keep the Republicans in office or you and your children will surely die. 9/11 is the best thing that ever happened to the Republican party, they know it and they are milking it to the hilt and will in perpetuity unless Americans wake up to the con.

"The Republicans are traditionally the US's conservative party, in favor of (generally) keeping things as they are."

Thats a ridiculous simplification of reality and is ancient history thanks to the likes of Tom Delay, George W. and a pack of really dangerous neocons (Wolfowitz, Perl, Feith, etc).

The Republicans are no longer even remotely conservative. True conservatives are in fact getting fed up with the new Republican party, they just dont have any place to go. They are also being replaced as the Republican base by evangelicals, rascist Southerners who bailed on the Democrats when LBJ pushed civil rights, rural Americans and Fox News watchers who amazingly just don't get how dangerous, corrupt and dishonest the Bush administration really is (and of course Kerry is so pathetic Bush does almost look good by comparison).

Real conservatives are aghast at the massive spending and deficits the new Republicans are running. They only fiscal policy they like are tax cuts for the rich but they want those to be paid for by slashing spending, not massive borrowing.

The so called Medicare "reform" act was a gigantic transfer of money from tax payers to the health care and drug mega corps. Real conservatives hate that.

Launching wars like the one in Iraq which have nothing to do with defending America, and engaging in nation building there, are also anathema to conservatives.

Its a reason why a number of conservative newspapers are either endorsing Kerry or endorsing Bush only very reluctantly because they see Kerry as worse. The conservative paper in Orlando is endorsing a Democrat for the first time in 40 years. The last time they did that was LBJ because Goldwater was an off the deep end right wing extremist just like Bush/Cheney.

But, the fact is on most key areas the Republicans and Democrats are becoming nearly indistinguishable. They are both owned by corporations and lobbyists which means they are the ones that really make most policy decisions and it doesn't really matter that much which party is in power.

The two parties have a stock set of issues that they use to divide the American people, abortion, gays, tax the rich or tax the poor, and con us in to thinking we have a choice. But, once you get past those inflammatory issues they are really both about taxing ordinary working people in to the ground, spreading pork to their friends and slowly stripping us of all of our civil liberties, which is again all anathema to true conservatives.

Easiest way I can think of.

[khasim]

That's why the only sane way to do electronic voting is to use whatever fancy dan front end you want, I couldn't care less, but at the end of the voting session you spit out a human verifiable paper receipt that is the official vote.

And the easiest way I can think of doing that is with a nice, old fashined punch card.

The voter chooses at the computer, the computer records the vote electronically, punches the card, and prints the names of the candidate chosen on it.

That way, the voter looks at the card, checks whether the person they've selected is printed on it and then drops it in the box.

Each machine can be verified by matching:
#1. The electronic count to
#2. The punch cards to
#3. A hand count

It's quick and easy to tally punch cards if that's request and if a hand vote is necessary, it's just as easy (but not as quick).

That way, any problems can quickly be tracked to the machine(s).