Verified Voting

Joe from the EFF writes "Verified Voting has just gone live with a number of tools for all you data-hungry election nerds out there. Amongst the goods: an election guide for geeks, a voter's guide to electronic voting, the Verifier database of county-by-county election information and the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) which will be used on E-day by attorneys and observers in the field to collect data about election incidents called into the Election Protection Coalition's hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. The geek community is playing a particularly active role in this year's eleciton via VV's TechWatch program. However, we could still use the help of the slashdot community, and all you have to do is click: We need to test the resiliency of the Verifier database and the EIRS before the election.

Comments

Who hasn't voted yet?

[Jagasian]

I voted early last week. Why would you risk waiting until the last second to vote? Who knows what could go wrong. You could get sick, your car could break down, you could accidentally go to the wrong polling location, etc...

Funny thing is that on the second day of early voting, the polling location that I went to had a 30 minute wait!!! In 2000, on election day, there was no wait whatsoever! I think this year there is going to be a HUGE voter turnout. I am not sure who it is going to favor, but it is an interesting phenomenon.

Yeah.

[Staos]

As a Maryland resident, I've tried to do my part. I contacted my elected officials and warned them about Diebold. I sent another round of faxes and emails after we learned that Diebold planned to gouge us "out the yin-yang" if we wanted verified voting. Final results: a couple form letter replies amounting to diddly squat.

The most frustrating part is that my county already had perfectly good voting machines: paper-based scantron-type forms where you mark the appropriate rectangle and a simple scanner tabulates the results. Effective, verifiable, well-understood, and relatively inexpensive. In other words, the complete opposite of what the state just bought for us.

Re:Yeah.

[donnyspi]

I took plenty of Scantron tests in high school and college and there were frequently errors. Either the scanner didn't detect that a box was shaded or it thought two were shaded and marked the question wrong anyway.... arrrgh.

Mr Wizard is broken

[DunbarTheInept]

They had a nice wizard at www.verifiedvoting.org (one of the sites mentioned in the article) that would help tell you what voting technologies exist in your precinct, and what alternatives exist if you want a paper receipt of your vote. (In some places, absentee ballot by snail-mail is the only alternative to trusting Diebold, in other places there are more alternatives.) But, possibly because of the slashdot link, all the wizard tells me now is that it can't connect to the mySQL database.

Election "incidents"

[Capt'n Hector]

I'm no expert in polls, but isn't the best (only?) way to detect voting fraud is by statistical analysis? That is, compare paper ballots with electronic ones, and then those to exit polls. If those Diabolical... err Diebold voting machines differ from normal ballots by more than a few fractions of a percent, wouldn't that indicate some sort of foul play? Fire-alarm pulling, voter-registration-tear-upping aside, the worst threat to American democracy (heh, did I just say that) is a few lines of code in Diebold's server software, something like:

$record_vote_function() {
...
$i = rand(1,0, 0.000001);
if($i=1 && $vote="Kerry-Edwards") {
$vote="Bush-Cheney";
}
...
}

Secret Message..

[donnyspi]

Heh heh...

Go to Verified Voting site and at the top right click "Edit Preferences" Click OK without typing anything in...

Read the SeCrEt MeSsAgE!

Re:hold on a second.

[emc]

If you want to see traffic, get your site on Drudge... or god forbid... the AOL start page.

I was working for a company that had a customer get a co-branding deal with AOL. 2 weeks of being on the AOL start page... sustained over 400MB/Sec up from around 25MB/Sec sustained.

You could almost tell the second the link went up on AOLs page, and when it went down... the MRTG 24 Hour View of the switch port counter was a massive square wave.

Beautiful, but insane.

Kevin Shelley

[linuxwrangler]

I find it amusing that the quote on the front page is from Kevin Shelley (CA Secretary of State) who is up to his eyeballs in scandals including misappropriation of federal voting money on Democratic consultants, accepting checks in his Sacramento office (a crime in CA), receiving laundered campaign contributions, etc. For the curious, here's just a smattering of the articles about him:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ ch ronicle/archive/2004/09/30/MNG9U91ANA1.DTL
http:/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/09/30/BAGPE91B571.DTL
http:/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/07/EDGII94AG81.DTL
http:/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/08/BAG4M95J231.DTL
http:/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/11/MNGID9748P1.DTL
http:/ /www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/24/BAGML9F94221.DTL
http: //www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/10/27/BAGGE9FSN057.DTL

Seems like they could have picked someone better to quote.

(My preview is showing odd spaces in the URI - you may have to fix to view the articles)

Verification

[4of12]

I've noticed that technology exists already for anonymous verification of lottery tickets and gambling bets by the bearer. An optically read hash of the transaction is printed and saved by the issuer and can be verified at any network location.

It should be possible for some of the same technologies to be applied to voting. AFAICT, the big hangup is limiting the paper to official boxes and official terminals to discourage vote selling where a person could produce a ticket and collect $10, a bottle of whiskey, or whatever for voting a verifiable ticket.