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WI Bill Would Require E-Voting Paper Trail, Source
AdamBLang writes "Three Wisconsin legislators announced today that they began circulating a memo for cosponsors to a bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper ballot. Additionally, the new bill includes a provision that the source code must be publicly accessible. After the November 2004 elections, there were numerous reports of problems with the new paperless touch voting screens. Problems include machines subtracting or adding votes, freezing up, shutting down and skipping past races."
First B@1tz
...voting for people that don't exist. I love how acts like this come about After 2 terms.
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin and up till now that's been Diebold.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
It's hard to overstate the importance of this--no matter what your stance on any of the multitude of wedge issues, you should be behind this. Only people who somehow expect to gain from rigged elections could rationally oppose it.
So let's keep a list of who objects, shall we?
--MarkusQ
Certainly corruption and misreporting on a massive scale can be avoided entirely by "backing up" an electronic process with a paper trail - because paper based voting systems are infallible!
Just ask anyone from Florida.
Quick question: Why isn't this already a national requirement? What reasonable explanation is there for such a glaring lack of security in the most fundamental of governmental institutions?
Even though this particular story is local to the Wisconsin statehouse, it will be interesting to see what actual language ends up in their bill. If done well this could make an excellent template for us to push out to our own state and federal legislators. We've gotta start somewhere with a serious effort to regulate this into openness.
Not that I am overly paranoid, but I fail to see how this will change anything.
Even with paper ballots being printed, how are we to know that our vote gets tallied on the right column? What is to stop the program from printing one result while tabulating another?
Furthermore, even if source code is publicly available, what guarantees are there that the publicly available code is the actual code running on the balloting machine?
I would personally have more confidence in the system if completely separate systems are responsible for creating a ballot and for counting the ballot with the only link between the two machines being a printed ballot which is verified by the voter prior to entering it into the counting machine. Although, even then there are no guarantees that it will be counted correctly.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
There is a link on the EFF page so you can send a canned or customized letter of support for this bill to your Senators and representative.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Too bad Andy Stephenson wasn't around for this...
"Voter verified paper ballot" was his mantra to the end.
RIP
Is anybody really that paperless? Would the go to a paperless bank for example?
--MarkusQ
I'm not by any means an expert programmer, but I can make a program that counts based on a users selections, and I see no possible way for an error to be made.
if(optKerry)
kerryVote=kerryVote + 1;
else if(optBush)
bushVote=bushVote + 1;
else
msgBox("You stupid moron. Please choose one or the other before voting");
None of this leaves any room for votes to disappear, or more than one vote to be tallied per person. Am I missing something here? Is there any reason it should be more complex than this?
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Sometimes our senators make me really proud to be from this state. This is one of those times. Screw Diebold. Screw proprietary software. This is a democracy. We need voting machine code that is for the people, and BY the people. No exceptions.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
and paper ballots have been at the forefront of fraud for ages.
After we ensure that the vote cast is recorded as intended we also need to move on to the most important issue.
Ensuring the person casting the vote is who they say they are and that they are entitled to cast the vote.
I won't be satisfied until we use picture id and get receipts for our votes. If we are to eliminate fraud lets not do it half assed.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
In this time of automated exploration of the solar system, robotic probes wandering around on Mars, computer systems decoding the human genome and whatnot, we find that addition in a simple tally of votes is just too damned hard to get right.
Am I being cynical?
Why is it that the American people sit idly by and allow the gutting of America? This Diebold voting scam was about the most obvious and malicious corruption (or coup) of the democratic process in the history of the world. But nobody even bothered to pay attention.
What the hell is wrong with all of us? We should be marching on Washington with pitchforks, torches and hangman nooses!! I'm serious!!
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
a bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper ballot.
Good, they should. If atm machines can print a receipt so should e-voting machines. I seem to recall some years back about how Deibolt, one of the companies that makes them, said having these machines print receipts wasn't practical. Funny because Deibolt also makes atms.
Falcon
Help support Black Box Voting, they guard your right to have your vote counted.Should there be a Law?
I first became interested in the paper trail issiue after seeing a poting here early in 2001, and began bugging Rep. Pocan shortly thereafter.
Got the Attention of the State Elections Board in Jan 2003, resulting in decertification of prior machines that April.
Pocan had a paper trail bill a little over a year ago which passed the Assembly unanimously, but was not acted upon in the Senate before they closed shop for the year. Pocan at the time told me adding an open source code clause was too late, buy promised to include my language in re-introducing the bill this year.
See my March 18, 2004 post
The Elections Board is currently examining equipment to be purchased 1 for each polling place, for handicapped voters. The systems they examined last week provide paper trails, but are closed source code. Elections Board notice to County Clerks (Word.doc)
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
In order to ensure that the votes are counted correctly, the receipt for your vote should include the total number of votes, including yours, that each candidate has received, including the ones you didn't vote for. This way, if people want to, they can check against the people who voted before them that the tallies reflect the correct vote. The voting could still be anonymous, as all one would need to know is the number of votes that the previous persons receipt reflects, and judge it against their own.
This too, will end.
There were marches. There was outraged protest. And the only reason I know is that I was there. If you watched the news that day all you heard about was the bread (or was it circus day?) that was deemed newsworthy by our *ahem* free and independent news corporations.
Which leads to the question: If a democracy falls in the forest and there's nobody willing to report it--where'd all the bean dip go--dang, I forgot my question. Who's got the remote?
--MarkusQ
Whenever I hear this little strawman it's from somebody contesting the results. We heard it in Florida in 2000, we heard it just recently in Washington when that crybaby Rossi tried to get the third recount tossed because of alleged voter fraud. You don't get to pick and choose of the results after the election is done. X number of supposed fraud votes does not come off the number of the winners votes. If you suspect fraud stop that vote from going in. If it's in your S.O.L. And if I hear from somebody in person mouth that crap I am gonna take some of their teeth. A hidden vote is a hidden vote. Don't like it, then you don't like the USA and you should get the hell out.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
the more immediate pure electronic vote can go forward with the machine, but the voters could verify their vote on the paper,then drop them in another tally box if they look good, then those paper votes get manually counted elsewhere and compared against the electronic result within a few days.
That's one way to do it. Of course I am in favor of no e-voting at all. I've voted for decades, and it's only the last three I have been required to be dieboldized. My vote has disappeared, you can't see it, it's gone, poofed away to some closed source machine only used by a few people with an agenda. We have no vote now, we have an illusion of a vote, we traded magic beans voodoo "new shiny" voting for anything resembling a vote. Paper pencil and wooden box are quite sufficient. worked for centuries. I like tech, but I like simple too. The only *need* for diebold is to hack elections, that's it. all the stuff that has leaked out about diebold screams "hacked elections on mass scales for fun and profit". Obvious as all get out. I don't think it was a coincidence that the first state wide all e-voting (georgia) also resulted in major poll busting differences in the vote, all *conveniently* in favor of the party currently enjoying power. Now I am not a D,nor an R, none of my guys every hardly gets elected, but... but this was fairly easy to see happen. It just sucks. pre and post polling for years was always pretty accurate,not perfect, but usually nailed it well. Then all of a sudden these polls "failed" the same time we started using diebold machines.
uh huh
I just don't believe in coincidences with power politics, not with the stakes as high as controlling large states and the federal government. It is beyond even putting a numerical value in dollars to estimate what control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government are 'worth", and if that continues for some time, then control of the judiciary, then that's it, you got it wrapped up. Only two parties is dismal enough, but just one party would be a disaster, and with the vote controlled, it would stay a disaster.
One interesting thought, though. It makes sense that the paper ballots will be machine readable. So, who writes the software that reads the paper ballots during the recounts?
Sigh... I hope this gets passed and enacted upon before the 2006 elections. This was introduced by my state representative - that's cool.
R
1. 2.
That said, I do suspect that the current US voting methods do not meet the requirements set out for an open and fair election by both the UN and the US when they go about observing elections. Invited UN inspectors were actually denied access during the 2004 election. Perhaps the US should take Castro up on his offer to oversee the elections if the UN isn't good enough.
In the 2000 and 2004 elections some people claim that there is no evidence of voting fraud or errors on a large scale in the current machines. However, on the other hand, there is no way to provide evidence to the contrary either. i.e. there is not way to prove the votes are valid and/or authentic. And, regardless of whether there was or not, the fact that the authenticity of large numbers of votes cannot be proved or disproved is a terrible and ridiculous situation for any country to find itself in.
Until such time as voting machines can be proven to provide an audit trail (whether paper or not) with 100% certainty as to both the authenticity and accuracy of the votes, the machines should be disallowed. The current ones used for both voting and tallying votes clearly lack the ability for authenticating either the veracity and origin of the votes and tallies, and should be banned and replaced with other methods until then.
Since we're talking lots of paper if the insistence is on a paper trail, why not just go for plain old hand counts. Canada, though smaller than the US, can do it. Either way, get rid of the defective machines and punish their vendors. We can probably never get to the bottom of what really happened in the 2000 and 2004 elections, but we can take proactive steps NOW to ensure that such problems cannot and do not occur again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Check out the results of this this search.
They want to eliminate limits on tenure.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Agreed, but I kind of felt that "a plurality of the local democracies comprising a federated republic" was a little heavy for the allusion I was aiming for.
--MarkusQ
In my township we already have a highly reliable, open-source voting mschine that provides a complete paper trail. It consists of a 100 year old tin and wood box that we place our paper ballots in.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The issue is that nothing is being done to prevent the fraud NOW. Every possibly means of avoiding identification and eligibility to vote is the norm. Look how many times in the news we see people opposing reform? Right now the big issue is electronic voting mainly because of the fact that Diebold's high muckety-mucks visibly support Bush and too many people want to make it appear Ohio was won by Bush only through Fraud.
Hell we still have the Voting Rights Act nearly 40 years after it was supposedly not needed. Its not being done to protect voters but instead to protect politicians by allowing for current methods of fraud to remain unimpeded. Vote fraud is very real and combining positive voter ID and a paper trail are both required, not one, BOTH.
Here in Georgia we had a major problem with voting fraud. The problem with current computer voting systems is that they could not trace the vote to who cast it. Normally I would be all for that type of privacy but this is a big avenue for fraud.
Now in Fulton county we got 45,907 new registrations to vote. When precinct cards were mailed nearly 3100 were undeliverable. Of those 3100 undeliverable 921 of them voted!
Now of 8100 plus registrations that were missing information on the form they mailed to each and only 55 responded!
Under the old paper ballot system with little to no voter verification there was a slight chance to correct fraundulent elections. The paperless solution we have no provides no means.
What happened in my Grandparents area of Ohio was that a few of them were bussed to multiple voting areas and told to vote in each. They were also told whom to vote for.
This isn't a crybaby ploy and attempts to dismiss the argument as such only contribute to the fraud, after all it is far easier to dismiss the person bringing the claim than to refute the claim.
Actually the Washington case is a good one for why picture Id and instant verification are needed. What was done in Washington is similar to what is done nationwide but usually only for smaller local elections - keep counting until you get the results you want. Extrapolating from my examples of attempted voter fraud in Georgia may explain how vote tallies can change so much. Found votes, lost votes, and miscounts are all part of dirty politics.
What you propose by ignoring the problem is that we keep the politics as usual. This of course walks right into the hands of the politicians in power. They don't want to lose their jobs and will therefor encourage anything which allows them and their cronies to protect those jobs.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I worked as a local election judge in November 2004. I saw hundreds upon hundreds of people show up at the polls, and I can't remember how many times we cleared the memory of those microship-implanted cards. All told, I think we did a pretty good job at making sure that people at least provided an ID before we let them vote. Could that checkpoint have been invalidated? Sure, but you'd have to do the following:
1) Change the computer printout of our list of names to allow voting at our facility.
2) Pose as someone else, and either hope or ensure the identity theft victim didn't show up first.
When all was said and done, we took each computer voting terminal and got a printout of votes for Bush/Kerry/other. We also had identification sheets of who was registered to vote. This sheet included their listed party affiliation. As a CYA measure, we compared the voting results with the list of people who voted and their party prefreence. The ratios in both cases leaned slightly towards Bush. Could that have been invalidated? Sure, but you'd have to tamper with the list of registered voters as well as the voting machines.
Now I'm still young (23) and don't really know how things worked back in the one-armed bandit days or with simple paper ballots. I'll agree that our voting machines aren't perfect. They're still subject to people in high places with an agenda. I'm convinced there always will be that possibility as long as Americans have the right to vote. At least now I don't have to worry about corrupt local election judges fixing the results to fit their personal prejudices.
A man, a plan, a canal: went overbudget and held back by red tape.
At work, almost every electronic machine we use leaves a paper trail. Our registers print a journal of every purchase we ring up, and mistake we correct, in addition to keeping track pay-at-pump purchases, and the verbosity can be changed. The Minnesota State Lottery Machine produces a paper report for every lottery ticket we cash out or cancel. We then just file those away.
And, (like mentioned below) the paper trail would be computer/human readable, which would make recounts much quicker, more reliable, and less expensive. "Go ahead, have another recount. The results will be in tomorrow." I don't think we can go wrong with this one. As much as it pains me to say this (as a Minnesotan), Go Cheese-heads, Go!
Rawr
Alternately, I believe that congressmen should get paid the average wage of the residents of their state. That would make the job pay well enough to live off of, but would avoid attracting those who just want the money. At the same, it would encourage raising the standard of living of those in their state (across the board), instead of just sucking them dry like parasites.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Wired has a running thing on the last page of every issue, Found: Artifacts from the Future. One of them is on this exact subject. It is here. I very much support both of these ideas. Open source makes sure no one's screwing with the machines intentionally and a hard copy makes sure people can't lie. Well not exactly, but it makes it harder.
No you misunderstood. The voter does not keep the paper, they put it in a ballot box. Keeping a proof of how you voted would allow vote buying (ie your boss insists you show you voted for his candidate or your are fired).
I think having the voter move the paper from the machine to the box would inspire more confidence that it really is their vote (the machine *may* be incinerating the enclosed paper you see and printing another...) However I can see problems with some scheme where many voters are somehow made to submit bogus receipts in place of their real ones, screwing up an election by invalidating many results due to mismatches between the paper and electronic votes. This may be why the "paper behind glass" schemes are being proposed.
How can anyone who opposes paper trails for votes, that don't compromise anonymity, possibly be taken seriously for even one second? How is it that these "accountable voting" laws are controversial at all?
--
make install -not war