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BlackBox Voting Tests California Diebold Machines
Doc Ruby writes "The California Secretary of State has invited Black Box Voting to hack away at some Diebold voting systems. The testing is set for Nov. 30, 2005. Evaluations conducted by Black Box Voting in San Joaquin, Marin, and Alameda counties (Calif.) reveal that a critical paper audit component is missing for all absentee and mail-in ballots, and also for recounts. (Black Box personnel were hired by the Libertarian Party to conduct inspections.)"
Recently, the state of Connecticut sent mailers to households inviting voters to demo electronic voting machines, and fill out a survey. I decided to attend the one held at a local branch of our state university. There were only three machines to try out. One was a Diebold machine.
On the two non-Diebold machines, I was allowed to vote a sample ballot as if the vote were real. The Diebold demonstrator, however, kept tight control over the Diebold machine, allowing only limited public interaction.
I did see something very interesting about the Diebold machine. Something I didn't like at all. The "proctor" explained that during a real voting session, the voter would get a smart card from election officials, insert it into the reader on the voting machine, vote, then turn back the card. The stated reason for the card was to prevent one person from voting multiple times while standing at the machine. However, the proctor was re-using the same card to restart the session as each new person stepped up. When I asked about this, the proctor claimed that during a real voting session, no-one would have access to a multi-use card. I asked her if that was a promise, but she didn't have an answer.
The big problem here is that paper ballots can still be tampered with - ballot box stuffing, throwing out opposing ballots, even changing ballots. It's possible.
Maybe if there was some sort of (excuse the buzz word here) biometric way of tracking a vote? Paper ballots with a thumbprint? Well... that does make the whole "secret ballot" thing problematic... and everyone's finger prints would then have to be on file to vote, which probably wouldn't fly either... most polling places don't even require a picture ID as far as I know.
Maybe we should drop the idea of a secret ballot? I'm not saying we should make it a matter of public record or anything, but allow votes to be tied to names specifically. Or is that already done?
Sorry, I'll admit I'm quite ignorant about voting procedures (don't mod me down for it - please correct my ignorance), but developing a truly functional and verifiable means of voting seems nearly impossible while votes records are secret.
I am disappointed that edjucated engineers are crying out for a paper trail on for voting machines. We can use an all computerized system that lets everybody count the votes, and is secured via asymmetric encryption. Two public lists are maintained by the government. One list contains registered public keys. This list is generated during voter registration, when a person submits their typical voter registration info along with their public key and an optional request to be anonymous. If a person is anonymous, then only their public key is added to the list, and otherwise their name is also added. When people vote, they use their own computer to cast a vote via the web, and their vote consists of a pair:
( public key, encrypt( private key, ( public key, votes ) ) )
Then anybody can have access to both lists. Anything that can be observed using a paper trail is now observable via a purely computerized system. Even better, since anybody has access to both lists, anybody can count the votes and anybody can audit the system.