Wisconsin Requires Open Source, Verifiable Voting

AdamBLang writes "Previously covered on Slashdot, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle today signed legislation that "will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source. Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used." Madison's Capital Times reports "the bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.""

Comments

KISS

[grub]

[T]he machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer? Being open source makes it tamper-resistent, not tamper-proof. Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place? Then any recount could be performed against the actual ballots cast, not as a spot check against computer (glitches|fraud).

Re:KISS

[McGiraf]

if there is a doubt you ask for a recount and count .... the paper ballots!

duh ..

Re:KISS

[hazem]

What I've always thought would be a good idea would be a computer to help generate the ballot, and then a separate computer to count those ballots.

This offers the advantages of multi-language ballots with brail, audio prompts, etc. And the resulting ballot is standardized so it can be read by both machine and human - and no "hanging chads".

The ballots can then be easily counted by another machine - and human validated as necessary.

The ballot-generating computer never needs to "count" - but it could do so as a spot check against the counting computer.

Re:KISS

[Dutchmaan]

We can only move in the right direction.. This is a positive step to be sure, and as flaws in this system reveal themselves we will take further steps toward refining the process of preserving intergrity in the voting system.

The perfect democracy is a goal and can never really be perfectly attained... but it serves as a compass to keep us going in the right direction.

Re:KISS

[SatanicPuppy]

I'm all about e-voting, but the way it's shaped up, I'm going to have to agree with you. Everybody fills it out with a #2 pencil, fill in the WHOLE bubble Grandma, then put your thumbprint in the corner, and stuff it in the nice locked box.

Even that probably isn't truly secure in our system. The joker who picks up the boxes will lob a couple in the lake on the way to get them counted.

Re:KISS

[grub]

"if". Being that leadership of government is being determined, I'd prefer the actual cast ballots be counted. Canada does it in a few hours with 1/10th the US population (and the public can view the count I believe)

Re:KISS

[joschm0]

In addition to the paper ballot or receipt, a listing of all votes cast in a precient should be available after the polls close for the voters to verify that their voters were recorded properly. Of course, the paper receipt would have a randomly generated ID number which the voter to use to look up and verify their recorded votes against.

Maybe eventually we'll have a fair election. The last two were complete farces.

Re:KISS

[cait56]

That's why you also need a write-only audit trail produced
before the voter leaves the booth. A second paper copy is
certainly one form of a write-only audit trail.

Keep in mind that paper-ballots were far from perfect.
Counters could and did vote for people who neglected
to fill in for some contests, and/or create extraneous
marks on the ballot to make it retroactively ambiguous.

A print-out with full candidate names is a lot harder
to alter than a pre-printed form with Xs inside of boxes.

Re:KISS

[kfg]

. . .put your thumbprint in the corner . . .

No.

KFG

Re:KISS

[Sheetrock]

I think so. When you talk paper ballots people think it's just paper and pencil/pen, but it would be possible to use a computer to fill the ballot while allowing visual verification by the voter (helpful to prevent filling out the ballot incorrectly or to provide accessibility features).

The advantage to computers is that if they aren't tampered with and are implemented properly, they should provide a more accurate count than manually processing the ballots. Nice in theory, anyway.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

OP called it tamper-resistant, not tamper-proof (asso many things will claim to be). What's the point you were making with your first sentance?

"If it leaves a paper trail, then it is roughly equivalent to a paper ballot."

Yes so why not use a paper ballot in the first place, rather than running around the indirect route?

"So here is my next question, are you stupid?"

Are you? Because I can't see much point in your post. It's brung little/nothing to the debate.

"Because I don't like stupid people. And they seem to proliferate here."

Yes they do. How about you help out and think before you post. Then at least if you have a point you can make it in a clear concise way.

Re:KISS

[blazer1024]

Voting systems are only as good as the people administering them. Even with the most super-secure systems, if you pay/kill off enough of the right people, it doesn't matter what the vote really was. Especially if you screw with random polling on television so it *looks* like the vote is going to head in the direction you want it to, as well... nobody's going to question the local news station's informal polls anyway.

If all that fails, just get plenty of dead people to vote. That what they do here in Albuquerque anyway.

Re:KISS

[edbosanquet]

then put your thumbprint in the corner,

Voting is supposted to anoymous. If I can be identified back to my ballot then I can be pursuaded to vote by a corrupt official.

Re:KISS

[ucblockhead]

The idea is that the printouts are saved just the way paper ballots would otherwise be saved, and if a recount is needed, you go back to that paper and thus any recound is performed against the actual ballots cast.

Re:KISS

[BushCheney08]

...fill in the WHOLE bubble Grandma, then put your thumbprint in the corner

Ahhh, let's hear it for our anonymous voting system...

Re:KISS

[Rude Turnip]

To elaborate on kfg's comment..."No. I'd rather not give my employer or corrupt union leader a way of tracing my ballot back to me. I appreciate my status of being employed and only wish to have my bones broken due to a skiing accident."

Re:KISS

[Joe U]

Check out what Oklahoma uses for a ballot.

Re:KISS

[HUADPE]

Agreed. One of the major tenets of democratic voting is the secret ballot. This is in and of itself a problem with electronic voting because the order of votes can be counted as well as the votes themselves. A determined individual can then match the order and time of votes to individuals as they signed in to the polling place. Non-secret ballots can allow for voter intimidation (will the new mayor fire people who voted against him?)

Re:KISS

[hackstraw]

Being open source makes it tamper-resistent, not tamper-proof.

Somebody, probably not me or you will compile the final code to be run on some computer that we don't know the details of anyway. That somebody may know how to alter the code, maybe not.

I know of no way that a computer recount could happen without a paper trail.

Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place?

I don't see how this is so difficult. Each voting place I've been to scratches off your name when you show up to vote off of a roster of registered voters, and there should be a total count of those registered which should equal the number of pieces of paper in the ballot box.

There can be simple large scantron type cards that are immediately sorted into something like X party, Y party and Z party, and maybe "other". These can be quickly gone though and if there was an X in the Y party box, something might be fishy. If the Z party box weighs more than the X party box which has more than Y, then Z won. It could counted if mass is that big of a controversy.

In this country, people have the right to anonymously vote for a particular candidate, but not to vote anonymously. It is known when you vote, and for good reason so that dead people don't go around voting over and over again or even live people.

What is so difficult with counting nominal data these days?

Re:KISS

[AKAImBatman]

Mod parent up:

100% Correct
100% American
100% Insightful

Remember that one of the key points in an election is anonymous ballots. The entire point is that someone can't hold a gun to your head (or hold your family hostage, blackmail you, or do millions of other nasty things) to force you to vote the way they want you to. The moment a ballot can be traced back to its owner is the day our entire system will collapse.

Re:KISS

[Joe U]

It would have helped if I actually pointed to a sample.

http://www.tulsacounty.org/documents/Dec13Sample.p df

Re:KISS

[smittyoneeach]

The entropy of the human soul is unavoidable, but Open Source can help minimize the damage.
Re your sig:
How can you quote Lemmy without any Motorhead attribution? (He said, realizing that he wasn't crediting Devo in his own).

Re:KISS

[oni]

Just off the top of my head, I would say:
Give the voter a receipt that consists of, 1) a long randomly generated ReceiptID, 2) a plaintext record of the vote (as in, "you voted for Kodos"), and 3) a cryptographic signature.

So in other words, I have a peice of paper that I get to take home with me and on that peice of paper is written:
------ Begin PHP Signed Text -----
ReceiptID 243524534523423454345234234
Voted For: Kodos
------ Begin PHP Signatre Block -----
(signature here)
------ End PHP Signatre Block -----
------ End PHP Signed Text -----

After the election, you can publish the ReceiptIDs and vote records on a website. Anyone who wants to verify the authenticity of the election can tally all the votes themselves. If I want to make sure that MY vote counted, I can look it up. If I see that they changed my vote, I can come forward with my reciept. I can't change my receipt because it's crytographically signed. Nobody can find out who I am because my reciept number has nothing at all to do with me, it's just a random unique number.

(why is it that this stuff always seems easy to us slashdotians? Why do corporations always make it so complicated and broken??)

Re:KISS

[jgc7]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer?
Audit the machines.

Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place?
No. It makes more sense to have a person input their vote on a computer and verify it on paper. Letting people fill out a ballot however they want and then having a computer try and interpret and count the votes doesn't make much sense. Think about the hanging and pregnant chads or butterfly ballots that confuse old people.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out what Oklahoma uses for a ballot.

I would, but I'm almost blind and I can't change the ballot's font size, and it won't read itself to me.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.

Dr. Spock? He's dead. I don't think he'll be coming up with new quotes.

Re:KISS

[cortana]

Like EVM2K3? :)

Re:KISS

[mooneyd]

That's exactly how it should be done. Use a touch screen to make your choices, it prints out a op-scannable ballot you can hold in your hand and verify. You then stick it in one of two slots: the scanner slot or the shredder slot. That action will either confirm or reject your vote inherantly. If you reject the ballot, you can go through it again on the touchscreen, otherwise you are done.

And the machines should be developed by national research labratory in a completely open and transparent way. The source code, design plans and manufacturing process would be completely auditable by the public. No corporate control of voting machines. No security through obscurity.

Re:KISS

[Chagrin]

Correct. The paper ballot is still modifiable or "lost" if need be (it's just more difficult). Since it travels with the same person that collects the electronic votes there's not a whole lot of safety here.

However, it's better than nothing.

Re:KISS

[hazem]

The problem with a receipt is that it can then be used to make sure you voted a certain way.

corrupt boss: Joe, have fun voting, and be sure to bring back your receipt so I can know how you voted and decide if I'm going to fire you. Oh yeah, and if you don't have a receipt, I'll fire you.

Re:KISS

[alienw]

This is a horrible idea, because it makes your vote public. This means you could buy votes -- ask people to show them the receipt with the unique ID and verify which way they voted. We have a secret ballot system for a very good reason.

Re:KISS

[sam1am]

As has been mentioned elsewhere; this is a bad idea, because you could be "persuaded" to share your receipt number with someone else, who could use it to verify you voted a certain way.

Guy sets up booth taking receipts that prove a vote for candidate A, you get $10.

Or more insidious, your boss tells you you need to vote for candidate A. In order to obtain your next paycheck, you must show your receipt that you voted for candidate A.

Once you leave the polling place, you should not be able to verify your vote to yourself or anyone else.

(Now, if you took that receipt and dropped it in the ballot box on the way out of the polling place, that's another story)

Re:KISS

[Rich0]

The problem with this is that your boss can ask to see your receipt to make sure you voted for the right guy. Failure to produce a valid receipt leads to your eventual firing for whatever excuse is necessary...

Re:KISS

[skiflyer]

What is so difficult with counting nominal data these days?

It's not difficult to count nominal data these days, it's difficult to verify (to yourself and outsiders) that no one along the way has been able to modify the count. In the paper ballot days, a simple recount is what was offered, this addresses mistakes, and malicious counters who lie about what they tallied. But it doesn't help with ballot stuffing or tossing the box into the river... so then you could have the ballots inspected, and a committee would check for comparisons between vote totals and vote sign ins, and so and so forth.

One of the major difficulties with electronic tabulation is that if you keep it super simple, there's no great way to go back and verify. Everything is at the word of the computer.

As far as your scantron solution, that's great for a single ballot initiative, but last time I voted we had well over a hundred... do I fill out a hundred cards?

Re:KISS

[skiflyer]

That would never fly... the receipt id may have nothing to do with you, but it can be retreived through a simple search warrant, and whether or not that's paranoia isn't my point, my point is it's enough to keep it from ever being implemented in this country.

Re:KISS

[kernelpanicked]

------ Begin PHP Signed Text -----
ReceiptID 243524534523423454345234234
Voted For: Kodos
------ Begin PHP Signatre Block -----
(signature here)
------ End PHP Signatre Block -----
------ End PHP Signed Text -----

I think what you're looking for is 'PGP" signed, but hen again some folks will use php for damn near anything.

Re:KISS

[j. andrew rogers]

Something similar is done in Nevada, which is generally regarded as being clueful about preventing fraud in electronic machines thanks to many years of dealing with elaborate attempts at electronic gambling machine fraud. Much of the value of electronic voting machines are that they are inexpensive, fast, and theoretically less error-prone to manage compared to pre-printed paper ballots and other older methods.

While no voting system is fool-proof, the Nevada method is something like this: Electronic voting with a voter-verified paper receipt to ensure that what is on the paper is what was selected electronically by voter. The paper receipts are collected and a few percent of the total paper records are randomly and independently audited to verify the electronic records. The important thing that happens here is that the verification and authentication of the vote is distributed among multiple authorities, providing strong statistical evidence that an election was indeed counted as it was voted while providing no single point of failure or manipulation that is likely to go unnoticed. It also does not have the overhead of manually counting every single paper ballot.

This is actually a more robust voting protocol in many ways than the paper ballots it replaces. I do not know if Wisconsin is doing things precisely this way, but I imagine that they would use some variation of the Nevada protocol.

Re:KISS

[oni]

Once you leave the polling place, you should not be able to verify your vote to yourself or anyone else.

Fine, in that case, a voter must be shown the master log and allowed to compare his receipt with it. That way, he can be sure that his vote was recorded. Then the voter is required to dispose of the receipt. No voter is allowed to carry a receipt out of the voting place.

Re:KISS

[Rich0]

Agreed - the simplest and most efficent solution is full automation with some percentage of completely random auditing.

In each state pick 10 precients at random, and count every last vote in them - they better agree to the automated total.

The proposal to always count them manually amounts to 100% auditing. Sure, it works, but it really isn't necessary. In fact, it is likely to have a higher error rate since there is no value being checked against (unless you have two independant groups count all the votes separately and submit separate counts which are then cross-checked).

Have each machine programmed, assembled, and sealed by an individual who signs some dotted line. If the count turns out wrong, the machine gets a major investigation. If there is fraud, the individual gets sent to prison with an opportunity to somewhat reduce his sentence by singing like a canary.

The EU uses systems like this for drug imports. If you want to certify a lot of manufactured drugs as safe for use in Europe, you have to have an EU citizen sign on the final line. The logic is that there is at least somebody personally accountable for the action who lives in the EU jurisdiction. In the same way, if a megacorp builds a bridge there is still an individual engineer signing each drawing.

The key to law enforcement is individual accountability. No need to waste huge amounts of money counting every vote by hand. You just need to make sure the system fosters accountability. If you check 5% of the precients across the country the chance of any widespread fraud going uncaught is very low. Once widespread fraud is detected you would of course count every last piece of paper three times, and send the bill to the perpetrators...

Re:KISS

[FreeMars]

So in other words, I have a peice of paper that I get to take home with me and on that peice of paper is written:
------ Begin PHP Signed Text -----
ReceiptID 243524534523423454345234234
Voted For: Kodos
------ Begin PHP Signatre Block -----
(signature here)
------ End PHP Signatre Block -----
------ End PHP Signed Text -----

No.

The Corrupt Party could buy votes. After you leave the polling location the local party enforcer could give you $10 and take the receipt -- after all your vote is printed right on it.

Suppose the receipt only has an ID number on it. The enforcer then checks the polling website the next day. If it turns out your reciept is recorded as a vote for the Honest Party the enforcer tracks you down and breaks your arms.

It's safer to have witnesses from each party watching as human-readable ballots are counted.

Re:KISS

[uncqual]

The paper and electronic versions could travel with different people. Also, the electronic version could be transmitted electronically immediately at the close of polling and in view of all the poll watchers. If the transmitted version is later found not to match the paper versions, it's time for a big investigation.

Re:KISS

[chris macura]

It's a good idea, although you'll need to have some system in place to watch for multiple-votes by one person (just print the same ballot multiple times). But I can't imagine that being too hard.

Re:KISS

[oni]

the receipt id may have nothing to do with you, but it can be retreived through a simple search warrant

no you don't understand. The receipt is physically not traceable to you. You showed your ID to a person in order to enter to voting place, but you didn't log on to the machine. The machine doesn't know who you are. There's no way to link a receipt with a person.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer? Being open source makes it tamper-resistent, not tamper-proof.

The paper print-outs are also collected. The correct functioning of the machine can be verified by comparing a hand count with the machine result. And no, it isn't the same as doing a hand count of all the ballots because only a random sampling of machines need to be checked to give a reasonable level of trust. Heck. we could even use a separate machine from a different manufacturer and maintained by a different staff to do the recount of the print-outs, assuming there in some kind of easily read format.

Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place

I would think hand-counting the votes would be a lot more work than letting a machine do the counting. Also, there's less concern about trust for the people doing the counting. And maybe the idoits in Florida that can't figure out a paper ballot will have an easier time with the touch-screens. Maybe a big picture of the candidate with a "are you sure" dialog.

Re:KISS

[jgc7]

2) a plaintext record of the vote
It is illegal to give plain text receipts people can take with them. If you give people receipts, then it is simple to buy votes. "Give me a receipt with George Dub's name and I'll give you $5" You get the idea.

Re:KISS

[timeOday]

Correct. The paper ballot is still modifiable or "lost" if need be (it's just more difficult).

It's easy to alter or discard a paper ballot, but not thousands of them as would likely be required to swing a national election. In an electronic system, a few keystrokes or lines of code could "disappear" almost any number of votes. Tangible objects don't work that way.

I'm still in favor of electronic voting with an instant tentative result. The final result can be announced later, after a vote of the paper ballots. The paper version should be generated automatically and checkable by the voter in the booth.

Re:KISS

[iluvcapra]

Well, if you're using PHP, I know exactly how I'd vote:

Enter your vote below:

Kodos; INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos'); INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos'); INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos'); INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos'); INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos'); INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos');INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos'); INSERT INTO votes ('candidate') VALUES ('Kodos');

Etc...

Re:KISS

[skiflyer]

There's no way to link a receipt with a person. With the notable exception of the person's possession of the receipt.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

So... Guido comes up to me as I'm walking toward the polls, and says "Vote Quimby, or I break your kneecaps". As I exit the polls, Guido demands to know my reciept number.

If I lie to him (making up a number), he can verify that it doesn't match anything, and the next day... ouch.

If I tell him the truth, he can now verify whether or not I voted for Quimby, and thus will probably succeed in affecting my vote via threatening me.

This is why no real voting system provides any sort of reciept to the voter which can in any way be used to connect a voter to a vote -- they open the door to vote-buying and threats.

Or as a great man once said, every complex problem has a solution which is simple, attractive, and wrong. Providing a reciept, whether plaintext, cryptographically signed, or carved in stone, is simple, solves one problem (assuring the voter his vote was counted), and creates another (allowing bought or compelled votes).

Re:KISS

[TheDarkener]

I've always thought that an independent website could be used to tally votes completely seperately, using paper ballots from the voters. This would introduce another step in the voting process, but wouldn't it be nice to have a totally independent, "disconnected" source tally votes with something like a simple web form? This way you could compare the results, and if something is grossly wrong, you can contest it.

AND you have the paper ballots as a third verifiable source if they need to be counted by humans.

GO WISCONSIN! Finally, someone GETS IT!!!

Re:KISS

[DavidTC]

That's why you don't have any paper in the booth.

You hand them an unprinted ballot, they walk into the booth and stick it in the printer.

Of course, you don't want the place that holds the ballot in the booth either. That needs to be in the center of the room where people can't tamper with it. Likewise, put the shredder there so you can watch people shred their ballots.

But all this discussions focuses on an fundimental falsehood: That it is hard to think of a secure way to do this.

It is not. It is not the least bit hard to come up with an hard-to-tamper system.

Why didn't we start with one? TRAITORS built a system that could be tampered with. It really is that simple.

Re:KISS

[OzPeter]

In Australia, when we vote we don't "sign in" per se.

Instead there is a big book for each district at each poling place that contains our name and address. When we vote our name is just crossed out. So there is a record of voting, but no record of order. Given we have compulsary voting, any defrauding my impersonating someone else will be caught by this system.

I would posit that the US is struggling with voting because you are trying to bolt on security to an existing system. If you tried to do that with software development, then your peers would just laugh you out of the development area. A better idea would be to go back to the drawing board and redesign the voting system from the ground up. That way you could eliminate the systemic flaws such as potetially correlating voting order with votes cast to produce a list of who voted for whom

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

so basically it is much better when its good. and no worse than it ever was (those mechanical machines arent very verifiable either :)

Re:KISS

[oni]

With the notable exception of the person's possession of the receipt.

and you and others were absolutely right to point that out to me. I suggest one possible fix in this post:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17299 9&threshold=0&commentsort=3&tid=103&tid=137&mode=t hread&pid=14396188#14396261

Re:KISS

[TheDarkener]

If you're that worried about your boss firing you for voting for someone other than who he/she wants you to vote for, maybe you should stand up for yourself and quit.

Re:KISS

[Richard Steiner]

That might be a thing to do anyway just as a sanity check...

Re:KISS

[Locke2005]

Right, then I can meet you coming out of the voting booth, demand to see your receipt, and either 1) pay you for voting for my canditate or 2) shoot you for voting for the wrong candidate. You see, even being able to prove/verify who you voted for has problems that aren't easily solved.

Re:KISS

[gbobeck]

"In this country, people have the right to anonymously vote for a particular candidate, but not to vote anonymously. It is known when you vote, and for good reason so that dead people don't go around voting over and over again or even live people."

You've never dealt with the Chicago Board of Elections. Chicago is the only city in the US where the dead vote on a regular basis.

"There can be simple large scantron type cards that are immediately sorted into something like X party, Y party and Z party, and maybe "other". These can be quickly gone though and if there was an X in the Y party box, something might be fishy. If the Z party box weighs more than the X party box which has more than Y, then Z won. It could counted if mass is that big of a controversy."

Recently, the City of Chicago used a system where voters used punch-card systems (similar to the butterfly ballot used in Florida, but better laid out). Voters, after they finished punching their votes would feed them into a scanner and the vote would be counted. The only problem was that *some* election judges didn't spend the time going to basic training so they ended up telling the voters to re-feed their ballots into the machine numerous times, causing errors in the tallies.

Re:KISS

[AKAImBatman]

Your system really isn't any different than the one in the US. In the US, you must first register to vote. This only needs to be done once, after which the voting place will expect you. As soon as you check in, your name is crossed out and you're given a ballot. That ballor has no identifying information, thus securing your right to a secret ballot. If a recount goes into effect, two things can happen:

1) The ballots themselves are recounted
2) The voters who showed up are verified to ensure that no one voted who shouldn't have. (e.g. Dead people.)

The system is tedious, but it works. The problem that has arisen, however, is that districts want to streamline voting by using electronic ballots. Since it can be difficult to *prove* that a counted vote wasn't changed after the fact, we have various stories like this one pointing out the many problems with E-Voting.

Re:KISS

[thegnu]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer?

You don't. You could, however, give the voter a piece of paper with his decisions on it he puts in a box, to be counted later. Just like paper voting.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way to detect tampering would be to have each voting machine generate some random number of fake votes. If someone hacks the protocol and they alter one of the fake votes, it can be detected by the host and in the recount.

Re:KISS

[HappyEngineer]

Some guy couldn't just set up a booth. Paying for votes it absolutely illegal. Obviously, many try to do this in more subtle ways (even with no way to verify that the voting occurred), but there's no way that anyone could publicly declare that they were paying for votes and stay out of jail for very long.

Re:KISS

[mindriot]

It's obviously not easy to ensure a verifiable voting process that still guarantees that your vote remains secret. The only solution I've seen so far that seems satisfying in every respect (correct me if I missed something) is this one (PDF) by David Chaum.

Re:KISS

[NeutronCowboy]

Don't know why this is modded insightful, other than that complete and utter corruption of our political system has been accepted as truth of the land. That said, there are two reasons why this is unlikely. One (and the parent post already mentioned it), receipts will not be there for you to take home. They will be used to show you who the system thinks you voted for, and as an alternate means of counting votes. Which means that they will be collected before you leave the voting station. Two, this is illegal. Granted, it is difficult to prevent within families or other very close-knit communities, but it is unlikely that anyone else (especially not an employer) would be willing to face a fat, juicy lawsuit for voter coercion.

Re:KISS

[deblau]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer?

We don't, other than by inspecting the source. Once we cast our vote using a paper ballot, how do we know it was actually counted? We don't, other than by having observers present. Source inspection is the digital analogue of human election observers.

IMHO, having computers count is more accurate than having people count. Remember, as Stalin may or may not have said, "those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 showed us that. Computers have no motivation to lie, and I can inspect a computer's source code. I can't inspect the mind of the person counting my paper ballot. To me, computers have more accountability.

Re:KISS

[Thunderstruck]

Actually, in some jurisdictions (North Dakota), one does not need to register to vote.

Too, we can't have a single national lab developing a single national voting system, because each state sets voting rules based on its own preferences, values, and traditions. (At least, it seems that a single system which tries to handle the voting systems in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and the territories, will not be truly good at any one in particular.)

Re:KISS

[hackstraw]

I wish I was on a website with computer geeks.

"hanging chads"

Bullshit. Punchcards were first made in the early 1800's and then used more commonly by big computer companies like IBM in the late 1800's. They were not used after the late 70's because they sucked. I work with people that used punch cards to program computers. They never talk about "chads" they talk about things like getting cards out of order, dropping them on the ground and not being able to edit them once made. They don't talk about "chads", those are invented words for the 2000 election well after nobody used punchcards for over 20 years.

I've taken a number of standardized tests for over 20 years that have never, ever used punchcards or had hanging chads. They were all done with standard #2 pencils and a piece of paper that could scan them at remarkable speeds and accuracy. I'm sure somebody could counter with a time that one kid had his SAT score off by a point or two out of 1600 or the 2400 or whatever it is now, but AFAK they are beyond human accuracy, and never, ever have "chad" issues.

So, why all the talk and fuss about this stuff? Are elections routinely rigged? Is this the new terrorist plot? Are the scantron type ballots that I have used rigged or wrong? Are the mechanical vote counters rigged or wrong? Was the President of the United States chosen by popular ballot in 2000? Does it even matter?

The more this disinformation keeps us busy, it makes those who really matter in these matters more free to have more room to do whatever they want to do.

I don't believe its any more difficult to count nominal data accurately than it ever was. Its the people that do the counting that are always variable, and will always be.

Re:KISS

[utexaspunk]

This is true. So here's what you do-

1) You have non-forgeable (printed like money) ballots with detachable stubs on them, each of which would have the same unique number printed on them. Why we go through so much effort to make our money non-forgeable, but not our ballots, is beyond me.
2) When you sign in at the polling location, your ID info is written on the stub. Perhaps the stub is even thumbprinted with indelible ink.
3) You vote on the computer, which prints your votes on the ballot (but not the stub) in human-readable as well as machine-readable form, put your ballot in the box, and take the stub home.
4) The ballots are then kept by the registrar after the polls have closed. For a certain period of time after the election, any voter may present their stub to the registrar, verify their identity, and request to view their ballot to ensure that it was counted and not altered.

There are probably flaws I haven't thought of... Anyone?

Re:KISS

[bill_kress]

The point is simply that a recount is possible, not that the machine records exactly what is printed.

If I were running such a program, I'd have the additional requirement to randomly do 100% audits of election results and if the paper vote is in any way different than the vote the machine put out, remove that entire class of machine from service and assign a commission that must produce the EXACT cause of the mismatch and a suggest correction before that type of machine can be used again.

The fact that a system like that is not in place on these voting machines is mind-boggling, it seems so completely obvious to me. To not have some kind of trail is deliberate sabotage.

Re:KISS

[hhawk]

If the APP is open source but the OS is not and/or the Network stack and/or any drivers are not open source it doesn't really help. A step in the right direction but the entire system (hardware, Software, Firm ware, etc. need to be inspectable.

If these machines are networked in anyway all of that equipment should also be open source..

Re:KISS

[MindStalker]

Traitors is a bit of a strong word.
If your talking about the current system of paper ballots its simply a matter of what was avaiable at the time of creation and the unmobility of the average election council to go with unproven new systems. If your refering to things such as diebold I again point to the untechness of the election coucils. Now diebold themselves, is most likly a combination of lazy employees just trying to earn a buck.... and TRAITORS!

Re:KISS

[deanj]

I'd be satisfied if they required proof (via State issued FREE ids, if necessary) of who you are when you showed up to vote.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the dead once existed. Out here in CA voter ID is a huge issue because the hemp-weaver lefties making their smoke money soliciting voter reg signups in the grocery store parking lots hunt out and sign up "undocumented", that is illegal alien, immigrants who are not only non-citizens, but on paper don't even exist. Of course this is known to be a predominantly (politically) liberal clientelle. Spot checking on registrations is so sparse that many get through to vote.

The other thing I have witnessed is people going in to vote only to discover that they have already been crossed off the list. Without requiring valid ID, this will always be a potential problem. The mechanism of voting isn't so significant if the validity of the voter in unverifiable.

Re:KISS

[edwdig]

Bullshit. Punchcards were first made in the early 1800's and then used more commonly by big computer companies like IBM in the late 1800's. They were not used after the late 70's because they sucked. I work with people that used punch cards to program computers. They never talk about "chads" they talk about things like getting cards out of order, dropping them on the ground and not being able to edit them once made. They don't talk about "chads", those are invented words for the 2000 election well after nobody used punchcards for over 20 years.

I'm not trying to say punchcards are good, but, those complaints are irrelevant when it comes to counting ballots. If you drop a pile of cards and pick they up in a different order, who cares. The vote total doesn't change if you run the votes through in a different order. Punch cards being hard to edit is a good thing in an election.

As for chads, I wouldn't expect those people to complain about them. If your job depends on using punchcards every day, you're going to learn how to punch them correctly very quickly. If you only use them once a year (or every 4 years), the odds of you making a mistake are much higher.

I've taken a number of standardized tests for over 20 years that have never, ever used punchcards or had hanging chads. They were all done with standard #2 pencils and a piece of paper that could scan them at remarkable speeds and accuracy. I'm sure somebody could counter with a time that one kid had his SAT score off by a point or two out of 1600 or the 2400 or whatever it is now, but AFAK they are beyond human accuracy, and never, ever have "chad" issues.

How do you know how accurate they are? Have you ever received your graded test back along with an answer key to compare? I've never seen that happen. I assume they're accurate since the final scores I receive tend to be in the same ballpark as my assumptions are, but I have no way of knowing for sure. People I talk to usually seem to find the results believable as well, which certainly increases my trust of the system, but it still doesn't give any idea of the margin of error.

Re:KISS

[Joe U]

I would, but I'm almost blind and I can't change the ballot's font size, and it won't read itself to me.

"Life sucks, get a fucking helmet"

Seriously, the answer isn't always 'TECHNOLOGY!'

Ever think about having someone help you? Or possibly, just possibly they might make a large print or a Braile version of the ballot for the small percentage of the population that needs it?

Re:KISS

[Sarisar]

Yeah my GF lives in Nevada and mentioned electronic voting and my immediate thought was "oh shit, diebold" but it isn't, it's Sequoia that is actually doing this.

Now as I'm trying to sort out moving to NV, and will presumably sometime get to vote (have to be a citizen though?) does anyone know about this company. I did a quick google and found nothing bad in the stuff I found (unlike diebold where every result seems to also include the words ballot-tampering or similar!)

Re:KISS

[metamatic]

Agreed - the simplest and most efficent solution is full automation with some percentage of completely random auditing.

The simplest and most efficient solution is not to have elections at all. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of troublemakers who believe in this crazy idea called democracy, even though it's inherently complicated and inefficient.

That is: 'simple' and 'efficient' are not the most important criteria for a voting system. They're not even in the top 5.

Re:KISS

[Sarisar]

Or have a second computer count the ballots printed from the first, and compare. Make damn sure that one is open source or at the very least another company so they can't fix it. Then put the paper in the box. If the first two match completely would that be OK for not having to check all paper ballots? Of course some random matching should be done on SOME ballots anyway.

Re:KISS

[Izaak]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is
incremented within the computer?

Actually, the count of voters will also be tracked
independent of the machine. Voter registration is
checked before you vote. They check in a hardcopy
voter registration book that your name shows up
at the address you claim to be living at. You
need to show ID or something else with your address.
They then check you off as having voted by writing a
sequence number next your name. The number is not reliable
for determining how you voted because their are multiple
voting stations at each polling place and no way to
know which one you went to after making it through the
registration queue. Nevertheless, the total recorded
in the book must match the totals recorded in the
machines at the end of the night. It would be impossible
for the voting machine to add phantom votes to the paper
tape without it showing up when you check the registration
books.

I live in Wisconsin and have actually been a volunteer
poll observer. I am very happy to see this law, though
I still think optical scan machines are better for a
variety of reasons.

Later,

Thad

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Some guy couldn't just sell drugs. Selling drugs it absolutely illegal. Obviously, many try to do this in more subtle ways, but there's no way that anyone could publicly declare that they were selling drugs and stay out of jail for very long.

Re:KISS

[Chris Burke]

It was modded insightful because the post he replied to suggested that you should be able to verify your vote is correct once you get home. This is utterly unnacceptable, since it breaks anonymous voting. If you can verify your vote once you leave the polling station, then you can be coerced into verifying your vote for someone else.

As far as being illegal -- all forms of voting fraud are illegal, yet they still occur. All crimes are illegal (duh) yet they still occur. You might not believe this, but a lot of people would be willing to give in to coercion to keep their job, rather than lose their job and have to wait years to prosecute a lawsuit in hopes of getting compensation. Making vote buying or vote coersion possible by breaking anonymous voting is a bad idea.

Anonymous voting is good.
Non-anonymous voting is bad.
That's all; I guess it's only insightful if you didn't know that.

Re:KISS

[dfenstrate]

From what I understand, the hanging chads were most likely the result of voter fraud by the election officials in charge.

They would take a stack of ballots, and run an icepick through their preferred candidate's hole.

If their candidate was the same as the voters, the card was unchanged. If it wasn't, a new hole would be made and the vote invalided for multiple voting. Since Icepicks weren't the proper instrument for voting, they left chads hanging.

Of course, who you think the fraudulent election officials were fucking up ballots for depends largely on your party affiliation.

Personally, I only remember one candidate in the 2000 election trying to cherry-pick areas to recount, and these chosen areas became famous for their hanging chads.

Of course, I don't have any substatiation of this, so take it with a grain of salt.

More directly on topic, I'm all for wisconsin's law to be adopted here in New Hampshire for electronic voting machines. The voting machine computer tally could be hand counted (or verified by a machine from a completely different vendor for speed) in maybe 1-3% of the voting districts, randomly chosen after the election, for consistency.

Re:KISS

[VE3MTM]

US Code, Title 42, Chapter 20, Subchapter 1, Section 1971:

(b) Intimidation, threats, or coercion
No person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose, or of causing such other person to vote for, or not to vote for, any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, presidential elector, Member of the Senate, or Member of the House of Representatives, Delegates or Commissioners from the Territories or possessions, at any general, special, or primary election held solely or in part for the purpose of selecting or electing any such candidate.

Source: http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscod e42/usc_sec_42_00001971----000-.html

Ah, yes, those pesky laws.

Re:KISS

[AK Marc]

Providing a reciept, whether plaintext, cryptographically signed, or carved in stone, is simple, solves one problem (assuring the voter his vote was counted), and creates another (allowing bought or compelled votes).

Just because you are too stupid to come up with the answer does not mean it does not exist.

Re:KISS

[pthisis]

How do you know how accurate they are? Have you ever received your graded test back along with an answer key to compare? I've never seen that happen.

Yes, you can get your graded SAT back with an answer key to compare (I did it). It's a nominal fee.

Re:KISS

[DavidTC]

Traitors is exactly the right word for people attempting to corrupt the vote taking and counting process.

Re:KISS

[vsprintf]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer? Being open source makes it tamper-resistent, not tamper-proof. Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place?

It doesn't have anything to do with open source. It is about a voter-verified paper ballot that matches the electronic vote. Our previous system was not tamper-proof, only tamper-resistant. Our current system in some locales (e-voting with no paper trail) is not even tamper-resistant. And yes, it would be better to use paper in the first place, but that was made obsolete by legislators who were bought off by the companies that make the electronic voting machines. Have you been living under a rock somewhere? This is all about making the system tamper-resistant again, so we don't get a candidate with a negative number of votes (like from Volusia County, Florida) again.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place? Then any recount could be performed against the actual ballots cast, not as a spot check against computer (glitches|fraud)."

It would certainly be more valid.

That's the way Canada has been voting for decades. With simple paper ballots
and pencils. And the votes are manually counted and verified at the precinct
level. No fraud is possible, or tolerated (like it is in the United States).
And Canadians learn the final results that night from the 11-o'clock news.

That's why a lot of us are leaving the U.S. for Canada and elsewhere.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

The good old punch cards work fine. Unless you don't follow the instructions given to you three times to check for hanging pieces(it does NOT WARRANT a name) and proper insertion. Or if you're trying to punch through multiple cards at once I would guess, though it'd be a tight fit in the machine.

Re:KISS

[johansalk]

I agree. Why must everything be computerised? Elections can be done pretty well on paper.

Re:KISS

[Amouth]

my problem is i see the source.. how do i know that it was what was used when i casted my vote?

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

the perfect democracy is not a goal. never was. hence the US was not founded as one.

it's a representational federal republic.

"pure" democracies fail for remarkably similar reasons as "pure" communisms - they rely on non-base human attributes - will never work for a "mob"

look to critical systems design like space shuttle controls for hints.

3 independent machines. all open source HW and SW. all using different code base. all count from the same data source (an immutable card that's visually verifiable by the voter - there is a nice piece on 2 part cards that allow two cards to each hold half of the data - voter picks random card of two - very simple system to develope, use, and manage) check them against each other.

no muss no fuss.

Re:KISS

[JasonTik]

So encrypt the electronic copy in such a way that noone but the destination can access it, and sign it so the destination knows it is intact.

GPG. PGP. Write your own. I dont care, just do it.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

What MAKES it a complete paper ballot is that it is the paper that is counted. That means the computer isn't incrementing anything, or at least, if it is, its count is used not as the vote tally, but to CHECK the vote tally of the machine that reads the paper ballots.

Re:KISS

[Halfbaked Plan]

Making it "Open Source" makes it easier for someone to compile a patched version of the program. It needs to be:

Compiled under controlled observation.
MD5 verified to generate a key.
Every version on every voting machine needs to be MD5 verified and compared to the key.

Making it 'Open Source' does NOTHING unless the chain-of-binary-generation is verified and tracable. In fact, the source being 'out there' makes it more likely for extremely close facsimile versions that cheat to exist. So the verification steps are necessary.

Re:KISS

[Halfbaked Plan]

Yes. Offering bribes of a free pack of cigarettes to get someone to vote is traitorous. Phony 'Get Out The Vote' drives that are really 'Get Out The Zombies In The Nursing Home' drives are traitorous.

There are countless other examples of traitorous behavior. People who rant from both wings of the big stupid Political Bird are culpable.

Re:KISS

[YetAnotherLogin]

Yeah, but even if it was open source, you'd never really be to trust it unless you compiled it yourself. For example, Ken Thompson was able to bug the compiler so that it installed a backdoor whenever the login(1) program was compiled. For details you should see his paper Reflections on Trusting Trust.

Re:KISS

[ClarkMills]

Just because we can't trust the boss doesn't mean we have to trust everybody.

Re:KISS

[Halfbaked Plan]

Why should a recount be possible? Why should a recount be permitted? Shouldn't the system be set up in such a way that anybody calling for a recount would be scoffed at openly by anybody who understands the robust process?

I mean, really. Do it right, and the idea of a recount would just be a story people tell about what a bunch of dunderheads used to demand.

Re:KISS

[Baloo Ursidae]

They don't talk about "chads", those are invented words for the 2000 election well after nobody used punchcards for over 20 years.

The Jargon File says you're wrong.

Re:KISS

[AKAImBatman]

TRue. Some states didn't even have voting until a hundred or so years after the United States was founded. There is, in fact, no Constitutional requirement that any State of the Union provide voting to any person or persons. Each state gets its allotted number of electorial votes, then it's up to the state to figure out how to allocate them.

That being said, most states I've lived in require voter registration to prevent fraud. North Dakota probably doesn't because it doesn't need it as much. No offense to you guys, but it's not like there are that many people for each voting station to sort through. Even when I lived in Wisconsin (which *does* require registration), everyone knew everyone well enough to keep fraud out. :-)

Re:KISS

[Baloo Ursidae]

It's PGP, not PHP, and a key for it is something you generate on your own, not something someone else generates. You might want to brush up on public key cryptography.

Re:KISS

[vidarh]

Any robust process DOES involve the ability to recount. It is much easier and faster to simply make it possible to recount than to spend the effort required to make the initial count tamper proof.

Re:KISS

[gbobeck]

I'm not going to discuss politics in this post.

Ok, so by your admission, your local board of elections sucks due to an inability to check on the validity and legal status of newly registered voters.

By my admisson, my local board of elections sucks due to an inability to check vital signs of voters.

I do believe in the requirement for a state issued ID to vote. Of course that does not guarantee that there willn't be problems with the elections.

Lets face it, the bigest problem when it comes to elections is people. People can mess up an election, by malice and/or stupidity, even when using the most complex and 'foolproof' machines to safeguard the election.

Re:KISS

[Junior J. Junior III]

The second amendment provides more than adequate fix for the citizen brave and dutiful enough to carry out his or her full civic duty.

Re:KISS

[mrhartwig]

From what I understand, the hanging chads were most likely the result of voter fraud by the election officials in charge.

Bullshit. While I happen to suspect that there was some fraud in the 2000 election (in Florida along with a bunch of other places) this sounds like nothing more than a Conspiracy Theory, knee-jerk, reaction.

We use the same ballot system here in my little corner of Missouri, and I assure you that it's very possible to leave a chad hanging, even with the "approved" punch device that's part of the voting station. No icepick required.

If you did use an icepick in the manner described in the parent, you couldn't do very many cards at once; there would be quite obvious damage around the hole, as the icepick would be significantly bigger than the chad hole. And the wrong shape (round vs. rectangular).

I don't remember if I'm making this up, but I believe our instructions include a step having you check to make sure all the chads have been totally punched out. If we do have such an instruction, I don't know if it was there before 2000. But I've always checked, instruction or not; it's not that complicated. :-)

Also to add an on-topic comment; Wisconsin's law is a great step, but I agree with other posters that a much better system would be to make the vote generation device separately from the vote counting device.

Re:KISS

[dangitman]

Do you really think Republicans would allow a re-count to proceed? They'll just say it's a liberal terrorist plot to undermine the presidency, and then declare martial law.

Re:KISS

[mrhartwig]

As for chads, I wouldn't expect those people to complain about them. If your job depends on using punchcards every day, you're going to learn how to punch them correctly very quickly. If you only use them once a year (or every 4 years), the odds of you making a mistake are much higher.

Also, voting "chads" (or is the the holes that are important? :-) are generated via a manual process. You punch out a pre-perforated chad with a little pushing device. Computer punch cards were (are?) punched with a machine, which is obviously going to be much more consistent.

Chads were a problem with punch cards; they'd sometimes not go where they were supposed to & could clog the machine. What I don't remember is if we called them "chads" or not; I didn't work with punch cards that long. I'm old, but not that old....

Re:KISS

[Thunderstruck]

Under the Federal Constitution, all states are required to provide a "republican form of government." The States have always had voting. I think you're thinking of presidential electors only. (Which of course gets all the press, but when it comes down to the things I vote about that actually affect my day-to-day life, is pretty low on the list.)

Re:KISS

[dfenstrate]

Thanks for the additional info. Like I said, I have no substatiation and I don't even remember were I heard it.

Re:KISS

[AKAImBatman]

You're referring to the fourth section of the Constituion, right? From Wikipedia:

The United States is obligated by Section Four to ensure a "Republican Form of Government" in each state. What exactly constitutes a republican government, however, is not up to the courts. In effect, the clause is non-justiciable; in Luther v. Borden 48 U.S. 1 (1849), the Court held that "it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State ... as well as its republican character."

So states can pretty much be anything they want as long as Congress agrees that they're "republican". Since the definition is so broad, the States are not required to hold elections for the state positions. This is something of a throwback to when the states were "owned" through a purchase or deeding from the King of England.

But yes, I was primarily referring to the Presidential Elections, which are decided by the state alone. The state may suffer an election at its own option.

Re:KISS

[lorelorn]

Being open source makes it tamper-resistant, not tamper-proof. Would it not be easier to just use a paper ballot in the first place?

This may shock and surprise you - but paper ballots are not tamper-proof. They are not even tamper-resistant. Any random pen or pencil mark on a paper ballot invalidates it. This is known as the 'informal vote' people mark their own ballot then deface it so that it will no count.

The assumption of course is that the person who filled it out also defaced it.

Note too that 'deface' in this context can be a simple pen mark outside the box.

Re:KISS

[orbz]

"What is so difficult with counting nominal data these days?" it's called fascism.

Re:KISS

[drn8]

I live in Madison, WI, The state capital, and at least here all the ballots are paper. I love Wisconsin, we have the best Senator(Russ Feingold) and my congress woman(Tammy Baldwin) is the only openly gay member of the house.

Wisconsin is also the birthplace of both Bob La Follette, founder of the Progressive party, and Joseph Mccarthy of Mccarthy-ism(talk about contrast). IIRC Milwaukee had a Socialist Mayor from 1914 to 1940 to boot.

Re:KISS

[Hans Lehmann]

If you did use an icepick in the manner described in the parent, you couldn't do very many cards at once; there would be quite obvious damage around the hole, as the icepick would be significantly bigger than the chad hole. And the wrong shape (round vs. rectangular).

Not at all. Here in my part of Los Angeles County, most of the elections in recent memory have been done using punch cards. The votes are cast using a metal stylus; nothing more than a metal rod about 1/16" in diameter. It's guided through a template that makes sure you're punching the correct rectangular hole in the voting card. It wouldn't require a rectangular punch to remove a rectangular chad; a piece of coat hanger wire would easily do the trick on a stack of 100 cards.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to "know" because you can "verify" later by comparing the paper to the computer, if you so desired. You could *still* do a human-paper recount, even if the original machine was hijacked by terrorists and used to give the avian flu to nuns and school children.

I don't see why you think having the computer count in the first place makes things less accurate. Having more counts lets you do faster and better verification and error detection. If we're using the paper ballot, how do you know that the machine counting the paper ballots hasn't been tampered with in the same way that the booth would be, or do you really want to have an 87-year-old woman hand-tallying thousands of votes for tens of categories as your primary counting mechanism?

Re:KISS

[jZnat]

I would have to assume that GNU didn't have this problem at least considering RMS made GCC from scratch. Of course, then it would be a question of trusting RMS, but we usually do.

Re:KISS

[jZnat]

Or more insidious, your boss tells you you need to vote for candidate A. In order to obtain your next paycheck, you must show your receipt that you voted for candidate A.

That's illegal as specifically stated here.

Re:KISS

[DavidTC]

By 'taking' and 'counting', I actually meant the process of the 'moving a vote from human hands into a number somewhere', not 'get people to vote when you suspect you know how they will vote' or even 'pay them off in order to vote a certain way'.

The second of that is fine. The last of that is vile and illegal, although I am not such if it really is 'traitorous'.

The first, however, completely corrupting the entire system, is certainly traitorous.

There's a difference btween burning down your house for insurance money and burning down a military supply depot so the Canadians can invade. The first is illegal. The second is treason. Likewise, minor electon tampering is certainly illegal. But wholesale election tampering is treason, as one of the basises for the US is free elections.

Re:KISS

[aaronl]

They could also do it the semi-mechanical way that many Northeast (and probably others) use. You have a machine with levers. You set the levers the way that you want, and the machine doesn't allow an incorrect number of choices. When you're done, you pull a handle. This creates a paper card that has marked out your choices. You put your card into a box, after checking it to make sure it was created correctly. The machine tallies the numbers of votes, with the paper cards serving as auditing backup.

If you wanted to be sure, you would release your machine tallies when voting ends, and then always perform a manual recount of the cards, to verify the machine accuracy.

Re:KISS

[linuxghoul]

apologies in advance for the shameless plug, but I was just wondering about this problem and I think I may have a solution. I came up with a brief proposal to the trustable electronic voting problem, and posted it on my personal blog. Read it here:

A proposal for Trustable Electronic Voting

Am sure there are issues I missed in there, would appreciate comments.

Re:KISS

[will_die]

What caused most of the hanging chap problem in florida was that the poll workers were not empting the trash boxes when the chads were suppose to fall into. There were no ice-picks or anything of that nature.
Yet some people think that the same people who had problems pulling out a tray, turning it upside down and returning it are going to be able to install the paper needed for theses machines.

Re:KISS

[YetAnotherLogin]

Good point. But also keep in mind that the compiler that compiles the executable that will actually be running on these production ballots doesn't necessarily have to be GNU's. They control that aspect of the system, and then you're back to trusting them again. That's the whole point I was trying to make. They can show you all the clean code you want, but compile it in the manner described in Ken Thompson's paper.

Re:KISS

[Gorshkov]

There's a difference btween burning down your house for insurance money and burning down a military supply depot so the Canadians can invade. The first is illegal. The second is treason. Likewise, minor electon tampering is certainly illegal.

Ummmmm ....... don't we need to have a military first?

Re:KISS

[Eivind]

We don't. A good system would be something akin to the following:

Voter votes on some sort of machine. Machine counts vote internally, and also prints a paper with the same vote, giving this to the voter.

The voter looks at the paper, verifies it says what he wants it to say, thereafter the paper goes in a sealed box, like votes do today.

When the election is over, results based on the machine-count can quickly be produced. A random selection of the machines can then be checked for correctness by the simple expedient of opening the sealed boxes and manually counting the votes therein, verifying that the result matches that from the machine.

This is dead simple, yet it's something that no currently used electronic-voting system does. One has to wonder why. It's as if they've gone to great lengths to ensure that no independent data exists by which one could verify the accuracy of the machine.

I would argue that with such a system, there's not even really any need to see the sourcecode of the machine, or examine it particularily closely. The only thing that *really* matters is that it reliably prints easily readable, easily countable receipts.

Re:KISS

[dan the person]

The problem with a receipt is that it can then be used to make sure you voted a certain way.

you don't take the receipt away with you. It goes into a ballot box to be used for recounts and random verification.

Re:KISS

[red990033]

>I wish I was on a website with computer geeks.
>
>"hanging chads"

WHAT??! Oh.. sorry.. had to finish RTFP. As a man named Chad, I was very upset to hear about a website who "hangs chads".

Re:KISS

[Tesen]

if there is a doubt you ask for a recount and count .... the paper ballots!

Yup and we all know how well that worked in the last two US Presidential Elections. Yup a bunch of republicans stood there shouting, "Boo! Get lost you liberals! All we want is OUR man in! We don't care if it is legal. NO recount for you!."

Tes

Re:KISS

[Big Nothing]

"Use a touch screen to make your choices, it prints out a op-scannable ballot you can hold in your hand and verify. You then stick it in one of two slots: the scanner slot or the shredder slot."

The result is bound to be a lot of dolts looking for "the Pat Buchanan slot".

Re:KISS

[muchtooold]

Warning pedant at work. Chad goes back much earlier than you state. A casual web search suggests the term was in use in the early days of punched cards More convincingly a Penguin " Dictionary of Electronics", published in 1966, makes reference to chad. Even more convincingly I remember its use with respect to punched paper tape.

Re:KISS

[RipTides9x]

And the machines should be developed by national research labratory in a completely open and transparent way

Yes exactly, myself I would go with the completely acrylic case with Blue LEDs.
Nothing says l33tness like Blue LEDs with acrylic and.. UV reactive water-cooling...
Jeez, they would be beating back the Nerds and Noobs from the polling places.
Imagine getting online on a Tuesday and seeing,
"my candidate just pwned joor candidate, LOLOBQQ Voting Roxors!!!"

Re:KISS

[laird]

This is the approach advocated by the Open Voting Consortium (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ a group dedicated to promoting open source voting systems. Please go to their web site and read more, and if you like what you see, contribute your time and/or money to support them!

Re:KISS

[zanderredux]

This is in and of itself a problem with electronic voting because the order of votes can be counted as well as the votes themselves.

Gosh. Why do people continue to insist that the solution for every single problem in the world is in the use of computers?

The whole "electronic voting" concept is deemed to be unworkable because there is a bias for computers as a solution for some problem, not just a tool.

To me, this seems the work of some consultancy company that saw an opportunity to make a buck expanding an existing problem.

Re:KISS

[mrhartwig]

I never said it would require a rectangular punch; I was disagreeing with a single, specific, implement -- an ice pick. Any ice pick I've ever seen is much too thick, and they tend to get thicker as you get further from the pointy end. Said thickness being much bigger than the narrow width of the holes in our voting cards, which would therefore cause visible distortion of the card.

It sounds like you use the same system we do. I agree that a coat hanger would work, but I'm not sure it'd work very well on a stack of cards; it seems it would be tough to push the chads all the way through the stack and out of the way.

Re:KISS

[Sneakabout]

Of course, because that would stop it happening.....

And such things can be done other ways. What if everyone else *chooses* to display their voting openly and you don't? Getting passed over for promotion is damned difficult to prove, especially when your colleagues won't be inclined to support the commie/redneck who didn't vote like they did.

But if you've nothing to hide.....

Re:KISS

[Kadin2048]

I know people who went to very large universities, and took 2-3 scantron exams per course per semester, five our more courses per semester, for four or five years, and got their test questions back in most cases along with the graded scantron sheet to check, if they wanted. Based on everything I've heard from them, the systems were very accurate. In fact I've never heard of anyone finding an error that was actually attributable to the scantron that didn't have some mitigating factor (sloppy erasing, etc.).

The biggest source of error is human. You skip a row of bubbles and forget to check numbers, and all of your answers are wrong (or randomized, so 80% of them are wrong or whatever). It's arguable and I'm tempted to agree, to a certain extent, that this is just the price you pay if you're stupid and can't fill out the right set of bubbles for the question; regardless of your stance on that however, the technology itself isn't to blame.

I'm sure there are other people out there who went to big state colleges who used scantron-type tests a lot, and if someone was really interested they could gather together a lot of old tests and sheets and calculate the accuracy. I'm willing to bet it's very, very high; probably higher than a human being would be at doing the same thing.

Re:KISS

[raypsaliga]

I have always had my written answer keys along with my scantrons returned to me. I 've never seen an error on the scantron, unless I'd erased and changed an answer with a crappy eraser. From my experience, scantron tests are 100% accurate.

Re:KISS

[Kadin2048]

The whole point of the receipt (which is separate from a paper trail) is so that you could go to a web site later, type in the key from the receipt, and make sure that your vote actually counted in the election, and was for the candidate that you cast it for. If you put it in some box, then it would be outside of your control and subject to manipulation.

The theory is that, if a large percentage of people kept their receipts and then checked them later on the Internet, and if the receipts contained the name of the candidate voted for, it would be easy to detect tampering. If the vote on the web site doesn't match the vote on the receipt, somebody monkeyed with something somewhere. Or at least it's a potential that would need to be investigated.

However as other people pointed out, there are a lot of problems with giving the voter a "take home" proof of who they voted for. It makes it easy to buy votes, or could easily become a social pressure (just think of some future where members of the cool political party proudly display their voting receipts -- if you don't have a receipt for the right candidate, you get ostracized).

I wonder if this could be fixed by doing a one-way hash of the candidate, plus the date and time that the vote was cast, and printing that on the receipt instead. Then you'd have a slip of paper that you could check to make sure that the vote that was counted under your name was the same one that you cast, but there'd never be anything that you'd take home saying who it was. I'll have to think about it.

Having receipts is a good idea, but there are a bunch of social problems that would have to be worked around first.

Re:KISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if the paper trail is in the hands of the person casting his/her vote and is assigned a unique id and all the votes can be recalled using the specific ID it will be possible for citizens to check for fraud, off course someone might steal a persons paper copy, thus becoming capable of hiding election fraud, however the risk of someone systematicly ripping paper receits off is miniscule and therefore not a problem to be put into consideration, and as long as only one paper receit is printed one could secure the concept of anonymous voting and at the same time have a system in place to reveal election fraud.

Re:KISS

[BaudKarma]

Even better yet still... Voter makes thier decisions on the screen of voting machine #1. Machine #1 prints out a ballot with votes in plain text and scannable barcode. Voter reads the ballot to confirm selections then takes this ballot and feeds it into Machine #2.

Now you've got 3 voting records... machine #1, machine #2, and the paper ballots. Machine #1 can be networked and programmable, #2 can be standalone and pretty darn simple. If the two machines are made by different companies, you've got a system that's not too complicated and should be much more difficult to hack then any single machine solution.

Re:KISS

[bill_kress]

It is not possible to "Do it right". There is always going to be a level of trust involved. Even if "They" did it right, how do "I" Trust them?

I'm not talking about recounts either, I'm talking about random audits. If the random audits succeeded, you're right, recounts should be unheard of.

You could also randomly videotape the voting (Just the screen and the hand of the voter) and line up votes with video timestamps to ensure it worked.

Strangely enough, your comment about scoffing people who don't understand is the worst thing that could possibly have.

Re:KISS

[Chris Burke]

We use the same ballot system here in my little corner of Missouri, and I assure you that it's very possible to leave a chad hanging, even with the "approved" punch device that's part of the voting station. No icepick required.

Precisely. It is quite possible to create an invalid ballot. The notion, floated in 2000 with alarming ease, that only poor black people in a Democratic district were unable to produce valid ballots is pure nonsense.

The answer to why there were so many more invalid ballots in those districts is simple. In some districts, the machine was configured to reject an invalid ballot and spit it back out so the voter could fix it -- the behavior one would expect in a sane world. In other districts, the machine was configured to accept the ballot, and then of course not count it because it was invalid.

Re:KISS

[nodrogluap]

Here are the results for the 2004 election in my riding:

In Canada we mark an X in a circle on the ballot next to name of our choice. The results show a 0.3% ballot spoilage. That's what I call KISS. :-)

Re:KISS

[bill_mcgonigle]

There are algorithms for issuing a receipt which can be combined with a key at the voting office to reproduce the correct vote. The voter can verify his vote at any time by going to the voting office but noone but the voting office can.

This can be used for recounts, in theory, but stop votes from being sold. There's a crytographically secure algorithm for doing this available, can't recall the name at the moment.

Re:KISS

[deblau]

You don't. How do you know that when you pull the handle in an election machine, it records a vote for the right candidate? You don't. What level of certainty do you require? I'm fine with election observers making sure that the electronic machines have the proper source, as verified by MD5 hash or other reliable technique, either at the voting site or at another location with a proper chain of custody in between. That's at least as good as what we've got now, and doesn't require a lot of extra work to implement.

Re:KISS

[Amouth]

I know.. it is just that i don't trust any of it as it is.. our government (US) is so far gone in my mind.. politics was not ment to be a carear

Re:KISS

[dan the person]

You're talking about a totally different election system if you don't have anonymous voting.

Besides, if you don't trust the voting software to tell the truth, why are you going to trust some website interfacing to said voting software to tell the truth?

Re:KISS

[AZURERAZOR]

The problem is that someone would get into the bussing business and pay people for votes... the reciept gives a verifiable way to pay for votes. With the current system, no one would be willing to pay for the vote because there is no way to verify that the PAYEE actually votes for the candidate preferred by the PAYOR.

Just my 2 cents...

This should not be news.

[C10H14N2]

...but sadly, it is.

Re:This should not be news.

[lilmouse]

This is a celebration annoucement!

--LWM

Re:This should not be news.

[User 956]

I think the real question here is, why does Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle hate America? And Freedom?

And Babies?

Re:This should not be news.

[Spy der Mann]

...but sadly, it is.

AH! But then it's GOOD NEWS! :)

Common sense?

[Anonymous Coward]

Common sense and open source prevailing? In America? Surely not!!

Re:Common sense?

[homebrewmike]

"Forward" is Wisconsin's motto.

Now, if we can only get people to forget the feral cat thing...

Re:Common sense?

[swerk]

Count me as proud, damn proud, to be a Wisconsinite! ...'Course, I live in Utah now, writing Free software for Novell, but HELL YEAH all the same!

I'll have to have some extra beer and cheese tonight.

Re:Common sense?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thomas Paine would be proud.

Re:Common sense?

[John Hasler]

> Now, if we can only get people to forget the feral cat thing...

I'd rather forget the premise registration thing.

That's great, but

[LodCrappo]

unfortunately you will still have to vote for either a republican, a democrat, or someone who will lose.

Re:That's great, but

[pHatidic]

Yes, but once Wisco goes open source it will be better than what it is currently: vote for a republican or someone who will lose.

Re:That's great, but

[Pyrion]

Except that Kerry won Wisconsin in 2004.

Re:That's great, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if all the balots were counted. :)

Re:That's great, but

[Ruff_ilb]

Ah, but every vote on one of these babies is a vote for open source ;)

Re:That's great, but

[John Hasler]

You will have to vote for someone who will win or someone who will lose regardless, and your vote will not alter the result.

No matter who you vote for your vote has the same effect: it causes the candidate of your choice to receive one more vote than she would have otherwise. Except for small local elections where there is a significant chance of a one vote margin, the outcome will be exactly the same no matter what you do.

Re:That's great, but

[daemonc]

Ah, but once we finally have secure electronic voting, it will be much easier to implement instant runoff voting allowing you to vote for a republican, a democrat, AND someone who will lose, in the order of your preference.

Then we may end up with something resembling democracy...

Re:That's great, but

[boarder8925]

This is so much more insightful than funny. Or maybe it's funny because it's so insightful. The big result of a two-party system is that the two parties can lock out independent and "third-party" candidates with their muscle. At the same time, the two parties are pitting themselves against each other, masquerading as two truly different bodies of thought. The common people are thus led to believe that they are truly voting for change, reducing votes for "third-party" to a mere statement that you vote your mind.

God bless America, indeed.

Re:That's great, but

[mattwarden]

a democrat, or someone who will lose

Typical redundant /. comment.

Re:That's great, but

[Burning1]

What do you mean still? The choice used to be: Republican (republican,) Democrat (republican,) and 3rd party (russian rulette!)

Re:That's great, but

[jedo]

Hey mods. That's not funny. It's sad.

Re:That's great, but

[Anonymous Coward]

You consider Russ Feingold a republican. You are a moron.

Re:That's great, but

[aeoo]

Surely you mean republicrat and democan?

Re:That's great, but

[kbielefe]

Let me guess, you don't vote because you think your vote doesn't count. You make an interesting argument, but it is logically invalid and self defeating.

You should consider your vote as an aggregate of people who think as you do, rather than an individual vote. Don't make the mistake of assuming a bullet isn't dangerous because a single atom of lead isn't dangerous. People who voted for the loser in the last election are more likely to feel that their vote didn't count than those who voted for the winner. Therefore, statistically speaking, choosing not to vote because you feel your vote won't count is more likely to give an advantage to the person you don't want to win rather than have no effect at all on the outcome. That is completely counterintuitive on an individual basis. It only makes sense when you pull back and look at the big picture.

In addition, elected officials change their approach based on their perception of public opinion. Look at how democrats in congress changed their political tactics regarding the Iraq war after presidential approval plummeted last Fall. In an election, it is not only the majority vote that counts. The difference between a close race and a landslide is huge when you look at what actually gets accomplished after the election.

In short, your vote always counts even if it isn't obvious how. And you have nothing to lose except a few minutes of your time. Please always vote. Unless, of course, you're a democrat. Then I don't mind if you stay home ;-)

Re:That's great, but

[ArghBlarg]

It's not solely dependent on the number of dominant parties -- in Canada, we have 3 "traditional" (Conservatives, Liberal, NDP) parties and one separatist party (Bloc Qubecois) that, ridiculously, is allowed to be federal due to Quebec having such a large population -- with no candidates *anywhere* else.

So here we are, with *four* parties, an election coming up.. and the Green Party, which ran in *every* riding in the country, was not even allowed to be on the national televised debates. Even though they qualified for official party status with 4% (or as high as 6%, depending on the source) in the last election. They almost certainly have more of a right to be a *federal* party than the Bloc. So much for democracy.

The ability for new parties to challenge the established old boys' networks is dependent on multiple factors; The media, choosing to give parties exposure for their platforms (or not); and laws regarding the ability of smaller parties to get funding.

The media in Canada isn't much better than that in the US. I haven't heard *one* journalist with the guts to ask hard questions of a federal candidate in an interview, like asking them to sign an affadavit for all those promises they spout during the campaign. But then again, if you piss off the politicians, they won't agree to any interviews...

Sigh. Rant mode off

Re:That's great, but

[John Hasler]

> Let me guess, you don't vote because you think your vote doesn't
> count.

You guessed wrong. I'm arguing against those who say that you should only vote for major party candidates, because otherwise you are "wasting your vote".

> Please always vote.

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I decide.

> Unless, of course, you're a democrat. Then I don't mind if you
> stay home ;-)

In your terms, I'm a radical libertarian with anarchistic tendencies. From my point of view the differences between Republicans and Democrats is almost imperceptible.

BTW before you get all choked up about the wonders of democracy you might want to read up on Arrow's theorem.

Re:That's great, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny? It's sad.

Re:That's great, but

[MeltUp]

> Please always vote. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I decide.

Where I live (Belgium), we HAVE to vote. Well, we don't have to vote (you can vote blank), but we have to show up, and pretend we vote at the least ;) I wonder what effect that would have on the outcome of, for example, American elections...

Re:That's great, but

[jc42]

I'm arguing against those who say that you should only vote for major party candidates, because otherwise you are "wasting your vote".

I've found that a good reply to this is "No, voting for someone other than the best candidate is wasting your vote."

If you vote for a major-party candidate because your preferred third-party candidate "can't win", then you have truly been tricked into wasting your vote. And in the worst possible way: You not only gave your vote to a candidate you didn't want to win; you also added data to the idea that third-party candidates can't win.

Re:That's great, but

[kbielefe]

I forgot the first rule of posting to the Internet: someone will always take a joke seriously, even with an emoticon appended.

I am not so ignorant as to believe that everyone's political beliefs fit neatly into the boxes of republican or democrat. Nor am I so dogmatic as to ignore that those categories are applicable enough for most Americans, most of the time.

No one claims that democracy is perfect. It can't be unless people are homogenous. Almost everyone has an opinion on at least one issue which differs from the majority. A vote for a candidate is not an endorsement of his or her opinion on every single issue. It is merely an expression that one candidate's views are closest to yours on most of the issues that are most important to you.

I have never known a candidate to agree with me on every issue. That's why I don't restrict my voting to election day. My elected representatives regularly receive my opinion on all the current issues that are important to me.

The level of public support has a significant impact on the compromises in a bill, how moderates and sometimes minority party members vote, and if a bill even comes up for a vote in the first place. My former congressman once crossed party lines to cosponsor a bill I supported.

Another great example is the patriot act. A shift in public support not only enabled several moderating amendments to be passed so far -- due to efforts on both sides of the aisle that have received almost no media attention -- but also prompted a filibuster on a more moderate version of a bill that only had one nay vote in the senate 4 years ago. The end result will probably be that those portions of the patriot act will be renewed, but with even more amendments to make it a little more palatable to civil libertarians.

If you're a civil libertarian, your vote just counted for something, even if it wasn't as much as you originally hoped for. Choosing not to vote is your right, but there are unintended consequences for such a choice. No politician ever made a decision based on what a majority of non-voters believe, no matter how many +5 insightful comments those non-voters have in YRO.

Re:That's great, but

[pete-classic]

Penn Jillette is a genius.

-Peter

ABOUT GODDAMN TIME!

[Mattness]

Paper receipts should be a no brainer, as should be open source software for voting machines. Too bad this isn't occurring in every state, yet. Or is it? I am an ignorant person about this topic. Someone enlighten me.

Re:ABOUT GODDAMN TIME!

[SilverspurG]

will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source.

Likely, the moment the lobbyists get their move on this, open source will be redefined to be source code printed on punch cards submitted to the state archives under an NDA to be kept in a vault next to Hoffa's shoes and The Ring of Power.

The printed receipt is fine. Governments have known how to manipulate those for centuries.

Re:ABOUT GODDAMN TIME!

[General Fault]

Nor should a voting system require a multi-function operating system like windows nt. Really, do we need something with more power than nasa had 10 years ago just for the ++ op of voting? See the solution that India came up with. Cheap, simple, verifiable and easy to copy. Honestly, how many Mhz do you need to count a vote and how many MB do you need to store a tally?

Re:ABOUT GODDAMN TIME!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be careful with paper ballots because the voter might have been asked to show their vote to someone else after leaving the polling station (eg, they may have been coersced into voting a certain way in order to get a ride back to the senior center...)

Some electronic voting places require that this paper not leave the voting precinct. But some places have been very lax on that security detail.

As long as we have the code...

[Anonymous Coward]

... it does not matter what's used in the executable.

Thank you very much

[stevenm86]

This is exactly what people have been saying all along. It is not a good idea to trust the numbers that the machine keeps track of electronically somewhere. Some sort of paper trail is definitely a good idea. Even a simple line printer that sits in the back of the room somewhere, printing a short summary of every cast ballot would work because it provides a paper trail that can be verified by a human.
Question is, why aren't other states doing this?

Re:Thank you very much

[SatanicPuppy]

Eh. What if the machine changes every 50th vote, so it's wrong even in the paper trail?

Either the process needs to be wholly transparent and heavily audited, or we need to move back to paper. I just flat out do not trust these companys who make the machines. Every damn one of them is crooked.

Re:Thank you very much

[Pyrion]

Cost.

Re:Thank you very much

[Anonymous Coward]

"he machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine"

You are an idiot.

Unfortunately,

[Sheetrock]

There's also a provision that the voting machines be made out of cheddar.

Re:Unfortunately,

[Anonymous Coward]

What?! Such a blatantly cheesist act cannot be allowed. Just because cheddar is the most popular choice does not mean those who like other cheeses can be ignored. I, for one, refuse to use anything but a colby jack device.

We don't need to allow swiss though. Those people are just freaks.

Re:Unfortunately,

[everphilski]

Hell yea. And attended by milkmaids of German and Dutch descent.

-everphilski-

Re:Unfortunately,

[EvanED]

Just because cheddar is the most popular choice...

Not around here, sir. We don't get much call for it. Ilchester, however, is staggeringly popular in this manor.

Re:Unfortunately,

[Anonymous Coward]

Effect can also be used as a noun as in:

The demolition of the wall was effected by the detonation of a charge of dynamite.

See AskOxford. In this example, we mean that the detontation of the charge brought about the demolition of the wall.

Uh oh! I see the next calamity approaching!

[mister_llah]

So instead of people who can't figure out how to punch the proper hole, now we'll have people pushing the wrong button, accidentely pushing the "Are you sure?" prompt's "OK" ....

Oh wait, whew, Wisconsin, not Florida...

Re:Uh oh! I see the next calamity approaching!

[sucker_muts]

This one?
Link.

Re:Uh oh! I see the next calamity approaching!

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck ebaums

This is amazing

[TubeSteak]

Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used.

This isn't like North Carolina requiring that the source be placed in escrow, they're actually requiring it be available to the public.

I can't wait to see what http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ has to say about this one.

It means they won't have to jump through fucking hoops just to test the machine (like in California)

Re: This is amazing

[Black Parrot]

> This isn't like North Carolina requiring that the source be placed in escrow, they're actually requiring it be available to the public.

Though it won't make much difference if they also decide to ignore the new law when no vendors offer anything compliant.

Re: This is amazing

[John Hasler]

> Though it won't make much difference if they also decide to ignore
> the new law when no vendors offer anything compliant.

If they try that I abso-fucking-lutely guarantee that they will find themselves in court if I have to sue them myself and go pro se.

Re: This is amazing

[dangitman]

Though it won't make much difference if they also decide to ignore the new law when no vendors offer anything compliant.

I don't get it. What happened to capitalism and the desire for profit? Surely, this market is wide open. It's an extremely lucrative market, and the established players now have a reputation for being incompetent crooks.

Someone can start a new company and tout it as making the best hardware for electronic voting, and having a company mission that insists all software development be Open Source, and all hardware meets strict security requirements.

So, why isn't this happening? Heck, why isn't some enterprising slashdotter doing it? This would be so easy to make money with, yet people still start businesses founded on much less probable business models.

Re: This is amazing

[shadowbearer]

Then they just may have to do it themselves. That *is* the real strength of open source, isn't it? That they CAN?

SB

Re:This is amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article moron! This isn't "open source", the code is placed in escrow!

Oh yeah...the code IS NOT and WILL NOT be available to the public! Sheesh...do any of you live in reality? How can you possibly read an article and post the exact opposite of what it says as true?

Doesn't precude bar codes

[justanyone]

There seems to be (happily) no preclusion of printing bar codes indicating the choices underneath the names of the candidates. This should allow for rapid and accurate scanning and counting. Ballots can be verified by hand or other (possibly 3rd party) means to prove that the bar codes equal the name on the ballot.

This will speed up and make more accurate the counting vs. OCR of the candidates' names.

Re:Doesn't precude bar codes

[shawn(at)fsu]

Um damn it for the first time in my life (on /. anyway) i'm putting in my tinfoil hat. If you rely on barcodes how are you going to know the barcode corrosponds to your candiate of choice. What if they use candidate 1's bar code for both canidates? What about write ins?

Re:Doesn't precude bar codes

[skiflyer]

Given the common source (or limited sources) for the printing plus the very small number of possible choices (write-ins can be handled separately), OCR could easily be done just as fast as a barcodeon this sample.

Re:Doesn't precude bar codes

[2short]

What are you taking about? OCR of the candidates name? Where in the process would you possibly OCR the candidates name? The thing that needs to be scanned quickly and accurately (for paper ballots) is what box is filled in. You know what name is next to the box because you printed the ballot in the first place.

Re:Doesn't precude bar codes

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not, but when a recount happens and the name doesn't match the barcode, somebody goes to jail.

Re:Doesn't precude bar codes

[DavidTC]

Uh, no.

What needs to happen is that the ballot (Yes, the piece of paper is the ballot, not a receipt, and the memory in the computer is just a fast way of adding it up.) has predefined blank areas on it.

The computer prints OCRable text on there indicating the person voted for.

We don't need damn 'check boxes' or whatever. It is trivially possible to print text that human beings and computers can both read, especially when the selection is so limited and the positioning exactly controlled.

At least, it's possible after we line up all the people trying to sell us blatantly hackable electronic voting systems and have them executed for treason.

Machine *and* Final counter ?

[PHOOsun]

So the machine I/O will be avalible for examination ?

What about making the whole system from there through to the final count automated ?

Or is it still going to need a few recounts to be seen to be "fair"

making humans do the work of computers is silly!

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems to be one step in the right direction hopefully they can avoid legal fiascos this way but does making it open source really help if the software is already reviewed? I suppose it cant hurt.

diebold

[Anonymous Coward]

Diebold is getting right on this... : p

Nonsense

[bheading]

It hardly matters if it is open source. Who will compile it before it is uploaded to the machine ? Who will check that the correct software is loaded ? Who will check the guy doing the checking ?

Automated vote counting of any kind - electronic or mechanical - makes fraud considerably easier, puts a mystery shroud around the counting process and as such is incompatible with democracy. In the UK we count all the votes in our elections within 12 hours including the odd recount. Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?

Re:Nonsense

[Whafro]

the board of elections in your local municipality (depending on state, etc) is responsible for choosing the machines and the software. These are either elected officials or are appointed by elected officials, and therefore responsible for representing your interests.

The Board of Elections is responsible for ensuring that the correct software is loaded, and you, as a voter, will check the Board of Elections.

Elections don't just happen, they are overseen by people you put there, directly or indirectly.

The open source element just ensures that even if the Board of Elections has no idea about what the computer code is actually doing, that the greater community will be able to make that check and balance.

With a punch card or even a mechanical voting machine, you can see and understand how it works. By making the code for these machines open source, that same consumer/voter check and balance is being provided-- or, at least, that's the idea.

This does not address the other tampering that can happen. If you want to ensure that your elections are clean and untampered, then make sure you pay attention next time your local board of elections is up for appointment or election.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

You could say the essence of Democracy is choosing if we want those systems or not. Electronic voting does not necessarily dilute democracy any more than hand counting does. There are provisions to make sure hand counting produces accurate results, similar provisions can apply to machines. Granted, there is always the factor of human error even when machines are doing the counting and there is the occasional faulty machine. I think the point of making it open source is one step towards eliminating some of those errors. You'll never have a perfect system but you can continue to keep troubleshooting your system so everyone is satisfied.

Re:Nonsense

[killmenow]

Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?

Shhh! It's easier to control the populace this way. Now shut up!

Re:Nonsense

[IANAAC]

Automated vote counting of any kind - electronic or mechanical - makes fraud considerably easier, puts a mystery shroud around the counting process and as such is incompatible with democracy. In the UK we count all the votes in our elections within 12 hours including the odd recount. Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?

I don't disagree with you at all. I will, however, add that the difference in population size may have something to do with the US wanting to automate things.

I'm also unfamiliar with the UKs various measures et al that are put to a vote. In the US, a RIDICULOUS number of things are put to ballot.

Re:Nonsense

[bheading]

the board of elections in your local municipality (depending on state, etc) is responsible for choosing the machines and the software. These are either elected officials or are appointed by elected officials, and therefore responsible for representing your interests.

Presumably they're elected in a vote which will be counted by one of the electronic machines they've bought ? What makes you convinced that corruption or (more realistically) incompetence cannot interfere with the result of an election ? Do you think your elected representatives would have the skills to, say, recompile code or get checksums to confirm that the correct load had been installed, and that no tampering had taken place ?

Elections don't just happen, they are overseen by people you put there, directly or indirectly.

You're talking as if elected representatives are infallible and incorruptible. They aren't.

In the UK, if I am a candidate in an election I can watch each vote being counted, right there in the countroom. I don't have to trust a bureaucrat who doesn't know what he is doing to make sure the count is done properly. Because I can see the votes, and they are not hidden in the bowels of a machine or of a computer, I can be personally assured that no attempt has been made to disenfranchise my voters. How can you even begin to provide that guarantee with automated vote counting ?

With a punch card or even a mechanical voting machine, you can see and understand how it works.

I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work, and how people got confused or thrown off by their poor understanding of how it DID work. Through what may be deliberate fiddling, or more likely incompetence, the ballot paper in parts of Florida made it potentially unclear to some people who they were voting for, and unclear to those counting the votes who the voter had actually voted for. That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.

Re:Nonsense

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

...and what if the hardware is hacked? Detecting this would be much harder than checking on the code, which could be verified by checksum.

Re:Nonsense

[bheading]

You could say the essence of Democracy is choosing if we want those systems or not.

A purely philosophical argument. Is democracy choosing whether we want democracy or not ?

Electronic voting does not necessarily dilute democracy any more than hand counting does.

Yes it does, precisely because no-one, other than the experts who are familiar with the machine's operation, can be reasonably sure about what way they votes were counted. Even the experts cannot be sure that the votes were recorded correctly (come up with a way to retrospectively prove that an anonymous elector voted for a particular candidate while maintaining anonymity and you'll be rich for the rest of your life).

There are provisions to make sure hand counting produces accurate results, similar provisions can apply to machines.

Explain to me how I can prove that during the course of a day, votes for a candidate by anonymous voters were correctly recorded. With a paper ballot I've got the sheets of paper, right here in my hand, and everyone can see what was scrawled on them by the voter. With an electronic ballot I've got a recording made by a computer, which due either to tampering, software bugs, data corruption or other electronic failure, may or may not match what the voter actually entered. How can you get around this very serious obstacle ?

Granted, there is always the factor of human error even when machines are doing the counting and there is the occasional faulty machine.

How can the error rate of electronic vote-counting machines ever be measured ? You can measure it in a test scenario, but not in a production scenario.

Re:Nonsense

[bheading]

Indeed. Recall Brian Kernighan's famed Trojan Horse speech.

Re:Nonsense

[skiflyer]

With an electronic ballot I've got a recording made by a computer, which due either to tampering, software bugs, data corruption or other electronic failure, may or may not match what the voter actually entered. How can you get around this very serious obstacle ?

Have it print out a paper ballot which the voter can verify, and then drop in a box. Now, at the end of the day, you have the computers word, and you have the paper ballots you can verify against... all done. This also answers your question about the error rate being measured.

And yes, this has its short comings, but no more so than any other system which has a paper ballot or an electronic ballot... in fact, it has the intersection of the two, which is getting pretty small.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak authoritatively for the UK, but I'm pretty sure it is quite similar to our situation in Canada (our system was modelled after the UK, after all), where we are usually voting on a single question ("Which one candidate has your one vote in your riding?") My understanding is that it's the number of ballot questions in the US which necessitate some form of automatic counting. (Incidentally, we Canadians like to be all smug that, while our voter turnout is low, it's still higher than in the US. To that, I would point out that while in Canada, sure, roughly 60% of us are willing to check a single box, more than 50% of Americans seem to be willing to fill out a freaking lengthy questionnaire. If we had a bunch of ballot questions, I wouldn't be surprised if our turnout would drop even lower. Of course, we also have four parties in parliament, covering a broader spectrum of public opinion, but that's an entirely different point.)

The population question is irrelevant, I think. The larger your population, the larger your pool of volunteers available for counting. In general, counting ballots in a Canadian election seems to take about as long as in UK elections, usually with a good level of certainty of seat counts by midnight, and everything completely counted by the following morning. This, in spite of the fact that they have twice our population (and a little more than twice the number of seats in parliament). (Though I was confused about the results from Northern Ireland coming in a day later in the last UK election. If anyone from the UK could explain why that happens, I'd appreciate it.)

Re:Nonsense

[servognome]

That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.

Because it doesn't change the problem with the idiots. The ones who only put a "/" instead of an "X", does that mean they meant to vote for the candidate, or did they start and change their mind halfway through? (hanging/dimpled chad type problem) or the ones who thought "X" meant they didn't want that candidate, or the ones who just circle the candidate

Re:Nonsense

[AeroIllini]

I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work, and how people got confused or thrown off by their poor understanding of how it DID work. Through what may be deliberate fiddling, or more likely incompetence, the ballot paper in parts of Florida made it potentially unclear to some people who they were voting for, and unclear to those counting the votes who the voter had actually voted for. That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.

I agree with you whole-heartedly, but there are several factors keeping things from being that simple.

The ballots here in the US usually contain a huge number of elections. In the last presidential election, we were asked not only to vote for the president, but also for congressmen, judges, city councilmen, county board members, and other various municipal elected officials, not to mention the three to five different local resolutions on each ballot. The butterfly ballot system (which became famous in Florida in 2000 for the Pat Buchanan situation) is simply a way to condense a large amount of information in an anonymous way onto a small ballot card. These things are literally books, usually with ten or more pages of elections to vote for. It's not a perfect system, certainly, but putting all the same information on a single sheet of paper with room for marking a candidate, clearly delimiting the various elections taking place, allowing for instructions in both English and Spanish, and making the text large enough to read makes for a rather large sheet of paper. And asking people to read candidates off one sheet and mark their choice on another sheet creates all the same confusion and problems people had with the butterfly ballots.

I think our best bet in the US for paper ballots is to create printed booklets with instructions and a single election on each page. The actual listed candidates and boxes for marking a vote would be contained on a perforated sheet like a coupon, which the voter rips out and stuffs in the ballot box. The voter would keep the booklet after voting. The creation of these booklets could be automated without much fuss; each municipality could retrieve their booklets as a PDF file and have them printed and stapled before the election. It's not like ballots are secret until the day of the election.

But truly, in any voting system, accuracy boils down to the skill of the people recording the votes. In paper voting, that means the people counting, the people recording the votes, the people calling in the numbers to state headquarters, and the people assisting voters with questions. In computerized voting, that means the people who designed and built the hardware, the people who wrote the firmware, the people who wrote the software, and the people in charge of the networks doing the reporting to a central agency. Mistakes will be made, and recounts will happen. If automation does not help fix the mistakes that are made, and in fact creates many more problems, then it is not worth the trouble.

Re:Nonsense

[theodicey]

Mostly because of the disabled lobby. Various disability-rights groups got in bed with profiteering election-machine companies, and through lobbying encouraged the federal goverment to pass the porkfilled HAVA (Help America Vote Act of 2002).

Also, we have hundreds of permanent elections officials around who have nothing to do outside of election season, and far too much to do during elections. To fill up their time before elections, and reduce their workload during elections, they *love* the technology.

Re:Nonsense

[mattwarden]

Would some kind of binary signing/checksumming help in this regard?

Re:Nonsense

[deblau]

In the UK we count all the votes in our elections within 12 hours including the odd recount. Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?

United Kingdom -- Population: 60,441,457
United States -- Population: 295,734,134

Re:Nonsense

[mihalis]

Recall Brian Kernighan's famed Trojan Horse speech.

Are you referring to this? That was Ken Thompson.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?

It's getting harder and harder to get the Mexicans to do our boring work

Re:Nonsense

[asr_man]

In the UK we count all the votes... Why are Americans obsessed with diluting their democracy by using machines to do it ?

We think it's more efficient than using networked cameras to enforce behavior.

Re:Nonsense

[DoorFrame]

The ballot questions can be great fun. In Massachusetts a few years ago a ballot question almost overturned the entire concept of a state income tax. Most of the time, however, the ballot question is a non-binding question as to whether we like pot or not. I'm very tired of answering that question.

Re:Nonsense

[DavidTC]

In the UK, if I am a candidate in an election I can watch each vote being counted, right there in the countroom. I don't have to trust a bureaucrat who doesn't know what he is doing to make sure the count is done properly. Because I can see the votes, and they are not hidden in the bowels of a machine or of a computer, I can be personally assured that no attempt has been made to disenfranchise my voters. How can you even begin to provide that guarantee with automated vote counting ?

I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work

Well, there's your confusion. You think this is some sort of idiotic mistake.

It is not a mistake, it is not poor implimentation, it is not money-grubbing company putting profit ahead of reliablity.

It is delibrate, it is designed to make elections stealable. It has always been designed as such. There has never been any other reason to promote elections we have no record of except what a computer says.

Courts have blatantly ignored abuses. Election officials have blatantly ignored courts. Machines have been certified in blatant disregard of laws.

You think we're in crisis because our President thinks he can secretly break the law when we're at war? No. We've been in a damn constitutional crisis for a long time because of eletronic voting machines deciding elections.

It has literally taken us six years to straighten this whole mess out, and instead of lining the goddamn traitors up and shooting them, we're apparently going to say 'Hey, wait, you need to make these machines better.'. Every. Single. One. of those companies should get the corporate death penalty, and charges should be filed against company officials who helped subvert the election process.

Re:Nonsense

[DavidTC]

No one would have the slightest problem with that method. Everyone agrees that is the best method.

Except, apparently, companies providing the machines.

Re:Nonsense

[vidarh]

At least you don't have the Monster Raving Loony Party on your ballots. (Yes, they do actually contest the odd seat here in the UK every election...)

Re:Nonsense

[darkat]

Automated vote counting of any kind - electronic or mechanical - makes fraud considerably easier, puts a mystery shroud around the counting process and as such is incompatible with democracy

Agreed! There is a guy in Italy (we are, unfortunately, about to test the electronic vote in April) that set up a very interesting and detailed site about the incompatibility between electronig voting and democracy. Please take a look here

http://www.electronic-vote.org/

The site is worth a visit.

Re:Nonsense

[regen]

Which is why the human readible paper ballot is the ultimate record of the vote. If the machine tallies the vote incorrectly, but the voter's paper ballot is correct, the machine tallies can be detected and the machine tallies discarded.

Re:Nonsense

[bheading]

No one would have the slightest problem with that method. Everyone agrees that is the best method.

No it isn't, people who think that do not understand the issue here, which is that we cannot verify what the computer recorded retrospectively. There is no way to say whether the computer correctly recorded the vote accepted - even if it manages to print this vote out correctly.

Think about it. Why print a record in the first place - because you don't want to trust the machine, right ? So, if you don't trust the machine then why are you using it to begin with, rather than merely using the paper copy ?

I bet if this were the scenario and someone were to go to court over it, it would be found that the fact the paper printout exists constitutes an admission that the electronic machine's counting is not verifiably correct, and the result of any given election counted electronically could therefore be ruled void. How could you argue against that in court ? I suspect that is the real reason why the voting machine companies do not want to print paper records out.

Electronic vote counting cannot work in a way that is compatible with proper, accountable democracy folks. The sooner you guys understand that fact the better.

Re:Nonsense

[bheading]

Specious argument. If you have a larger population, then you have a larger number of staff to count all of the votes so that they are still counted just as quickly. Just like you have a larger number of shopkeepers to run your shops, a larger number of gas stations to fill your cars at, etc.

The USA could quite easily hand-count the results of a presidential election.

On the other hand I do concede that at some of these polls you guys are voting to fill 20 or so different offices. Even so, I'd still say an accurate and accountable count is more important than a quick one.

In Ireland there are only ~4 million people but votes are counted in about the same length of time as in the UK. That said, it is an STV system so there's a bit more work involved.

Re:Nonsense

[DavidTC]

No it isn't, people who think that do not understand the issue here, which is that we cannot verify what the computer recorded retrospectively. There is no way to say whether the computer correctly recorded the vote accepted - even if it manages to print this vote out correctly.

Erm, huh? There certainly is a way to verify the vote sit recorded. You count the printed ballots, and you count what the computer recorded. If they are the same, than the machine recorded them right.

People who think that would be the most logical way to do 'electronic' voting do, indeed, understand that computers cannot be trusted. That is the whole damn point of the paper.

And, yes, in any court, paper that was looked at by the person would be more trusted than an electronic record, and that, too, is the damn point of the paper. That's why I call the printout the 'ballot', and the electronic thing the 'record' of the ballot, and I suspect why the person I responded to also did that. The computer prints a ballot that contains only the names of the people you voted for, in nice, computer-readable type, so there's no question about who you voted for.

It solves every single existing problem with ballots, and it solves the new problems that electronic voting companies are trying to create so they can manipulate the vote. (1) And, on top of that, it lets you get early returns that should be trustworthy. (Although considering how fucked up the results of some voting machines have been, who knows?)

Before you start attacking people, maybe you should read what us 'you guys' actually say. We know exactly what you are talking about, and agree exactly with you.

1) Is this statement of fact too harsh for some people here? You say we can't just assume they want the power to manipulate the vote, and that all the proven abuses, the lies, the questionable elections aren't enough? Well, fuck you, pick a side, and stop making excuses for them. You're like one of those women who keeps 'falling down the stairs' and 'running into doors'. Read blackboxvoting.org and get a clue.

as long as the fraud is in electronic voting

[Anonymous Coward]

the competing non-fraudulent technology will have to be electronic.

it's how the human brain works. electronic is seen as the next step.
so the good guys have to be electronic too.

if people try a completely different route, that entire class of technology is going to be ignored.

it's idiotic but true.

PAPER RECEIPTS ARE BAD!

[justanyone]

There are two meanings for "paper receipts":
1. paper ballot which is the actual ballot, kept by the county clerk / election officials;
2. paper receipt, kept by the voter, proving they've voted and indicating who they voted for.

The latter concept is VERY BAD. It would encourage the ability of someone to buy an election by paying money or favors to someone in exchange for their receipt proving they voted for someone in particular.

This is the reason we have secret ballots - to make vote-buying quite difficult if not impossible.

Paper Trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't voting supposed to be anynomous for those who wish so?

non-american heratic :-)

buried in the legalese

[revery]

the bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.

Of course buried in the legalese was the rest of the bill:

The vote-tallying software shall be closed source and shall be owned in whole by Diebold. As such, the printed ballot shown to elector may have no bearing on actual vote recorded. Names may be substituted based on (1) party of candidate (2) intelligence of choice (3) corruption in district (4) time of day (5) OR if you live in Palm Beach or Broward County, pure whimsy. Additionally, elector may be fined or audited based on vote case, or in extreme cases, placed on the National Do-Not-Fly list and scheduled for investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.

To what extent?

[dtfinch]

Will the BIOS and firmware also have to be open source? Maybe this move will give some hardware manufacturers an incentive to start providing this.

Re:To what extent?

[John Hasler]

First, the law does not require "open source". It requires that the software be availble for voters to read and test. Not the same thing at all. Second, what part of "the software" don't you understand? And why would a voting machine have a BIOS at all? And why would it have anything other than firmware? Do you expect them to use desktop pcs for this?

Sing it!

[PMuse]

Hallelujah!

(The above is not to be construed as an endorsement of any particular religion, or religion in general.)

Re:Sing it!

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong

Re:Sing it!

[PMuse]

Some one seems to be irony-impaired.

Things are moving along...

[Anonymous Coward]

Once we have a reliable computer voting system politicians will become redundant. Instead of voting for a president we can vote AS presidents (and senators, and representatives, and mayors, and so on). I have a friend who strongly believes the USA will become the first true democracy by voting itself as such in the 2012 elections....with all that has been happening, I think he might be right.

Yeah, for Verifiable Vote Fraud

[lax-goalie]

Sorry, "paper receipt" is just a bad idea, despite how popular it is among some. Here's the next step: the paper receipt goes to a party boss so you can collect the payment for your vote, or to your boss or union rep to prove you voted the "right" way so you can keep your job.

Flame me if you want, but I've been a candidate, so I have a vested interest in the issue. As long as the machine doesn't say "Diebold", I'd rather take a chance on some totally improbable conspiracy to rig electronic ballots. That's way less risky than a return to old party machine politics.

Re:Yeah, for Verifiable Vote Fraud

[Infernal Device]

That's way less risky than a return to old party machine politics.

In the old days, getting elected was all about who had the most money to pay off voters. Now, it's about who has the most money to pay for media. At least under the old system, the voters got something besides good intentions and empty promises.

Re:Yeah, for Verifiable Vote Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you miss the point...

The voter votes,and the computer prints out a receipt. The computer themn prompts the voter - "Do these look right to you?" If no, then re-vote.

If yes, the system tallies the vote, thanks them and instructs them to place the printed copy of their ballot in a box - just like with a regular ballot.

If at some point officials think there is any sort of problem with the voting software, they still have a verified copy of who the voter voted for.

Re:Yeah, for Verifiable Vote Fraud

[Lifewish]

They're not saying that the voter gets given a copy, they're saying that a copy gets stuck in a box so that in an emergency the total can be double-checked. Basically the only reason they're not calling these bits of paper the ballots is that you can only have one ballot and that's the signal inside the computer. Best of both worlds - fast effortless counting that you can double-check in an emergency.

Sounds great ...

[SengirV]

... provided we stop all the dead from voting Democratic as well.

Re:Sounds great ...

[Anonymous Coward]

They just make up for the minority citizens who couldn't vote because of the lack of voting machines, thugs at the door, etc.

Re:Sounds great ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I thought that was made up for by all the illegal aliens casting ballots and the people driving up the East Coast to cast ballots in multiple jurisdictions.

Still not that great

[Eli Gottlieb]

What would really be nice for secure voting would be a system of encrypted voting. Everyone writes their vote to a small disk or USB dongle twice: once cleartext, once encrypted with a public key. On Election Day the dongle is plugged into the open-source voting machine, which increments the vote-count of the appropriate candidate based on the cleartext version and associates the encrypted vote in a database with the voter's identity.

If at any point the vote needs to be verified or the voter contests the way their vote was registered said voter simply decrypts their encrypted vote with the necessary private key. Doing so violates the principle of the secret ballot, but unfortunately that's what must be done in order to verify that a vote was registered correctly, unless you simply run the election over again.

Re:Still not that great

[Eli Gottlieb]

If I may correct myself, using public key cryptography would allow vote tampering in this case. A single, private key should be used.

Re:Still not that great

[EvanED]

Doing so violates the principle of the secret ballot, but unfortunately that's what must be done in order to verify that a vote was registered correctly, unless you simply run the election over again.

IMO, a non-secret ballot is worse than a system in which direct, vote-manipulating fraud is easier.

Re:Still not that great

[John Hasler]

> What would really be nice for secure voting would be a system of
> encrypted voting.

It is not sufficient for a system of voting to be secure. It must also be able to be seen to be secure by an ordinary citizen. Paper ballots meet both requirements. No computerized system does.

Re:Still not that great

[Eli Gottlieb]

So what if the voting machine changes my vote to be for George W. Bush and then prints out that tampered version on paper, when in fact I voted for Dennis Kucinich?

Re:Still not that great

[John Hasler]

I don't understand your question. What voting machine?

Re:Still not that great

[insertwackynamehere]

keep in mind a lot of the country probably would have no idea what you're talking about or how to do what you're talking about or even have the tools to do what you're talking about :P its a good idea but a lot of people don't have computers or the know-how to even use new software without a lot of learning. i know, we're all slashdottians (or whatever :P) here, but I barely believe the number of times I have to help a friend do something I consider mind-bogglingly trivial. I know its cliche, but its true, there are still people who honestly have no idea where to begin when it comes to computers and are more likely to not even attempt anything that involves them. also, money comes into play, sure, cds and floppies are cheap (assuming they'd support that and not just USB stuff which would definatly never fly) but people arent gonna pay to vote on general priniciple for the most part, and legally they shouldn't have to either.

Re:Still not that great

[Eli Gottlieb]

So you prefer paper ballots that are filled out, copied so the voter can verify later, and then dropped into a little box?

Re:Still not that great

[uncqual]

The voter could be given a receipt which contains, in encrypted text, their selections and their id (perhaps their voter registration number or perhaps their name and address). A clear-text "ballot id" would also be printed on the receipt. (A "voter key" would also be included - see below).

The voting system would also store an electronic copy of the encrypted receipt along with a fragment of the encryption key ("registrar key" below) in a "receipt database" indexed by ballot id. The receipt field in the receipt database would further be encrypted with a public key to which only a few trusted "ballot verifiers" (perhaps a panel of federal or state judges) have the private key (and even this key may be split among the panel so "m-of-n" panel members are required to construct the entire key).

Three keys would be combined to encrypt the receipt:

One unique random key ("voter key") printed on the receipt and stored NOWHERE else.

One unique random key ("registrar key") stored ONLY in the ballot record in the "ballot record" database in the voting system and not revealed to the voter.

A user supplied password ("voter password") which the voter is responsible for generating and remembering and which is not stored anywhere by the system (yes, we know, users will probably write it on a sticky note on their dashboard).

If a voter wanted to verify that their vote was recorded correctly, they would go to the "ballot verifier" panel and the following would happen:

Your photo id would be checked and verified by the panel.

You would provide a copy of your receipt to the panel.

You would enter your "voter password" into a terminal in a secure private room.

The panel (or a fraction thereof) would, in a private room, enter the "voter key" from your receipt.

The panel (or a fraction thereof) would, in a private room, enter their private key to decrypt the "receipt database" record corresponding to your vote.

The receipt field for your ballot would then be decrypted with the "voter key" (from the receipt), the "registrar key" (stored in the record itself), and the "voter password" (entered above by the voter).

The panel would then be allowed to view the "voter id" portion of the record and accept that it matches who your id says you are (if not, you'd probably be investigated for a federal voting rights crime since you're trying to infringe on the "secret ballot").

Assuming the id check passed, you (but not the panel unless you request it) would be allowed to view the decrypted receipt AND the actual vote recorded in conjunction with this ballot. If there is a mismatch, obviously it would become a matter for serious investigation and possible prosecution -- which may require the approval of the voter to reveal their decrypted vote for the purposes of evidence.

This seems to cover everything to prevent vote buying/coercion while still allowing complete verification that ones vote was counted correctly AND moves the verification process (hopefully) to a higher level (the ballot verifier panels should, as a matter of public policy, be distant from the local voting boards - probably state or federal level).

Re:Still not that great

[John Hasler]

When I say paper ballot I mean paper ballot. Computer-printed ballots are something else, though certainly preferable to purely electronic systems.

Where did the "copied so the voter can verify later" part come from, though?

Democracy run amok!

[second class skygod]

They're acting as if they want to avoid rampant abuse and fraud. While it sounds great, I don't think America is ready for such a radical notion.

-- scsg

Re:Democracy run amok!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont you fret, I doubt there will ever be an election where America will avoid a law suit or scandal with regards to the voting system

The greatest democracy?

[jaclu]

Carma burning time ;)

I find it somewhat amusing that the country that brags to the world that they are such a great democracy, are having such a hard time to perform something as basic and simple as a vote without the citizens suspecting foul play and cheating all the time...

Isnt it some kind of generel error with a system when the major issue is not what to vote on, but if the voting process wasn't rigged?

Of course its good that the citicens can keep control on the elections, but why not just handle it like most of the rest of the "democratic" world, vote with paper notes, and have a public count for each election-locale where representatives from all parties who wants, can monitor the counting process.

That way there cant be any suspicions of rigged results - everything is public, and nobody can cheat.

Somehow I realy dont see the point in making elections electronic, since all machine-stored results is based on a chain of trust, since that trust doesnt exist, why not stick to paper?

Re:The greatest democracy?

[jollyroger1210]

Hey, the Romans in Sparta had no problems with just using beans. The only way to cheat was to knock ove the basket/jar with the beans in it, hoping to knock out a few of the oponents beans. Thus, the term "don't spill the beans".

Re:The greatest democracy?

[SilentOne]

The Romans in Sparta?

Re:The greatest democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget it, He's rolling

Re:The greatest democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Key thing to remember with democracy in America is the topic of problems with the voting process doesnt come up until after nearly everyone has cast their ballot. In our great democracy the main topic usually revolves around which candidate has the whitest teeth or which one slept with the most women.

You say machines rely on a chain of trust but so does any method of hand counting ballots (natural human error). In fact, democracy is a chain of trust....we trust that the person we voted for will provide what they promised, what's to say they'll do the opposite but our faith in other people of power who got there via trust.

Re:The greatest democracy?

[jaclu]

"You say machines rely on a chain of trust but so does any method of hand counting ballots (natural human error)."

Maybe I wasnt clear on this, what I ment was that with machines the chain of trust is more subtle. You have to trust that the compiled program actually running is compiled from authentic sourcecode and is not manipulated.

With manual (public) counting, its still a trust part, but if each party can have representation in the counting process, at least I assume that they keep an eye on each other - a sort of self stabilizing situation.

You empty the box on a big table, all representatives sit around the table
then start sorting the votes after content.

If you have 300 notes with "party A" and 480 notes with "party B" its easy to do a recount if somebody wouldnt agree with the first count.

If the sum doesnt add up with the number of cast votes for that district, that districtsvote is declared void and that district does a re-election

When everybody is sattisfied, report the result up one level, repeat until ypu have a grand national total.

At least that is how we do it in Sweden, seems to work for us.

Re:The greatest democracy?

[R3d M3rcury]

Population of Sweden: 9,001,774
Population of United States: 295,734,134

Some ideas don't scale.

What about ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The article states that "any device used". To me that implies that each county is responsible for deciding which machine they use. Is the state making sure that any system used also uses a standarized format for the results?

Also, just because you publish some source, that is no guarantee that that was the source that went into creating the binaries that are being executed. Are they going to use a mechanism to verify that a vendor publishes the exact source? Are they going to force vendors to react to bugs found within a specific timeframe. After all, someone examining the source could find a problem and potentially use it as an exploit, this usually isn't an issue because you're banking on someone else also finding the problem and being open/honest about it, but for something like voting, is that good enough? It seems like a lot of focus is being given to it being open source, but is ignoring other software deployment issues.

Federal Mandate Time

[Kefaa]

Can someone explain why we can standardize street signs and the amount of sugar allowed in school lunches but we cannot get a standardized election system?

After the 2000 election debacle, we had money thrown at the states to "fix the problem." So we ended up with 35 different solutions.

A simple federal mandate - the voter must be verifiable, their vote must be able to be able to be authenticated after they leave the booth, in the event of a recount and the system can be fully audited. Instead, we have systems with no paper trails, questionable vendor operations, and seemingly contradictory election results.

We can make millions of secure stock sales, bank transfers and on-line purchases daily, and we cannot get a vote counted and auditable? The people who produced these machines should be fired for stupidity and forced to return our money.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[User 956]

After the 2000 election debacle, we had money thrown at the states to "fix the problem." So we ended up with 35 different solutions.

Only 35 solutions? I'm pretty sure we have more states than that... Are you using wikipedia for reference again?

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[Tankko]

The problem with being able to verify your vote after leaving the booth is that it opens up a wide range of "buying votes" issues. Currently, if I pay you to vote for "bob", there is no way I can know for sure that you voted for "bob", I just have to take your word for it. Now, if there is a verifiable paper trail after you leave, all I have to do is show you that I did vote for "bob".

Plus, imaging a business or club or union that what's proof of their employees or members voting for "their" candidate. or imagine of overly abusive spouse that wants proof that their partner voted for the "right candidate". Sad to say, but by Grandparents were like this. My controlling grandfather told my grandmother who to vote for. I have no doubt that she did what she wanted once in that booth, but if there was a way for her to prove who she voted for...her one act of defiance would be lost.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[Starker_Kull]

I agree that the present generation of electronic voting machines are crap. The idea of federally mandated standards, In theory, is a great idea. In reality, our federal government has little interest in an accurate vote tally presently - I'm not saying they ARE, WERE or ARE NOT, or WERE NOT interested in vote manipulation - this is not meant as a Troll. I am simply saying that cleaning up the messy details of governing (good governance) is just not interesting or a priority for the present administration.

This is an example where states' rights are quite vital. Rather than being hamstrung by the Feds, different experiments by different states may finally result in a very good solution, which may ultimately be made nationwide.

Remember, if the Federal government could mandate how states are supposed to count their votes, they could say all states must use present Diebold machines. Wouldn't that be lovely?

As for why stock sales, bank transfers and on-line purchaces occur so regularly and reliably, remember there is money to be made in those. There is no money in insuring an accurate and verified tamper-proof vote count, a fact Thomas Edison discovered when he applied for his very first patent. It was on a fast and accurate voting machine. Nobody wanted them; it was a commercial disaster. Pols liked the slow counts, because they could campain at the last minute in "weak" districts (or recruit bosses to get out the troops to vote), not to mention many more opportunites for ballot stuffing, bribery, and general corruption. Not much has changed....

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[vidarh]

It is sufficient that the "verifiable voter trail" consists of an anonymous piece of paper stating your votes, that immediately gets put into a sealed ballot box together with everyone elses votes. As long as you have seen and confirmed that the paper shows the same vote you entered in the machine, and the ballot box gets sealed in front of independent witnesses and is reasonably tamper resistant, you have a verifiable voter trail. There is no need to be able to track a vote back to an individual, and indeed it shouldn't be possible for just the reasons you mentioned.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[dangitman]

Can someone explain why we can standardize street signs and the amount of sugar allowed in school lunches but we cannot get a standardized election system?

Because that would mean fairer elections that are more difficult to manipulate. I find it interesting that during the 2000 debate over going to electronic voting, the most experiences geeks and technophiles tended to favor paper ballots, and were suspicious of electronic voting. While the naive people who didn't know a lot about technology were saying "Electronic voting is the future! Humans make mistakes! Paper is bad!" without really thinking about it.

Of course, there were a few self-styled geeks who thought electronic voting would be simple to implement - but they were usually pretty inexperienced and caught up in "dotcom" and "direct democracy" hype.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[aaronl]

You can have a Federally standardized voting procedure because the method of voting is constitutionally left up to the States. We had to get an amendment to insure than every 18 year old could vote, but nothing stops a state from allowing a 14 year old to vote; this is because States control the election process. If you didn't like this, it could be changed corruptly through using the threat of revocation of Federal monies, or properly, by a constitional amendment.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[MoneyT]

Can someone explain why we can standardize street signs and the amount of sugar allowed in school lunches but we cannot get a standardized election system?


A pesky little paper called the constitution. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Besides, do you really want congress critters and the POTUS to tell you HOW to vote? Fuck, florida can't even make a system for their own people let alone 49 other states.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[Mr2001]

You can have a Federally standardized voting procedure because the method of voting is constitutionally left up to the States.

I assume you meant "can't", but in fact you can. From the Constitution:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[laird]

"Can someone explain why we can standardize street signs and the amount of sugar allowed in school lunches but we cannot get a standardized election system?"

To elaborate, the US government makes a clear separation between the federal level and the state level. The Constitution specifies the mechanism at the federal level by which the states submit electors and electors select the President and Vice-President. Each of the states specifically has the authority to choose any mechanism it likes to determine who those electors are. This means that it's unconstitutional for the federal government to tell the states how to select electors -- if a state decided to select electors based on the results of a poker game, that'd be fine (Constitutionally) so long as they did submitted the results properly.

Ammending the Constitution is theoretically possible, but pragmatically speaking it'd be impossible to get the states to all decide to throw out all of their election laws and replace them with a single, federal set of laws. Among other things, the people voting on that issue were all successfully elected by the current system, so they have little incentive to change it.

That being said, it'd be great for their to be a decent set of guidelines for evaluating electronic voting systems. NIST was authorized to produce such as set of guidelines after the 2000 elections, but then Congress defunded the project so they couldn't actually do the work.

Re:Federal Mandate Time

[aaronl]

That passage says the States decide how elections happen. It gives Congress the ability to ovveride the States by creating regulations to set the time and manner for choosing Senators, and to set the time, place, and manner of choosing Representatives. Senators had been appointed by the States, so there was no election for them. This means that they are solely saying that they can meddle with how/where/when election for Representatives occur.

A later passage gives Congress the ability to set the time and date for choosing electors. This is not the actual vote, however.

It gives no power over the method of choosing electors, State elections, Presidential elections, etc. They could require voting by missile for Reps and Senators, and the States could still use paper for the Presidential elections.

Yes, I did mean "can't" before. :)

Upper Midwest FTW

[ClamIAm]

Wisconsin was also the state that delegated district boundary duties to a third party, to try and prevent Gerrymandering. I live in Minnesota, and I can say with some certainty that there must be somethhing up here that makes us slightly saner than the rest of the country. And I'm glad.

Re:Upper Midwest FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try. I have lived in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, and I think that you give us too much credit. Remember that both Joe McCarthy and Jesse Ventura were elected by the fine voters of these states

Re:Upper Midwest FTW

[ClamIAm]

Sure, Ventura was an asshole, but he wasn't that bad.

Re:Upper Midwest FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he was better than Pawlenty, but voting for him hardly is a sign of sanity.

It's only a matter of time...

[Kesch]

So when will we begin seeing extensions for our voting machines?

Parallel systems?

[addbo]

Couldn't they do what many organizations do when implementing a new system and run them both in parallel until they're sure the new system is working as it's supposed to?

I mean since this thing generates a verifiable paper ballot... then have humans count the ballots for a few elections and see if it matches the computer generated total... if they do match (or come really close... like within 0.001% or something) then you have verified that the system is working and that you can trust it for further elections without requiring a human count.

I don't believe they should trust the system totally right out of the box... and with a human count for the first few elections it'll help transition in the technology and allow people to become comfortable with it. You may still want to do random human counts on various ridings to see if the computer is still producing accurate results after the full human count phase. But reducing the human portion of an election helps to produce more accurate and efficient results. (And ultimately the costs required to hold each election...)

Not really Open Source

[hweimer]

From TFB:

5.91 (19) The coding for the software that is used to operate the system on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election.

This is somewhat less than what is usually meant by the term "Open Source". But it seems that at least voting machines running a completely closed operating systems are ruled out.

Not the count, but the recount that's important...

[Ramses0]

"""How do you recount? Election results must be reproduceable by a human afterwards, especially if a virus or spyware got into the election results (either on purpose, or with malicious intent). Open Voting has this part figured out by producing a paper ballot that can be validated without the use of a computer, or you can use a computer to check it faster."""

http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/links/v ote-hacking-2004.html

Links have broken with time, but here's an updated link to Open Voting...

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/modules.php?na me=FAQ&myfaq=yes&id_cat=11&categories=Security%2C+ Resiliency%2C+Integrity%2C+Reliability

Their systems are reallly neat and they've had a lot of smart people looking at the problem. I've not been involved in it, but have read some of their documentations, and promised myself that I'd speak up and give them google-juice anytime voting came up. Some highlights:

    - Commodity hardware / software

    - Open source code

    - Paper "receipts" that can be verified by:

        * Sight

        * Barcode

        * Audio / Visual

        * Separate "reader / recounter"

    - Accurate computer counts (ie: select count(*) from votes group by person)

    - Paper trail for recounts (re-count manually or computer assisted the receipts), with useful information hidden in the water-marked receipts (kindof like scantron stuff, where both computers and humans can read it). ...all in all it seems like a pretty good system and like I said they've done a lot of thinking about it.

--Robert

Teriffic!

[mmell]

The voting mechanism will be smarter than the candidates!

SO . . . say I'm a sysadmin living in Florida and related to Dubya . . . d'ya suppose I could just noodle the count a teensy bit . . . no? How 'bout losing some of those packets, especially the ones with dangling or pregnant electrons? No? What are you, a damned democrat or something?

Sorry folks, you can't get rid of corruption that way; you can only make it pick up and move somewhere else (read: some other element of the electoral process). Build a better mousetrap and nature keeps answering with better mice.

George Bush did <blink>not</blink> steal the last election! As long as nobody looks, it's okay, right? After all, we had a "paper trail" from that election, but we still couldn't figure out what actually happened. The courts wisely held that collapsing the wave function was unconstitutional.

We're all adults here - I don't need <SARCASM> tags, right?

They bother voting in Wisconsin...

[kalbzayn]

I thought they just gave the job to whoever the Democrat is.

Should be interesting to track the change, though. I have relatives in Wisconsin that are very set on voting, but are not computer friendly at all. Getting them to make the change should be entertaining. There comfort level is based on the old system, and any change about something they view as important as voting will make them very nervous. But, they are in small enough of an area to where they will probably be using paper for quite a while longer.

Re:They bother voting in Wisconsin...

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to Texas: they give the job to whoever the town idiot is.

Re:They bother voting in Wisconsin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wisconsin state politics has skewed Republican recently (and historical as the birthplace of the Republican party).The current governor is the first Democratic governor in 30 years or so. Both houses of the legislature are controlled by the Republicans.

In presidential elections Wisconsin tends to leans Democratic, but it is usually close.

Re:They bother voting in Wisconsin...

[John Hasler]

> I have relatives in Wisconsin that are very set on voting, but are
> not computer friendly at all. Getting them to make the change
> should be entertaining. There comfort level is based on the old
> system, and any change about something they view as important as
> voting will make them very nervous.

I'm with them. I live in Wisconsin and am more computer-literate than the average Slashdotter, but I still oppose computerized voting. In fact, it is precisely because I know a lot about computers that I oppose it. Fortunately, I live in a small rural township where I hope we will continue to put our paper ballots into our 100 year old ballot box for the forseeable future.

Re:They bother voting in Wisconsin...

[kalbzayn]

Don't tell that to my inlaws. They are all teachers and hardcore Democrats. I think there might be part of the teachers' union contract that requires them to vote Democrat.

Re:They bother voting in Wisconsin...

[andytrevino]

Well, not quite... really only Madison and downtown Milwaukee are liberal bastions. Both the state Senate and Assembly here in Wisconsin are controlled by Republicans, which is why this bill has come into law in the first place. Well-documented voter fraud took place in Milwaukee during the 2000 and 2004 elections -- and the state Democratic party's unwillingness to address voter fraud issues with real solutions like a statewide ID (which, while not a panacea, would certainly help curb fraud) is really something to behold.

I do applaud Doyle for his signing of this bill. Now let's see some more real progress on the issue of voter fraud in Wisconsin. :)

There isn't a voter name on the receipt, RTFP

[Medievalist]

Although that would work on incredibly stupid voters, simple intimidation usually works on them anyway.

Voters with half a brain cell copy, forge or borrow a receipt to show to the boss.

There's no voter name on the receipt, thus no way for the boss to know how YOU voted.

Why?

[Valiss]

(why is it that this stuff always seems easy to us slashdotians? Why do corporations always make it so complicated and broken??)

Cause if you make a product that works right, the first time (and every time) you get no new business.

To put in another way: job security.

Re:Why?

[Baricom]

There are plenty of companies that make good money renting voting machines to governments.

Not Open Source

[John Hasler]

> Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle today signed legislation that "will
> require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in
> elections to be open-source."

The law does not require that the software be Open Source. It merely requires that voters be able to examine and test it.

Re:This is amazingly shameful

[wondafucka]

...but I have to plug my product: I've got magnetic ribbons that say "Demand Open Source Voting"

If you aren't from Wisconsin, write your state legislature and demand the same for you!

Love /.

[HeliumHigh]

Heheh, I just love slashdot... my little fortune cookie for the hour is:
"Don't Vote -- it only encourages them!"

How fitting :)

transparency, transparency, transparency

[circletimessquare]

so much of business, politics, heck even interpersonal relationships revolves aorund the issue of transparency

keeping secrets breeds mistrust, transparency breeds trust

and only after trust is established can prosperity grow- concrete prosperity as in $, or abstract prosperity as in political fidelity and integrity and legitimacy

transparency, transparency, transparency

much of the history of every single country's march towards progress can simply be summed up in the trend towards greater openness... or lack thereof, and the inevitable intellectual, capital, and political poverty from the resulting distrust

it really is a concept everyone should accept and extend

BIG PROBLEM

[goombah99]

The problem here is that there are no open source voting machines on the market at this time. So what is going to happen?
In most cases they can't be since the OS is closed source. Moreover, federal certification is no longer just for stand alone voting machines but requires the whole "system" of vote counting and vote merging software to be certified. So even when the vote counters could be open source the vote databases may not be. Diebolds run on windows CE, ES&S ivotronics probably run on windows CE, ES&S opscans run on Qnix, sequoia touchscreen kiosks run on some undisclosed proprietary software and the ballot database software runs on windows. No word what Sequoia Optek/insights run on but again the ballot data bases run on windows.

thus these companies can't open their source since it's not theirs to open.

Accupol is built on linux and java so it could in principle be open source at their discretion. But because the accupols are cobbled together from mainly commodity components the company investors is averse to open sourcing their only real IP.

Not sure about avante and harte and unilect but it appears they contain windows software.

OVC is the only system truly designed with open source in mind. But it's not ready for sale yet.

Re:BIG PROBLEM

[Halfbaked Plan]

Any software binary is 'closed source' within a few microseconds after the binary has been generated. This includes wether the compiler toolchain is open source or not, and wether the source was revealed for the binary before it was compiled. 'Open Source' is not a panacea in the instance of voting machines. It's just populist hype, and thus not surprising, coming from a state capitol like Madison.

Re: KISS and privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are keeping a copy of your ballot, you could be asked by your boss to show him that you voted the proper way.

Or you could get your bottle of booze from the precinct captain for voting the proper way.

You should only be able to look at the printout, before depositing it in a lockbox for later recount.

Contested votes

[Tony]

Uhm... usually, an individual vote is not contested-- it's the aggregate vote that is contested. So, this process would only work if you could get everyone who voted to release their vote.

The *only* way to do this is with a paper trail. Use electronic voting to generate the paper, and give instant results. If the vote is contested, count the paper ballots, just as we do now.

I see no other acceptable solution; anything beyond this is excessively complex, anything less is intrinisically untrustworthy.

I wouldn't give Doyle credit....

[daemonenwind]

This from the same guy who feels that you should not have to prove your identity before voting.

I would expect this is only a ploy to make it seem like he cares about the voting irregularities which occurred in WI during the 2004 Presidental election, causing several leading Milwaukee Democrats to be investigated.

Reading the requirements, not only does no one currently offer such a machine, but most machines in the state wouldn't live up to it today.

Re:I wouldn't give Doyle credit....

[bbuchs]

first of all, that issue isn't about not having to prove your identity, it's about requiring government-issued ID cards in order to vote.

secondly - a grand total of four people have been charged with double voting in Milwaukee in the 2004 election. What "leading Milwaukee Democrats" were investigated?

Re:I wouldn't give Doyle credit....

[TheFlyingGoat]

1. It's pretty much the same thing in the debate. Right now I'm not required to show any form of ID before I vote. I just give them my name and they assume I'm telling them the truth. The reason it has turned into a voter ID card debate is that the Democrats feel that requiring an ID will exclude the poor from voting (most have a driver's license to buy booze anyway). The Republicans countered with a very solid plan for the state to pay for ID cards for individuals that can't afford them, removing the burden for the poor. Both sides are giving extreme examples, but the fact remains that they SHOULD be doing some verification that the person is who they say they are.
   
2. 4 people have been charged with double voting, but there were far more discrepancies than those 4. There were votes from addresses that don't exist, from addresses that aren't residential, and votes from people that no longer live in those districts. A voter ID would prevent many of those. There were a handful of local elections that were decided by fewer than 20 votes. Voter verification might not have affected the presidential race, but it would have definitely affected those local races.
   
3. Michael Pratt, son of former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, and Supreme Solar Allah, the son of state Sen. Gwen Moore were investigated for slashing the tires of GOP vans on election day. Although you might not consider them "leading Milwaukee Democrats" their parents sure are.
   

Re:I wouldn't give Doyle credit....

[John Hasler]

> It's pretty much the same thing in the debate. Right now I'm not
> required to show any form of ID before I vote.

Neither am I. Anna just writes down my name and asks if Robin will be coming in to vote later.

OSS isn't enough

[gcauthon]

That's great that their system will be open source, but that isn't quite enough. There are a few things that I think would make the systems more trustworthy in addition to the open source requirement:

• Secure hashes on every single file on the system. A technician should be able to take a voting system and quickly determine if any files were modified (programs, shared libs, data, etc).
• Reliable network security. No modems or network connectivity of any sort. Find some other way to tabulate the votes that doesn't compromise the integrity of the system.
• More testing and absolutely no changes between testing sign-off and election day.
• Other than voting, the system should be completely read-only. The voting should have some sanity checks as well. For example, votes can not decrease and only one vote can be made within a certain period of time.
• The certifications themselves and testing results should be made public.
• Any information should be available through the FOIA and should have a clear and concise retention policy. No more showing up at the election polls only to find workers forming an ant trail to the dumpster.

In other news ...

[Anonymous Coward]

new legislation requires that all electronic voting machines be outfitted with open-source artificial intelligence engines that will examine the positions of the various candidates and compare them to the fundamental ideals of the government. The machines will assign scores to each candidate/issue and select the highest in each choice, thereby eliminating any burden the voting process has on the voter.

In a pilot trial of this technology last November, however, it seems that all electronic voting machines segfaulted since no candidate received a positive score.

Move to digital, or the terrorists win!

[damned_mediocrity]

From TFA: Once TV stations switch to digital transmission, they will return to the government a big chunk of the radio spectrum they currently use to transmit their analog channels. Some of that spectrum will go to first responders -- police, fire and public safety officials -- so they can better communicate with one another. Breakdowns in emergency communication slowed the response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

Why, why WHY? Why must the government/media always raise the specter of terrorism and "national security," even when it's clearly only peripherally related?

Come on, let's be honest. This legislation for a mandatory switch to digital has always been about money. The switch to digital allows the media companies to use all sorts of nifty DRM, like broadcast flags, to prevent unauthorized copying. A lot of people stand to make a whole hell of a lot of money from this, and the average consumer has a lot to lose (obsolete TVs, VCRs, DVRs, etc).

It's about MONEY, for chrissake. So let's NOT talk about terrorism here. Let's NOT invoke the name of September Eleventh when talking about digital TV.

Sure, ONE side effect of this legistlation is that we'll have more free radio spectrum, which emergency responders MAY eventually utilize, which MAY help in emergency situations. But the fact that this is a POSSIBILITY does NOT necessitate linking digital TV with "protection from terrorism!" Unfortunately, the ads being run and the articles being written are doing just that.

Re:Move to digital, or the terrorists win!

[damned_mediocrity]

Holy crap! I din't even come CLOSE to posting that in the right article, did I?
**hangs head in shame**

Re:Move to digital, or the terrorists win!

[gcauthon]

I didn't even notice until I read your follow-up.

Re:Not the count, but the recount that's important

[John Hasler]

> Commodity hardware

Bad idea. Closed-source firmware, excessive complexity, poor reliability. Voting machines need to be simple special-purpose machines with all design details (not just source code) public.

From the "we should have already done that" dept.

[millennial]

See subject.

Where is an open-source voting machine?

[epaulson]

Is there a non-profit out there that has produced an open-source voting machine? Either software that converts a regular PC into a voting machine, or maybe even take it a step further and is willing to build the hardware and sell it at cost to governments.

Why is this "open source"?

[mykdavies]

I don't see any sign that this bill requires the code to be open source. The bill requires it to be made public, but does it actually require the state to make it available under an open source licence?

The WIS quote only says that "the coding for the software that is used to operate the system on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election". For them to call this open source is bad enough, but for Slashdot to repeat this misunderstanding of the term is ridiculous.

It needs to be verifiable AFTER the voter has left

[joekrahn]

The most important feature to prevent tampering is for voters to be able to verify that their votes have not been modified AFTER all of the votes are pooled. There should be a final, public consolidated database that anyone should be able to tally to get the vote counts, and for which any indivual voter should be able to verify that their votes have not been modified.

Ideally, there would be multiple independent HTTP inquiry servers so regular voters could go home and enter their voting hash over and verify thet their actual vote is in the final pool.

The hard part is coming up with a way that the tallied vote database can be public and able to verify a voter's hash, but still prevent people from being able to determine which votes belong to which voter.

Easy to make this work

[sacrilicious]

And how do we know that the prinout matches whatever counter is incremented within the computer?

The voter visually verifies the printed ballot, then drops it in the box. The computer results can be used as early count results for the media, but the real vote is in the box. In the event of a recount, it's the box that gets counted. And there are random checks made between box counts and computer counts, regardless of calls for recounts.

This also addresses the vote coercion objections that people have voiced in this thread.

Re:Easy to make this work

[Halfbaked Plan]

The HELL with the media. Why release ANY results to the media earlier than the totals are arrived at? Really, booting the Media out of the scene would be a big improvement. There can be rigorous observation by volunteer citizens. The Media can wait at the end of the line.

It would be going too far to lock them up for the week before and after the election. Just slightly too far.

Voting System Proposal

[fossa]

Based on suggestions I've read in the comments, how about this:

Voter enters polling place, name scratched off list as usual. Voter enters booth. For each office up for election, voter types* a name or names+ into the voting machine. A blank vote or "Nobody" would indicate no vote for that office. Referendums etc. could be indicated with some predefined response (preferably more than a simple "yes" or "no" in order to avoid Windows-dialog-box-style confusion). When finished, the voting machine prints out the completed ballot. The format is importantly both human readable and machine readable via OCR. Surely if the machine knows the font beforehand, OCR can be fairly quick and highly accurate...? A ballot would essentialy be a list like:

President: John P. Doe
Senator: Jane T. Smith
Representative: Joe G. Johnson
Increase taxes for schools?: Do not increase

A ballot may contain special marks to help a machine reader align the text, but the actual vote info must be human readable (i.e. not a barcode). The voter reviews the ballot and either destroys it and creates a new one, or submits it to the ballot box. Ballots are then machine tallied after all ballots are collected (it is important to not tally instaneously for the sake of voter anonymity). Hand recounts may be conducted as necesarry.

The good parts about this are 1) machine countable, 2) human countable, 3) transparent (voter puts physical paper ballot into box rather than bits into a database), 4) tamper resistant (difficult to invalidate votes by marking or tampering with the ballot after the fact) 5) anonymous.

One problem is: how to type a candidate's name. Keyboard? What about those with disabilities? I'm not really familiar with alternate text entry systems, but surely some exist.

* The biggest problem is, of course, determining who is meant by "John P. Doe", since there may be many John P. Does in America. I don't really like the idea of requiring people to "get on the ballot" because anyone who doesn't know who to vote for will almost certainly pick a candidate who is on the ballot. But I don't really have a solution for an all-write-in system. Please address this as a separate issue. In lieu of requiring a typed name, the system could easily offer a selection of candidates as is common now. (How do write-in votes work now? I assume they are silently ignored unless it's clear that a majority of votes are not for someone on the ballot which almost surely never happens).

+ Some offices may allow multiple candidates. Some voting systems may allow multiple votes, possibly ranked, for a single final winner. This voting method lends itself well to these alternative (surperior IMO) methods.

Discuss.

Population arguments won't work here

[PostItNote]

Counting ballots is exactly the kind of thing that scales nicely - just hire more counters. O(lg n) maybe, but then there's still no reason that in the US we couldn't simply wait 24 hours for nice handcounted results, except for our obsession with real time nownownow results.

Re:Population arguments won't work here

[deblau]

We almost always get overnight results from a Presidential election, procedural screwups and statistical dead heats notwithstanding. Hiring counters isn't the problem, the problem is trust. I trust a program whose code I can inspect more than I trust some seasonal lackey hired off the street, provided appropriate safeguards are taken.

Re:Population arguments won't work here

[AK Marc]

then there's still no reason that in the US we couldn't simply wait 24 hours for nice handcounted results, except for our obsession with real time nownownow results.

Well, the people that watch the polls and count are supposed to be from one of the two major parties. How are the 3rd parties supposed to feel when they aren't allowed to count ballots with some of the rules, and they are forced to have two opposing parties count them together? Though I think that isn't an issue now, since no 3rd party is anywhere close to winning an election. The real problem is that the feds have issued a requirement that handicapped people be able to vote without assistance, or something like that. I haven't read the actual regulations, since I don't really care what they say, but the effect is that they are restrictive for what polling machines can do to offer up as options. That is the real drive is behind the electronic voting movement. The other is saving money. For some reason, the local governments have been talked into the idea that a computer for every station and a server for every polling location is somehow cheaper than a few pens and some copies of a paper ballot.

Re:Population arguments won't work here

[PostItNote]

Actually, the real problem is how they funded that act (HAVA - Help America Vote Act). They gave lump sums of money to each district, and those lump sums expire. This means that election districts NEED to upgrade really soon now, and they have no money to maintain or to do fancy paper systems. Because it was a onetime huge sum with no upkeep attached, the district managers have an interest in big expensive systems that salesmen tell them have very low repeating costs (i.e. computers). And because they aren't computer experts, they are easily hoodwinked.

The solution has many parts, but the biggest is just to raise awareness of the need to generate paper ballots.

Re:Population arguments won't work here

[dangitman]

Hiring counters isn't the problem, the problem is trust. I trust a program whose code I can inspect more than I trust some seasonal lackey hired off the street, provided appropriate safeguards are taken.

I wouldn't. the source code doesn't tell you anything about how it will be compiled - or the hardware that it runs on. What if someone makes hardware to interpret the Open Source code differently?

The big risk is that manipulation from a single person or organization can easily be distributed far and wide through electronic voting. With manual counting, you need so many people to influence the vote that even if there is an effort to manipulate things, it won't have much impact compared to the power of electronic manipulation.

Your point about oversight also applies to manual counting. If supervised properly (video cameras, scrutineers, etc) then manual counters won't be able to get away with much. And most people wouldn't know how to detect electronic fraud, but know when they see it in the "real" world.

Re:Population arguments won't work here

[deblau]

What if someone makes hardware to interpret the Open Source code differently?

You're stretching. What if the vote counter fell in the shower that morning, and thought red meant Democrat and blue meant Republican? How attenuated do you want to argue? No system will be perfectly secure. We both know that, and arguing unlikely scenarios detracts from the overall issue, which is trust. Besides, it's simple enough to require that the software run on hardware supplied by the state.

The big risk is that manipulation from a single person or organization can easily be distributed far and wide through electronic voting.

If the machines are non-networked, there isn't too big of a risk. I wouldn't trust any e-voting machine with a network card in it anyway. As long as the source MD5 hash checks out, it doesn't matter who's trying to corrupt what. That's something that can be verified on-site, after the Big Evil Scary Guys have no more control. And any corruption that happens outside the voting booth isn't an attack against the system used to record the votes.

Re:Population arguments won't work here

[bheading]

You're stretching. What if the vote counter fell in the shower that morning, and thought red meant Democrat and blue meant Republican? How attenuated do you want to argue?

That one's easy. I'm watching the guy over his shoulder as he counts, and shout "hey! this guy is counting the votes wrong". That is what we do in the UK and Ireland. Because the votes are not counted by a machine, everyone - all the candidates - can have a representative monitoring the count and making a huge fuss if there's dodgy business afoot.

He may slip one or two past the observers (hard but not impossible), but that's not a problem either. If the vote comes down within a hair, we ask for a recount. If the vote is a landslide for another candidate - well, he wouldn't have got *that* many past easily so it's a fair cop. And it's not worth his while anyway - if he's incompetent or trying to fiddle things he won't keep his job for very long.

No system will be perfectly secure. We both know that, and arguing unlikely scenarios detracts from the overall issue, which is trust. Besides, it's simple enough to require that the software run on hardware supplied by the state.

Security is not the issue so much as bugs or improper calibration or use. So you trust the state and the software to be incapable of error. What do you use, a HAL9000 ?

In Northern Ireland a few years ago we had a historic referendum. The government made it clear that it was in favour of a certain result in that referendum. One of the political parties is a bit on the nutty side claimed that the government would try to remove the votes against it from the ballot boxes, thus swinging the vote. Accordingly, the electoral office invited that party to place it's own seals on the ballot boxes. The party accordingly did so, and at the count the following day, that party was able to confirm that all of the seals were in place and that the contents of the boxes had not been adjusted. Tell me how you do that with an electronic vote system ?

I think it was Napoleon who said to never ascribe to malice what could just as easily be incompetence. I think that is particularly true here. The possiblity of deliberate fiddling is distinct, but remote. The far greater possibility is of a whole collection of people not understanding how the system works, how to spot dodgy behaviour, or the system being designed to avoid such scrutiny. Think Chernobyl for an example of this problem when it gets really out of hand. It only needs to happen once for the population to lose all trust in the electoral system.

Condorcet, not IRV

[ChristTrekker]

Say this with me: Instant Runoff is flawed, use Condorcet instead; Instant Runoff is flawed, use Condorcet instead; Instant Runoff is flawed, use Condorcet instead. IRV has serious problems which are easily found with a simple Google search. Condorcet is no harder to use than IRV, doesn't yield bizarre unintuitive results like IRV, and removes incentives to vote dishonestly.

Re:Condorcet, not IRV

[metamatic]

The existence of preference cycles in condorcet results is a pretty serious problem. Frankly, it makes it a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.

Wikipedia lists seven different algorithms for resolving cycles. Can you imagine TV news explaining to the average American how the set theory behind the Schwartz set method determines the President?

IRV may be flawed, but it's easily understandable, and a huge improvement on FPTP.

Re:Condorcet, not IRV

[ChristTrekker]

Preference cycles simply reflect reality. I might prefer B to A because of his stance on education, C to B because of her opinions on foreign trade, and A to C because of his military background. It's possible, though extremely unlikely IMO, that a similar cycle will manifest itself in a collective body. The fact that the voting system reflects reality isn't a weakness; it simply goes to show that finding a concensus in a large group of people is a very difficult thing to do!

The basic definition of a Condorcet method (the winner is the guy who can beat anybody and everybody else head-to-head) is really pretty intuitive. (You don't need to start using words like "pairwise" and "matrix" to explain this!) So are the rules for disambiguating cycles. There are more than one, sure, so just pick one and go with it. I don't see how the public would be any more confused than they are with the Electoral College.

IRV a huge improvement over plurality? Surely you jest! IRV fails even more voting criteria than plurality does! See the chart?

IRV doesn't even meet monotonicity for crying out loud...you can cause a candidate to fall back in the race by ranking him higher than his competitors! What good is a system like that?

With IRV, you can't sub-aggregate the votes by districts either...once you "throw away" the "runoff rounds" there's no way to sum all the districts together. (The summability criterion. Not on the chart, but another failure for IRV.) Condorcet, OTOH, gives you a very neat summary (A vs B, A vs C, A vs D, B vs C, etc) that can be tallied up at any district level. IRV would have you counting (potentially) 280 million votes at the US level (for example), Condorcet would have you combining 50 state totals.

IRV gives a nice illusion that your full preference is being recorded and makes a difference, but that's all it is — an illusion.

Re:Condorcet, not IRV

[metamatic]

Well, in the light of the fuss over Ralph Nader, I consider IA independence to be an extremely important property for a voting system. So based on that table, I guess I should favor Approval voting as simple and effective--and Condorcet looks like it still fails.

Personally I've used Range Voting most often (for things like picking which features go in products).

How would we know that its really open source?

[rubberbando]

I ask this because its not like you could just look at the binary and tell that it was the same program as the source.

Are there going to be people who will read the entire source, then sit there and watch it compile, then installed, followed by watching the machines every moment from there until voting is completed?

This is the one state...

[dimension6]

...whose senator actually voted against the Patriot Act.

Like this is going to help

[Verteiron]

North Carolina law states that the voting machine code must be available to (at least) the state. North Carolina certified 3 companies for e-voting in the state. None of the 3 provided any source code.

I'm sure this will be the same.

This is all silly.

[Catbeller]

Paper ballots.
Counted by hand, in public, in a goldfish bowl.
Representatives of both parties watching the counter.
After the tally is done, rotate the ballot stacks to different counting tables, and recount.
Check the tallies.
If they don't match, investigate the table counts. Redo.
If they match, all three, interested parties and counter, move to the head table. Enter tally, in plain view, on a master list.
After the tallies are totalled for the site, the totals are phoned in.
The paper ballots, labeled with approporate tags, are placed in containers with one-time-only interior latches. Close latch. To recount, you must cut the box apart with power tools. No PICKABLE LOCKS.
Ballot boxes are labeled and stored -- forever.

If these steps are followed, the vote count is impeccable, 100% accurate, and 100% verifiable (cut open the boxes, recount as necessary, reseal into new boxes).

And it would only take 3-6 hours. do the math.

Canada does something like this, and they have no problems. Using Occam's Razor, the only reason you'd want to use something as laughably alterable as a computer system is to alter the totals. Everything else is sophistry.

Call me crazy.

[Arterion]

I think everyone's vote should be posted on a big website, using a special identification number. That way, anyone can check if their ballots were correct, anyone can access the raw data, and there's still anonymity.

This seems to be a BS political move

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry folks. As someone who knows Wisconsin state IT (and posting anonymously). The voter registration server and apps (SVRS) are CITRIX based. And the papers are already publishing complaints about that application. It is failing to poor project management by state workers with a history of poor project management. The state CIO is a linux advocate (Matt M.), but even he had to bow to pressure for a high profile project and go with HP UX. And our efforts to get rid of MS Exchange had been fairly difficult, and may yet hit the papers. (Even the governor's office hasn't attempted the email conversion despite Larry Ellison's visit...Oracle is trying to help replace MS). The governor can sign anything he wants in to law, but how will it be implemented? And how will the municipalities feel about further requirements to get voters registered and voting, when SVRS works so poorly? It sounds like the average Wisconsin citizen is not going to be very happy with what the state government dictates. From my point of view, too many state IT management folk are jumping on the open source bandwagon because of the CIO, rather than practising good IT. Sounds like the governor signed into law a feel good law without thinking about the consequences. Do I have the answers? Nope, just know this will be a great idea, poorly implemented.

It's not funny

[YA_Python_dev]

I agree. Please don't mod the GP as funny.
Anything but not funny.

Ask Indiana

[dangitman]

Ballot boxes are labeled and stored -- forever.

They tried that with the holy ark of the covenant - and it still ended up in Cheney's hands.

Ballot printing

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... am I the only one that thinks that with the prinitng requirement we are actually moving towards very expensive ballot printing? I mean, in the case of a recount they would count by hand anyway in most cases. Where exactly is the big improvement? This is becoming just as bogus as the 'paperless office' craze of the 90's.

Or am I just cynical?

Re:Ballot printing

[haapi]

The cost is some small delta over the cost of printing your receipt after using an ATM machine. These are some of the same companies that manufacture ATM machines, after all!

Interpreted languages

[CrazedWalrus]

Somebody, probably not me or you will compile the final code to be run on some computer that we don't know the details of anyway. That somebody may know how to alter the code, maybe not.

What's wrong with an interpreted language? PERL? Python? If the code can be edited, presumably a binary can be swapped just as easily. At least that way you know that the code on the machine is what the machine is running (unless someone is fooling with the compilers / interpreters themselves).

Likewise Australia

[caitsith01]

In Australia, we manage to get the results of most of our lower house seats counted on the evening of the election at least as quickly as the US did at the last presidential election.

Transparency is maintained through both neutral and partisan observers from all interested parties verifying the count as it happens. I participated (for a political party) at the last Australian federal election and I can tell you that if any votes were under or over counted in an electorate of maybe 30,000 it would have been in the order of 10 or fewer. Whenever a vote is in doubt it is put in a separate pile which is then debated by members of the interested parties and ultimately decided upon by a neutral scrutineer.

The only downside is that many votes are incorrectly cast on a paper ballot - as high as 1-3% - which is technically impossible on an electronic ballot. Unless you vote for Bush. *ducks*

Re:Likewise Australia

[Baricom]

This is why I'm really a fan of OCR ballots. The precinct's ballot box machine warns you immediately if you spoiled your ballot, the paper trail is built-in if there's a need for a recount, there's no possibility for cracking the modem transmission because there isn't any, and the successful scan of the ballot guarantees that the voter's intention is obvious in the event of a recount (no pregnant chads!).

Re:Likewise Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife's name is Chad, you insensitive clod!

TV news; approval voting

[tepples]

The existence of preference cycles in condorcet results is a pretty serious problem.

In theory, or in practice?

Can you imagine TV news explaining to the average American how the set theory behind the Schwartz set method determines the President?

Can you imagine TV news explaining the electoral kindergarten? But it manages to do so, and TV news is overrated anyway given that all major TV news networks are controlled by an MPAA member (ABC->Disney; NBC->Universal; CNN->Warner Bros.; Fox News-> 20th C Fox) except for CBS News which separated from Paramount Pictures less than a week ago.

That said, I highly recommend approval voting. The voter gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each candidate, and the candidate that gets the most thumbs-up wins. Behind the scenes, it is a special case of Condorcet voting where the voter divides candidates into two groups: one tied for most preferred, and one tied for least preferred. Approval is much easier to count than IRV because unlike IRV, approval is summable. It's also trivial to implement on voting machines designed for plurality, as the operator needs only to remove the protection against an overvote.

Re:It needs to be verifiable AFTER the voter has l

[Baricom]

The hard part is coming up with a way that the tallied vote database can be public and able to verify a voter's hash, but still prevent people from being able to determine which votes belong to which voter.

Actually, it's impossible. If there's a way for the voter to verify their vote once they leave the polling place, others can as well.

What we really want is the voter to finish voting confident that their vote has been counted, yet without any way to prove that to themselves or others once they leave the polling place.

Possible Quote

[ichigo 2.0]

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin

An open source e-voting one-liner in Perl

[hutchike]

map{$c{$_}++}and print'winner:'.(sort{$c{$a}<=>$c{$b}}keys %c)[-1];

Anyone for Perl golf? :-)

Re:An open source e-voting one-liner in Perl

[hutchike]

map{$cand{$_}++}and print'winner:'.(sort{$cand{$a}<=>$cand{$b}}keys %cand)[-1];

Oops - forgot STDIN

Needed in ALL 50 states, or weak link syndrome

[Anonymous Coward]

As we've seen, it just takes one state to swing things. This is a good step but will not save anything unless it also takes place in GOP strongholds like Ohio and Florida (strongholds in terms of who is in charge of counting the votes, not by percentage of Republican voters).

Each state SHOULD require that national results be

[krysolid]

verifiable as well.

It's great that Wisconsin has the love of liberty
and democracy so great that they make this change,
but what if they are the only one?

We need to have every, or as many as possible,
states state that they will not recognize the
results of any election that has non-open source
code, or whatever, otherwise to throw an election
only certain states need be targetted for attention.
Say Florida, Ohio for example.

The no-software- option

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need software?

The voting device: buttons for the candidates and a chip with lots of fuses (mechanicaly once-programmable registers). Doesn't matter how you count the votes upstream, they can allways be verified (recounted) from the voting-machine. It's so simple it could be done the good old hardware-way, without firmware, thus tamper-proof and with open-to-the-public schematics. Silicon is not so easy to check for malicious circuitry, but it's even harder to change it once it's approved.

The only connections to the outside (non-sealed enviroment) would be the read-only connection upstream and the buttons representing the candidates.

You could have enough fuses in the machine to last, say 100 elections (100 * voters passing through one voting-boot/election).

Slot machines more secure than voting machines

[Anonymous Coward]

In Nevada, among other security measures, the state has a copies of the code used in all slot machines and audits machines to make sure they haven't been modified from the reference versions. Gamblers can request an immediate investigation of any machine they believe may have cheated them. After all, money is at stake. It would be nice to have at least the same level of security for our vote.

  Links to NY Times article "MAKING VOTES COUNT - Gambling on Voting",
  contrasting slot machine and voting machine security

http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/voting/press/nyt /2004-06-13%20NYT%20Gambling%20on%20Voting.pdf (PDF)
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-31.htm (no registration required)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/13SUN1.h tml (registration required)

a simple way to implement this

[jonwil]

Basicly, you go up to the computer and fill it all in.
The computer then prints out a ballot containing a human readable vote and a machine readable barcode.
Then, the ballot (assuming the voter aggrees with it) puts it into a sealed ballot box. To count the votes, the barcodes can be run through a barcode scanner. If necessary, a hand count could be performed. This could be done either with or without a direct count made by the poling station computer.

Another option would be to just do what we have in australia and use a paper ballot where you mark the boxes for the people you want (in our case, you indicate who you wnat to put as first preference, second preference etc etc)
Simple and no chance that the computer got it wrong.

Re:a simple way to implement this

[SuiteSisterMary]

So long as the barcode is only being used for quick tallying, but there is a mandatory hand count to get the actual numbers, great.

Workshop on Open Source in Government

[Anonymous Coward]

SCALE 4x will be holding a workshop on open-source in government.

Re:Not the count, but the recount that's important

[Ramses0]

You give me paper, I'll give you your "Voting Brick(tm)". The point is that with paper (or caged gophers carving your votes into planks of wood), any recounts are very trustable and the security of physical items is a well-understood problem.

The point being that with any human-understandable, physical token serving as the official voting record, then the system(s) used to collect it are immaterial. Slap a hacked, virus-riddled, internet connected consumer PC into the voting booth and make me vote on it... if I get a paper receipt that I can read and understand and give that back to the election officials to serve as the vote of record, I'm OK with it. But give me a "Voting Brick(tm)" that says: "Your vote was cast. Click OK to continue." ...somehow that doesn't give me the same warm-fuzzy. :^)

--Robert

Spelling

[Mal-2]

This is /. and most of the people here are technically competent and of at least average intelligence. Many of them cannot spell their way out of a paper bag. What makes you think the general populace can spell? How do you decide what a voter MEANT if they misspell a name? Further, what if they are physically incapable of typing?

Making every vote a write-in has serious issues, which is why it hasn't been done. I fully believe that write-ins should be allowed for every office, but it should not be mandatory to write in every name. If every office allowed write-ins, we wouldn't even need "none of the above" on ballots -- just encourage people to vote for THEMSELVES if they don't like any of the candidates on the ballot. Then you have millions of people getting one vote apiece, and the point has been made.

Mal-2

The article covers the law introduced, not signed

[Archon]

The article -- and its bit about the bill requiring the source to be disclosed to citizens -- refers to the bill as introduced. On November 3rd, the committee gutted the disclosed source requirement. On November 10th, the new version of the bill was in place and THAT was what was passed.

Legislative history of AB627: http://www.legis.state.wi.us/2005/data/AB-627hst.p df

HEADLINE: Yet Another State Kicks Diebold in Nuts

[jnadke]

^ New headline should read.

I don't think any of these "open-source" machines are going to solve anything. I'm just proud the machines won't be Diebold. After all, corruption comes from those manning the machines, not the machines themselves.

Wisconsin's System now is pretty good

[Mr. Arbusto]

I have lived and voted in several districts in Wisconsin. The system that is in place now in most Municipalities is a scantron like form. You complete the arrow pointing toward the person, referendum, or party you're voting for.

When you complete the ballot you put it into a counter, that will reject the ballad if it is unreadable, over voted, or under voted. It prints out the record for a real time tally internally, and I'm certain it is able to run a report, and you have to go through the ballots anyway for write in candidates. Easy, Fast, tamper resistant, verifiable.

Why do we need to change the system in Wisconsin? Because we can and it is another great way to spend money on it now, rather than, uhm, making silly deals with Indian Gaming.