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

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: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

[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.