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

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.

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

[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: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

[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.

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.