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Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
smooth wombat writes "Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said Wednesday that he has lost confidence in the state's ability to hold fair and secure elections this fall, and called for paper receipts for Maryland's electronic voting machines,and the delay of early-voting procedures approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature." From the article: "'In light of these recent national decertifications and the Maryland General Assembly's decision to override my vetoes ... I no longer have confidence in the State Board of Elections' ability to conduct fair and accurate elections in 2006,' said Ehrlich, a Republican, in his letter to Board of Elections Chairman Gilles W. Burger. Democrats criticized Ehrlich's apparent shift on the paper-receipt issue, noting that he vetoed a bill last year that would have studied the option. Advocates of reforming the state's voting system cheered Ehrlich's remarks, which he made a day before a Senate committee is to hold hearings on a bill that would require a paper trail. "
What, a guy can't make a mistake, change his mind, and try and fix things?
Work with him, Democrats! Work with him! It's better for everyone that the system is fair, because eventually it will be you that gets screwed over.
GPL Deconstructed
I got your paper trail, right here!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Democrats criticized Ehrlich's apparent shift on the paper-receipt issue, noting that he vetoed a bill last year that would have studied the option.
Yes, but chances are, the bill didn't do just that. Chances are, there were a billion and one unrelated things attached to it, any one of which could have been collosally stupid. Until politicians stop playing anti-democratic games like that, I'm not willing to assume that just because he vetoed a "paper-trail" bill that he is against paper trails.
I'm starting to consider the opinon that voting should be an essay question as of late.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
Congratulations, so do your constituents.
Developers: We can use your help.
Gee, paper receipts. I wonder how we could possibly implement that.
Oh wait, here's an idea. Why don't we just use PAPER BALLOTS.
If you really want your fancy touch screens and all to waste tax dollars on, fine, use them. Just have the voting machine print out a ballot. But we should never be in a situation where we're considering an electromagnetic smudge to have a "vote". You simply cannot have accountability with electronic votes. Electronic voting is a bad idea to begin with and the fact the voting machine companies are now themselves a political interest makes the idea uterly unworkable.
Why should we rush to use these new fangled voting gadgets? Oh, thats right pockets needed lining. What a waste of money.
Oh, and "Go Ehrlich!" Is that politicaly correct to say here?
How many districts have we heard about, where their have been problems with electronig voting machines? Don't get me wrong, I use ATMs all the time, and trust it with my money, so I don't see why it should be so hard to come up with a secure and easy way to use voting machines. Diebold, the same company in trouble in several counties, is trusted for making great ATMs, but their voting machines are notoriously bad and their behaviour not to be trusted http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00 .html. Voting machines's source code should be open to election officials, so that they can take a look at them and make sure that they don't count backwards...
After the Red Team exercises that demonstrated how flimsy the system security was, he really should want the system upgraded and re-scrutinized.
USA Today Article
RABA Technologies PDF Report on Security Assessment
As a Democrat, I thought we were supposed to be the ones wanting accountability and paper voting records -- especially in light of the 2000 election and recent questions about Diebold machines. How can accountability be anything but good in this case? Isn't sunshine "the best disinfectant," no matter which party benefits?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
As I say a few posts above (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177649&ci d=14734757) what the Democrats actually said and what was reported by the media and by slashdot are probably very different.
That said, Republicans don't have a good track record for forgiving people who grow and evolve their opinions.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Let's hope this yields a chance to fix them. Our report is here. For a funnier take on it, see my boss in this Daily Show clip.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
ConsultingFair.com
This isn't the first time Ehrlich has tried to re-open debate issues involving putting your trust into machines. [washingtonpost.com]
But on a more serious note... this article mentions nothing about annonymity. The type of paper trail that they seek would essentially mean that they would have to keep track of your voter ID and who your choice was. While I think it would be paranoid to assume that they would actually go back and try to figure out who voted for who, it does undermine the idea of a secret ballot.
I think what they really need to work on more is enhanced security and a more accurate verification system. That would ensure that you are indeed a unique registered voter without having to log who you voted for. If they can be sure of who the vote is coming from, then they can assume the vote is indeed accurate.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
I keep hearing that this will make elections "more secure". If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Let me guess... thru the use of open source software for voting machines?
The point with paper trails is that they're permanent. Let me remind you that with the 1988 elections in Mexico, a "system crash" elliminated all evidence, and all of a sudden, the officialist party won the presidential elections. Many people wanted a recount of the PAPER BALLOTS, but they were burned.
I agree, use of electronic voting machines does make voting risky - but it's much more risky WITHOUT paper trails.
What we need is scantron! Just require everyone bring their #2 pencils. As long as we can keep candidates and issues down to a maxium of four possible choices per question everything will work out. You've never seen the SAT people worrying about receipts or hanging chads.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Why is this insightful?
You don't understand how a paper trail works.
In a nutshell:
You vote on the machine.
It prints a receipt that you can read.
You verify that the machine & receipt both agree on your vote.
You drop your receipt into a secure repository, e.g. an old fashioned ballot box.
Later, if there is any concern over the vote that triggers a recount, it is the secured receipts that are recounted, because there's no point in checking the machine a second time when it says that 10,000,000 votes were cast for Bush in a county with only 2,000 registered voters.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but who's to say this was the Governor's plan to make the Dems look bad and they fell right into his trap? It could be completely innocent but, He could very well be playing politics right now, having discovered that his constituents liked the idea, and while his base may not be interested in the idea. He managed to get the Democrats to compromise with him before, and then just flips over to the 'good idea' to make em look bad. While he looks like some enlightened individual with the 'publics good' in mind. Honestly. Don't blame the Democrats when really the Republican party has history of recently changing things around just so the Democrats can accidently put their foot in thier mouth and look stupid. It's worked for months now, and hasn't stoped. It's hard to play the game, when the winning team keeps changing the rules on ya.
You mis-understand, the voter does not get a receipt.
What happens is eletronic voting machine replaces the role of the pen in marking a paper ballot. This in no way violates the concept of a secret ballot any more than marking your ballot with a pen and dropping it in a box does.
The paper ballot is placed in the vote box. The paper ballot is the official vote. Machine totals can be used for preliminary results, but some percentage of the machines will be auditted, to make sure their totals match that of the paper.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
You don't take the paper ballot home with you. You put it in a locked box, where unlike electronic ballots it cannot be invisibly changed later.
How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind?
By destroying the original paper ballot and printing out another; in the polling booth; while you're voting; until you've put your ballot in the box. Note that you can still have computers print out the ballots if you want - and you may want to, so they can prevent voters from accidentally choosing two candidates in the same race, help read to blind voters, warn voters who may have unintentionally missed casting a vote, and make long ballots easy to read. What is important is that the final official ballot is in an immutable human-readable form that gets checked by the voter before it is cast.
If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Because hacking into a computer that your opponents are watching requires you to be smart, but hacking into large numbers of ballot boxes that your opponents are watching requires magic.
Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
No, remember the voting machines while also focusing on absentee ballots and voter registration. Security is hard and tedious - if you want the voting system to be secure, you have to secure every weak element of the process, not just the weakest.
Why is voting openness and accuracy a partisan issue?
That would come in real handy for a recount. Have stubs at the end of the receipt that shows the vote - nothing else - for submission when/if there's a recount. Of course, there's the whole issue of forgery, but then again, when has it not been an issue.
The idea is *not* that you get a receipt for your vote that you take home with you.
It's the same as the previous ways of vote counting. The big 'fidge sized machines that counted the levers pulled in an automatic fashion, but also imprinted a card with your vote that was held inside the machine untill the election was over. Or the more recent use of scan cards, where the cards are marked, run through the machine which counts them and automatically puts them in a sealed box. There is a paper trail there, and (unless the thug is really motivated, and the election officials are oblivious) no one can effect your strong arm proposal.
The problem as I see it is this, if the new Diebold machines screw up, there is no way of reconstructing the data. In the old days if the lever machine stripped a gear, the election officials could just read and count up the cards in the machine. If the scanner blows a fuse and dies, the election officials can just pull the scan forms out and recount. If the new touch screen machine has its power cord pulled, or its memory gets hit by a cosmic ray (these things happen), or what ever, the election officials are SOL to do anything.
Just because it's "awesome new technology" doesn't mean it shouldn't be backed up. Isn't that what we're always saying "back-up!!!" why shouldn't it be applied here?
The whole issue of verified voting has been mired in stupid partisan squabbling for over 4 years. The entire Demoblican duopoly deserves large shares of scorn, blame, and (in a much better universe than this one) defeat at the polls.
This isn't what most people mean when they talk about paper & voting machines. What is usually meant is this:
The voter goes into the booth and uses a computer to do their votes, which are tallied electronically. The computer prints out a paper slip which says how the person voted. HOWEVER, that slip is handled one of two ways. Either the voter then carries the paper slip to a ballot box just like they do with hand-done ballots now, or the paper slip appears to the voter behind a piece of glass and is then dumped in a ballot box attached to the computer, without the voter getting access to it.
The idea is that it creates a hard-to-tamper-with backup for the electronic record of votes. Other people care about secret ballots, too (although not enough people considering how much absentee voting and vote-by-mail is done these days) and so the system doesn't provide you with a receipt you can bring to your boss to prove you voted the "right" way.
Maryland also has a hearing today on SB 292, which would require "instant runoff" voting in Maryland ballots.
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make install -not war
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. It violates the whole concept of the secret ballot not to mention adding layers of potential abuse to the vote counting process. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
That would be stupid, except that's not what's being discussed. The "paper trail" in question is a ballot, which gets dropped into the ballot box. The voter can't show the receipt to anyone because it's an anonymous slip mixed in with hundreds of others inside of a locked metal box.
The idea is that the pieces of paper are the *real* ballots, any purely electronic tallies can be challenged and overruled by recourse to the paper.
The way I'd like to see such a system work is to have the paper ballots printed with both human and machine-readable content. If OCR-able fonts could make this one and the same, fine, you can omit a verification step, but it's not a problem either way. That way, the voter would be able to see who they voted for before leaving the booth and dropping the paper in the box. The purely electronic tallies could be reported as soon as all the polls closed, so we'd get our instant gratification, and then all the paper ballots could be machine-counted over the course of the next few days to produce the official results. In addition, a random sample of the ballots should be verified by hand to ensure that the human-readable and machine-readable portions match.
Electronic voting machines, if well-designed, can make the voting process easier and more accessible, and can provide faster results, but without the paper ballots, the system is too easy to rig. With a system of unofficial electronic tallies backed by counted pieces of paper, you get the best of both (plus a big bill for voting machine hardware).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Having an "official receipt" also opens up another form of abuse which is not possible under the current secret-ballot system: vote selling.
Apparently neither the parent poster nor several moderators have any freaking clue what the words Voter Verified Paper Trail actually mean.
Jeez, my threading is wacked -- otherwise I would have noticed the other excellent responses.
So is adding/withdrawing money from an ATM. You shouldn't need a receipt to verify that the correct amount of money was withdrawn from your account because it's all electronic.
I was once shorted by an ATM. In short, I complained to my credit union and they ordered an audit of the ATM and my account was credited. At no time was my receipt requested. My point is how could the voter have something that would really prove the vote he caste was his without casting doubt on his vote?
Ok, that pun was unitentional, ut I can't think of a re-phrasing off of the top of my head.
Back around 2000 or so I was voting in Stafford County, Virginia where I lived, and the voting machines there used the equivalent of Scantrons; the voting booth had a device where it indicated which item to mark on the page, then you inserted the paper ballot into the machine that scanned it, then dropped the paper inside of it. This meant that it had a paper ballot stored as a check in case there was a question. So this can be done, but because it's easier to (undetectably) steal elections with electronic voting machines thats why they use them.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I think that you have some misconceptions about what a voting paper trail consists of. While I don't know of any hard and fast regulations about what form such a trail should take, I doubt that it would take the form you seem to fear.
First off: the paper "receipt" does not leave with the voter. It is not like the slip of paper you can get at the post office as proof that you mailed something, or that allows you to track the parcel's progress. The receipt stays at the polling location, just like paper ballots currently do. It would be retained as a permanent record of an individual's vote so that, if the electronic results were ever in doubt or lost, a recount could be done with the receipts.
Second: Like paper ballots today, the receipts would not contain information that could link a certain vote to a certain person. This has been a feature of elections in the United States for years, and there is no reason that a paper trail would require any change.
Third: "Thugs," as you call them, are not allowed to interrogate voters on how they vote. Since the paper receipt stays at the polling station, the thug wouldn't have any way to verify which way someone voted. This kind of thing is taken very seriously, and coercing voters will land you in jail pretty quickly.
Fourth: Incorrect votes (i.e., when a person looks at the receipt and determines that what it shows is not what they intended it to be) would be discovered and dealt with at the polling station. Correcting a ballot would most likely consist of filling out a new one by hand, which would later be counted separately like absentee ballots. As I stated at the beginning, the receipt stays at the polling station. Once the voter hands it over (or places it in a scanner, etc.) their vote is considered "cast" and is irrevocable. This is essentially no different than how things work today with paper ballots - once you put it through that slot in the box, that's it.
I will not delve into the debate about whether using electronic voting with a paper trail is "more secure" other than to say that it is far and away more transparent and accountable than electronic voting without a paper trail. If anyone has reason to believe that the electronically collected votes have been tampered with or lost, then there is something physical to fall back on. Spoofing a paper trail takes a great deal more work and preparation than spoofing an electronic record. In that sense, having the paper trail makes our democracy more secure in the face of idiots blindly latching onto electronic voting as some inherently better way.
Oh Dear God. Somone mod this troll down.
1) a PAPER TRAIL is not a PAPER RECEIPT. It's a PAPER record of the vote that is exactly the same as the ELECTRONIC record. And in one of the best solutions (the AutoMark system) the computer prints the ballot, which is then both READ by the COMPUTER and STORED at the same time.
2) ATMs have NO relationship to Voting Machines. Sorry, seems like they would, but no. ATMs are crediting and debiting accounts in your name with an audit trail between the ATM, the Bank, and an account with your name on it. It's not anonymous, and doesn't need to be particularly secure (since if someone else accidentally gets your money, the bank can check its records and put your money back). Voting Machines have wildly different requirements.
And by the way, the ATM GENERATES AN INTERNAL PAPER TRAIL because the BANKS DON'T TRUST THEM TO RECORD PROPERLY.
3) you don't get to take a RECEIPT out of the voting booth because then you can use it as proof of how you voted and sell your vote, or alternately if you are being pressured into voting a certain way you can get them off your back with a receipt.
4) Almost everyone who debates this issue has never researched it. Almost every assertion they make is incorrect. If you don't know what to do, SUPPORT PAPER TRAILS in specific, and COMPLETELY OPEN VOTING SYSTEMS in general. Why the hell can't we see EVERYTHING about a system that decides EVERYTHING about my life, in one way or another?
You people make me so angry sometimes.
That the Governor changed his mind when he found out that Diebold would be charging the state, abour $600 per machine to add a printer. That and help his reelection bid. It might also cause the democrats to take the opposing side of the issue now since they have been working hard in the legislature to make Erlich seem inneffective. The GOP minority leader in the state legislature said that the Democrats motto is "Fail Bobby [Erlich] Fail!"
"Ehrlich's remarks, which he made a day before a Senate committee is to hold hearings on a bill that would require a paper trail" Nothing to see here. Just another politician trying to show he's "ahead of the curve".
I keep getting this image of the Florida electorate at least having something to wipe with, next time their vote gets flushed.
Maryland comptroller wants cute intern tail
All's true that is mistrusted
Irrespective of the value of the proposal, voting reform is an excuse to make a dig at the State Elections adminstrator, Linda Lamone, an appointee of Democrat Parris Glendening, whom Ehrlich and his cronies have been trying to oust for years.
Further, it's pandering to voter reform interests to slap at the Democrats who keep overturning his vetoes.
This is base political opportunism.
You wanna see principal? Look at Ehrlich's veto of the law that requires employers of more than 10,000 workers to pay health care for their employees.
Actually, there are a few really good reasons to use electronic voting even if it prints out a full ballot.
1) It can also store ballot information in the system, so you can have an accurate vote count within minutes of the election closing.
2) The system can ensure that all votes are valid (not voting for too many people for a single position, etc.)
3) Electronic voting becomes essential if we ever move to a better voting system (condorcet, etc.)
You'd approach the voting booth and type in a some phrase that would be used to calculate a signature for your ballot, which is assigned a pseudo-random id. You get a copy of your ballot and the identifying marks for your votes.
After the election, you could download (or search online) the official vote. If the ballot doesn't match yours, or doesn't appear, there's a problem. If there are a statistically significant number of "problems", then something's fishy. The integrity of an election could be measured by taking a random sample of people and verifying their ballots (or even asking EVERYONE to do so in a certain area). The results of the election would be a matter of public record and verifiable.
It wouldn't immediately catch votes for which there was no corresponding voter (that would take another validation mechanism), but it seems simple enough that the absence of even a simple scheme like that would be grounds for suspicion.
I'm not saying Clint Curtis is to be believed, I'm just saying that without any evidence to the contrary (and in light of some of the strange things that have happened in that case), one can't be to sure what the truth is. You'd expect someone to at least that receipts aren't a bad idea.
Third: "Thugs," as you call them, are not allowed to interrogate voters on how they vote. Since the paper receipt stays at the polling station, the thug wouldn't have any way to verify which way someone voted. This kind of thing is taken very seriously, and coercing voters will land you in jail pretty quickly.
Yeah, lawbreakers are always worried about keeping within the law.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Sadly, Maryland has been rocked by allegations of vote fraud in the past. Some of this would be easy to deal with given a paper tally from a voting machine. However, many things about Maryland have nothing to do with voting machines and everything to do with the process that certifies a citizen and his/her right to vote. I've heard rumors that as many 6000 Baltimoreans voted even though they were listed as deceased.
The real problem here is political machines playing dirty tricks on each other. The Republican party in Maryland is starving for office and will do nearly anything after three decades of predominantly Democratic rule. The Democratic party is so used to being in power that they're taking their constiuency for granted. Both sides are gearing to slime the other in any way possible. Maryland is losing as a result.
I vote Republican in Maryland mainly because they're marginally less looney than the Democratic Party here. That's not a ringing endorsement. Nor will they get one from me until I see a more balanced and fair view of the issues at hand.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
All you need is for the voting machine to count the vote electronicly and ALSO print out a ballot with both a machine readable barcode and a human readable vote on it. Ballot goes into a sealed ballot box.
If there is a dispute about the machine readable vote (which has the advantage of being available soon after the election closes), you can scan the barcodes or manually count the votes.
Its not hard to build, it would be dead simple given a computer to run it on (either a PC or something embedded, whatever is cheaper), a cheap LCD touch screen and a simple reciept printer (same as you see in a cash register). Then, given an OS to run on the machine and hardware drivers for the screen and printer, all you need is some simple software to do the actual voting.
Then all you have to do is to put an end to groups whos sole reason for existance is to get people to vote one way or the other because of and there might be a chance of people being elected because they are the right people for the job people who can fix the problems with the economy and people who are prepared to stop throwing money away fighting wars that shouldnt have been fought in the first place for example)
Source: True Vote MD
The machine readable portion probably needs to be human readable as well. Imagine if the machine readable portion were a barcode. It could be hacked to be just about anything and you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at it. In fact, automated recounts in general might be a bad idea in that they can be manipulated. At the very least an automated recount system needs to be human verified by reading the ballot on a vote by vote basis during the recount process.
Lasers Controlled Games!
With much fanfare, Maryland's new E-voting sytem was unveiled to the public at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. This replaced an electronic system of paper ballots that were filled out like the op-scan forms used for so many surveys and standardized tests for the last 30 or 40 years. At least some privacy was provided to prevent others from seeing a completed form and being able to link it to a particular voter, and the voter himself or herself fed the form into the scanning machine. For the most part I liked this system, the paper forms provided annonymity, the advantages of electronic tabulation of results, and a built in ability to audit the results.
The new sytem had nice pretty touchscreen displays, smart cards to enable the machines, and the ability to review and change your choices before hitting the "Vote" button. The new system did not provide any kind of hard copy tabulation though, and I worry about what might happen to my vote in case a plug gets kicked out of the wall or lightning strikes the transformer outside the fire station where I vote. In the hands of inexperienced volunteers, would they think to put all the machines on UPSs? In my area, the polls at the local precinct are traditionally run by mostly retirees who volunteer for the job, not by IT guys who set up ATMs and the like. Under the old system, if a machine crashed and burned, you could just refeed the paper data into another machine and not lose a vote.
An area in both the old and new systems that had me concerned wasn't so much the technology of the voting systems, but the recordkeeping of eligible voters. In 2002, I lived in my grandmother's old house, had the same last name and found out that she was still in the registered voter database, despite that fact she had been dead for 5 years and had been out of the area for 10. I made a joke about voting for her, but also asked them to update their database. Having representatives of all interested political parties working at the polls usually keeps people honest, but I can imagine in certain precincts there could be no opposition party workers. Without anyone of the opposition party to watch over their shoulders, collusion could result in ballot box stuffing and other shenanigans. In a close race, a few hundred extra votes for one candidate or another could swing an election, and with that the political direction of an entire state or country.
Given validation of a statistically valid random sampling of the ballots, it doesn't matter if the machine-readable portion is human-readable. It'd be nice if it could be, but it's more important to make sure it can be read by machines with extremely high accuracy.
As for machine recounts being manipulable, I don't think that's necessarily true. It can be done so that all parties are satisfied with the accuracy. And if they're unhappy with it, they can always pay for manual recounts.
Done right, with such a system the purely electronic tallies would always be accurate. The machine counts of the paper ballots, the random sampling to validate the integrity of the machine-readable ballots and the opportunity to fall back on hand counting to resolve disputed elections would only exist in order to make sure that no one cared to bother tampering with the electronic counts.
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