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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Well, what 24-year old woman wouldn't want a classy, sexy comment from such a studly, hunky 84 year-old like him?
I think it's sad she had to bring him tea. You see, they have these things called pitchers that really work well for things like beverages.