OSS Election Systems Desired, but Not Ready

An anonymous reader writes "Even though many American voters are ready for open source systems at the polls, Newsforge (a Slashdot sister site) has an interesting story about why open source may not be ready for the polls. From the article: 'The only open source e-voting effort that Rubin [an e-voting expert] noted was the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). "I don't agree with everything they are doing, but they are all about transparency and open source," Rubin said. OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.'"

Comments

OSS ready for the polls

[kc0re]

You know, I am an OSS guy as much as most of the people on Slashdot. I would love all software to be free, but then companies wouldn't make any money.

But if closed source polls can't get it right, what makes us think that OSS polls can? Again, I'm a big OSS advocate, and I would love to see OSS in the role for everything under the sun.
I don't think the public would know, however, if people were using OSS polls or a closed source poll. Nor do I think they would care...

but I would be willing to be that they would be more secure than their closed counterparts
I know i have read somewhere of someone hacking a voting machine..

But it all falls back on the basis of all software problems. The (software|hardware) is only as smart as the person operating it.

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought that the fundamental problem with closed source, in this particular application (not in general), is the fact that it is closed source. For elections to work it is important that the entire process be open to scrutiny. If something goes wrong, you need to be able to look through and find what/where... even if the only remedy is to say "bug x in function y of the source code makes this result invalid, we need to vote again using a different system (eg. paper)". But if the source is not available for scrutiny, you can't do this... you can look at the results and say "that's a bit odd", but you can't trace back to probable cause. This is precisely what closed source software can never get right, whereas OSS does by definition

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[Dachannien]

But if closed source polls can't get it right, what makes us think that OSS polls can?

The difference is that, with an OSS voting system, if there's a problem with the code, the public will (be able to) know about it.

Compare that to Diebold and ask yourself how likely it is that they'd be forthcoming with crucial details if and when something goes haywire with their electronic voting machines.

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[jaseparlo]

The (software|hardware) is only as smart as the person operating it.

The same could be said for democracy...

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[Catbeller]

"The difference is that, with an OSS voting system, if there's a problem with the code, the public will (be able to) know about it."

How? How do you know the code running on any particular machine or within any process in the system hasn't been temporarily tampered with? How do you monitor the states of every function in the system in real time? How do you know if your monitor isn't being fed fake data?

You can't lock up a system if a motivated someone wants to subvert it, and knows what he's doing.

Paper ballots. Hand counted with two witnesses, one from each party. Or more. Totals tallied on paper and totals forwarded and verified in the presence of suspicious witnesses. Recounts at will, not when a margin becomes too small. They count by hand in Canada and other places, and all ballots are totalled within hours, and there aren't any problems. What the hell do we need computers for? (Ans: to cheat.)

I don't forsee the Republicans being voted out of total national power until those machines are decommissioned. They won't let themselves be kicked out. There's too much money at stake, trillions of dollars. Does anyone think that those who staged a poll riot in Dade county will blink at flipping a few districts Republican in key races? You think men who staged a war will care about the morality of staging an election?

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[hunterx11]

The fact that it's hard to write good software is irrelevant if you hire a bunch of ex-convicts who don't even try to create a half-decent system that a small business might trust.

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[Yvanhoe]

Yes, the official code may be open, but how could you be sure that the machines run the code they pretend to be running ?

How would you notice the difference if there where an alien code like:

if(vote_nb%15==0)
{
jeb++;
}
else
{
regular_ voting();
}

And don't speak about md5sum to check it, how could you be sure to be running the right md5sum software ?
Label me paranoiac, I must be because I am into network security, but keep in mind that it is the government that organize the elections and chose the voting machines. Be it democrat or republican, I don't want to trust them with a single ballot.

Re:OSS ready for the polls

[M1FCJ]

Really I wonder what is the problem with paper ballots? United Kingdom manages without any complicated hardware, just a stamp and a piece of paper folded into two does the job perfectly fine. Here the government trusts the people so that now they are allowing the majority to vote with postal ballots (that is, if you can trust the Royal Mail).

Open source and elections

[RudyValencia]

I think that if open source software is used in elections, it will reduce ballot stuffing, political party bias by contribution, and possibly make elections fair for all involved, from candidates to voters.

Re:Open source and elections

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you live in Haiti or something?

In most of the western world, ballot stuffing is rather hard to do, even with simple paper & pencil voting sytems. Open source would not affect this practice either way, as it's a really inefficent way of rigging elections.

Open source also has nothing to do with changing the fact that some political parties have more money than others.

It also won't make the elections any more fair or unfair than they already are. The only thing that it may bring is some transparency to the process. Exposing frauds is not the job of open source.

Paper Ballots?

[Eightyford]

What's wrong with paper ballots? They work great in Canada. We even have election results within a few hours, at most. As far as I can tell the only "downside" is that paper ballots are hard to rig elections with.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[nbcjr]

try using paper ballots with 200 million votes... Doesn't look too good.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Quantam]

Hello? 2000 was an even bigger fiasco than 2004, and 2000 used paper ballots. To this day many people say the 2000 election was rigged.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Eightyford]

Hello? 2000 was an even bigger fiasco than 2004, and 2000 used paper ballots. To this day many people say the 2000 election was rigged.

Not the stupid punch card ballots with the hanging chads. Pen and paper. In Canada during federal elections, anyone can supervise the vote counting. It's almost impossible to rig elections that are held this way.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[PenGun]

The method used in Canada scales very well. What you have is this.

  Each voting district has an elections officer who assembles the hardware. Then groups composed of all parties do the actual work of taking the vote and counting the results. All the parties involved are at the count and it's pretty well impossible to spin the result.
  As this happens at an individual poll level it will scale effortlessly. We get our hand counted results about 3 -4 hours after the polls close.

  It'll never catch on in da USA as it makes it pretty well impossible to cheat.

      PenGun
    Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

I think the problem is the timeliness of getting returns. People want election results fast. So, like everything else in politics they want it fast and easy, not slowly and accurately.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Eightyford]

I think the problem is the timeliness of getting returns. People want election results fast. So, like everything else in politics they want it fast and easy, not slowly and accurately.

They can't wait a few hours?

Re:Paper Ballots?

[ToasterofDOOM]

That's us Americans you're talking about. How often have we been patient or reasonable?

Re:Paper Ballots?

[rewinn]

> People want election results fast

I disagree.

We may be told that we want results fast, but really we want them accurate.

Go ahead, ask anyone: "Would you rather have poll results within an hour of the polls closing, with a 50% chance that they would be wrong, or have them within 3 days with a 0.00001% chance that they might be wrong?"

You can play with the times and percentages a bit, but I would bet cash money that most people want accuracy & precision, not speed.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

Well, the politics comment was my cyncism getting the better of me...

But let me put it this way. I live in Ohio. There was a precinct upstate who didn't turn their tallies in until 9 am the next morning after the 2004 elections. This made the news, in other counties (such as mine). They were repremanded by state politicians about how this was unacceptable.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[???]

Ummm... The returns do come in fast... The last election, we knew who our prime minister was going to be before the polls closed on the West Coast. Hand counted paper ballots are a highly scalable solution because counting is highly parallelizable. You don't have one team counting 200 million ballots...

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

That's a really bad way to frame this issue. The answers you get from asking questions like that are always going to be skewed in favor of the point you're trying to get at. I strongly believe however, that when elections are taking place, the pressure being placed on election boards are to make sure the job is done as fast as possible. Correctness of the results is hard to check, and is done infrequently. Speed however, is plainly obvious to everyone.

I guess i would put it this way:
This is an issue of sociology and organizational structure, not an issue of how people respond to when polled.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[stubear]

We have this thing in the US called States Rights. Voting systems are picked by each district, not on a Federal level and you'd have a very hard time forcing thousand of districts to replce their current systems. Some out of spite and stubborness, others out of financial hardship, and probably a mix of the two with the rest. The US Constitution was written to appease the States and as such the Federal Government could not appear to take too much power over their little feifdoms. Things like this are the result of this decision our forefathers made, for better or worse. Perhaps you should try to understand this concept and why it came about before you bash the US.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

It can be highly parallelizable. If you have the man-power to staff it. I don't know whether all polling stations can. I'm not arguing that it's a bad way to do it. In fact, i agree, it's hard to forge. (Heck, i'm probably moving to canada in the next year or so, so believe me, i'm not slamming the system)

I do however think that it would be hard to get people to impliment such a system, and i'm trying to give you reasons how people might quibble.

Elections are complicated, even the simple things can get really broken. Again, another example, here in central ohio, polling stations which served a lot of people (the inner city ones) ended up with a severe shortage of voting machines. This is a really easy oversight to fix (which is why there were so many accusations of rigging), but it still went drastically drastically wrong. And i also agree that just using pen and paper might have averted such a stupid problem, but my point is that murphy's law is always in play during events like elections, which have so many moving parts.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Zeinfeld]

They use paper ballots in the UK with a population of 60 million. The issue is not the number of voters, its the number of elections. In the US there are frequently ten posts up for election, sometimes more. Then there are ballot measures and so on.

Counting paper ballots is not a big issue, we use bank tellers. I have run elections with several thousand people voting, it is not a huge issue. The general election counts are run in essentially the same way.

I am very skeptical of this particular OSS project. Not because I don't believe in publishing the actual code running on the machines running the count. I think that part is a no-brainer. Publishing the source is a small part of OSS though. The big problem is how you set up an audit trail without losing the secret ballot. Without that how do you know what code is running on the machine?

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

That's a bunk argument. So many states rights issues have been overruled by the federal court system. And, specifically, there have also been noises made about mandating a federal standard for federal elections. I'm quite sure that principle is not going to win out in this sort of discussion, as in many others.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

Out of curiousity, how many people do you have staffing any given election/vote count?

Re:Paper Ballots?

[???]

Elections are complicated, even the simple things can get really broken. Again, another example, here in central ohio, polling stations which served a lot of people (the inner city ones) ended up with a severe shortage of voting machines. This is a really easy oversight to fix (which is why there were so many accusations of rigging), but it still went drastically drastically wrong.

Referring to this as an oversight is tremendously rich, given that the County elections boards and the Secretary of State's offices were advised of this potential problem repeatedly prior to the election and took no action to correct it. Furthermore all of the precincts affected by this problem happened to be precincts that voted for the opponent of the candidate for whom the highest ranking state elections official (Sec of State) held the position of co-chair of re-election campaign.

BTW, in Canada, we generally discourage elections officials (with the weight of the law) the practice of engaging in partisan activities (like, say, acting as co-chair of the election campaign of one of the candidates in the election you are running).

Re:Paper Ballots?

[MochaMan]

We have this thing in the US called States Rights. [blah blah blah blah]. Perhaps you should try to understand this concept and why it came about before you bash the US.

That's all fine and good, except you totally failed to actually address the question. What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries, and they seem to historically have fewer problems than other alternatives.

That in mind, to address your two main concerns:

1. You point out that they can't be mandated at a federal level. I'm confused as to how this is relevant. At some level a system has to be chosen. The parent is questioning the value of choosing an e-voting system regardless of the level of government.

2. You seem quite upset that the parent poster criticised the US. I really enjoyed the bits about your forefathers, and the bits about the state and federal governments not getting along; very passionate -- good effort all round! I guess the only bit I found disconcerting was that the parent poster never mentioned or implied anything about the US, just about electronic voting systems... which can be found in many countries.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

Hey, preaching to the choir here. I voted for the guy who lost. Hell, i campaigned for the guy who lost. On top of that, i voted for the ballot measures in 2005 that were designed to remove the Secretary of State from the governance of elections. The problem is, and the republicans are right to say this, but the democrats who were to oversee things like the distribution of voting machines totally dropped the ball. I blame the Ohio Democratic Party more than anyone else. Cause i already assume that republican politicians are all crooks.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[SpectralDesign]

Not to post simply to be disagreeable, I think paper ballots (or at a minimum, a paper-trail from electronic voting devices) are certainly preferable over some of the other options that have been tried...

but you should keep in mind -- the entire population of Canada is less (nearly half, as a matter of fact) the population of only California...

I'm fairly certain that has some bearing on the ability to rapidly process the paper ballots :)

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Zeinfeld]

Out of curiousity, how many people do you have staffing any given election/vote count?

I don't recall, 30 or so per constituency but it certainly varies.

The main thing about paper ballots is that there is no variation in the ballot access by precinct. There is no way to pull the type of corruption the GOP pulled in Ohio, Ken Blackwell deliberately underequiping the polling booths in student areas so that there were people waiting to vote at 2am. There is no way to pull the type of corruption that Katherine 'faceache' Harris pulled in Florida where the optical scanning machines had different programming acording to whether the precinct was white or black. In the white precincts the machines sounded an alarm if the ballot misread and the voter got another chance. In the black precincts the machines just silently accepted the paper without making any response.

The way that elections are really stolen is to suppress turnout. Harris had an operation that was 'purging' the electoral rolls of people who had the same names and skin color as convicted fellons. The contract was awarded no bid to a crony.

Clean elections should not be a party issue. It looks to me as if the GOP is about to get burned really bad. There are 15 or so members of Congress likely to be taken out by various scandals, only one of which is a Democrat (from Louisiana natch.). Those 15 are all from the same districts at the center of the election fraud disputes and involve many of the same people. Harris is about to drop out of the Senate race in Florida now that it is clear she lied in her response to the Wade scandal. In Ohio the wife of Noe, the guy at the center of the 'coingate' scam was at the center of the election fix.

The type of people who fix elections are the type of people who take bribes and kickbacks in office. As a result of the sleaze scandals during the Major government Tony Blair has just celebrated his third election victory without even the hint of a challenge from the Conservative party. The same could easily happen in the US, even a polarized electorate can tip very heavily.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[seifried]

No it doesn't. You have 10 times as many people voting. You also have 10 times as many people working the polls and counting ballots and whatnot. End result: the same amoutn of time. Getting 10 times more people to work elections in a country with 10 times more people... geee. that'd be the same percentages as here. You people suck at math.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[NoTheory]

Well, point of note, there was only one precinct where people were waiting until 2 AM, which was at a single small college that's kinda out in the boondocks (i have friends who went there), so i'd say that the 8 hr thing was rather anomalous. The large bulk of the problem took place in the cities, and disproportionately in places that had high population density (which happens to also correlate to poorer areas of the cities, and more democratic leaning populations). But even if you ignored the 8 hr waiting time, if you have polling locations where people are waiting between 3 and 5 hours to vote, there is indeed something seriously wrong.

I'd also like to see more information about Noe's wife being involved in the election set up, because that is not something i have ever heard, and i pay a good deal of attention to reputable news sources in ohio. Noe himself was involved in illegal campaigning for Bush/Cheney '04, i know that for a fact.

Regardless, there are some checks and balances in our horribly complicated election system, and i still fault the Ohio Democratic Party for not even going so far as to use the tools that they had available to them.

Finally, i don't think the republicans are going to get burned. I think that some semblance of what passes for sanity around here will return, because the republicans have fucked things up so terribly. That doesn't mean that republicans won't still have power, or that they still won't be able to lie cheat and steal, it just means that they can't do it so brazenly, or so obviously. It's still a winner takes all system.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[modecx]

Yeah, and with this system, it's quite possible to get results from the entire east side of the country just at the polls are closing on the west side! If wanted faster results, you'd have to bring back Johnny Carson so he could do the Carnac the Magnificent bit.

Personally, I think election coverage by the polls should be regulated such that news stations can only carry information about local elections at least until every polling place has closed--and everyone can spaz out... If we can't get a beer from a bar that's too close to a polling station (so it wouldn't be possible to buy a vote from a drunk), then the shitheads on TV shouldn't get the chance to buy votes from the morons out there, either. It's come to the point where people are influenced to vote depending on how the person they want to win/lose is projected to do, at any given instant during election day.

I'd also be happy if people who voted would somehow be eligable for a reasonable tax break. That would bring in tons of people alone... But it wouldn't ever happen... A tax break that actually stood a chance of helping the poor and middle class? Not a chance.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[bill_mcgonigle]

The big problem is how you set up an audit trail without losing the secret ballot.

There's a cryptosystem to handle this (somebody fill in the name here).

Basically, you get a receipt with a code on it. It's one half of a pair. The administrator of elections gets the other half of the pair (in a log, for instance). Together, the two parts of the pair can recreate your ballot. Apart they're useless. So, you can't sell your vote, and the official can't determine how you voted, but if the election needs to be validated it can be.

The trick, I suppose, is you can't directly re-count the election without everybody bringing in their receipts. And what happens if somebody dies on the way home from the polling place, they wash their pants with the receipt in the pocket, etc? It's probably impossible to ever fully re-create an election. So this is a trade-off if you want to use voting machines but don't trust them or the people administering them.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[TallGuyRacer]

As far as I can tell the only "downside" is that paper ballots are hard to rig elections with.

Exactly. That's why they are totally unsuitable for US elections.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[muhgcee]

I'd also be happy if people who voted would somehow be eligable for a reasonable tax break. That would bring in tons of people alone... But it wouldn't ever happen... A tax break that actually stood a chance of helping the poor and middle class? Not a chance.

Well yes, interesting idea, and maybe a good one. One potential problem with this, however, is that people (more than usual, that is) might vote without being informed. i.e. they'll go and make their mark just to get their tax break.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[ajs318]

Well, in the UK we use pencil and paper for about 50 million voters. The trick is just to arrange it so that polling stations are numerous, and only a few thousand people vote in each one. For 200 million voters, you will need 50 000-100 000 polling stations. It doesn't take that long to count 2000-4000 votes by hand and telephone the numbers through. The existence of so many separate polling stations makes it (1) harder to bribe everyone involved, and (2) less likely for one bodged result materially to affect the outcome.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[meringuoid]

There was a precinct upstate who didn't turn their tallies in until 9 am the next morning after the 2004 elections. This made the news, in other counties (such as mine). They were repremanded by state politicians about how this was unacceptable.

Interesting... but that's, what, one out of how many in the state? Usually that won't affect the outcome, right?

In British elections, the polls are open all day Thursday (I have no idea why Thursday, AFAIK it's just traditional) and close at 10pm. Counting goes on through the night. Generally the result is clear by about 1 or 2am, and confirmed at about three or four once one party controls a majority of the seats. Early the next morning the Prime Minister is waving to the cameras from the steps of No. 10.

However, there are always a few constituencies where the count is delayed for whatever reason, or where a recount is demanded. Although the vast majority will have returned already, results continue to trickle in well into Friday daytime. This does not seem to bother anybody.

However, there was one case - I believe in 1997, when the Tory vote collapsed spectacularly - where one seat which the Tories had considered safely theirs for decades had returned a Liberal Democrat MP, by a very small majority. The Tory demanded a recount, as was his right, and the recount was held. Yep, the Liberal won, but the majority was even smaller than we thought the first time (in single figures, IIRC). The Tory then somehow forced the vote to be retaken... which resulted in a massive majority for the Liberal.

The lesson? Recounts and delays are all very well, but don't take the piss, mate :-)

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Haeleth]

there was one case - I believe in 1997, when the Tory vote collapsed spectacularly - where one seat which the Tories had considered safely theirs for decades had returned a Liberal Democrat MP, by a very small majority. The Tory demanded a recount, as was his right, and the recount was held. Yep, the Liberal won, but the majority was even smaller than we thought the first time (in single figures, IIRC). The Tory then somehow forced the vote to be retaken... which resulted in a massive majority for the Liberal.

This is because unlike the USA, the UK is a three-party state. There was therefore a large group of Labour supporters available to switch their votes to the Lib Dems, in order to keep the Tory out. (The way you tell the story, it almost sounds like you might be suggesting some Tory supporters tried to punish their candidate for wasting time, which seems unlikely.)

Re:Paper Ballots?

[rtb61]

If people wanted to be picky they would simply point at there is no oppurtunity for profit in a straight forward, paper ballot, hand counted system, which means of course there is no way in hell, that it will be used in the US, no profit - un-American ;-).

Re:Paper Ballots?

[meringuoid]

The way you tell the story, it almost sounds like you might be suggesting some Tory supporters tried to punish their candidate for wasting time, which seems unlikely.

IIRC, this was the sort of place where Labour never had a significant share of the vote...

A bit of googlery reveals the details. It was Winchester, in 1997.

The original result was Liberal 26,100, Tory 26,098, Labour 6,528. After the re-run, the result was Liberal 37,006, Tory 15,450 and Labour 944. Certainly some of those Labour votes would have gone Liberal, but it also seems that the party didn't even bother campaigning; there was a winnable by-election elsewhere on the same day. Notice also that the Liberal vote increased by more than the entire Labour vote from the original result, and that the Tory vote collapsed. It looks a lot like many Tory voters either stayed at home or switched to Liberal out of annoyance at their candidate playing silly buggers.

Oh, and the nostalgia... good old Screaming Lord Sutch on the hustings. I really miss seeing him at elections.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Ohio during the paper ballot years, there was a rule that any stray marks on a ballot invalidated the ballot. The rationale was that stray marks would both make optical scanning of the ballots unreliable and indicate that the ballot was mishandled because in the voting booth, only valid areas of the ballot are exposed and available to be marked.

Fraud was reportedly rampant. At the vote counting, a pair of representatives from each party with a candidate on the ballot would count. Each ballot was removed from a box, and handed from person to person for inspection before the ballot was fed into the optical counting machine. The (typically little old ladies) inspecting the ballots would place a small piece of pencil led under their fingernail and inadvertently place stray marks an ballots containing the wrong votes.

It is rumored that in one Cleveland area counting station, 2/3 of all ballots were invalidated for stray pencil marks.

Then there are the famous dead voters in Chicago and the magic box of ballots delivered hours after the polls closed. The box was magic because it contained ballots in sequential serial number order, and every ballot voted the same way.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[MarkGriz]

> People want election results fast

I disagree.

We may be told that we want results fast, but really we want them accurate.

Absolutely. The only people that want faster results are the news media.
Besides, a little inaccuracy makes a great news story, so its a bonus.

I'm perfectly content to hear about it the next day.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[jamiesan]

The only problem with Instant Gratification is that it's too slow.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[sadler121]

you don't GIVE people the receipts, you have them drop it off in a ballot box.

all a computer would do is be a glorified poll taker, the election would be certified from the print out s/receipts/ballots. The TV networks would get there instant election numbers with in x% error (really close to accurate), and the election would be certified off the paper ballots. You wouldn't track the votes at all.

I know in my home state, (illinois) we use punch cards, and the only way you can get a punch card is by going to an election judge giving them your name (some require ID), they look your name up in the book, if there you get a ballot, and can goto a booth. Nothing would change from that angle, the only defference being that the booth would have a computer, and would be able to instently tabulate your vote. Once you are done, the computer prints out a ballot, that allows you to make sure you voted correctly, if you did, then you take the ballot and drop it off in a box.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[wrfelts]

That's a bunk argument. So many states rights issues have been overruled by the federal court system.

You have to remember that at the founding of this nation, State==Nation. Yes, each state is considered a soveriegn nation loosley coupled at the federal level for the common good. The Constitution is very clear that all rights not specified for the federal government in the constitution are strictly reserved for the states (individual nations) to preserve their sovereignty and to keep the federal government in check. Over the years we have forgotten this but, as it stands now, any serious challenge to any law that allows the federal government to overstep these bounds (good or bad) is subject to being overturned. So, if you want good law to stand, it must be based in all (or most) states or be set in as a constitutional ammendment.

Most of this has been ignored since the Civil War because of Lincoln's enforcement of the Union. No one has wanted to reopen that can of worms. His not-quite-legal enforcement matched the not-quite-legal seccession of the various states. (Only CA and TX have treaty codified rights to secceed due to their previous, undeniable soveregnty as independant and recognized nations prior to statehood.)

The states' rights issue is one that does need to be revisited in the future for clarity and some clean-up. I just don't think our nation is mature enough, yet to handle it without some major problems.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[rewinn]

> the pressure being placed on election boards are to make sure the job is done as fast as possible.

Now you've changed the subject. I've served on local election boards for the past 5 years, and of course there is pressure to work quickly. That's true in most enterprises, from MacDonald's to NASA.

But you have to distinguish between pressure and priority. Regardless of the pressure to get everything cheap & fast, the priority is still to make burgers that don't kill you, space flights that land safely, and balloting that is as close as possible to 100% accurate and precise. If you tell you customer that you are going slower to improve the ultimate product, they will understand and, in the case of elections, demand that you go slower to get it right.

[Insert reference to "You Can Do It Fast, Cheap Or Right" here]

Re:Paper Ballots?

[mpe]

What's wrong with paper ballots? They work great in Canada. We even have election results within a few hours, at most.

As well as in many other parts of the world. However the whole process of running elections just appears to completly non-standard when it comes to the US.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[msouth]

People want election results fast

I disagree.

We may be told that we want results fast, but really we want them accurate.

We think we want election results fast, because we get most of our information from the media, who are the ones that have a vested interest in getting them fast--they want "the result" quickly so that they can explain to us the correct opinion of the result. (And if you consume anything that the national media in the US produce, you should really read Bias--independent of what side of the fence you are on.)

Re:Paper Ballots?

[mpe]

What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries,

Things go beyond the ballots being on paper. It would be perfectly possible to count Canadian ballot papers using a machine. But doing so would lose several layers of transparancy and supervision of the counting process.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[mpe]

but you should keep in mind -- the entire population of Canada is less (nearly half, as a matter of fact) the population of only California...

Not really a meaningful comparison, it would make more sense to compare sizes of electoral districts.

I'm fairly certain that has some bearing on the ability to rapidly process the paper ballots :)

Manual counting of paper ballots typically is quite rapid. Though the interesting thing is that many US elections do not take effect for several months...

Re:Paper Ballots?

[modecx]

Yeah, of course that's true--you raise a good point, and I have had the same thought. I'm sure a larger amount of people than normal would vote uninformed, just to get whatever benefit was offered... However, I think that most people who would be lured in by this benefit (but wouldn't have voted otherwise) would probably vote the way they truely felt, just because they're already there, and the "why not" factor. So, even if there was an increased level of noise, I think the net effect in the end would be a better signal to noise ratio than we have now.

It's a disgusting thing to me, that something like 70+% of Iraqi citizens can show up to the polls despite a good chance that some bomber could explode a large crowd, and even though they're relatively sure of the outcome (Shiite v. Suni populations), but the best we can do is around 30%. People taking freedom for granted is a terrible thing with so much freedom at stake.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[mpe]

This is because unlike the USA, the UK is a three-party state.

This might be applicable to England in Scotland and Wales you have at least 4 main parties and Northern Ireland has a completly different set of political parties from the rest of the UK.

Re:Paper Ballots?

[mpe]

In Ohio during the paper ballot years, there was a rule that any stray marks on a ballot invalidated the ballot. The rationale was that stray marks would both make optical scanning of the ballots unreliable and indicate that the ballot was mishandled because in the voting booth, only valid areas of the ballot are exposed and available to be marked.

This is not a "paper ballot" as understood by most of the workd.

Fraud was reportedly rampant. At the vote counting, a pair of representatives from each party with a candidate on the ballot would count. Each ballot was removed from a box, and handed from person to person for inspection before the ballot was fed into the optical counting machine. The (typically little old ladies) inspecting the ballots would place a small piece of pencil led under their fingernail and inadvertently place stray marks an ballots containing the wrong votes.

At least part of the problem here is using machines to do the counting. It's also a bad idea to let partisan people handle ballot papers if it is this easy to invalidate them.

Australia

[Kangburra]

Here in Australia we have a system that works, and has been used already.

http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evoting

Re:Australia

[barefootgenius]

Hate to say this mate. But all the paper trail, open source, accountable, triple times goodness isn't gonna help them a bit if all they have to choose between is someone backed by a some corporations vs someone else backed by some other (maybe the same) corporations.

What ever happened to the political protester comes to power. Haven't any of their presidents spent their youth being locked up fighting the government, staging marches, standing up for whats right? Well, on the bright side maybe the yanks will listen to us next time we say the guy that are voting for is an idiot.

(By the way, thanks for protecting New Zealand. You're pretty much our only hope since the government down here decided to decimate the defense force. Lots of love, try not to burn your country down by throwing a ciggi out the window or something...)

Re:Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Australia we have a system that works, and has been used already.

It's also worth noting that the eVACS system is free software under the GPL and you can get the source, and some more info, at the ACT Electoral Commission site.

Relevant to the article!

Oh right.

[DogDude]

Oh, right. Hackers putting together beige-box PC's running Linux and this simple software are going to get to install voting machines. Riiiight. And monkeys might fly out of my butt. Nice idea, but pretty damn silly, nonetheless.

Re:Oh right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, right. Hackers putting together beige-box PC's running Linux and this simple software are going to get to install voting machines. Riiiight. And monkeys might fly out of my butt. Nice idea, but pretty damn silly, nonetheless.

Oh, right, troll. Proprietary vendors putting together shiny snake-oil security with closed source software and security by obscurity? Riiight? We already tried that one. You're also repeating very old "hackers/hobbyists" FUD and should try something new and intuitive.

Re:Oh right.

[santaliqueur]

so are "hackers" going to be the ones writing the document formats for the commonwealth of massachusetts? troll much?

Easy formula

[HairyCanary]

For public safety, I say we require three things from electronic voting systems:

1. Open source. We need to be able to trust these systems and how can we do that without being able to examine the code behind them?
2. Paper records kept for the government. Just in case there is a trust issue, this is a backup method for the recount.
3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.

So easy. I am all for having the convenience and speed of electronic voting, but I cannot for the life of me understand why we must give up the benefits of paper ballots at the same time, and even improve on them (as in the paper copy for the voter).

Re:Easy formula

[???]

1. Open source. We need to be able to trust these systems and how can we do that without being able to examine the code behind them?

Indeed, I concur

2. Paper records kept for the government. Just in case there is a trust issue, this is a backup method for the recount.

So long as these records contain a human readable indication of an individual voter's intent, and were verified by the voter at vote-time.

3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.

Absolutely, uncategorically, under no circumstances. Proof of vote makes wholesale coercion, vote-buying and vote-selling methods practical.

Re:Easy formula

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This used to be the standard, until they caught on to Big Business asking their employees to show them their voting receipt to make sure they were voting for the right candidate. Especially around the turn of the century, this became an effective way to abuse immigrant workers, who had little choice in employment and didn't know much about the political system.

Re:Easy formula

[shaneh0]

>3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own >vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.

>>Absolutely, uncategorically, under no circumstances. Proof of vote makes >>wholesale coercion, vote-buying and vote-selling methods practical."

You fix this by COMBINING the two steps of government paper trail and user paper verification.

The voting machine prints you a receipt with a serial number on it. You can read it. Examine it. Put it under a a magnifying lense and check for microscopic defects in the paper. Then drop it in a box and walk out the door.

The gov't keeps the receipts, of course, and checks a statistically sufficient sample and compares that to the computer count. In cases of too much variation, a full count of the receipts is done.

And, as an aside, how hard can it be to build a voting application? I'm a software developer. Although I haven't worked on any open source projects, I have to think that I could build a voting application MYSELF before the november election.

I know that you need it way before then, but if you add a couple more programmers, maybe a dedicated testing team, and how could this be more then a 6-8 week project?

Re:Easy formula

[moonbender]

6 to 8 weeks?! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to rig a closed-source election software so that you can change the votes without anybody noticing? Come to think about it, yeah, 6 to 8 weeks seems about right...

Re:Easy formula

[ajs318]

Open Source just doesn't go far enough. Open Source still means nothing to computer illiterates, who still constitute the majority of the population.

The "paper record" thing does not properly address the problem, which is that the vote must be recorded {which you are trying to address in (2)} without there being anything, anywhere in the world that links the voter with their chosen candidate after their vote is cast. If what you are seeking to address is unreliability in the recording of the votes, then consider this premise: If the vote recording is sufficiently reliable, then there is no requirement for a backup -- and the problem then is not how to make a backup, but how to record votes reliably enough not to need a backup.

As for (3), you may need a record of the fact that you have voted for someone, but that must not show who you voted for. Otherwise, notwithstanding the probability that the two records may disagree {by accident or on purpose}, you create an opportunity to discriminate on the basis of for whom a person voted. Beside which, you can't expect everyone to bring in their voting receipts if a severe anomaly is discovered after the event.

That's why I designed a Direct Recording Electromechanical system for first-past-the-post elections. It replaces pen-and-paper ballots, it still needs two staff {a presiding officer and a poll clerk} to operate, but it gives near-instantaneous results {some mental arithmetic - one subtraction per candidate - is required, due to the use of non-resetting counters}. Your vote has as much chance of being traced back to you as any one of the pulses of electricity which ever caused a solenoid counter to advance. The equipment could be made available for public scrutiny almost right up to the moment it was required for use. Finally -- and IMHO crucially -- the entire principle of operation can be understood by anyone with GCSE physics.

Re:Easy formula

[Anonymous Coward]

This vote buying/vote coersion thing is easy to fix. Make the reciept spoofable. My thought goes like this:

Give Each voter a paper record with an electronic signature. Make public the votes file with it's signatures, after election day. This would allow each voter to verify that thier individual vote was counted correctly. (important because it'll increase voter participation) And gives a legalaly provable case if it wasn't.

BUT! Since the reciept is just laser printed on standard paper, and contains no identifying information, you can just print out a different one when you get home, from the publicly available vote file. Or even print from the polling place, if facilities are provided. And you can use that reciept to get your silver dollar. Or prove to your employer that you voted correctly.

So:

1. Each voter can prove to their own satisfaction that their individual vote was counted correctly.
2. No voter can prove to anybody else how they voted.
3. The counts and results are public records, and reviewable/downloadable by everyone.
4. If my vote is missing or registered incorrectly, I can prove that in a court of law. (But I can't prove that it was my personal vote that wasn't counted correctly)

What more could anyone ask?

Re:Easy formula

[Rolgar]

Or even not employers, you get a criminal eliment that tells people to vote a certain way or they'll have to take a swim with concrete shoes. Also consider that ID thieves might attempt to profit by registering as multiple people, and get someone to buy their votes. This opens up considerable methods of abuse.

Huh?

[femto]

The article itself states (and other comments have pointed out):

"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."

Perhaps the author meant to say:

"no American vendor offers open source software and systems that are ready for voting."

Re:Huh?

[killjoe]

What I don't understand is why they are waiting around for a vendor? Take the money you would have given diebold, pool it with all other states that would have done the same thing, hire people, get it done.

You can also create a private company and buy a significant percentage of shares in it and sell the system to other states or countries. There are all sorts of govt-private partnerships all over the world like this.

Re:Huh?

[femto]

My understanding is that that is essentially what the ACT government did in Australia.

It's interesting to note that the source code includes a patch to rectify a bug found by a local University. The Uni (ANU+NICTA) took advantage of the free nature of the code and used it as a basis for formal code verification research. Score one for Free software.

Re:Huh?

[mdielmann]

"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."

You know it's getting bad when the Americans need to start looking to Estonia for tools to build a better democracy...

Australian

[LetterRip]

EVACS started open source under the GPL - but closed the source at a later point.

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html

It is made in Australia, and I was of the impression has been used in elections already.

LetterRip

Re:Australian

[LetterRip]

and from a previous slashdot article,

[QUOTE]Within the world of electronic voting, though, eVACS (for "Electronic Voting and Counting System") has been a rare success story both for open source development methodology and for the benefits that electronic voting can offer. The first generation of eVACS (running on Debian Linux machines) was developed starting in March 2001 in response to a request for bids by the Australian Capitol Territory Electoral Commission (ACTEC), and it was done on a budget of only AUS$200,000.

(The Australian Capitol Territory includes Australia's capitol city, Canberra, as well as surrounding suburbs and Namadgi National Park.)

Besides a respectable list of features driven by ACTEC's initial requirements (like support for 12 voting languages, and audio support for blind voters), eVACS has an advantage not enjoyed by many electronic voting systems: it's been successfully, uneventfully used to gather votes in a national election. The election in which it played a part went smoothly, and the eVACS system itself functioned as hoped.[/QUOTE]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/04/19 51202&mode=nocomment

Get some decent candidates

[RedHatLinux]

before you worry about how the votes are counted. Seriously, given that most candidates are basically carbon copies of each other, with only token differences, there no real motivation to vote.

I've voted in every election held since I turned 18,but the only reason I do that is avoid hearing "If you didn't vote, you can't complain", which is an assinine theory, given I pay taxes and served in the military, but hey, it's always funny when I get asked why I was flipping a coin while voting.

Re:Get some decent candidates

[NoTheory]

This is a silly thing to say. There are massive differences between all candidates. Their policy platforms may not be drastically different, but the character of their administrations, the people they surround themselves with, and the process by which decisions are made are vastly different. Al Gore, and George W. Bush had very similar platforms, but i don't think anyone disagrees that the War on Terror would have turned out very differently had Gore been rightfully installed as president.

Re:Get some decent candidates

[Quantam]

It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit: - The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004. - Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found. - There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists. - Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats - Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans - Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans). - Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans. This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.

Re:Get some decent candidates

[Quantam]

...my apologies for forgetting Slashdot used HTML formatting for posts by default. Let me repost that entire post, since it's nearly unreadable.

It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit:

- The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004.
- Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found.
- There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists.
- Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats
- Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans
- Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans).
- Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans.

This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.

Re:Get some decent candidates

[r00t]

Reasonable people can disagree about the single-issue activists, labor unions, and possibly finance/insurance/etc.

It's damn hard to argue that litigation is good for our society.

Re:Get some decent candidates

[danpsmith]

Candidates do have differences though. If Gore had won I can almost guarantee we wouldn't be in Iraq. It's a minimal choice, but there is some difference there.

Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[jaywee]

Can anyone explain me how can I trust OSS running box more than the one running closed software? How can I verify that the software running in the box is the same I verified? How can I be sure the cpu isn't mangled by some foreign goverment? (Since most hw is now made on taiwan..) What's wrong with paper ballots?

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can I verify that the software running in the box is the same I verified?

Compile from source.

How can I be sure the cpu isn't mangled by some foreign goverment?

At best all they can do by such a method is to crash the system. It's practically impossible for a CPU to manipulate a program in any meaningful way when the software is implemented after the hardware.

What's wrong with paper ballots?

Paper ballots are excellent. I'm all for keeping paper ballots. Paper ballots don't crash, can't be hacked from the internet, etc.

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[jonaskoelker]

(Mandatory reference) Reflections on trusting trust: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

Spot on! Another question: How can you trust the net card (there was post not long ago about IPMI, and the potential for hiding complete remote control backdoors in network interfaces).

Then again, how can you trust humans to count perfectly?

What's wrong with paper
Nothing! Absolutely nothing. As much as my mom suggests I should write my masters or Ph.D thesis on "on-line voting", I relly think this is one of the areas where correctness is just too important to ever trust networked computers (which, afaict, is a strict requirement). Also, there's a lot of long-haired issues: how do we make sure each voter can vote at most once? How do we make selling votes difficult (My best guess: through social ways, i.e. education)? How do we make sure each vote is anonymous, yet at the same time make sure each voter can vote at most once? These are just hard problems in my mind.

In effect, since it's the foundation of democracy (for those nations that are still at least somewhat democratic, i.e. excluding the USA), we need to treat this as safety-critical systems. That includes the provability (and proof!) of correctness, one-time pads for encryption and all that rigamarole.

No. Please. That's the one area where a two-mile bike ride plus waiting in line to put a cross on a piece of paper really pays off well. Stick with the primitive technology here, due to the advantages of being primitive.

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[bit01]

Nobody said "OSS == trustable", you've created a straw man.

OSS is just more trustable as it's harder for the software writer to, accidentally or deliberately, pull a fast one.

There are still many potential problems that need to be addressed, as you and other posters have noted.

Open source is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.

---

Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[Hast]

Most of the difficult questions about anynomity and uniqueness have already been solved.

Browsing through an introduction to cryptography will show you a large number of different different voting systems with different properties.

Of coruse, then the new question becomes how to manage PKI in a system which is understandable and easy for the entire population. (I'm sure a system can be made though.)

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[_iris]

You can be sure that the code on the machine is the same as the source by compiling the source code yourself, building the data image, then comparing that to the flash memory. You could even overwrite what's on the flash memory.

A CPU that mangles code, in any vote-altering way, without a consistent pattern of irregularities would cost more money than would be financially viable to produce and sell.

Nothing is wrong with paper ballots.

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[mpe]

You can be sure that the code on the machine is the same as the source by compiling the source code yourself, building the data image, then comparing that to the flash memory.

It's perfectly possible that the "code" is simply an interpreter for a high level language. If you want features such as "vote validation" the data is at least as important as the code.

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[mpe]

Paper ballots are excellent. I'm all for keeping paper ballots. Paper ballots don't crash, can't be hacked from the internet, etc.

As well as needing minimal infrastructure to keep working. Even if it is dark there are plenty of sources of artifical light sufficent for writing which are incapable of powering even one computer.

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[jonaskoelker]

Of coruse, then the new question becomes how to manage PKI in a system which is understandable and easy for the entire population. (I'm sure a system can be made though.)

Aunt Tillie (to her nephew Mervin): "But it won't install the smiley icons if I click no in the pop-up thingie... security something, it says".

Heck, even I don't read all the "do you want to trust this signature?" popups that firefox shoves into my face. It'd take a lot of education to make that work at what I'd call an accptable level. Also, some people actively resist any attempt to educate them, so... I highly doubt it. But then again, I haven't successfully predicted any social revolutions (mostly because I don't go around predicting social revolutions).

Anyways... I better go look at some cryptography (I haven't had that course yet...)

Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable?

[rtechie]

Bit01 nailed it on the head. Whether or not you're an open source zealot, the availability of source naturally creates more transparency. It's still vulnerable to hardware attacks (as you mention), but these are FAR more unlikey because of the specificity. Example: Intel writing secrret microcode into the Dual Corce CPUs to tamper with (say) the Diebold voting system is possible, but extremely tricky. The Intel people would have to know the details of the Diebold system, hope they will use Dual Cores in their hardware, and (most importantly) hope that Diebold doesn't change their software to invalidate their tampering. Not to mention this would cost literally BILLIONS of dollars to implement.

To put it another way, this might be an issue if voting machines used highly-specialized hardware. They don't. They use commodity computer and networking parts to save money.

It's also worth noting that many of the people here are implying "non commercial" to go along with "open source". The idea to being to remove the provit motive that may create corruption in voting machine technology.

Paper trail

[ArcherB]

I don't care how "open" or secure a system is, I want a paper trail.

We make photo kiosks. Every time someone places an order, we print a receipt. The receipt printer is one of the most reliable pieces of equipment on our systesm. We have about 60 employees. If we can do it, I see no reason why you could not have a voting machine print a paper receipt with your voting selection on it along with a unique, encrypted number. On the way out, the voter places the receipt (or paper ballot, if you will) in the drop box. Once the election is over, if everyone is satisfied with the results, the paper ballots are discarded. If there is a challenge, the paper receipts are counted and compared to the digital count. There should not be much of a difference. If the difference is enough to change the outcome, I'd say go with the paper count. However, if voting fraud is an issue, it will not be a small margin. It is doubtful that someone will try to fraud for only a couple of votes and there should never be more pieces of paper in the box than digital votes cast.

This will allow for a challenge, investigation, and is the only way to provide for a recount.

Re:Paper trail

[???]

However, if voting fraud is an issue, it will not be a small margin. It is doubtful that someone will try to fraud for only a couple of votes

Then clearly, you underestimate the skills and resources of your adversary. It is precisely small margins that are concerning. Remember, a small margin of votes can be changed in a close race without producing statistically significant differences from polling (and exit-polling) to raise suspicion. Such small changes, well placed, can have a significant effect on the overall race.

If you think that people do not have the skill to predict where small vote count frauds will make a difference, you need to visit the "gerrymandering" page on wikipedia, particularly the "Gerrymandering computer technology" heading.

Re:Paper trail

[killjoe]

In the last two election there was a statistically significant variance between exit polling and actual vote. In any other election, in any other country this would be a sign of voter fraud. In america nobody even cared.

Let's face it you could out and out rig the machines and nobody would care. This is america only 35% of people eligable for voting even care enough to stop by the polling place on the way from work.

Re:Paper trail

[karl.auerbach]

You are in luck - the Open Voting Consortium design does, in fact, produce a paper ballot that shows, in human readible form, the voter's choices. It's not a receipt, it's the actual ballot and has to be put into a ballot box to be counted. And it won't go into the ballot box until you, the voter, have a chance to review it to ensure that it reflects your choices.

The OVC system is very much the traditional paper ballot system but with computer systems added to help voters (including voters with physical impairments) create the paper ballots and to help voting administrators count the paper ballots.

The idea of having open or disclosed/inspectable source is to help you, me, and everyone gain faith that the system is relatively bug free and free of trojan horses. You can look to see that some naive programmer hasn't tried to stuff the vote counts into a 16-bit integer, you can look to see that the vote counting software won't get confused if there are two candidates with the same name.

Also, voting systems are not just software - there is a big procedural component (like ensuring that the vote counters are zero before counting starts, like making sure that voters only get to vote once, like knowing how to handle a voter who spoils his/her ballot or walks out in the middle of filling out the ballot). And there is a big hardware task - this stuff has to run in garages with ungrounded circuits from circa 1903 and a penny stuffed into the fuse box, etc. The software is perhaps the easier part.

Disclosure: I'm on the OVC Board of Directors.

many americans?

[Anonymous Coward]

by saying many do you mean the 250 many who run linux on the desktop?

Privacy??

[Freaky Spook]

I haven't really read how this e-voting works, but if it means you can log on to a website and vote from home, wouldn't that make your vote not anonymus? What would happen with the log of your IP, your vote could be traced back to you.

I like paper ballots because they don't get traced back to you, once you put it in the box you have no identity.

Re:Privacy??

[dsandler]

The "e-voting" here refers to the use of electronic voting machines (specifically Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines, which tabulate votes internally on digital storage). In particular, the "entrenched" DRE systems described in TFA typically offer weak (if any) resistance to tampering with the digital vote tallies, and they usually don't provide any auxiliary non-electronic verifiable record (such as a "voter-verifiable" printed ballot: a piece of paper which you can visually confirm represents your intent, and which you then place in a separate box for tabulation).

Add to this the fact that the software in these voting machines is kept secret from the general public, so it's difficult for outsiders to vouch for the correctness and robustness of the programming inside. In short, a voter has little reason to believe that the vote she thinks she cast on election day was accurately recorded and counted by these systems.

Internet voting is a whole other ball of worms, in part because of exactly what you describe: loss of anonymity and possibility of vote coercion. Anonymity can be preserved in part with strong crypto (reducing the packet-sniffing adversary to knowing that you voted today, but not for whom); vote coercion is very, very hard to avoid (someone can always stand over your shoulder with a blunt object and "encourage" you to log on and vote a certain way). This is why polling places exist: to give voters a safe, private place to cast an anonymous ballot.

Re:Privacy??

[Hackeron]

Having your IP/access time is the equivalent of spotting you walking into the booth. You cant say you didnt vote, but no one knows who you voted for because the vote is done via SSL.

Should be part of more sweeping election reform.

[tukkayoot]

I'm of the opinion that we should reform our entire election process nearly from the ground up. Trash the electoral college and the plurality voting system and implement the Condorcet method instead and have everyone's vote count equally, regardless of their geographical location (assuming eligibility to vote on a particular ballot to begin with).

All voting machines should be open source and the systems should be utterly transparent. All machines should provide a paper receipt and ballot, to allow individuals to easily verify their selections and in the event that a manual recount is needed, for whatever reason.

Our elections are at the foundation of our democracy. If they are broken or flawed, our entire system of government is flawed. Reforming our elections to do everything humanly possible to make it so the system accurately reflects the will of the elecorate should be one of our nation's very highest priorities.

Voting Machines are a Waste of Money

[Soong]

It's cheaper to count them by hand. A full county wide voting machine system costs a lot of money, a lot of money that could buy a lot of ballot counting labor hours.

I love a technofix as much as the next geek, but computerized voting machines are not the technology for now.

Re:Voting Machines are a Waste of Money

[The_Hun]

OK, it's too late to reply to such an old post, but an e-voting system would be cheaper if you could use it more than once in four years. That would of course mean a departure from representative democracy towards more direct forms of that ugly-but-useful-political-system.

open source software in voting?

[iamwoodyjones]

VOTER: "Okay need to vote...here we go...."

VOTER: "Huh, it's a command line terminal...Okay..."

Looks at people running the voting place

VOTER: "Excuse me. How do I vote....?...Uh huh...'ls'? Uh huh...'RFTM?' What does that mean...Oh I see. Thank you very much"

ls

VOTER: "Okay there's a file in here called README and INSTALL. I'll look at README first."

after some time...

VOTER: "Seams to be something about a pissed off guy named Richard and something he humps called a GNU...Okay. I'll take a look at INSTALL instead here"

VOTER: "Generic install instructions....something something something, configure....something something make? Okay worth a shot"

configure; make; make install

....
Checking for sed.....ok
Checking for awk.....ok
Checking for kernl...
........

30 mintues latter
Checking for libyourmom....ok
Checking for libkitchensick...Found Emacs....ok
Checking for ruby on rails....
ruby on rails not found...
ruby on rails not found.??
ruby on rails not found.??!!!!!!
RUBY ON RAILS NOT FOUND!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ruby on rails is the latest h4x0r dood!!!!!
Install Ruby rails AJAX0r!!!!

VOTER: "Son of a....!"

Working now in the Australian Capital Territor

[child_of_mercy]

We've got an open source electronic voting system in the Australian Capital Territory, it's been used in two elections.

Details and code here.

Seriously, how can this be relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the choice is between a free, as-perfect-as-can-be, open source voting solution versus Diebold... who do you think'll get the job?

This is a human problem.

The worst part about OSS election software...

[EnronHaliburton2004]

The worst part about OSS election software is that someone else runs 'make', you run 'make install', but the install process installs too much crap and trashes some of your local files.

Then, you try to 'make uninstall' but the process fails halfway through and so you're left with a system in an unknown state, with rogue files hanging out everyyear.

But as Thomas Jefferson said, it's doubful that your current system will remain stable forever. Every once in a while you need to Reinstall the Operating System.

Re:The worst part about OSS election software...

[lakeland]

There's this thing called packages.... they bundle software together to prevent clobbering files. Very handy. I wonder if windows will ever support them?

Re:The worst part about OSS election software...

[PatrickThomson]

He was making a subtle political allergory, dumbass.

This is ridiculous, it really is.

[ScrewMaster]

Look. This is America. The nation that led the world in technological development for two hundred years, put men on the Moon a couple of times and invented the personal computer, and now we're saying that we can't even develop a machine that can count reliably???!!! Please. This is not, repeat not a technological issue. It is a political one, pure and simple.

The only reason that implementing a transparent, auditable electronic voting system is such a problem is because there are certain people that have a vested interest in making it a problem.

Re:This is ridiculous, it really is.

[Doug Merritt]

This is America. The nation that led the world in technological development for two hundred years

Nitpick: no, not 200 years; the U.S. was a math/science/engineering backwater for most of that time. It was pretty much World War II that was the pivot, so call it 50 years.

(Your main point seems pretty glaringly obviously true.)

... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.

"The Great Time Machine Hoax" by Keith Laumer. Great book; that was a funny scene. Grandfather was quite the eccentric.

Re:This is ridiculous, it really is.

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah well ... it's called "hyperbole" and I used it to make a point.

You're the second person that's recognized that quote. Most people that have commented on it have just been offended. No sense of humor, I guess.

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Black-box voting machines are complicated. Who knows if you can trust them? Who knows if your vote actually counts?

Canada has been using paper ballots for as long as I have been voting. I see no reason to change the system because it works pretty well. Fraud is still possible, but difficult. Using machines to vote and to count votes would only introduce new ways to subvert the system.

Always vote for the opposition

[Anonymous Coward]

it's always funny when I get asked why I was flipping a coin while voting.

That's actually a bad idea, as random voting affects both main parties equally and hence is really a vote for the establishment.

A far more effective approach is to always vote for the opposition. This makes life very tough for politicians during the 50% of the time when they are most dangerous, ie. when they are in government, because they will spend a lot of time on the defensive to try to avert the turnaround at the next election. Thus occupied, they will have less time to perform their usual damage.

Always voting for the opposition is in effect a vote against the two-party system, and sends the message that politicians are shit and their actions entirely without merit --- which of course is exactly right.

Re:Always vote for the opposition

[Anonymous Coward]

Always voting for the opposition is in effect a vote against the two-party system

No!

Voting for the biggest opposition party is a vote *for* the two-party system. If you dislike that system, you should vote for a third party. It's a snowball effect, because the more people that vote for smaller parties, the more viable they look, and the more people will vote for them.

Large invest of time and money? WHY?

[OzPhIsH]

"OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.'"

How much capital does an originization really need to code up a secure counting machine? I just don't get where all these costs are coming from. The thing is just supposed to simply count. How hard is it? A couple of geeks should be able to do it in an afternoon in their free time, especially when they don't have to waste their time implementing all those backdoors.

Re:Large invest of time and money? WHY?

[laird]

"How much capital does an originization really need to code up a secure counting machine?"

While implementing a voting system isn't as trivial as you make it sound, the cost isn't so much in the development of the software to implement voting as the political and certification processes to allow it to be used. It costs $millions to work with the states to get each state to modify their laws to allow for the use of a secure, open source voting system, and then to them get the system certified in each state. Keep in mind that the US, unlike most countries, runs elections at the state level, with state laws about the election process that are unique to each state, and the states have VERY specific laws concerning the voting process, down to the level of what order the candidates must be listed in, and which font must be used. For example, laws detailing ballot layout written assuming printed paper ballots (for example) must be changed to allow for touch-screen voting, voting by the visually impaired (via the computer reading the ballot to the voter and collecting the votes), etc.

Balloting Programs are Trivial

[Anonymous Coward]

A balloting machine has to be one of the easiest things to write period.

Each candidate gets a counter. When a vote is cast for a candidate increment counter by one. When the polls close, display the count for each candidate. Then the adminstrators go to each machine records the numbers and adds them together.

The ONLY part of the balloting proceedure that needs any speed up is the counting of the votes, that is the only part that is time consuming and error prone.

You don't need to network the machines to get an automatic accumulation of votes. That would actually be a bad idea.

The only non-trivial part of the entire electronic voting machine thing is the mechanical aspect that makes sure one voter doesn't vote more than once.

Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform

[yawn9]

I didn't read the whole thread, but here are my suggestions for any kind of voting machine:

1) To prevent fraud, you must swipe your drivers license or other acceptable government issued ID to gain access.
2) To prevent tampering and uncounted votes, have sensors on the machine that will detect if a voter is leaving the booth. If he leaves without submitting his vote, save his session and dump the machine back to the login screen. Play an audible message and alert an election official to let the voter know what happened

I had a few more, but I can't remember them now.

Who's ready?

[SEWilco]

"... open source may not be ready for the polls."

Is closed source ready for the polls?

you disenfranchise people!

[r00t]

Paper is no good because we "need" to let people vote in 42 different languages. Understanding what the candidates promise is not a prerequisite for voting.

Paper does not self-validate. What if somebody messes up? They get disenfranchised! We "need" to ensure that every moron can just play with the ballot until it is valid.

More seriously, paper is hard to reprint when a candidate dies a week before the election.

Some people with poor eyes need HUGE letters.

Plus, e-voting is all high-tech, so it must be good.

Re:you disenfranchise people!

[ztane]

Heh. In Finland we just write a 1 to 3 digit number inside a circle with a pencil. If you are stupid enough to not write a valid number, your vote does not qualify.

Re:you disenfranchise people!

[Hast]

In Sweden different parties have differently coloured papers. (The ballot paper is about half the size of a postcard.) There are a number of smaller parties who have white ballots. The colouring naturally makes it easy to quickly sort and count. The party also list a number of the top poloticians for that party and you can circle one if you want to vote for that person.

You then put your ballots (we vote for 3 different levels of government at the same time) in an envelope and drop it into the voting box.

There is no information about the party agenda on the ballot, you are supposed to know that before you vote. Of course, there are typically a few representatives for each party there whom you can ask directly.

Re:you disenfranchise people!

[CrimsonAvenger]

In Sweden different parties have differently coloured papers.

In America, we don't vote for a Party, we vote for a candidate. And usually for more than one. Last federal election, I got to vote for President, Senator, Representative, Governor, Lt. Governor (our Lt. Governor isn't the running mate for the Governor), State Senator, State Representative, Council President, two At-Large Council members, one Council member for my district, two Judges, and four or five State Constitutional Amendments.

And there might have been a School Board member or two thrown in - I tend to ignore them since my kid doesn't use the Public School System, so I don't remember for sure....

Re:you disenfranchise people!

[mpe]

Paper is no good because we "need" to let people vote in 42 different languages.

Paper ballots can be used by the illiterate.

Paper does not self-validate. What if somebody messes up? They get disenfranchised!

They could always ask for a replacement ballot paper.

We "need" to ensure that every moron can just play with the ballot until it is valid.

Idiots are infinitly resourceful. This "validation" also has the problem that it can force someone to cast votes they didn't want to cast in order for the machine to accept their vote. (Will "don't care" and "none of these" always appear in all relevent options?)

More seriously, paper is hard to reprint when a candidate dies a week before the election.

In which case don't print the ballot papers until the eve of the election/if the dead candidate wins then you need to have another election, the same as if the winning candidate had died the week after the election.

Basic stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Counting data is the most basic task a computer can perform, a VIC20 could do this more reliably than these guys can achieve.

Why does it need to run on an OS at all? Wouldn't it be more economical/stable/secure to run this embedded?

that would ruin us

[r00t]

As it is, cities and big states suck up money for expensive pet projects. Political candidates mostly ignore the middle of the country. The electoral college system helps fight this.

(and no, it isn't right or good, because this perpetuates and increases the inequality)

With the electoral college, your vote is MORE likely to count. ("count" being that it tips the scale, such that voting the other way would have changed the result) This is a matter of math.

What we really need to do is break up a few of the largest states and perhaps merge some of the smaller ones. Split California 8 ways, Texas 5 ways, etc.

If I recall right, the number of electoral voting regions should be much higher. About 8000 (the square root of our population) is probably best, assuming you stick to one level.

Re:that would ruin us

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus people forget that pure democracy always results in a fascist state. You are seeing that in the US now because both sides have forgetten we are a REPUBLIC not a democracy. Democracy always results in "tyranny of the majority". And we're setting Iraq up big time for this problem.

The machine could be running different code.

[dsandler]

1. Open source. We need to be able to trust these systems and how can we do that without being able to examine the code behind them?

Disclosed or open source is critical, but not sufficient, to be able to trust the system. Assuming you've already verified that the disclosed code is totally trustworthy (a big assumption), you need to also convince yourself that the electronic voting machine in the polling place is running that exact code.

"Trusted computing" might be a bad idea for desktop PCs (where the user should have total control of the software running on it), but it might be a really good idea for voting machines (where the entire software stack must be kept under very careful control from the moment the machine is configured and certified right up to election day).

Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform

[Jack Schitt]

I wrote this all out in notepad without spell check of any kind. I barely even proofread it.

This is my idea of a reform:
---
electronic balloting system:

user arrives at poll place
receives magnetic card with one-way hash of ssn.
user swipes card in cardreader at ballot box
this initiates the voting. touch screens or pushbuttons, etc
no records are kept at all at the ballot box.
Votes are immediatly printed twice via a standard receipt printer in human readable format.
There is also an XML translation of the vote with a checksum at the bottom.
A barcode uniquly identifies the vote.
Another barcode uniquely identifies the voter. (but not personnally identifiable)
User retains one copy of the vote and submits the other copy.
Both copies are identical and either (but only one) can be submitted.
Submitted papar-vote's barcodes are scanned to make sure that this voter has only voted once.
Voter is capable of making several paper ballots. All ballots would have same voter barcode, but different vote barcodes.
Voter is only allowd to submit one ballot, even if several were made.
At no point, other than receiving the voter mag-card is the voter identified by name or social security number.
At poll close, ballot is optically scanned (the entire ballot, on a flatbed scanner).
The ballot is electronically recognized (OCRed) and the XML section is decoded.
If the checksum matches, the ballot is electronically counted.
If the checksum does not match, the ballot is rejected electronically and must be manually entered by unbiased election officials.

All paper ballots must uniquely identify the voter without revealing who the voter is
All paper ballots must be individually uniquly identified in the event of a manual recount
All ballots also contain a date and time of when the ballot is printed.

Manual recount:
Because one voter can create multiple ballots (in case they change their mind, to prevent voter intimidation, etc). The ballots are uniquely identified. The voters are also uniquely identified. All ballots have two id barcodes on them.

If the results are disputed, the first step is an electronic recount.
The next step is a manual recount.
When fraud is charged such that the ballots in possession of the election officials cannot be trusted, the copies that the voters retains can be photocopied and mailed to the election officials. Only the copy that was submitted at the polling place should be submitted because an electronic record of submitted ballots (identifying the voter id and the ballot id) exists and the ballots will be checked upon receipt. If the paper-vote that is mailed has a different vote id than the record of the vote id, the voter is notified and may (if needed) recast their ballot.

Voter responsibilities:
It is the voter's responsibility to check the printed ballot against the vote they made on the ballot box. If they differ, they should try again, posibly with a different machine.
It is also the voter's responsibility to make sure the ballot's barcodes are scanned when submitted and afterward inserted into the ballot bin that is eventually sent to election officials for certification.

Missing paper ballots:
When ballots are submitted, the barcodes printed on them are scanned. This creates a record on an offsite database that contains ONLY the following information: The voter id, the ballot id (unique to voter, not globally unique), the date/time submitted (set by the offsite database), the polling place, and the station number. Each station is operated only by one worker per shift, the station must be logged into and out of by the worker.

(Based on a particular station)
In the event of a missing ballot, the ballot is ignored.
In the event of several missing ballots, the ballots are ignored and the poll worker responsible is fined.
In the event of a large number of missing ballots, ALL voters at that particular polling place are asked to photocopy and mail in their cop

The disabled, the confused, and the stupid

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

A blind citizen given a paper ballot has to get someone to help, raising problems of confidentiality and trust.

A computer UI can, in principle, be made easier to follow than a crowded piece of paper. Googling for "butterfly ballot" will get you an example that turned out to be important. A computerized ballot can do validity checking and spare the counting system from having to divine "voter intent" from a double-voted or unreadable ballot.

Those are the only real advantages I've ever seen mentioned.

Re:The disabled, the confused, and the stupid

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

A blind citizen given a paper ballot has to get someone to help, raising problems of confidentiality and trust.

There's such a thing as braille. Blind people can actually read you know. They can even post on Slashdot with the right software.

Re:The disabled, the confused, and the stupid

[mpe]

A blind citizen given a paper ballot has to get someone to help, raising problems of confidentiality and trust.

How do blind people cope with money in the US? Given that all paper money is same size and colour scheme, regardless of demonination...

A computer UI can, in principle, be made easier to follow than a crowded piece of paper.

The piece of paper is only crowded if you either have lots of candidates or insist on putting multiple elections on one ballot paper.

A computerized ballot can do validity checking

What if the voter wants to vote in some way which is "invalid"?

Due the Math!

[SpectralDesign]

According to Google, whom we all know never lies --

USA Population (via cia.gov) - 295,734,134
Canada population (via stat-can) - 32,569,394
caveat - I don't have Flash6 so this number is actually the projection for July 1

What this means, as any /.er could tell you is that the population differential is actually 9.080123935, not 10. But of course these numbers are based on statistics, and are prone to error, so YMMV.

In the 2006 Canadian election of the Prime Minister, preliminary results indicated that 64.9% of registered voters cast their ballot.

Based upon 2000 census figures, 42.45% of the U.S. population voted in the 2004 election. Note that this is a percentage of the entire population, not of just eligible voters. Now of course, this opens an other can of worms, because while this number claims to be inclusive of the entire population there must be tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, or more) of un-accounted-for illegal immigrants, but that's a minor issue -- I only raise it to reinforce the point that the 42.45% figure is not exactly accurate. All that as it is, it would seem to be the highest voter turn-out in decades, but you might just chalk that up to ballot-stuffing and not actual living people casting their personal single votes... Who's to say with the hodgepodge of various voting standards and closed-source electronic voting systems in use throughout the States.

Now, when it comes to how many poll workers there are in each system, I admit my ignorance. You seem to be claiming some expertise on the matter, so please, do enlighten us!

No matter how you cut it though, if you assume an equal per-capita number of poll workers to eligible voters, it would *seem* that perhaps the States does in fact have an edge over Canada, so why can't they produce accurate and uncontested voting results as rapidly as Canada? That, sir, is a question for someone else to answer, because frankly, I don't give a rat's-ass.

And for a final matter, you seem to be referring to me as a resident of the States, but I am, as far as I can tell, living in Canada, sir. Shall I conclude that "you people" jump to conclusions? (where-ever-the-hell-you-are-from?)

Agreed

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

So long as we are all understood that the government copies must not contain any indication of who cast the vote.

However, I am still concerned about the potential for observation. If there are electronics in operation, there is an increased risk of an observer having some kind of receiver capable of decoding the waste radiation from the voting box.

I know that tiny cameras and mirrors could theoretically be placed to catch the inside of voting booths, but there is an order of magnitude more probability of discover using those kinds of tools.

Sexy as electronic voting is, I think it's one of those great ideas that should not be implemented, period.

On the other hand, we should be able to afford ballot counters at every polling station. That might be something to consider, since it would reduce the opportunity for lost ballots on the way to the county or parish offices. If the voting judges run the counter in small batches, they could even spot check some batches by hand.

What's the holdup?

[pherthyl]

Am I completely out to lunch or could a 100% bug free e-voting system be written in half an hour and 100 lines of PHP?

I just don't get what the holdup is. I'll help out whoever wants to build one and write up the functional specs:
1. Present list of choices
2. User picks one
3. Present confirmation
4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.

Re:What's the holdup?

[Anonymous Coward]

er, you're an idiot; do some reading about the problem domain and come back in a year without having your head stuck up your behind

Re:What's the holdup?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

1. Present list of choices
2. User picks one
3. Present confirmation
4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.

You forgot spec 5.

5. Do Not Oppose Any OCP Officer

India has a good system

[canadian_right]

Slate on India's all electronic voting system

A simple, scalable, system.

I agree.

[jd]

There are only a few criteria:

• You must be able to prove that every valid vote was counted exactly once - no more, no less
  
• You must also be able to prove that fake ballots cannot be injected into the system
  
• You must finally be able to prove that valid votes cannot be deducted from the system for the required length of time
  

These are a bit trickier than just building a machine that can add 1 to a column, but not THAT much harder.

I would ascribe every digital ballot paper with a hash value that uniquely identifies that paper and would be hard to forge. eg: Have each ballot paper marked with a serial number, then digitally signed by the electoral authorities.

Each voter's voting card would have a totally random public encryption key on it, plus a number. On going to the voting machine, the card would first tick the person off on the list of people who had voted. After casting the votes, the machine would encrypt the ballot paper with the encryption key, then it would append the number to the end. The electronic ballot paper would then, after a random delay, be sent back to the central repository via an SSL connection. The machine would keep no tallies and no records whatsoever. Nor would the local office. It would all be central. (The local office could count votes cast, though, as it would be useful to compare against votes decoded.)

The central system would use the number to select a relatively small set of private keys. It would try each key in turn until it found the key that unlocked that ballot paper. That private key would then be deleted. The unlocked ballot paper would be placed into a secure database. The number of valid votes identified would be counted and publicly published in real-time.

Just to be absolutely certain what is meant here, the database must be write-only from the central system and must be in a tamper-proof environment. Once all ballots are uploaded, it will then perform the count and download the results, ALL of the decrypted ballots and ALL of the encrypted ballots.

That way, anyone can perform a recount and although it would be a monumental task to validate the votes, it could be done. This system is pseudo-anonymous, not truly anonymous, using a VERY large base to make anonymity effective. The upshot is that if a random sample of voter cards were gathered (anonymously!), it would be possible to show that each of those cards matches to exactly one encrypted vote and one decrypted vote.

This shouldn't be necessary, as most of the avenues for fraud have already been eliminated. The effort to fraudulently enter a vote in this system would be extraordinary, as it would require breaking the ballot paper generation system, the encryption key system AND the decryption system, in order to be transparent. Failure to break all of these would result in the votes being rejected by the unbroken component.

I don't think an actual voting system need be this complex, but that's not the point. The point here is that it is possible to imagine a system that is (a) Open Source and (b) so damn-near impervious that it would be cheaper to just buy the person who'd been elected than rig so much as a single vote.

Has this been done? Probably not. Could it be done? Sure. Give me a couple of weeks, a few smart-cards, readers, kiosks and a tamper-proof computer case. There should be no difficulty in writing a system that would be close to iron-clad for the next 50-100 years, with so close to zero chance of tampering that it's just not going to happen.

If an OSS election system group has the hardware and would like to play with this scheme, I'd be happy to write it for them.

Counting is not the problem here.

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

It really is not the problem. It's what can be done while the counting is in process, and whether or not a non-technical person can confirm the count, and such.

Have the voter hand carry sealed printout to box

[sethstorm]

3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.

The only way this would be viable is if you were to be able to hand carry the paper output (in something to conceal the choices, of course!) over to a locked ballot box within the area after examining it in the machine - just as done with paper based voting. When the day is done, you count both totals separately, with the electronic count performed separate from the paper count, with full transparency. No personally identifying information on the printouts, just the selections made as it was done before electronic voting.

A third record in the form of a printout would be retained as it is currently done with electronic voting for the current purpose. This would be kept separate from all other records and only used in a recount. Not perfect, but the idea is that you're going raise the bar high enough to increase the visibility of any attempts, and the amount of resources to pull anything off. You arent going to stop the dedicated, but you'll certainly be able to find a lot more low-hanging fruit.

moderate the parent post down, hard

[Anonymous Coward]

this poster is a fool; he knows not, yet he things he does - shun him, for he is dangerous

Something stinks...

[TheLink]

Seems rather strange that the richest and most powerful country in the world can't afford decent voting systems (whether free or not). There are plenty of really smart people in the USA, good in crypto, systems, architecture etc. So the talent is there.

As for the money: this is the same country that has spent BILLIONS in Iraq for dubious reasons (the official reasons kept changing, so they can't have been the real reasons).

I heard one of the US Gov's "reasons" was to have democracy/free elections in Iraq, but that can't be the real reason since the US Gov was very obviously not pleased when there was democracy/free elections in Palestine and Hamas got elected ;).

I don't know what is really going on with the USA, but I doubt that the main issue is whether a voting system is OSS or non-OSS.

With all this "globalisation" being hyped as such a great thing, maybe the US should outsource their elections to India, and have UN observers for free to observe stuff. ;).

After all India is arguably the world's largest democracy (1 billion citizens). I bet if they had results as ridiculous as "more votes than voters", "negative votes" heads would _literally_ roll. They somehow have managed to get a decent chap as Prime Minister ( Dr. Manmohan Singh seems to be well-respected by most).

If I were a US citizen I'd _demand_ that all the people involved in supplying or approving crappy election systems be charged for _TREASON_.

After all, the USA keeps saying democracy is so important etc.

Prove it with actions and not bullshit.

Inspection is not enough.

[jbn-o]

From the article:

""Companies could still maintain intellectual property rights, so that they are the only ones who can sell it, but members of the public should be able to inspect it," Dill says."

Not only does maintaining "intellectual property rights" not preclude others from distributing copies of the software for a fee (as anyone who understands Free Software licensing already knows), merely inspecting the software is insufficient to get real work done in a way that is beneficial to the public.

I served on the Champaign County election equipment advisory board—an appointed board made up of representatives of businesses and political parties from Champaign County, Illinois. Over months in the past couple of years this board weighed a few machines from a variety of vendors so that we could make a recommendation to the elected County Board who would then make the final decision and sign the appropriate contracts. We were told at the first meeting that we were only to consider machines from "approved vendors" but in the end we learned that even the machines we were considering had not yet all been approved by the State of Illinois. It was just a means of narrowing the allowable debate, effectively excluding a variety of vendors who probably never knew we were seriously considering voting machines.

I knew early on (and did my darndest to convince my fellow board members) that we want complete source code to the machines we'd buy so that we could make repairs and improvements while enjoying the benefits of global competition. Locally we have lots of talented computer programmers, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is in this county. It is a shame to waste all the talent we have by getting into a monopoly.

Politically, there are good reasons to need the source code too: it's your machine paid for with your tax dollars, so you should not be restricted from getting it fixed when it breaks, running it any time you want, and not just inspecting what it ostensibly does. But we should also not constrain ourselves to the features the machine has today. Locally, we could switch from a first-past-the-post to some kind of ranked voting system (like instant run-off or some Condorcet system) for local elections. But so long as we can't get the vendor to do what we want and as long as we can't help ourselves because we're choosing to buy into a monopoly for support (which is what you do when you get proprietary software), we have an additional restriction to overcome with our voting machines—we can't switch to the voting system we want because the proprietor won't let us and we can't afford to simply switch to another set of machines.

I discussed Free Software voting machines on Counterpunch.

Run a programming competition!

[Espressoman]

A polling application is just the kind of problem you could see in a programming competition. Why doesn't someone with some whoopass cred and some cash put together a competition. You'd get a bunch of people working towards a great goal (correct implementation of an important part of the democratic process), transparency and public input (after the functional framework is complete). I know that the software is only part of the problem, but perhaps a competition would stimulate a bit more public participation.

Graphical Voter Interface (GVI)

[RussP]

http://russp.org/GVI.htm

GVI, The Graphical Voter Interface, is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for voting, suitable for use in private or public elections. Although it could be adapted for online voting, it is currently intended only for conventional "precinct" voting. For security reasons, GVI does not require that the voter have access to a keyboard. It can handle write-ins and multi-language elections, and it can automate voting along party lines. GVI can be used for Condorcet Voting and Instant Runoff Voting, which allow voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. It can also be used for Approval Voting, which allows voters to select more than one candidate.

And it's FREE in every conceivable way!

Re:Graphical Voter Interface (GVI)

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all so ridiculous. As others have pointed out, the reason there are problems with voting machines is because they are built in to facilitate fraud. Hell, most of us can count in our head, you would think a computer could.

The answer is very simple: use the computer to produce the ballots ON PAPER, have the voter verify them and drop them in a box. Count them by hand, in front of a dozen witnesses, post the results on the door, on the web, and in the newspaper by precinct. (http://electionfraudbounty.org/Two%20simple%20ele ction%20plans.php)

The only downside to this approach? Honest elections! Which is exactly why you won't be seeing it in the United States.

How Belgium does it.

[vkt-tje]

Belgium is a small west-european country where every person over 18 must vote.

The major part of the votes since more then five years have been entered electronically.

The majority of the systems are made by Steria (formally, Integris, a part of Bull) http://www.steria.be/

The system consits of PC running some old M$ DOS version (4.5 I think) with a pen-screen and a magnetic card reader.

Secrecy of vote + audit trail: each voter gets one anonymous card. The card is writtten using the voting computer (in a ballot box) and is then dropped into a drop-box vault. You see the parallells with paper-and-pencil voting I suppose...
Counting happens afterwards and recounting remains possible (untill the cards are wiped for the next elections)

Open-Source: Even though the software is written by a commercial company (Steria) the software is open for scrunity (by any citizen) at the Interior Ministry. Before last elections, Steria's source was examined by a professor and he detected one weak point (regarding the use of a random generator using the PC's BIOS) but it requires physical access to the voting card (in the vault) and it only couldcompromises secrecy of the vote (if you manage to track the order in which cards have been written).
There is also a competitor with some (similar) voting computers, but they represent a minority and that same professor called their coding "very bad spaghetti code that is impossible to understand"...

One big difference with the rest of the world: like I said, every adult citizen has to vote, meaning that the number of vote(r)s is perfectly known. Also, since it is a nation wide occurence there is only one voting day. The benefit of this is that the effort of actually organising the vote, including the counting (there are still votes on paper!) can be perfectly predicted.

There are some communues that (in last elections) still voted on paper.
In those communues the time allowed to vote is much shorter (only untill noon often), and still the results of those communes are the last to come in: electronic voting really does have major benefits here: longer opening hours of the polling stations and faster results.

hah OVS

[sentientbrendan]

more like OV$

snap!

paper ballots and electronic voting can coexist!

[fredistheking]

Paper trails can easily be added to existing voting systems. Rolls of adding machine paper are cheap, about 55 cents for a 150' roll at Staples. I am sure they can be had for cheaper if bought in bulk. The adding machines and the ink are cheap too. How much are we paying Diebold and the others for thier voting kiosks?

The trick is to print the vote out and let the voter see it as it prints. The voter will not be able to touch the vote, only see it. Before the voter leaves the booth the vote gets rolled up. No one sees the vote except the voter. The vote can't easily be tampered with since it will be very hard to erase the ink printed by the adding machine. Also, paper cannot be torn and attached back together without some sort of obvious tampering like tape.

There are more pluses to this method. The adding machine printers are LOUD and someone will be able to hear everytime a vote is made. If you can fit 5 votes per foot you can fit 750 votes on one of those paper rolls. A city the size of San Francisco would only need about 1000 of these rolls for the entire city. Given each roll only waying a few ounces, The total number of votes per district and all together could easily be estimated by physically weighing the votes (one person could probably carry all the votes).

Adding such a device is trivial to the windows based systems that exist. Besides every grocery store clerk in the world knows how to load those paper rolls.

The War On Voting is Driven By Electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

QUIT FUCKING LIEING!!!!!
ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMS ARE NOT DESIRED.

You can not validate every fucking piece of the system from the power supply through every resistor, capacitor, logic chip, cpu, down to where the paper drops out of the printer tray.

NONE OF IT CAN BE TRUSTED. ALL OF IT CAN BE CRACKED.

1. Remove the electricity
2. Remove all digitized data
3. Remove all networks

If you do not do this, we are no longer a constitutional republic. And the better question is just what have we become because of this infestation of treasonous electronic voting equipment.

You people need to Bust your Local Secretary of State's Balls before there is cival war.

Too Important

[ajs318]

The processes of democracy are sacrosanct. If the voters cannot have absolute trust in the way elections are conducted, then there is no democracy. No individual or corporation's proprietary secrets are worth more than the democratic process, and no amount of physical or mental labour is too much for the democratic process.

Back in the day it was probably never seen as important; because everybody understood exactly how a pencil, paper and a wooden box with a slot in the top -- which are still used in many countries, and for exactly this reason -- worked.

Requiring Open Source Software to be used is a good step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. The requirements of democracy have not been satisfied if only a minority of the population is actually capable of verifying election machinery. Therefore, I would go so far as to say that:

No mechanical or electronic device employed in the course of elections may contain any technology which is deemed to be beyond the understanding of a school-leaver with good passing grades in mathematics and science.

Without this restriction, it would be too easy for manufacturers to bamboozle voters with technology. Everybody must be allowed to play with -- and try to break -- genuinely representative samples of the equipment used in elections, and the ability to understand how it actually works is crucial. Even if it means that counting votes becomes a labour-intensive process, this is a fair price to pay for democracy.

Re:Printed Logs Not a solution

[bussdriver]

25 Problems with Printed voter reviewed logs:

0) Its just less flawed, its a false sense of security.
1) Recounts are done from a paper log you can't review; multiple printouts. (1 voter, 1 official, 1 for election officials)
2) How many people can read the small print?
3) Will you have time enough to read it scrolling bye?
4) Will you see the last person's? (tons of white space + shield)
5) Will a bug or miss-configuration cause it to scroll past the viewable area?
6) What happens if the printer gets low on ink? or fails?
7) What happens if paper runs out? (see 2004)
8) Provisional ballots are made for screwing you. You can't get them counted. (see 2004)
9) Will it be complicated and hard to read? (think how you'd do it, without small print)
10) It is known science that a % of people will misread the result because in their mind they expect to see something else! (now go back to 9)
11) Anybody can print out LOGs and possibly switch them to change the record. (especially IT)
12) What about Error Corrections? Modications have to be logged as well; otherwise, whats the point of review?
13) Exploit error correction logging to change votes
14) Insert an extra line inbetween votes (so its covered by the privacy shield on the printer) that adds or subtracts from log totals
15) Legally don't give paper logs any stand against the electronic record, so a court/political battle can happen
16) Attack the validity of the paper record, with a conspiracy theory--just don't use the keyword 'conspiracy'
17) Attack the validity of HUMAN recounting of the paper record, do FUD, don't put in a real plan, etc. rerun 2000
18) Use/Require Optical readers to count the paper record, buy them from the same vendor.
19) Errors that print out invalid log entries, lowering the validity of the paper, also causing sections to be removed.
20) Use thermal transfer paper, store in a hot location.
21) Don't allow public review of the log, especially if the printer puts out watermark (like all the color ones do today)
22) Create a signature/watermark on printouts, then have bugs in it. Forget to use any special paper as well.)
23) Create pre-printed logs, load those into the machines on election day (think of the white space)
24) A % of voters will not review the paper, know what it is, or care enough to raise a fuss when they see a problem.
25) Make printouts shared between machines, making most of the above problems bigger

Hard? Ha ha.

[hummassa]

Paper ballots are just as easy to rig elections with than electronic voting. Been there, done that. The only thing that keeps ANY election clean is levels and more levels of checking and rechecking.

What's the population of India?

[Godwin O'Hitler]

AKA the world's biggest democracy...

"Elections in India are events involving political mobilisation and organisational complexity on an amazing scale. In the 1996 election to Lok Sabha there were 1,269 candidates from 38 officially recognised national and state parties seeking election, 1,048 candidates from registered parties, not recognised and 10,635 independent candidates. A total number of 592,572,288 people voted. The Election Commission employed almost 4,000,000 people to run the election. A vast number of civilian police and security forces were deployed to ensure that the elections were carried out peacefully. The direct cost of organising the election amounted to approximately Rs. 5,180 million.

"Voting is by secret ballot. Polling stations are usually set up in public institutions, such as schools and community halls. To enable as many electors as possible to vote, the officials of the Election Commission try to ensure that there is a polling station within 2km of every voter, and that no polling stations should have to deal with more than 1200 voters. Each polling station is open for at least 8 hours on the day of the election.

"On entering the polling station, the elector is checked against the Electoral Roll, and allocated a ballot paper. The elector votes by marking the ballot paper with a rubber stamp on or near the symbol of the candidate of his choice, inside a screened compartment in the polling station. The voter then folds the ballot paper and inserts it in a common ballot box which is kept in full view of the Presiding Officer and polling agents of the candidates. This marking system eliminates the possibility of ballot papers being surreptitiously taken out of the polling station or not being put in the ballot box."

"Open Counting" a possibly cheap/secure solution

[letsunix]

Some of us at the blackboxvoting.org forums may have discovered a simple system based on the idea of simply displaying OMR-able ballots after they're cast and letting all parties do a quick independent count...can also be used for reasonable oversight.

It has the potential for being as fast as DRE's but as trustable as paper ballots and cheaper than both.

We just came up with it recently and we're working out the details.

We could use some fresh feedback. I'm thinking of calling it "Open Counting"

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/9707/1777 9.html?1141327589

Sorry, I heard about this slashdot story late

peace 2 u,
-anwar

"Traditional electronic voting systems"

[argent]

Electronic voting systems haven't been around long enough to be called "traditional".

Traditional voting systems put up with the delays of moving physical ballots around and counting them by hand because the process is too important to be defined by the desire of TV networks to sell advertising on election night.

We'd be better off enacting a one week news blackout on election results than going to ANY kind of electronic voting system, even one that retained the essential primacy of the paper ballot.

Paper ballots are no guarantee of honesty

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I've posted on this before. Why do so many people have this fantasy that paper ballots can't be rigged? Ukraine uses paper ballots and the presidential election in November 2004 was widely considered to be rigged. I was in Ukraine just after the vote and I have no doubt at all that it was rigged.

Open Source Voting in Canada?

[necro81]

The article makes mention of "Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."

Could anyone elaborate on the Canadian system?

This is more than an "OSS" issue

[Halo-]

There are two problems here:

• It's hard to write software without a clear understanding of the problem
• Open source is written by people trying to solve a problem which applies to them directly

I'm a professional software developer, and my wife has a masters degree in political management and a lot of real-world experience in DC and elsewhere. Still I'm in no way qualified to write a requirements document for a voting system. Sure, the obvious things like "count the votes correctly" are easy, but there is a lot more to it. I'm sure there are all sorts of laws about the way the choices are presented, accessability regulations and laws, user interface concerns... These are all areas which traditionally open source projects struggle with.

The other problem is that elections are generally held by governments. The average coding geek doesn't have the alpha and beta test communities which are normally available to traditional projects. Open source is generally (but not always) and iterative model. Someone releases a solution which solves their specific problem, gets feedback from other users, and the solution gets enhanced.

Voting systems should not be made by a private company or by private citizens. The Federal government needs to pick the appropriate agency and develop a single, well-tested system. The system should be totally open source, hardware and software, but the people creating it should be aiming to "get it right" not "get it profitable"

The general public has the skills but not the knowledge.

Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. It's a shame the whole thing is null and void from the get go.

Requiring photo identification to vote in the state of Georgia was fought tooth and nail, and it got called a modern-day poll tax because--according to those making the argument--certain communities are apparently unable to acquire or are scared of photo ID cards, even if they are distributed free by the government.

And you think they're going to tolerate a magnetic swipe card with a Social Security number on it? Not only would that get shot down in a hurry and called discriminatory, but your friends here at Slashdot would tear it to shreds too because it'd be a gross invasion of privacy. Expect a YRO topic about it, if it ever happened.

Oh, and since this is Slashdot, expect a dupe of it too.

Obligatory Futurama Quote

[Zerbs]

Jack Johnson: I believe my opponent's 3% tax increase goes too far! John Jackson: And I believe my opponent's 3% tax increase doesn't go far enough!

I just voted

[Arrawa]

Interestingly enough, I just voted for the municipal elections, here in the Netherlands. As far as I know, pencils aren't used anymore (Amsterdam was the last and there they just switched to computers).

All the systems in use are in closed source. I think NEDAP, a Dutch company, is the market leader in the election systems here. And this company uses some old version of Windows with Office to produce the results.

The Irish did a review of the system:
http://www.electronicvoting.ie/pdf/ersreportmar200 4.doc
(I assume the same system is used in the Netherlands)

Strange thing is, almost nobody bothers here in the Netherlands. It just isn't an issue at all!

Australian Voting Systems

[missing000]

Another interesting note; the Secret ballot system in place in most republics today, including the US, was first called the Australian ballot.

IMHO it seems ideal to continue this tradition and look into the Aurtralian solution to electronic voting too.

Re:Australian Voting Systems

[mgblst]

Don't go touting the Australian system - it just doesn't work. Look at who is in power in Australia at the moment!

Re:Australian Voting Systems

[missing000]

"Don't go touting the Australian system - it just doesn't work. Look at who is in power in Australia at the moment!"

Ahh, but look who's in power over here in the states with our shiny new closed source system :)

I Disagree

[GmAz]

Though I have nothing wrong with OSS, an open source voting machine just smells bad. There are tons of great and nice people out there willing to make the system better and help fix holes, but there are others looking for the holes and trying to exploit them. Though I am a techie, I would prefer paper ballots. Maybe a different method of paper ballots so no more "hanging chad" incidents, but paper none the less. Now we just have to work on getting people other than people that can't count higher than 10 to count the ballots.

Re:I Disagree

[ajs318]

There are tons of great and nice people out there willing to make the system better and help fix holes, but there are others looking for the holes and trying to exploit them.

The former outnumber the latter.

Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform

[danpsmith]

Unless this was intended to be some really genius satire, am I missing something, or couldn't we just use old style voting machines or paper ballots?

Bah

[DaveJay]

I have a nearly ready-to-go voting system based on existing technology, with low hardware requirements, complete transparency and an obvious-in-retrospect UI and process that leaves an anonymous yet completely verifiable method to check your vote.

I'll let you know when it's being demo'd.

(I'm sure someone will mark this "funny", and you may well laugh, but you'll smack yourselves in the forehead if/when I get it out the door)

It's a cargo cult

[circusboy]

If we all look like we're taking part in a democracy, good things will happen...

re:If I were a US citizen I'd _demand_ that all the people involved in supplying or approving crappy election systems be charged for _TREASON_.

no, that's only if you get a blowjob. actual crimes against humanity are now simple misdemeanors.

They're ready, just not open...

[brianosaurus]

Any one of the voting machine vendors could turn their implementation into an Open Source one, simply by releasing source under an appropriate license.

The last election was so wrought with scandal. I don't trust the electronic voting machines (and I'm glad my state still uses paper!), and the news about them during the election only served to strengthen my distrust. I cannot be alone.

The outcome of our elections should not be determined by a Black Box. We need to be able to peek inside and know it can be trusted.

Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform

[Jack Schitt]

For privacy concerns, replace one-way hash of SSN with some other form of guaranteed unique number to prevent a voter from submitting duplicate votes.

Why, btw, would it be a violation of privacy if the agency running the poll place ALREADY has your SSN?

No photo ID required. You show up, state your name and address, they look it up and you sign it, as normal. They then hand you a mag-card with a unique number on it. It doesn't have to be based on the SSN. It's just that SSN happens to be a convienient unique number that already exists and that the poll place already has your name attached too.

Privacy concerns would occur if the voter sign-in book PRINTED the SSN. Identify the person on name and address instead. There aren't going to be two John P. Does living at 742 Evergreen Ter. Unless they are Sr. and Jr.

You missed one:

[natoochtoniket]

In addition to your stated requirments:

• You must be able to prove that every valid vote was counted exactly once - no more, no less
• You must also be able to prove that fake ballots cannot be injected into the system
• You must finally be able to prove that valid votes cannot be deducted from the system for the required length of time

You missed a couple very important requirements:

• You must be able to prove all of the above to the vast majority of ordinary people who:
  • know nothing about software
  • know even less about logic
  • do not trust computers
  • have a vague feeling that they've been cheated.
• You must be able to prove all of the above to a jury of experts who:
  • know a lot about software
  • know a lot about logic, encryption, etc.
  • do not trust computer programmers
  • have been trained to assume the worst.

The only systems that can possibly meet those requirements involve paper, lock boxes, and dual (or higher) controls. The security controls need to be similar to the controls that banks use on their their large piles of cash.

After all, a pile of ballots is effectively a very large amout of cash. Whoever wins the election gets to spend the taxpayers money.

For the Americans to use them

[Anonymous Coward]

they would have to be printed on very shiny paper.

It's also lunacy to try to sell an American government on a solution that is 1/100th the price: where's the pork in that?

Finally it is nearly impossible to meaningfully rig an election with the combination of modern communications and paper ballots.

I would agree...

[jd]

...but (isn't there always? :) paper ballots are too easy to tamper with. Few American elections go by without fairly solid evidence of tampering with ballot boxes, ballot boxes going missing, ballots being "lost" behind objects, etc.

Paper ballots also pose the problem that you've got to trust the collectors and counters. In many cases, nobody else will ever get to see the ballots themselves, so nobody else will ever know if someone has edited the figures.

I'm not saying paper ballots are a disaster, only that the existing paper ballots are vulnerable to fraud. In some cases, the parties have even been known to "collect" the ballots by mail and dispose of those for the "wrong" side.

These, again, are solvable problems but if ANY system is to be trusted, these problems will have to be solved. I'm less concerned with the "how" than with the "when". WHEN will we have trustable elections?

Transparency Begets Trust

[John Sokol]

Transparency Begets Trust - Expertise in niches, transparency in motives and thought process and owning up to mistakes publicly create a trust relationship" - Will Pate

The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)
From a really eye opening paper Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson 1984
(mentioned earlier in this thread.

I have a Open Source Voting scheme http://www.mailclad.com/ that allow privace and yet all communications and source code are OPEN and do not require security. The results can not be forged.

It's based on the same schemes the Race Tracks and Vegas Casinos use for there gaming systems.

Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform

[Jack Schitt]

I agree, however the HAVA act wants an electronic voting system. This system I wrote about, while still electronics as per the guidelines, is basically the electronic equivelent of the old style voting machines (which I think are much better anyways).

If all of the components can be created with open source software, all we have to do is get some really low end PCs running some lightweight OS on them (I imagine Windows 2000 PE with no networking, but that's just from lack of imagination), a bunch of thermal receipt printers and a whole shitload of rolls of paper for them, a bunch of magnetic card readers, and a bunch of blank cards.

Then several batch scanners (probably with parts from a handscanner) and write some software from parts picked from various open source software. (This includes the OCR part as well as the DB part).

I'm thinking the whole software side of it (batch scanner, ocr, ballot box) would have sourceforge pages and major survey companies could use the software for their own purposes as well.

Unfortunatly, this is not a satire, though I wish it was.