Building a Better Voting Machine

edmicman writes "Wired News has an interesting article about what would make the perfect voting machine: 'With election season upon us, Wired News spoke with two of the top computer scientists in the field, UC Berkeley's David Wagner and Princeton's Ed Felten, and came up with a wish list of features we would include in a voting machine, if we were asked to create one. These recommendations can't guarantee clean results on their own. Voting machines, no matter how secure, are no remedy for poor election procedures and ill-conceived election laws. So our system would include thorough auditing and verification capabilities and require faithful adherence to good election practices, as wells as topnotch usability and security features.'"

Comments

Random spot checks

[Harmonious Botch]

From TFA: "Random spot checks...This involves taking a random number of machines out of commission just before polls open on election morning to run a sample election on them to make sure the machines are recording and counting votes accurately.

Before the polls open? How about during the election? At random times during the day?
The poll workers should be required to have an extra one on hand just in case one breaks. It would be used to stand in for the one that was being checked. ( It could also be chosen for a random check. )

Open source & peer review

[guyjr]

I think Wired is barking up the exact same, wrong, tree, that Diebold and every other manufacturer of voting machines is barking up - namely that they have all the answers.

The solution is very simple: require all electronic voting machines to be open source, and invite all software developers around the world to peer review the code. When that majoriy agrees that a system is secure, then it's ready for use.

Re:Open source & peer review

[Random Utinni]

I think Wired is barking up the exact same, wrong, tree, that Diebold and every other manufacturer of voting machines is barking up - namely that they have all the answers.

The solution is very simple...

Erm? Pot... meet kettle.

There is no simple solution to voter fraud. There always has been fraud, and there always will be. It's the nature of ingenuity. Hence the "build an idiot-proof machine, and the universe will build a better idiot". If someone wants to hack an electronic voting system, they will, open-sourced and peer-reviewed or not.

In my view, the goal is simply to minimize the impact of such efforts, and to make it as difficult as possible to do so, as cheaply as possible. Open source *might* be a good way to go... certainly better than the closed electronic systems Diebold and their ilk are currently pushing. However, it's still an electronic system, and electronic systems are prone to making small errors very quickly (or being hacked to introduce small biases, very quickly). I'd personally prefer to return to a simple paper and pen ballot... simply check the box of the person/proposition you're voting for. Put paper in box. Let people count ballots (with observers, if desired). It scales fairly well, is difficult to introduce large errors into, and can't be hacked remotely. If it takes a little longer to get election results, so be it... there's almost two months between election day and inauguration day.

Re:Open source & peer review

[Qzukk]

Every time this comes up, I propose the same idea, but each time it gets a little more fleshed out.
0. The voter completes whatever identification/registration/whatever steps required before being allowed into the actual voting room where...

1. The voter receives a numbered (in an OCR friendly font, see below) blank ballot and is directed to the voting booth. The number indicates both the voting location and the sequence that the cards are issued. If ballots run out, voters are asked to wait while more are printed and delivered.
2. The voter inserts the ballot into the electronic voting machine until a green light comes on. Diagrams illustrate the right way to do this, a notch in one corner prevents the voter from continuing until he/she figures this step out. Red light if they fail to do it wrong (labelled "WRONG" for the colorblind, buzzer for the blind though they will probably have someone load the ballot for them) to prevent them from trying to jam it in harder.
3. The machine displays the ballot in the selected font size or reads the ballot to the blind user.
3a. Each race is displayed separately with the candidates below it in a column. (or "For" and "Against" for appropriate referendums, etc.)
3b. The user selects a candidate using up and down buttons, then presses the "Vote" button to select that.
3c. Their choice is now highlighted on the screen (and read to them).
3d. The user presses the "Next" button to move to the next race. Or presses the "Finished Voting" to indicate that they will will not vote in the remaining races. Loop to 3a until there are no more races or the user presses Finished Voting.
4. A list of races and the selected candidates appears, the user can move up or down and see each race (have it read to them) and if they wish to change their mind, they can press the "Vote" button to return to that race and change their vote (See 3). User presses "Finished Voting" again to indicate that they are done (5 second delay required to prevent accidentially bouncing the button).

Easy enough right? Now...
5. The ballot card is fed through the machine's printer and printed in rows, with each row containing one race. Columns are the name of the race, the selection for that race, and a pattern designed for optical recognition. Each option has a unique code consisting of the code for that race plus a code for the candidate (to prevent misaligned scans) as well as codes for "no vote" and "write-in".
6. Voter fills in any write-in positions.
7. Voter reads the ballot card, and if there is a mistake, the voter presents the ballot to the site overseers who
7a. Record the ballot number as destroyed and then
7b. Destroy the ballot and issue a new one. Go back to 2.
8. Voter places ballot in ballot box and goes home, proud to have done his civic duty.

Lather, rinse, repeat for thousands of voters. The numbered ballots tell us two things: 1) Are there any missing ballot boxes and 2) are there any extra ballot boxes.

8a. At the end of the day, the election observers record the lowest numbered unused ballot and destroy the remainder.
9. Ballot boxes are delivered to a counting station.
10. Ballots are dumped out, stacked up with the notches aligned, and each stack is counted in total
11. The counted stack is then fed through an optical sorter set to sort the possible options for the first race into bins, one bin per candidate, one bin for all write-ins, one bin for no-votes.
11a. Run each candidate's bin individually through the counting machine.
11ai. Election observers spot check stacks by flipping like a flipbook and watching to see if the optical pattern being counted changes.
11b. Count write-ins by hand
11c. Run the no-vote stack through the counting machine....
11d. and make sure the votes add up.
12. Report the total to the next higher up official.

Lather, rinse, repeat for all of the stacks.

Why is this superior? First off, let's look at the actual counting: The counting machine doesn't k

Don't build anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Paper and pencil. Mark your choices, put it in a cardboard box. It's the perfect solution and scales wonderfully.

Many countries already use this advanced technique.

Re:Don't build anything

[From A Far Away Land]

Other famous democratic countries do use pencil and paper. Canada, one of Americas greatest neighbours to the north uses the birchbark and pinecone voting system... just pulling your leg. They, like Australians, use pencil and paper. We have about 70% voter turnout in Canada, with a voting population in the range of at least 10 million people. It takes us less than 2 hours after a poll closes to give nearly complete and meaningful results to the public.

Telephoning the result to a central station is the extent of electrified voting in Canada. Everything else is on paper, for easy double checking if there's a court challenge. To have a system without paper that the voter marked, is an invitation for fraud.

MY Perfect Voting Machine

[AeroIllini]

The true perfect voting machine consists of the following four components:

- Paper
- Pencil
- Locked box with slot
- Election official who can count

Anything else is a solution in search of a problem, and a way for partisan election officials to send some contract money to their buddies in the tech industry.

Seriously, who the hell cares about digital records or fast counts? I don't care how fast the results come in, I want them to be RIGHT. A voting system needs to enforce two basic principles: private votes and public counts. The voters need to know that their votes are private and anonymous, and the counting process needs to be simple and transparent enough that it can be understood, audited, and repeated. Computers, for the majority of people, are magical black boxes. They don't trust them as far as they can throw them, and that means there will always be suspicion of fraud, no matter how open the source and how impenetrable the outer casing. When we go to paper ballots, we guarantee that the process is easily understood, auditible, difficult to rig, and that counting is repeatable. There is no electronic system that satisfies all those conditions, and therefore electronic systems should not be used.

However, if we wanted to use touch screen systems to print out ballots instead of marking them, that's fine with me (it would make voting more accessible, with a well-designed UI). The voter can verify their votes before dropping them in the box. But the printed paper ballots need to be counted by hand.

Open Voting Consortium

[AaronW]

For those who are interested in seeing a proper voting system put together, check out the Open Voting Consortium. They have a free, open-source voting platform that addresses all of the concerns. It has a verifiable paper trail as well as support for blind users and multiple languages.

I personally have donated money to this organization and believe they are doing the right thing in addressing the current mess we have now.

Their paper trail has a really nice feature in that it also prints a bar code for a quick machine recount of the ballots as well as a human readable output.

-Aaron

Trollish but valid point

[joggle]

I would just like to point out that while the parent post is trollish in nature, it is a sentiment similar to what nearly all (if not all) of the founding fathers believed. That being certain qualifications are needed in order to cast a ballot. Their fear was some rogue could convince less educated people to vote for him so that he could, in turn, pillage the government and/or be a tyrant. I'll grant it's a thorny issue, but the problem of attempting to intentionally limit people who vote is that inevitably some racial groups will be disenfranchised (as well as other categories of population, such as the elderly in this case). Also, some local officials will try to exacerbate the situation to their favor (as happened-- and is still happening--in the South).