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Feds to Recommend Paper Trail for Electronic Votes
flanksteak writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology is going to recommend the decertification of all electronic voting machines that don't create paper records. Although it sounds like this recommendation may have been in the works for a while, the recent issues in Sarasota, FL (18,000 missing votes) have brought the issue a higher profile. The most interesting comment in the story comes near the end, in which the author cites a study that said paper trails from electronic voting machines aren't all they're cracked up to be."
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2006/11/10/voting-f raud-security-tech-security-cz_bs_1113security.htm l
This article came out in forbes a while back and the author has the best solution I've seen for verifying votes on electronic voting machines. He proposes having a touchscreen computer to make all of your ballot selections and when you are done and hit vote it prints out a piece of paper with your sslections. You then can verify your votes were recorded correctly before putting your ballot in a box so that it can be run through an optical scanner at the end of the day to count the votes.
You've got it wrong. NIST is not proposing to decertify anything. The white paper only talks about proposals for what requirements ought to be in the 2007 federal voting system standards. Read the white paper.
There are no "missing 18000 votes" down in Florida.
They are undervotes.The citizen cast a ballot-successfully- but did not vote in the Congressional election.
Happens all the time for lots of different reasons. Republican voters had a good reason here not to vote for Katherine Harris and the Democrat was out of the question.There may have been some confusion with the ballot layout but where were the complaints about not finding the candidates on the ballot before the vote was cast?
There is an unmentioned paralell to Florida2000.Just because your turnout campaign brought your voters to the polls in greater numbers doen't mean they were voting for your candidate.
As a scrupulously impartial observer there does seem to be more post election whine from the winners this time
Democracy for America, the follow-up to Howard Dean's Dean for America organization, is running a "Put paper ballets on the agenda" drive right now. They want people to tell Nancy Pelosi, as the future Speaker of the House, to make this a priority for next year's Congress.
So if you care about this issue, make sure she hears about it!
For what it's worth, I filed testimony in the EFF lawsuit, OPG v. Diebold, where Diebold was suing kids who (like me!) posted to the Web copies of some Diebold memos in which you can read about Florida precicints with negative 16,000 votes for Al Gore and Diebold "upgrading" the software to uncertified (read: "illegal") versions in California.
|/usr/games/fortune
Doesn't matter. In the case of a recount, the paper ballots---the ones the voter verified---are used.
But ATMs have been in use for at least a quarter century.
ATMs are not as mission critical as voting machines are.
No one ever needs to use an ATM. They can always use another, or they can just go into the bank, but the voting machine needs to work right, from 6am to whenever polls close, be maintained by less than tech-savvy individuals, resist tampering that is arguably much more complex than a bank machine faces (the worst a machine can do is release its financial contents...which is actually a rather limited outcome, and even then, it's easy to prevent a machine from handing out $500 at a time, plus it gets to videotape the miscreant who did it.)
With the VVPAT requirement, they need to remember exactly how a voter voted without giving away the identity of the voter (which is arguably impossible.)
While in Ohio a lot of things we do are supposed to be overseen by two pollworkers (a "democrat" and a "republican"--many are just independents pretending to be one or the other) but none of us have the key to open the VVPAT box and change the tape. I watched the guy come and change the tape and then handed me the tape, which I thought was funny...because thought the VVPAT is the official voter results by Ohio law--I wasn't ever told what to do with it when it was removed from the machine.
Actually this time just RTFA isn't enough. You need to read the whitepaper as well.
e gislationProposal.pdf
It appears that at least one federal agency has not turned to the dark side. The draft NIST white paper recommends a voter verifiable paper audit trail that is also the ballot of record, AND robust auditing. I was very pleased to read it. I hope the final document isn't watered down, and I hope this or something similar is implemented in time for the 2008 election.
The premise of the whitepaper is that no software dependent system for counting votes (like a touchscreen with no paper ballot) can be fully vetted, and that they should never be used without a software independent record for use in mandatory statistically robust audits.
In other election reform news... There is an organization that has been a key mover in the election reform movement called electionarchive.org. They did a lot of very interesting statistical analysis of the 2004 elections and found some startling results. They have made a very solid list of 15 legislative recommendations. They can be found here:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvInfo/US/EI-FederalL
here is a list of the electionarchive.org recommendations
1.Manual Audits
2.Voter Service Reports
3.Auditable Voting Systems
4.Fund Manual Audits and Voter Service Reports
5.Teeth (enforcement)
6.Public Election Records
7.Election Monitoring Website
8.Submission of Reports
9.Public Disclosure of Voting System Software
10.Prohibit Certain Network Connections
11.Qualifications for Technical Guidelines Development Committee
12.Public Right to Observe
13.Vote Count Audit and Recount Committee
14.Repository for Voting System Disclosure
15.Prohibit Practices that Disenfranchise Voters
-- QED
Or you could use a pen and an optical scanner like the entire state of New Mexico did.
Yes there were problems, but the PAPER TRAILS REVEALED THE PROBLEMS! Read it here, they revealed the discrepencies, missing ballots, machines crashing, all the nasty stuff that would have been secret if the paper trail wasn't there.
85% of the VVPAT Ballots and VVPAT Summaries reconciled after the primary manual count, where
approximately 15% required a secondary count
1.4% of the VVPAT cartridges exhibited missing ballots.
16.9 % of VVPAT tapes showed a discrepancy of 1 - 5 votes between the tally of ballots and the results
report; 2.1 % showed a discrepancy of over 25 votes.
During the manual recount, team members discovered 40 VVPAT tapes (9.66%) that were either
destroyed, blank, illegible, missing, taped together or otherwise compromised.
Identifying information on the VVPAT tape such as precinct information and machine identification was
inconsistent, as were the summary reports printed at the end of the day. 2.8% of the VVPATs were
missing machine ID numbers; 5.4% did not identify the precinct, increasing the difficulty of a meaningful
audit and raising questions about the integrity of the vote count.
VVAPTs showed evidence of booth workers using trial and error to print reports and start up or close
down the machines; workers apparently attempted to overcome printer problems by shutting down
machines, removing and replacing cards, and restarting machines.
72% of the labels identifying cannisters containing the VVPAT tapes were missing information. 46% of
the canister labels were blank.
Booth workers frequently failed to sign the tapes. Such failures in chain of custody also increase the
risk of a legal challenge.
In that very same election that you are talking about people found that they could wash the ink off and voted twice. You should have known it wasn't entirely true when our government bragged about it. It's a shame that the american media has become lazy and tends to source their facts from government press releases instead of doing actual reporting.