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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."
actually it should never have been without a paper trail.
It's not like we don't have enough prior experience with data losss not to know how useful a paper trail is.
And the government with its sexdulpicates should have already know it.
Why do we have to overly complicate voting in this country anyway? Other Western democracies make do just fine with pencils and paper, so what's the reasoning behind using electronic voting machines in a country where most people can't set the clocks on their VCRs?
Part of the problem with the "paper trail" issue is that the idea keeps getting transformed, by gradual steps, into something that is totally useless. The paper gets put behind glass, printed on a roll, no recourse if it's too fant to read, etc. until there's no reason to suspect that it represents the voter's intentions and not some hacker's.
The ballot needs to be tangible, a physical object that the voter can inspect (handle, read and verify) and it should be the official record of the vote. If you want to have the touch screen machine give you an insta-count, fine (though I wouldn't) but the actual ballots should also be counted, every time, by hardware too dumb to hack, and if the counts differ the physical ballot count should be the one that is used.
--MarkusQ
There is a fundamental difference between an ATM and a voting machine, though. In an ATM, you MUST keep track of the user who was standing at the machine doing the transaction. With a voting machine, you MUST NOT keep track of who is standing at the machine at any given time. Doing so could leak information about how that person voted.
And, as has been proven, a company that can do one well can real screw up the other (hint: begins with a 'D' and rhymes with "re-told").
-J
Not a receipt. A receipt is a bad idea. A verifiable paper trail. If you need to involve computers (the only semi-legitimate reason that I've seen involves handicapped voters), then have the computer print the marked ballot. The person inspects it and then puts it into the ballot box. That is the official ballot. The person does not take a receipt with them. That makes it too easy to coerce people to vote a certain way, or punish them if they vote the wrong way.
How is that better than voting by marking up a heavy card stock ballot with a marker and running it through an optical scanner? If the goal is to minimize steps, why have the touch screen mumbo jumbo at all?
Plus, a sharpie is a lot cheaper than a tablet computer with built in printer.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Electronic voting benefits mainly the media. There really is not any real reason to have to produce the results of an election within hours after the polls close, except to support the media hype surrounding the election.
The ease of a voting system should not be directed towards the "counters", but towards the person voting and the people who need to be able to verify the counts during a dispute.
Use a simple paper ballot that the voter fills out (with maybe a mechanical/electronic assistance if needed), and places into a ballot box. The voter should not be able to walk out the door with any thing that can prove how they voted, as this can lead to selling votes or force someone to vote in a certain fashion (think of your boss saying that if you want to keep your job, you had to vote for X and bring in the proof).
Electronically/mechanically process the paper ballot to produce the counts. If there is a dispute the paper ballots are verified by hand counting.
The counting system should make a first pass through the ballots and perform a simple pass/fail on each ballot. Any ballot that fails goes to a hand count bin. The machine should be able to perform this "sorting" without human intervention (I believe that my local district's machines either require intervention with each failed scan, or simply indicates that there were failed scans within a batch).
I assume you realize that anyone who can hack the voting machine can also hack it so that the paper print-out will indicate your correct vote but the record on the card will be another set of votes, not what you made. The security of the system depends upon the integrity of the clerical staff in charge of the balloting system, it always has and always will. If you can't trust them, and make certain that some independent experts, who have to post bonds certifying the system is clean, certify and assure that no one has unauthorized access to the machines and all connections until the vote is tabulated. That will cost a little more but will put someone's money on guaranteeing that no one tampers with your vote.
CBS
First of all the paper document in the HBO documentary that was fixed to show incorrect results was produced by a central tabulator computer that reads aggregate results from memory cards. If the individual voting machines print out a paper trail of each voter then the the individual voters can catch the erroneous paper trails. This is not true if only the central tabulator machines have paper trails. So this recommended solution is totally different than the situation in the HBO documentry.
Secondly each electronic voting machine can be equipped to output paper records that can be scanned optically. The paper record outputted is checked by the voter and then it is summited to optical scanner where then and only then it is counted. Therefore you can have the benefits of electronic selection of votes and paper records that are transparent to the voter and can be recounted.