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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.
"Thing is, depending on whether or not the machine prints a human readable output only then it could be made to lie on the paper record as well.
But if a paper copy is given to the voter, then lies are caught.
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?
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.
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
It seems to me that ATM machines get a great deal more use and account for a great deal of money. They give a receipt and also have an internal paper log. It takes two people to open one up legally ....
You'd think this was new technology in light of the voting machine problems.
But ATMs have been in use for at least a quarter century.
You don't want a transparent election. While times are not tough now, they may be in the future, and you never know what kind of trouble those around you could create if they knew or could find out who you voted for. Voting is a anonymous and deniable for a reason.
The only real solution to this whole mess is to add a 'None of the above' to the list. I'd punch that as many times as registering a vote.
I fail to see how that is a solution to anything. Why go through all of that trouble just to not vote? If you are just trying to make a statement, that sure is a stupid way to do it.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
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.
Let's face it, e-voting is a dumb idea. It's bad solution to a host of problems that never existed outside media and lobbyist FUD and creates more problems than it will ever be worth. "Fixes" to it will make it worse. Want a paper trail? Use paper ballots.
You obviously misunderstand one of the new and enticing features of electronic voting systems. Paper trails would only make wide-scale fraud more difficult!
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
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.
Fascinating that the NIST requires an evidence trail only after Bush is no longer involved in a single election, only weeks after Democrats take back control of Congress.
So the law makes it harder for Democrats to steal elections like Republicans could get away with for years.
Though I bet Jeb Bush (R-FL) is pissed.
Next up, a law against lying the US into war. Or maybe against spending $TRILLIONS in debt. Against ignoring PDB warnings of terrorist attacks? Or maybe against NSA warrantless wiretapping. It all looks so much more sensible to live in a democracy when you're a civilian than when you're "the decider".
--
make install -not war
This system has all the benefits: the preliminary results are available immediately from the electronic machine, there is a complete paper trail, you know if the machine couldn't read the ballot, and absentee ballots look exactly the same as the ballots in the precinct. Why isn't this system used everywhere?
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
Warning RANT!
Then the people creating the current systems should all be fired. What kind of computer scientist doesn't understand that with any random access storage there is a risk of accidental or intentional destruction or alteration, at any time, in a random fasion. That's why it's called uhh random access. Hello? This is like a CS 101 second week quiz question. They even still call it RAM!
Any write once technology will be infinately better. Which one is academic. You can use a variety of write once technologies with a diverse amount of write confidence levels, number of rereads possible and techniqiue used, and cost. Just write the votes at they happen, in a sequential fasion, in a way that you cannot backtrack and rewrite.
Why the hell are do Sarb-Ox and Hipaa require worm tape and encryption in many cases, yet our voting systems have nothing but the seat of their pants.
As an aside Bruce Schneier chimed in on this recently. I wonder if this had any effect on NIST's comments.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
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).
if you haven't seen "Hacking Democracy" you better.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
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Since the time each voter spends at the optical scan machine is just a few moments, there is no waiting while the person behind the curtain flipping levers on a mechanical machine works through all the races on the ballot. We use small folding tables with privacy shields, all of which can be folded up into a very small space for storage between elections.
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The machine can, as you suggest, catch overvotes and alert the voter and election officials to allow the ballot to be redone.
- In the event of a failure of the scanner, or to randomly audit to prove there's no hanky-panky with its software, a hand count can easily be done, without any damned chads to fall out during the process. Ballots can be temporarily held in an old-fashioned locked box, then transported to the county courthouse, where another machine can be used to count all the ballots en masse.
- Absentee and provisional ballots can be executed on the same form as regular ballots, but processed as appropriate, reducing costs and eliminating a possible source of problems.
For visually handicapped voters, all that is needed is a computer that can give braille, or headphones for oral feedback, and a printer to print the selections onto the same size paper as the other voters use. If it's set up correctly, this printer can print the regular ballots as well, allowing the election workers to begin the day with a smaller number of pages preprinted, and only need to print additional forms if turnout is fairly heavy.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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
One thing I'd like would be for the electronic machine to generate a cryptographically-secure hash generated from all the votes cast on it. The paper ballots can then be electronically scanned and the same hash algorithm applied to the scanned data. If ALL votes are present and unmodified, then the hashes should be the same. Provided there is no collusion between the voting machine and the scanning machine makers, the probability of the hashes coming out the same in the event of vote-tampering of any kind should be extremely low.
However, knowing that tampering has occurred doesn't solve the issue of what to do about it. I'd simply insist on the election being re-held until all districts came back clean from tampering. Oh, and all sports, adult and cartoon channels would be legally required to stop transmitting until everyone bloody well voted and/or adjudicated honestly. Also, anyone caught attempting (or practicing) voting fraud should be compelled to buy everyone the DVDs of the shows they missed, before being locked up in a psych ward in Romania for the rest of their unnatural life.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
Make it so that the VOLUNTEERS who run the voting locations can be thrown in jail if they make a mistake. That'll really encourage more people to help out.
Computer prints you a receipt with a random number. Your vote is kept with your random number (electronically, plus internal paper roll in case electronic copy is FUBARed). You can check your vote, using the random number, on the web or via a bulletin board at the voting place the next day. Poll workers count the total number of voters at each site, which should "exactly" match the number of records on the web/bulletin board.
Can anyone think of a way to cheat THAT system?
It seems to be able to handle extra votes, dropped votes, and changed votes.
The problem with this and with any sort of receipt is that it destroys the anonymity of the vote. Someone could be pressured into revealing their ballot reciept or the information required to access it. You can bet your bottom dollar that union thugs and similar underworld types would take advantage of a receipt system, if one was instituted.
The real reason they want to use touch screen voting machines is so they can pay for all the new equipment by selling targeted ads on the touch screens. As you vote, the ads will be tailored to the demographics of the candidates you support.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
You sort of missed the point of paper trails.
In US States with competent electronic voting standards such as Nevada, a third party audits a random sample of all machines (usually 1-3% in practice, which is adequate), comparing the paper results with the electronic results. Any discrepancy found in the samples between the electronic results and the paper results triggers a full recount from paper, which is presumed to be correct since the voter verified it. This buys you the speed and accuracy of electronic ballots in theory, with the fault tolerance and robustness of third-party audits and independently derivable paper results. The best part is that it is extremely resistant to software/hardware attacks since the voter verified paper is statistically sampled to detect such attacks. Trust but verify, no?
If the problem is that people make mistakes in counting, mark and scan technology should produce better results. If the problem is votes from dead or imaginary voters, how can any technology help?
If there is, as I suspect, no real problem at all, why the hell are we stumbling around with all this half-baked technology?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
All other issues aside, there is no possible way we could afford anywhere near that many touch-screen machines. Even barring technical problems this is bound to cause a bottleneck as people ponder their vote.
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.