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Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting
emil10001 writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has rejected a proposal suggesting that electronic voting have a paper trail. The draft recommendation was developed by NIST scientists, who called out electronic voting machines as being 'impossible' to secure." From the article: "Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.' The proposal failed to obtain the 8 of 15 votes needed to pass. Five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina — use machines without a paper record exclusively. Eleven states and the District either use them in some jurisdictions or allow voters to chose whether to use them or some other voting system." So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
Hey! Where did the rest of my subject line go?? It was there! I typed an'o', an 's', and a 't'! These dang computers are so insecure. I want a paper trail of my postings.
So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
Yes, its expensive and will remain a joke, not because its expensive, but because politicians want it to be expensive to fix the joke that helps them win elections....
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
...besides the fact that all the candidates suck, but I did vote AGAINST Bush last time.
"You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware."
... yeah, like the switch from paper ballots and/or mechanical voting machines to electronic voting machines in the first place?
Um
Stupidest. Excuse. For. Shilling. For. The. Forces. Of. Evil. EVER.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So what if there's a paper trail? It means absolutely nothing unless it's actually used, and is accessible by the people casting the votes! This is something that is wrong with the current system also!
I have no idea who I voted for in any election. I know who I thought I voted for, but I have no idea if it was counted that way. Where can I go to find that out? Let's say there is some way for me to determine if my vote was counted in a certain way. What about everyone else? Is there a way to make sure the vote they think was mine was exclusively mine?
I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system.
So, disregarding the fact that their own scientists cited the machine's insecurities, the executives feel that the 'cost' of replacing or updating the machines is prohibitive for our countries (arguably) most important decision?
This whole things reeks of pork and the 'old boys' club'
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
That news article was from two days ago. Check out what happened since then: http://www.techliberation.com/archives/041383.php
"Members of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group created by Congress to advise the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, deadlocked 6 to 6 on the proposal at a meeting held at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg. Eight votes are needed to pass a measure on the 15-member committee."
How do you deadlock 6 to 6 on a 15 person committee? Were the other 3 votes just not counted?
And next time we have a top-down federal solution to a supposed problem that dangles a bunch of money with an arbitrary deadline, we should ask ourselves if we are making the problem worse.
If we need to pay more to fix the problems of HAVA, we need to do it. The fact that we wasted money on new machines without paper trails is not a good argument for the status quo.
This story is badly out of date. The panel voted again the next day and reached a compromise that will require future electronic voting machines to have paper trails. See:
v es+e-voting+checks/2100-1028_3-6140956.html
http://news.com.com/Panel+changes+course%2C+appro
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1095
The article summary (no, I didn't RTFA) seems to be in direct opposition to a Washington Post article I read today stating that the Technology Guidelines Development Committee wanted to "end the era" of paperless electronic voting and that many politicians wanted to add some form of verification method.
So who's got the real story and who's just spreading FUD? Inquiring minds want to know.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
It is important not to go on the offensive right away on this. The rejection is more likely linked to the logistics associated with the proposal. Everyone takes voting seriously, even Georgians. Local legislation in georgia is about to propose mandating paper trails on the three counties that currently use paperless voting machines. Slow and steady pressure will get the job done, outright slamming will not help.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
It might be easier to vote by mail instead of having people line up at poll booths. It would take away the intimidation and nuttiness factors of each side having their own lawyers watching to make sure that clueless those chads don't get pregnant.
So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
No. Accountability in voting will be a joke because that would be an inconvenience to the Inner Party achieving their goals, whatever those may be. Cost is simply an excuse for the public.
... except when it's our Democracy.
Think about it, we spend more in Iraq each month than this proposal would cost, all in the name of "securing democracy". Not only that, it's perfectly clear at this point that the only "freedom" we are providing the Iraqis is the freedom to kill each other and our soldiers.
How the hell can anyone not support this measure? Or, more appropriately, how are the clowns who don't support it keeping their jobs?
Oh,
yeah,
the easily stealable elections...
When I voted in the last election my polling place had about a dozen plastic voting booth tables on metal legs and one optical scan reader that instantly verified/tabulated/secured the paper ballot (mis-marked ballots are rejected by the reader). Imagine the costs for that single poll station if there were a dozen complex electronic voting machines instead of the plastic booths. It's also easier to train poll workers how to replace pens and issue new blank ballots than it is to get them to understand complex computing machinery.
Whether or not you think electronic voting can ever work, from a simple cost-effectiveness standpoint it is an asinine goal to pursue. The purpose was to simplify the voting process, but this has clearly been a failure. Costs have skyrocketed and results are worse than from poorly-maintained punch ballot installations. Now we hear the reason not to abandon this crappy technology is because it would cost too much to return to verified voting. And thus, yet another self-spiraling government system of waste and fraud becomes entrenched.
This is one of those situations where knee-jerk moderating doesn't quite work.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Personally, if machine purchasers/builders could not see this being an issue, yes they should have to reinstall the machines and the process should be forced to be open. I wouldn't sell or buy a car without doors for obvious reasons, no matter who tried to tell me it was a good idea. Paper trails are an obvious requirement even if not enabled as a core functionality.
Note he doesn't dispute the issue, just implies that dealing with it would take lots of work...
I'm getting really tired of this crap! Putting the whole country on an optical scanning system would not be expensive at all. No more excuses. I want a paper with the name of the candidate I voted for right next to my mark. I want this to be audited randomly and I want random checks of the random checks. I want to know that my vote was counted. Otherwise this is just a fake democracy.
Have you considered the possibility that the people who voted against the proposal (or their political masters) got into place via a software-rigged vote?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I haven't yet determined if this is a conspiracy of power mongers or just one of mass stupidity. I think both.
The scientiest at the NIST are right: voting machines *are* indeed impossible to secure. But it's not because of some inherent technical limitation or issue. It's because there is absolutely no way to truely verify the integrity of the machine at its most basic levels: operating system and voting software. There's no way to ensure that either has not been tampered with since both of these two critical pieces of the infrastructure are usually closed source.
Now, while I'm a fan of open source, I can definitely see situations where it doesn't really matter (from a security standpoint) whether you use a closed or open system. This is not one of them. If a complete solution would be developed centered around a completely open system it would nearly totally eliminate the integrity issues surrounding eVoting. And as for software reliability issues like making sure it doesn't crash, all the votes are counted and appropriated correctly, ect, that's really *not* an issue. Reliable and bug free software can be designed - think space shuttle, airplane guidance systems, etc. If these systems can be bug-free (or nearly so) then certainly a voting system (something that counts and catalogs) can be.
The government needs to stop wasting money with do-nothing firms with questionable integrity (I'm looking at YOU Diebold) and look towards a solution with nothing to hide. An open solution.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
Sure, who would want to spend a few dollars on something as trivial as preventing our (representative) democracy from being hijacked (again).
That money would be MUCH better spent on the Iraq mess and tax breaks for the ultra wealthy.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I don't think the solution to current-day voting machine problems are a more secure way of voting. I think what we need is secure tallying.
Whatever scheme we dream up, such as punch-card voting, or a paper trail, the fact remains that we really don't know whether our vote will affect the *tally*. A paper trail only comes into play when the official tally is suspect for some reason. What we really need to know is that our vote is counted. Even if we have a bar-code on a paper receipt that shows exactly who we voted for, we have no way of knowing whether or not our little bar-code verified data gets in to the official tally.
Here's what I wrote the last time this discussion came up on slashdot:
"What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string."
One problem with secure tallying is that you want to make sure that your vote is counted in the official tally, but you don't want others to deduce how you voted from the official tally. At this point, I imagine one voter passing the official tally to the next voter. That way you can be certain you have affected the tally, and the design of the system constrains you to only one vote. Periodically, perhaps every hour, the official tally is publicly released. Nobody can then figure out how you voted; they only know how the crowd voted in the past hour.
To satisfy the choke point of one voter passing the official tally to the next person, there can be multiple official tallies that are running concurrently, and at the end of voting, they are all added together in a master tally.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It isn't suprising that they wouldn't want you to vote considering the role they have played in covering up 9/11.
What do you expect from a government agency that is part of the most corrupt and facist government the world has ever known?
... but we can't afford to fix our voting system, the core of our democratic republic? I say we hang these fuckers!
A few years ago when your candidate lost, you complained about other countries having E-voting and u.s. lagging behind. When your candidate still lost in 2004, you complained about E-voting not working and rushing into it too fast.
Now you're complaining about other countries taxing energy use to reduce global warming and u.s. lagging behind in such taxes. Wonder where this is going.
It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes.
If voting mattered, they wouldn't let you vote! Silly to think you actually have choices in an election. Elections are just your high school SGA with older people. Simple popularity contests.
So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
And accountability in voting will be a joke because the first implementation was a total fuck up?
In software, the solution to this problem would be: eVoting 2.0
Changelog:
come up with such a system that protects you being susceptible to intimidation. your own access to your recorded vote outside of the voting booth of necessity grants access to your recorded vote to anyone who "convinces" you it is worthwhile to show them your vote.
i still don't see the problem with simple scantron "fill in the bubble" voting sheets. fill them in, take them to a machine and feed it in. the machine displays the votes on screen that it is about to record. you confirm that "yup, the machine read it correctly" and hit "submit". the vote is counted and your sheet is held by the machine. if you say "hey, that's not what i voted" you hit "cancel" and the sheet is marked clearly as a cancelled sheet, not counted, and you go get another sheet.
or, we have people count the votes and trust the people to count honestly and correctly.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Politicians would sooner have another quagmire in the middle east than secure the continued function of our Democracy.
With a paper trail it becomes extremely easy to sell votes or be coerced into voting. The voter has the receipt to prove to a third party they fulfilled their previously agreed upon obligation.
Take a look at Ben Adida's work on this http://benlog.com/ http://ben.adida.net/ and http://ben.adida.net/presentations/
This just pisses me off so fucking much. I want to punch this guy in the face, whining about having to rethink and reimpliment the entire voting system. And to top it off, stating that it would be "too expensive"? What kind of hypocritical bullshit is that? Look at all of the pointless shit that our government throws money at. Ted Stevens' "Bridge to Nowhere" comes to mind. If this is what needs to take place in order to reassure the American people that their election process is not being raped and murdered, then that's what must happen. This whole thing just stinks to high hell of dishonesty and double-crossing of the American people, from both ends of the political spectrum. Fuck this guy, and fuck the rest of the scapegoating shills. We need reform. Soon. Soon as in now.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
It doesn't matter either way. If the voting machine gives me a receipt what is that going to solve?
If I can look my vote up on the Internet to "verify" that my vote is recorded as I intended it to be. Nowhere in any of that can you reasonably assert that your vote was actually counted the way it's being presented to you, whether on a paper receipt or pulling it up online.
If I were to "hack the vote" in any system I would make sure that to the voter everything always looked as those his vote was counted as he intended. The only thing I'd change would be the totals.
Paper receipts would only be "verifiable" if you were in a small town and gathered up everyone with proof of who they voted for and matched the results to the totals. But good luck trying that with 100 million people.
Reno.
Fine. In the next election, make sure you vote for the party I tell you to. I expect to see your reciept as proof you voted appropriately. If you don't, I'll break your kneecaps with a sledgehammer. And if I can't find you, I'll just have your family killed.
Or we could just, you know, *not* promote vote fraud. That would be OK too. Whichever you and your family would prefer.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Voting machine:
1. Setup linux distro with apache, tomcat, whatever
2. Install ballot web app
3. Install ballot CUPS printer filter
4. Setup firefox for kiosk mode
Counting machine:
1. Setup linux distro with ballot_counter.py
2. Attach scanner
3. Run ballots through OCR software
4. Update counters (in realtime as scanned)
Ballots print like this, one measure per line:
PRESIDENT: AL GORE
SENATE: JAMES WEBB
STEM-CELL: YES
Also the tally program just keeps track of unique lines returned from the OCR and puts this count next to the on-screen list (sorted by count). Thus it doesn't need to know anything about the election. The top N lines on the screen as votes are scanned (after polls close) will automatically show the votes from the ballot followed by the most popular write-ins (ie Mickey Mouse).
You can add fancy CSS styles, javascript to prevent accidental undervoting, screen readers, on-screen keyboard, etc. There... a complete, secure, reliable, OSS, and cheap voting system for a day's work.
I do not understand why anybody would object to this unless they had 100,000 paperless machines sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
You can always change to the system used by most of the rest of the world and just stop voting altogether. Select a president for life and get it over with. This bi-anual media circus is very wasteful.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
...because you can't confirm that the vote on the scantron was the vote they used in determining who won the race.
With the proper governance in place, you can protect people from intimidation, and even make it worth their while to turn people in who attempt to.
If your boss is the kind of person who would force you to vote a certain way, they are the same kind of person who would make you perform sexual favors for them in order to keep your job... I just don't see it as a problem that has no repercussions.
Problem with mail voting is that ballots could be made to "disappear" outside the election system (for example post office clerks could be bribed to toss them). The more hands sensitive data passes through, the more of a chance there is for corruption of said data, whether accidental or malevolent.
-b.
-b.
voting machine looks like it does today, touch screen for example.
When the user presses the vote button the machine prints a ticket with the results.
The ticket is a two part ticket just like the recepits you get at the store.
The top copy goes into a lock box, the bottom copy is handed to the voter.
Before handing in the ticket the voter examines the ticket to make sure it is correct.
If in error the operator can cancel the vote on the machine and the voter makes corrections.
If correct the operator finalizes the vote on the machine and places the ticket in the
lock box. In the event of a recount the tickets in the lock box are used and compared
against the machine tally. The lockbox ticket count would override the machine count results.
1. Was the draft refused for technical merits, or because the solution was simply too expensive?
2. Are they trying to re-write the draft so address the issues that can be addressed without eliminating the solution to the problem?
3. Who do we contact in our government to urge them to get this voting mess corrected? Senators, Congress people, NIST representatives?
What's so hard about installing a printer?
What am I missing?
Paper ballots == ballot stuffing.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
My Mailclad scheme uses simple random numbers and data bases to make an unbreakable system that allow for clear open auditing while still allowing voters anonymity.
It's similar to the Autotote system used for betting on horse races and the way some Vegas slot machines print out cash vouchers, also Lotto tickets use a similar random serial number scheme.
Heck even Mc Donald's Monopoly game pieces uses random serial numbers to ensure anti forgery to prevent cheaters.
I have started a source forge project for this and have www.mailclad.com to make an open source voting system based on this.
john
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
An election system is verifiable if the results of the election can be verified by counting the unalterable voter-verified records of the votes that were cast in that election.
There is only one reason why any official might oppose requiring all elections systems to be verifiable. That reason is: That official wants to rig future elections.
Those officials should be tried for treason and shot.
They are perfectly willing to spend millions of dollars on doing recounts, fighting lawsuits, and don't apparently mind that America is becoming ever more cynical about the integrity of our voting system, but they won't spend a little extra money on voting machines? Give me a break. There are some who clearly favor a lack of accountability, and those people are called criminals. This is far too a matter to put into the hands of politically appointees or bureaucrats trying to appease their political masters. We need a Constitutional Amendment making every single voting place have a paper record. There are NO COMPUTERS that hackers can't hack into. I repeat, if you have a computer, then a hacker can break into your system and it doesn't matter how much security you think you have. The only exception could be someone like the NSA and somehow I doubt the polling places will ever achieve that kind of security. What we need are paper ballots and qualified voting place monitors from all parties involved in an election at that voting place, as well as from non-partisan groups that can make sure the independents aren't being cheated. Land of the free and home of the brave, but for how much longer if we allow corrupt people to tamper with the voting box?
Is NIST any more independent than the other agencies (and their scientists) that have been pressured by the Administration to toe the Christian Right Republican Party Line?
This story contradicts itself and confused me. Can someone please fix it?
Fucking Great.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Canada manages to have a paper-only voting system, and produces all their results within a few hours, and has a lot fewer voting issues. then again, one of the secrets is to vote for only one thing - we don't elect dog-catchers and judges and 10 levels of governemt at the same time...
The simple and obvious vote system would be this:
Vote electronically. Whatever, touch screens. When all is settled, print out a final ballot- on a piece of paper, the size of an old computer punch card. It would be printed with both the vote choices (text) and an easily-scanned bar code. For good measure, it would have some form of hash-encrypted key with checksum, machine, serial number, approximate tim,e of voting, etc. You could even print off a matching copy for the voter to take home. (I would also allow the voter to print off "fake" voter receipts, so if they are selling their vote, they could produce whatever receipt for show that they wanted - but not have to actually vote that way. Unless the vote buyer had access to the encoded ballots, he would not be able to tell if the receipt was really for a final vote.)
If you could make that code secure, then maybe add the exact time of voting so individual ballots could be disallowed if the voter were deemed fraudulent; as long as it's not easy to determine who voted how, without a very secret code.
So now, you have a series of bar coded (easily machine-read) paper ballots. The text names also appear, so the voter can verify.
I'm sure in the cases where machine code fudging is suspected, a scanner program could be written to compare text to bar code to ensure no hanky-panky was happening. Also, you could build sorting machines to sort ballots into slots (like the old card sorters) based on a vote value. A quick perusal of any stack ("these should all read 'GWB'...") would show whether any text-to-code mismatch was being performed.
Voters of questionable credentials could still vote,but their ballots would be segregated and serial-numbered (with a hidden code) so that they could be permitted or denied based on challenges - sort of like sealing your vote in an envelope and tossing it in the count when the case is won...
The down side? Every voting place would need a functional laser (3 for good measure) a huge supply of paper and some fancy computers and bar-code readers.
...every time we try to introduce a paper trail into voting the Democrats and various groups scream "racism!" and "disenfranchisement!". Heck, a court or two has even overturned such measure as "anti-constitutional".
Really, before we worry about whether we've recorded the vote correctly, shouldn't we be worrying about if we recorded the voter correctly?
details
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
...just how much technological solutions can actually suck worse than old tried and true solutions? And I'm NOT a luddite, I love many different technologies. But I think electronic voting is something that can only work if it's done with no profit motive behind it. The machines and the work to make them SHOULD be completely free as part of civic duty on the part of individuals and businesses. Of course that will never happen because too many people have been brainwashed to think they can get rich by doing what their masters tell them.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Why would this be a Bad Thing? I'd rather have an expensive overhaul to create a system I can trust than have a system which has no accountability.
Insert comment about the scalability and parallelizability of counting paper here.
Hand Counting is Cheaper than Voting Machines, even if you pay 3 people to redundantly count every ballot. No technology required beyond pen and paper.
Start Running Better Polls
These machines likely need to be replaced every 4-8 years. They're standard PC tech. How many of you are running an eight year old computer? XP for sure will be 'end of lifed' by 2012 anyway.
This was new back in march and november when the assemblies in these states were voting BEFORE the elections. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Quit posting shit zonk
you suck
I'm losing a lot of my respect for the folks at NIST. They are more detached from the concerns of the educated public than I could have imagined:
"You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware"
Uh, yes? Isn't that, like, exactly what everybody has been yelling for since the last election? In fact, we were all suggesting far more stringent requirements than just paper trails, but it appears that Freedom has lower budgets than we anticipated.
You should spend some time here reading about Oregon's exlusive vote-by-mail (VBM) policy. In particular, there is an excellent and balanced analysis (PDF!) by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III -- you may have heard of these guys. From the report:
The report continues to note that the voter participation claim may be exaggerated, though it admits to a 10% increase mostly in primary elections. There is also meager evidence to support an overall cost savings, though the administrative costs are lower a "hybrid" ballot-box and absentee system common most everywhere else. And to directly refute your concerns over the integrity of the system, the report notes "Despite having moved to an all by mail voting system in 1998 and having been a battleground state in the last two presidential elections, Oregon has been relatively free from the controversies that have dogged some absentee ballot systems." The report notes that of six supposed double-votes in the 2004 election, five were false and the sixth had already been caught and was being investigated prior to the complaint.
Let us not forget, too, that VBM has been exceptionally well-received by Oregonians across every spectrum you can think of, be it political, social, economic, educational, etc.
The key here is that everyone votes by mail. If you have the more typical hybrid system of ballot boxes and absentee VBM, you open yourself up to the kind of deceptive practices you warn against. A nationwide exclusive VBM system would probably solve a great number of the "voting irregularities" that continue to surface every couple of years.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
One pressure group is running a petition drive to ask the new Congressional leadership to require paper legally, rather than having us trust the wisdom and honesty of government agencies:
http://www.democracyforamerica.com/paperballots
Teachers call back NIST committee, they flunked the sixth grade. But NIST itself does many wonderful brainy things.
t ml
As an IT person and as an election judge here in Texas here are my comments. I omit those of despair
PARALLEL LOGIC. Voting electronics are PC embedded based (the ones I have seen boot up). Votes are precious. Lets assume the operations part of voting goes wacko clear down to the chip level. So create electronics based on outer space electronics. Copy each vote (time stamp and who voted for) to a dedicated vote saver chip that is completely separate from the operations part. Something that is write only for that election. Something that is electronically non volatile. This would be a different electronic KIND of saving counts than that on the main operations part of the system. For a weak example, say main operations saves to a register and dedicated save is a writable CD.
REDO THE VOTING MACHINES. One committee member decried changes saying everything would have to be replaced. You bet fella! Its brkoe ('broke'; see I had to replace my misspelled word).
THE VOTE PROCESS HAS A DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHY FROM IT. The vote process is kind of slow and crusty because it values those votes. So we have a problem with an IT approach (flush everything & reboot) vs be careful with everything approach. Really there is no happy medium. We must move to a more careful approach. Almost as far as keeping a change database of each line of operations code.An example is NASA's "They Write the Right Stuff".
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.h
Thanks slashdot for tickling our brains,
Jim Burke
if Brit Williams doesn't care about getting accurate and verifiable results from elections, he should just move to Russia where there's one candidate that you know is going to win regardless of the vote count. but as far as the rest of us are concerned, i'd rather have an expensive paper trail, one that requires removing all the Diebold CRAP that doesn't work in every blessed state, and implementing fair, trustable, and accurate vote counts for every single US citizen. failure to support such a measure is just freaking unamerican. even if the public elects some asshole who doesn't know what he's doing , we'd have the assurance that my neighbors at least voted for the jerk.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
How about just making a bunch of punch cards (hey, they're even reusable)?
Make them out of plastic, with a clearly defined weight tolerance (making it easy to do fairly accurate preliminary manual checks to see if the electronic vote was right). Print the candidate names on the cards. You put them in a slot, the machine reads the holes (we've had a few decades to get punch cards right, and they're pretty robust- no way to screw it up), ticks of the vote electronically, and deposits the card in the right box, which you should be able to see so you know it goes in the right box. Announce the results based on the electronic count, weigh the boxes to get an approximate verification (with a known distribution curve and defined tolerance, you can know just how precise this is). Any discrepancies cause a recount. Cards are reused between elections.
There's a million ways to do it, and most of them are better than what you have.
The great nation of Kazakstan will show the United States how to have a democratic election.
As a matter of fact, there really is evidence that the 2006 elections were hacked, in the Republican's favor. The tricky part of hacking an election is that you don't want to skew the results enough to be obvious, and it looks like they underestimated how many people would vote Democrat.