E-Voting Reform Bill Gaining Adherants

JeremyDuffy sends us to Ars Technica for a look at an e-voting bill making its way through Congress that is gaining the support of the likes of Ed Felten and the EFF. Quoting: "HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available."

Comments

How to refute the proprietary "rights" argument

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Even if democracy didn't trump trade secrets, the commercial interests of the vendors are safe. If a competitor steals their precious source code, well, the competitor has to publish too and will get caught.

Re:How to refute the proprietary "rights" argument

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, then they'll probably just go for the "but we need security by obscurity" defense ... (not endorsing that, OBVIOUSLY)

And maybe it's just me, but the worry about someone stealing your "innovative intellectual property" has always seemed hollow. It's a vote tabulation program for heaven's[1] sake!

[1] I mean "heaven" in the secular sense.

Good, but so what?

[Seumas]

I'm all for auditable voting, but what kind of naive idealist would expect this to make any difference whatsoever? And even if it did, there is a worse problem than which of two assholes wins the vote. Such as - you know - which assholes are accepted enough by the corporations, religious nuts and lobbiest groups in the first place to even become viable candidates.

This would be a good move (though a little late), but it's little more than picking one kernel of corn out of a large, steaming pile of political shit.

Re:Good, but so what?

[badboy_tw2002]

Its not just national politics - the election has to be pretty close and have a pretty far reaching collusion of districts to really make a difference. Its also state & local politics, where fraud at one precinct or county can really make a difference in the outcome of the election.

Re:Good, but so what?

[unclethehornet]

If you want a real e-democracy that can make a difference....

http://www.blognow.com.au/edemocracy

Re:Good, but so what?

[zCyl]

Such as - you know - which assholes are accepted enough by the corporations, religious nuts and lobbiest groups in the first place to even become viable candidates.

What good is a viable candidate if your vote doesn't count anyway? Accurate voting is an essential element of a democracy, and so it MUST be in place.

If you want a better system, you need to support each component of that better system when it comes along. Sticking your head in the sand and waiting for everything to completely match your dream world isn't going to get you anywhere.

Re:Good, but so what?

[skrolle2]

I'm sorry, but that would be a pretty stupid system.

There are problems with our representative democracies, but effectively going back to a direct democracy won't solve anything. Representative democracy is a direct cause of the division of labour which is the main reason our civilization is as advanced as it is. Instead of everyone farming their own food, building their own tools, writing their own programs, performing their own surgery, being their own lawyers and making their own political decisions, we divide the labour. I farm, you code, Johnny performs surgery and Karen sues people and everyone is happy doing what they're best at.

The important thing to remember about representatives is not that they should vote AS their constituents, but that they should make INFORMED DECISIONS in the interest of their contituents. That's the labour we divide to our representatives, to inform themselves of what a political decision means or leads to in the future, to inform themselves of the political landscape and the compromises needed to get a certain policy accepted, to see the big picture, to enact long-term policies for the benefit of their constituents, even though it might be bad in the short term. And, most importantly, to take personal responsibility for the votes cast as an elected official.

You forget some things about political decisions that would get totally lost in your suggested system.

1) Most decisions are incredibly boring regarding concerns that are interesting only to a small minority of the population. With direct democracy, everyone would have to spend time informing themselves of the impact of the fishing quotas of the North Atlantic to make the best decision. But seriously, people won't, they'll just press a little vote button on your webpage and not care what was enacted as a result. Ooops, we bankrupted an entire industry, oh well, noone *I* knew...

2) There's a lot of decisions like the one above, with direct democracy, so everyone would have to check your webpage every day, vote on the issues in a sensible manner, taking time away from whatever else they were doing. Why should people do this every day for the rest of their lives? If everyone does not participate every day, then it's no longer the will of the people, but the will of the people who can be bothered to do this every day, or have time to do this every day. Your average working parent who make up the bulk of the taxpayers will not have time for this, making the "decisions" pretty skewed.

3) Everyone does not have access to the internet every day. Seriously, get some perspectives.

4) You may think that the representatives are biased or lobbied into submission or corrupt, but why would ordinary people be any better? If people believe in ads, what's to stop them from believing in every political ad on their TV, comfortably telling them what to vote for tomorrow?

5) Voter turnout here is about 80%. That means that 20% of the eligible population can't be bothered to make ONE decision every FOURTH YEAR. That's not a lot of work. And you want these people to make decisions every day or at least every week? About things they care even less for than high-level general political ideology?

6) Referendums always lack personal responsibility. "It is the will of the people" is a great way to not have to stand for your actions. Part of the job of being an elected official is to make decisions and take personal responsibility for them. If an official makes decisions that the constituents really dislike, he/she will be voted out of office and someone who makes decisions that are better in line with the voters will take his/her place. But if everyone is voting on every issue, who is responsible for the bad ones? What's stopping people from only making badly-informed, short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves financially in the short run, but are devastating to the country in the long run? You can't vote the voters out of office. You could never have a regime-change in your system, with all the benefits that follow those.

Re:Good, but so what?

[unclethehornet]

Thanks for your feedback. I really am considering doing this, and so am interested in what actually would happen - ie, how it really would play out.

In response to your points:

1. The idea is that the website would have information/links/arguments etc above the little vote button - so it would be very easy to get educated on the issue before voting. Kind of like how you can read a slashdot thread and then become an expert on an issue. :-)

2-3. I think you missed the point of proxy voting. In it's laziest form, you could assign your proxy/default vote to a "normal" politician, which is effectively what you have today. The benefit ofcourse is that you can change your mind at any time or on any issue if/when you feel inclined.

4. I think that lobby groups lobbying the general population is better than lobbying politicians. Particularly for issues such as media ownership, corporate rights, etc.

5. Having no control and a feeling of helplessness in the existing political system creates much of the current apathy. I think that being able to impact change will increase involvement.

6. Regime change is required when the population wants to go a different direction to the government . This doesn't happen in a direct democracy, so the need for regime change (ie, the big reset button) doesn't exist.

You haven't convinced me that it wouldn't/couldn't work - but I do perhaps need to go into more detail as to how the website would actually work..

Re:Good, but so what?

[acramon1]

1. The idea is that the website would have information/links/arguments etc above the little vote button - so it would be very easy to get educated on the issue before voting. Kind of like how you can read a slashdot thread and then become an expert on an issue. :-) This perhaps is the most dangerous of all. Who gets to write what goes above the little vote button? Whoever does has immense power over the voters. By providing a potentially biased view while also trivializing the voting process, we would open up the possibility of thousands or millions of votes being swayed by the writer/compiler of the "facts." Lobbyists can lobby the writer/compiler. If instead of a single writer/compiler we have a committee, who gets to pick the committee members? What keeps lobbyists from lobbying the committee after it's been selected? If we make the information for the vote an open forum, what keeps lobbyists from flooding the forum with their interests? Would a forum even be feasible with millions of daily readers?

What you suggest may work, but I think, as you say, that a lot more thought is needed.

Re:Good, but so what?

[unclethehornet]

Part of the reason that I am "floating" the idea, rather than doing it, is that this system would not be a monopoly - but simply one of many websites in a competitive environment of e-polling stations - each with their own "coalition of independents". Some of these sites would be private, and some would themselves be democratically run - so you could vote out the facilitator if needed.

If voters thought the any particular system (e.g., mine) was in any way corrupted, they could stop voting in members from that system, and starting using another.

Similarly, I would think that many commentary and review websites would spring up with the specific goal of reviewing the independence of such e-polling sites. Much like our current Media Watch program in AU. People could easily visit my summary website, each lobby group's website, and a number of independent review sites before voting.

And my last count-point, is to compare the "corruptability" of my proposed edemocracy system verses your current "democratic" system. Start by counting the number of official "dinners", "lunches", or "functions" that your current representative attends in any given year...

PS. I'm surprised that I've only had negative feedback on slashdot... Imagine if slashdot had a "vote" button at the bottom of each issue relating to a parliamentary bill, and that one (or more) members of parliament (or senators or whatever) would actually vote that way. Obviously there's a lot of the logistics to work out, but doesn't democratic and political power, and the achievability of such a system appeal?

That's "Adherents"

[BarnabyWilde]

Yes, it matters.

Text of the bill

[Anonymous Coward]

HR 811 IH

110th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 811

To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot under title III of such Act, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

February 5, 2007

Mr. HOLT (for himself, Mr. TOM DAVIS of Virginia, Mr. WEXLER, Mr. EMANUEL, Mr. PETRI, Mr. WOLF, Mr. LEWIS of Georgia, Mr. LANGEVIN, Mr. COOPER, Mrs. JONES of Ohio, Mr. CLAY, Mr. SHAYS, Ms. KAPTUR, Mr. ENGLISH of Pennsylvania, Mr. HASTINGS of Florida, Mr. RAMSTAD, Mr. MEEK of Florida, Mr. ISSA, Mr. CUMMINGS, Mrs. BIGGERT, Ms. LEE, Mr. CASTLE, Ms. KILPATRICK of Michigan, Mr. KUHL of New York, Ms. CORRINE BROWN of Florida, Mr. MACK, Mr. SCOTT of Virginia, Mr. ABERCROMBIE, Mr. ACKERMAN, Mr. ALLEN, Mr. BECERRA, Ms. BERKLEY, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. BERRY, Mr. BISHOP of Georgia, Mr. BLUMENAUER, Mr. BOREN, Mr. BOSWELL, Mr. BOUCHER, Mr. BOYD of Florida, Mr. BRADY of Pennsylvania, Mr. BRALEY of Iowa, Mr. BUTTERFIELD, Mrs. CAPPS, Mr. CARNAHAN, Mr. CHANDLER, Mr. COHEN, Mr. COSTA, Mr. COSTELLO, Mr. COURTNEY, Mr. CROWLEY, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Mr. LINCOLN DAVIS of Tennessee, Mrs. DAVIS of California, Mr. DEFAZIO, Ms. DEGETTE, Mr. DELAHUNT, Ms. DELAURO, Mr. DICKS, Mr. DINGELL, Mr. DOGGETT, Mr. DOYLE, Mr. EDWARDS, Mr. ELLISON, Mr. ENGEL, Ms. ESHOO, Mr. ETHERIDGE, Mr. FATTAH, Mr. FILNER, Mr. FORTUN.AE6O, Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts, Mrs. GILLIBRAND, Mr. GONZALEZ, Mr. GORDON of Tennessee, Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas, Mr. GRIJALVA, Mr. GUTIERREZ, Mr. HALL of New York, Ms. HARMAN, Ms. HERSETH, Mr. HIGGINS, Mr. HINCHEY, Ms. HIRONO, Mr. HODES, Mr. HOLDEN, Mr. HONDA, Ms. HOOLEY, Mr. INSLEE, Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas, Mr. JEFFERSON, Ms. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON of Texas, Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia, Mr. KAGEN, Mr. KENNEDY, Mr. KILDEE, Mr. KIND, Mr. KLEIN of Florida, Mr. KUCINICH, Mr. LANTOS, Mr. LARSEN of Washington, Mr. LOEBSACK, Mrs. LOWEY, Mrs. MCCARTHY of New York, Ms. MCCOLLUM of Minnesota, Mr. MCINTYRE, Mr. MCNULTY, Mrs. MALONEY of New York, Mr. MARSHALL, Mr. MATHESON, Ms. MATSUI, Mr. MELANCON, Mr. MICHAUD, Mr. MILLER of North Carolina, Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California, Mr. MITCHELL, Mr. MOLLOHAN, Mr. MOORE of Kansas, Mr. MORAN of Virginia, Mr. PATRICK J. MURPHY of Pennsylvania, Mr. NADLER, Mrs. NAPOLITANO, Ms. NORTON, Mr. OBERSTAR, Mr. OBEY, Mr. OLVER, Mr. ORTIZ, Mr. PALLONE, Mr. PASTOR, Mr. PAYNE, Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota, Mr. PRICE of North Carolina, Mr. REYES, Mr. ROTHMAN, Ms. ROYBAL-ALLARD, Mr. RUPPERSBERGER, Mr. SALAZAR, Ms. LINDA T. SANCHEZ of California, Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California, Ms. SCHAKOWSKY, Mr. SCHIFF, Ms. SCHWARTZ, Mr. SCOTT of Georgia, Mr. SERRANO, Mr. SHERMAN, Mr. SHULER, Ms. SLAUGHTER, Mr. SMITH of Washington, Ms. SOLIS, Mr. SPRATT, Mr. STARK, Mr. STUPAK, Ms. SUTTON, Mr. TANNER, Mrs. TAUSCHER, Mr. TAYLOR, Mr. TIERNEY, Mr. TOWNS, Mr. UDALL of Colorado, Mr. VAN HOLLEN, Mr. WALZ of Minnesota, Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Ms. WATERS, Ms. WATSON, Mr. WAXMAN, Mr. WEINER, Ms. WOOLSEY, Mr. WU, Mr. WYNN, and Mr. ALTMIRE) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on House Administration

A BILL

To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot under title III of such Act, and for other purposes.

• Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

• This Act may be cited as the `Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007'.

SEC. 2. PROMOTING ACCURACY, INTEGRITY, AND SECURITY THROUGH VOTER-VERIFIED PERMANENT PAPER BALLOT.

• (a) Ballot Verification and Audit Capacity-

• • (1) IN GENERAL- Section 301(a)(2) of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (42 U.S.C. 15481(a)(2)) is amended to read as follows:

• • `(2) BALLOT VERIFICATION AND AUDIT CAPACITY-

• • • `(A) IN GENERA

Congratulations, you just killed it

[ericfitz]

By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill. Do you think Microsoft and Sun are going to sit by and watch a market opportunity vanish? Do you think Linux advocate lobbyists are going to show up at Congressmens' doors with campaign checks?

This is a case of sacrificing the good by demanding the perfect. If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source, then the bill would not have alienated so many parties with enough money to kill it.

Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a case of sacrificing the good by demanding the perfect. If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source, then the bill would not have alienated so many parties with enough money to kill it.

Well then the bill is toothless, because the vendor could install 'backdoor' patches into the os and nobody would be the wiser.

A voting machine vendor can just al easily load a version of linux with wine (though maybe clunky) to run their voting machine app. The difference they save on MS licenses can be used for a programmer to do the necessary program.

Really, there is no reason at all to not have any part of not be open source. Of course, congress whores itself out to lobbyists, so who knows.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[zarozarozaro]

By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill. Do you think Microsoft and Sun are going to sit by and watch a market opportunity vanish?

Yes, if there is enough pressure from the people to have fair elections, we can prevent Microsoft and Sun from choosing our government for us.

This is a case of sacrificing the good by demanding the perfect. If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source, then the bill would not have alienated so many parties with enough money to kill it.

This isn't about money, its about fair elections.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[Checkmait]

Perhaps they reduced its support slightly, but no more than a very tiny bit. What good would the source do to anyone? Remember that there is nothing stopping the vendor from copyrighting the source code and adding a provision to the license which says that no one may make derivative works: all the vendor must do is make the code publicly available.

So a competitor can't really gain anything from the code--it can't be overly complicated (this is a voting machine) and even if they do, the moment they release their machine onto the market, their source must be published, and certainly a competing vendor would notice such striking similarities in code.

Of course, who knows, Diebold might sue Congress for a law which they were not expecting..... :-)

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[paeanblack]

Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.

I read the bill too. All it did was remind me of this old automobile law:

The Locomotive Act 1865 set a speed limit of 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns. The 1865 Act also provided for the then famous "man with a red flag". Walking 60 yards ahead of each vehicle, a man with a red flag or lantern enforced a walking pace, and warned horse riders and horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self propelled machine.
http://www.nationalnumbers.co.uk/number-plate-hist ory.htm

While most of the requirements listed by the bill seem like good ideas, I get the impression the actual purpose of this bill is to make deployment of e-voting machines sufficiently onerous to make the whole idea pointless. Once you enforce the hobbling every potential advantage an e-voting system may have, you can rest secure with any existing investments you may have in the companies manufacturing existing machines. The pessimist in me wonders if Mr. Rush Holt has already planned for that exact scenario.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[SCHecklerX]

How can you trust a voting system if yo udon't know how it works? This is actually the bad part about electronic voting. The general public, even if the source code is available, won't be able to understand what happens to their vote. Not that they understand the backend with other schemes, but at least there is no question when they punch a hole or mark a box with pen and paper.

I can read code, and I didn't know what happened with my vote this past election. Who knows what those machines do? I was given an RFID card, which I used to cast my vote, and then returned that card when I left. It didn'tleave me feeling especially confident.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[adrianmonk]

By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill. Do you think Microsoft and Sun are going to sit by and watch a market opportunity vanish?

What makes you think Sun sells an operating system that isn't open source?

(Actually, they do: when you buy x86 Sun hardware, you have your choice among three operating systems: Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And of course one of those operating systems isn't open source. But by offering two open source alternatives, it seems like they'd be OK with this requirement.)

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[TheGreatHegemon]

I honestly didn't rtfa. But, what prevents companies from paying people for their votes directly, and watching as they vote?

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[MobyDisk]

Are you suggesting that Microsoft or Sun would make voting software, release the source, and then someone else would take that source code and sell it to the government as their own? Yeah... and nobody would notice that.

Of course, Microsoft would never write such code anyway. Voting machines are probably profitable for the maintenance contracts, not the hardware or the software.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[Workaphobia]

Why does requiring open source kill market opportunities? You do realize that open source does not equal free software, so when it says the source code needs to be publically available, that doesn't mean competitors are free to steal code for their own devices.

Re:Congratulations, you just killed it

[sjames]

Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.

Nor should it. The OS can do absolutely ANYTHING to the userspace code including patching it in memory while showing a debugger entirely different code and register values. When it comes to trustability (I don't mean Trusted Computing which is actually a marketing term for the opposite of trustable computing), if the OS is a black box, there can BE no trust.

Consider a simple blob of code in the OS that sets a breakpoint at the beginning of a verification function. When the breakpoint is triggered, stuff a true value in the return register and reset the IP to the end of the function. No amount of examination of the userspace program's source OR BINARY would reveal that verification doesn't happen. Even dumping the program's core wouldn't reveal the problem. The whole thing could probably be accomplished in about 20 bytes of machine code.

Luddites oppose robotic death machines!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Disability rights advocate Harold Snider compared opponents of e-voting to Luddites and chastised them for their lack of faith in technology."

Because it's better to vote and not have it count than to.. er.. get help voting and have it count?

I really hope that line from the article was a flawed summary from the reporter. If it's an accurate characterization, Snider is missing the point entirely.

Opposition to electronic voting is not blanket opposition to use of electronics in voting procedures. It's opposition to secret devices that follow hidden procedures and proclaim an official result -- without the ability of anyone to verify the correctness of the procedures or the result.

Re:Luddites oppose robotic death machines!

[theodicey]

Snider represents the National Federation of the Blind.

The National Federation of the Blind sold their integrity to Diebold for $1 million dollars. They do not deny that there was a quid pro quo, although they have issued a vague, non-denial denial.

Re:Luddites oppose robotic death machines!

[ISurfTooMuch]

A couple of years ago, I viewed a local e-voting demonstration presented by a disability advocacy group. I have no reason to believe that these folks were bought and paid for by a company, but they were solidly behind the idea. I kept bringing up the need for a paper trail, and, to be honest, I'm not sure if the guy fully grasped the significance of what I was talking about. I finally got him to say, yes, this machine could be hooked up to a printer to produce such a trail, but it wasn't easy to drag that assurance out of him.

Here's the thing. Many disability activists are strongly in favor of electronic voting because they see it as a way to allow people with disabilities to vote without assistance. And, yes, these machines can allow for that. I stood there, closed my eyes, and was able to navigate the system and vote without being able to see a thing. Bearing this in mind, we need to make these people aware of the risks that e-voting can create when it isn't implemented properly. As someone else said, what's worse: getting assistance to vote a ballot that will count or being able to independently vote one that may not count?

Good law!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, they can actually make a decent law if they try? Now, if only they'd pass the damn thing without amending it into a horrible parody of itself or huge piles of pork.

Aww, who am I kidding?

That said, I should probably tell my congressman to vote for it. Not that he's ever actually listened to me before, but...

Re:Good law!

[MindStalker]

You can be sure there will be pork added to pay for replacement machines. Possibly even pork added for the existing vendors even to pay for opening their source. Nothing leaves congress without a huge pricetag.

Re:Good law!

[canUbeleiveIT]

Alas, that's probably true...but it's a bargain compared to not knowing if the election is rigged.

Re:Good law!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a note about the sponsor and his central NJ district, which should explain how such a sensible bill came to be introduced. The district runs across the state from the Delaware River to within a few hundred yards of the Atlantic Ocean, encompassing Princeton University, and encompassing or abutting the telecom R&D community that had been centered around Bell Labs in Holmdel, including AT&T Labs, Avaya, Telcordia, Vonage, and many small companies founded by alumni of these companies. Also in the area are many civil servants and contractors for the Army's Communications Electronics Research Development & Engineering Command at Ft. Monmouth. In short, it's a real high-tech powerhouse.

The Congressman, prior to his election, was on staff at Princeton University's Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. A popular sight on many cars in this area is a bumper sticker reading (on two lines): "My Congressman is a Rocket Scientist / Rush Holt."

Re:Good law!

[trianglman]

There is already, just for the hardware, $1 billion worth of funds allocated for this bill; to be used until it is used up (not tied to a budget year). There were other appropriations sections in this as well, auditing and dispute handling were the other two sections I noticed, also how to divvy it up among the states, but I didn't read those sections closely. As someone else has said, that price is worth knowing what is happening to my vote.

Re:Good law!

[sakasune]

I live in Monmouth County (about 2 miles from Ft Monmouth) - never saw that bumper sticker

Re:Good law!

[kennygraham]

Now, if only they'd pass the damn thing without amending it into a horrible parody of itself or huge piles of pork.

I hope they just add pork. With our luck, they'll attach a broadcast flag rider.

There is no Excuse for laziness.

[Irvu]

Yes, this bill will not solve every problem with our political system but what kind of an excuse is there for whining? By your reasoning we shouldn't have bothered with the Clean Air act because it didn't address water pollution or the Clean Water Act because it didn't address air pollution, nor should we have bothered with the endangered species act because it did nothing about outsourcing.

This bill will not fix every problem that plagues our election system. It will fix some of the problems. Is that sufficient reason to pass it? Oh Hell Yes!

Re:There is no Excuse for laziness.

[Seumas]

No, by my reasoning we shouldn't enact legislation when it's just for show and has no actual benefit. Perhaps I will change my tune when there is some challenge made and all of these paper receipts somehow prove useful in changing an unfair outcome.

Re:There is no Excuse for laziness.

[Irvu]

At present the places without paper receips (vis Sarasota Florida, Maryland, etc) are the ones with real problem. States like New Mexico which had up to 10% vote losses among minorities during the 2004 election have switched to optical scanners with audits and have not looked back. Are they perfect? No. Are they a whole hell of a lot better off than they were? Oh yes.

Re:There is no Excuse for laziness.

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, it's amazing that it even took this long to get a bill that's at least partly decent, since the previous electronic voting bills (both passed and proposed) were so weak on common sense and good functionality. Like LBJ said,

You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.

This bill at least reduces a lot of the possible bads.

Re:There is no Excuse for laziness.

[Harmonious Botch]

An AC said something that I think deserves a ride on my karmic coattails...

Frankly, it's amazing that it even took this long to get a bill that's at least partly decent, since the previous electronic voting bills (both passed and proposed) were so weak on common sense and good functionality. Like LBJ said,

You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered. This bill at least reduces a lot of the possible bads

Re:There is no Excuse for laziness.

[aztracker1]

Personally I like Arizona's older visual scan (scan-tron like) system... the print is reasonably large, the sheets are physically marked, and don't "get stuck" like punch ballots. Are electronically scanned and tabulated, with a physical record for recount/audit if needed. Also, a scanned system allows for the setup of 100+ booths to one scanner at a polling place, which means less lines.

I don't think this, or anything from the federal level is requiring the switch to a computerized eVoting system, but at least some level of federal requirements for said systems is a good thing.

I'll continue to use the fill in the oval voting as long as it is available. I feel the biggest issue with the eVoting machines is that it will create longer lines, as well as much larger hardware costs.

A step in the right direction

[zarozarozaro]

This is the sort of law that we need. I urge all Americans who read /. and care about our democracy to write their representatives and tell them to vote for this bill. Voting machine companies like Diebold and Sequoia will surely be lobbying against the bill, so we really need to show them that we care about this issue. This bill is also a great way to find out what your representative is all about. It is often surprising to find which congressmen and women support open source elections. This is certainly an issue that will NOT break down to party affiliation.

Re:A step in the right direction

[poopdeville]

Linky, for your convenience.

Re:A step in the right direction

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately my congressman has already voted against this bill 315 times.

Re:A step in the right direction

[dei3oe]

Simply put, "voter verified trail" does not have to be a paper trail. This bill would be a step in the wrong direction. I do believe that the source code should be available, however mandating a paper trail is archaic.

Paper ballots also get easily lost or mis-placed. What do we do then?

Re:A step in the right direction

[nadamsieee]

You might want to read all of the pertinent information about HR811 first hand before contacting your representative about it.

Ed Felten's comments.

[Irvu]

Ed Felten's comments on the bill can be found Here.

Shhhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe nobody will notice!

Platform software

[Kuroji]

For such a specialized task, it shouldn't be hard to whip up some custom-coded OS that doesn't include all the bells and whistles that, say, Vista includes. Or XP. Or Win3.11, even.

But if only the program is transparent and the rest of the code on the machine is not, what's to prevent (for example) Steve Jobs for running for president and including a line of code that tells the MacOS voting machines that he always wins at least 50.1% of the vote?

Re:Platform software

[Anonymous Coward]

But if only the program is transparent and the rest of the code on the machine is not, what's to prevent (for example) Steve Jobs for running for president and including a line of code that tells the MacOS voting machines that he always wins at least 50.1% of the vote?

The paper trail.

The real danger is voters coming to trust this system to record their votes properly. To game the system you'd want to change X% of votes, and rely on voters not checking their ballots. The results will be more natural. You won't get 50.1% across every contested precinct. You won't get 50.1% in a place where polls show you're going to get creamed. You won't even win every precinct. You'll just do a little better in each one than you should. In a close race, this will give you a win. In a landslide you don't want to win by cheating since as a winner you don't need to cheat and as a loser you're more likely to get caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Re:Platform software

[pjrc]

But if only the program is transparent and the rest of the code on the machine is not, what's to prevent (for example) Steve Jobs for running for president and including a line of code that tells the MacOS voting machines that he always wins at least 50.1% of the vote?

The bill requires an automatic audit of 3% of the required voter-verified paper output, and also required signs encouraging all voters to check the paper copy before leaving.

So if that hidden line of code in the OS steals votes, it either will or won't also steal the printed paper output. If it causes the paper to be printed incorrectly, at least some voters will certainly notice and complain and the fraud will be exposed. If it only changes the electronic count and prints the paper according to the voter's wishes, that discrepancy will almost certainly be noticed during the audit of 3% of the paper. Either way, the fraud will become apparent.

Reviewing the source will make such fraud much more difficult to hide, but in all likelyhood, public source review will most likely combat unforeseen security holes and unintentional bugs... which are also important issues. The paper trail and automatic audit will also expose such problems, but only after the fact. Source review can potentially prevent problems before the election, which is why it's such a good idea.

Re:Platform software

[Anonymous Coward]

So don't make it change votes, make it add votes. If someone votes for Candidate A, build in a 10% chance of the machine also recording a vote for Candidate B. Add it in before the real vote so that when the voter looks at his paper trail, he sees his correct vote.

Seriously. It's amazing how unimaginative people here are when it comes to things like stealing elections.

Re:Platform software

[Anonymous Coward]

Your proposed steal will only work if they do not count paper ballots as part of the audit.

Changing votes can work on small scales, but the risk-to-benefit ratio is very high. (Odds of discovery are something like 3 * X where X is the percent of votes you alter.)

Sites which print ballots which are then optically scanned are the most vulnerable. Print the correct name, but print in the wrong location and the vote is changed with the voter none-the-wiser. An audit using the optical scanner will not reveal the deception as the results will match your computer-tabulated results. Only a manual audit can uncover the deception and then only if the auditors recognize the ramifications of the 'misprinted' ballots. Combine this with shifting other (unimportant) items around and you can even have plausible deniability if discovered.

Relax.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what amendments are for.

(among other things)

voting machines waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

So if paper is going to be the final word, why waste the money on voting machines in the first place?

KISS anyone? No, because then there are no kickbacks and bribes to take.

(lol verify word is "paranoia")

Re:voting machines waste of money

[Chirs]

Because in the vast majority of cases no recount will be necessary, so it will be much faster/cheaper to use the electronic records than if you had to manually count each vote by hand.

Re:voting machines waste of money

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Because:

  - The voting machine result can be used whenever the particular precinct's results are uncontested, leaving all the advantages (except the "advantage" of being able to invisibly rig an election) intact.

  - The auditability of the result will virtually eliminate any utility in rigging the machines (while bringing to bear draconian penalties for attempting to rig them and getting caught), greatly improving the reliability of the machines' results - to the point that they CAN be used without creating the appearance of rigged elections.

Re:voting machines waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree the legislation is a good way to address the problem. However, why again do we need spend millions of dollars on these voting machines and training and maintenance, etc. jacking up my taxes just so I can play with some new shiny object?

Re:voting machines waste of money

[Ungrounded Lightning]

However, why again do we need spend millions of dollars on these voting machines and training and maintenance, etc. jacking up my taxes just so I can play with some new shiny object?

Because your elected lawmakers decided that you would.

Accessibility for the handicapped was a major driver. Issues with previous balloting systems were another.

As usual the legislative solution wasn't well thought out and had unintended consequences. Now we have to fix the fix.

Given the importance of visibly accurate elections (which is how republics avoid civil war) it's vitally important to get this done.

Given that reverting to pure paper balloting would regress the improved handicapped access, complete elimination of the electronic voting aids is not an option. (Note that some jurisdictions that have decertified the Diebold mahchines - such as Alameda County CA - still allow their use for handicapped voters until a better solution can be deployed.)

Re:voting machines waste of money

[JayBat]

so it will be much faster/cheaper to use the electronic records than if you had to manually count each vote by hand.

False dichotomy. Oregon doesn't use touch-screen machines, we use fill-in-the-bubble paper ballots and machine counters. Works great, and much faster during heavy turnout elections (where from an outsider's POV, touch-screen states just never seem to have enough of those glorified PC's around).

Oregon is vote-by-mail also, but that is an orthogonal issue.

All the same source-inspection criteria should apply to ballot-counting machines also; they are, in general, made by the same corporations that make touch-screen machines.

-Jay-

Re:voting machines waste of money

[X-rated Ouroboros]

Voter 1 needs a ballot for District 13 in Portugese. Voter 2 needs a ballot for District 7 in English. Voter 3 needs a ballot for District 3 in English. Voter 4 needs a ballot for district 3 in Spanish for the Vision Impaired. With a fully realized electronic voting system, all of these people can be served by the same machine, at the same polling station, with the same basic procedure.

The statistical skew from top balloting or voter fatigue can be eliminated by displaying to voters equivalent ballots with the order of candidates and/or races/measures/referenda presented randomly.

A lot of things become enabled by removing the burden of generating and distributing physical ballots.

Re:voting machines waste of money

[StikyPad]

Right.. this whole thing is idiotic. Aside from the redundancy, you have the problem that a paper printout doesn't necessarily reflect the stored vote. I mean, if I compromised the system, I'd just have it print out Bush while secretly recording a vote for Gore. Secondly, a paper recount would never work. You sure as hell can't count the voter's record because he may change his vote ex post facto, unless it printed out two copies: One copy for the voter, and another for safe keeping, and the voter would have to verify that they match. Of course, it would be no less vulnerable to tampering than a regular paper system, so all we're doing is introducting MORE vulnerabilities to the system.

Here's an idea, if you really want to introduce electronics. Make a modern touchscreen front-end that creates punched ballots (OMG punched card ponies), have the voter examine the ballot, and turn it in. No electronic counting, no crazy hanging chads, no butterfly daisies with extra sprinkles.. just a card with holes in it, like this:

1 2 3 4 5
O - - - - 1. Bush 2. Gore 3. Kim Jong Il 4. Nader 5. Yoda
- O - - - 1. Gonzales 2. Mouse, Mickey
O - - - - etc..

France ...

[koxkoxkox]

If only the French government did the same thing ... In France, electronic vote will be used for the next presidential elections, without any of these guarantees and without any open debate with the citizens.

A lot of people are against this evolution, as shown by a petition on the Internet : http://www.recul-democratique.org/About-us.html, and they demand approximatively the same requirements. People have to trust completely the result of the elections and they can't rely on the report of a private expert claiming that the program is secure. So it means open source for the computer scientists originating this petition and paper trail for the vast majority of the population who don't feel completely safe about the whole dematerialisation process.

Excuse me for any spelling or grammar mistake, or correct me in french. :o)

Re:France ...

[ScrewMaster]

Trust me, your English is a hell of a lot better than my French.

An even better bill?

[ziegast]

Some people analyzed weaknesses in the bill and made recommendations for changes....
http://electionarchive.org/ucvInfo/US/ChangesNeede d2HR811.pdf

It is time for the /. community to act!

[Irvu]

This bill does many of the things that we in the /. community have argued for for some time now including open code inspection, reliable voting systems, and yes, reliable recounts and audits. Now is the time for the /. community to act on our endless snarky comments and help to move real change forward.

The Bill's text and record are available at Thomas. While there you can peruse the list of 200 Cosponsors to see if your house rep is among them (and should be given a cookie for that) or not (and should be corrected).

If you both support the bill and are a U.S. Citizen or Resident, you can go to the U.S. House of Representatives Website at www.house.gov, and Write your rep or contact them via their website (Recommended) to urge them to support the bill or thank them for already cosponsoring it.

With time to spare you can head over to the Senate and urge your senators to back the forthcoming companion bill in the senate. Following that a stop off to contact The Executive Branch (va a aqui para Espanol) to urge signing of the bill wouldn't hurt.

If you believe in any of the things this bill does then a few minutes on the phone or sending a polite e-mail shouldn't be too much. As cynical as we all can be about the influence of money on elections a groundswell is too costly to be overrun.

Re:It is time for the /. community to act!

[garcia]

This bill does many of the things that we in the /. community have argued for for some time now including open code inspection, reliable voting systems, and yes, reliable recounts and audits. Now is the time for the /. community to act on our endless snarky comments and help to move real change forward.

Yes, this *bill* does a lot. It doesn't mean that any of this will actually go through regardless of our contacting those in power.

What I want to know is why there isn't a provision to allow there to be paper ballots for *EVERYONE* that doesn't want to use the pointless machines in the first place. Hell, why are we going to waste tax dollars purchasing these machines, training voting officials and the public to use them, and using additional power (which is such a popular topic these days) to drive these machines when the fucking paper ballots will be the official device used during recounts?

Let's end the bullshit and just continue to use paper. It has worked for ~230 years and just because our society wants "instant reporting" doesn't mean it's a good idea to do this.

No, I'm not a luddite (as many of you know) but there are too many opportunities for even more widespread voter fraud if they use this technology. Just because the source code is released doesn't mean that we'll ever be able to verify that it is actually the code being used when the votes are cast and counted.

Re:It is time for the /. community to act!

[cdrguru]

Let's end the bullshit and just continue to use paper. It has worked for ~230 years and just because our society wants "instant reporting" doesn't mean it's a good idea to do this.

The news media will report the results, real or imagined, instantly no matter what. The news media cannot be controlled by the government or blocked from reporting results based on exit polls and theories. We cannot choose whether or not such results are reported.

We get to choose whether or not the results are real. Imagine if Kerry was the announced winner at 9:00 PM EST and the next night this was rescinded in favor of Bush.

Re:It is time for the /. community to act!

[Anonymous Coward]

This was amazingly easy. I first went to http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp to look up my zip+4 , then to http://www.house.gov/writerep/ to write my rep. I didn't even know his name, or my district, or my zip code, and I was able to find and write him in less than 5 minutes.

There is no excuse for each of you not to do the same thing. Keep it short, or they'll never read it. Here's what I wrote:

Please support HR811 so that the most precious aspect of a democracy, the integrity of the vote, is not at risk. With our current electronic voting process, there is the potential for a few corrupt individuals to completely subvert the will of the people by altering the vote, and no method to prove they didn't. If this bill becomes law, then the possibility for a paper recount to prove the validity of and maintain public confidence in the vote in electronic voting areas is restored.

H.R.811
Title: To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot under title III of such Act, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Rep Holt, Rush D. [NJ-12] (introduced 2/5/2007) Cosponsors (200)
Related Bills: S.559
Latest Major Action: 3/29/2007 House committee/subcommittee actions. Status: Committee Hearings Held.

Re:It is time for the /. community to act!

[CmdrSam]

Thanks for the links. This was indeed a very straightforward process, and I've contacted my representative and both my senators. I hope other slashdotters do the same!

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[erbmjw]

The bill shouldn't discriminate between the OS and the voting software. This is not a general purpose machine that requires an advanced OS -- it requires a bare minimum system that can count votes and print ballots! The machines that do these very limited tasks should not be something which Microsoft targets as a significant market for their standard operating systems.

You sunk my battleship

[Eudial]

You sunk my battleship

More business

[Anonymous Coward]

What else would Diebold want? If this bill passes it would invalidate all the machines they
sold. They can then sell new machines to these customers.

spoofing voting an election

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently audited a local election in vote-buying prone Eastern Kentucky. Had I access to the voting machines, I could have pre-loaded the paper tapes with my desired results- all the observers would have signed off, seeing the printouts come out of the machines. In order to compare and count the voter sign-in sheet to the count generated by the voting machine, the candidate that lost the election would have had to spend thousands of dollars for a "re-count" (vs a re-canvass). One could not even count the signatures in the sign in sheets and compare that to the voting machine count under the "re-canvass" rules. Requiring a paper trail, and a statistical audit for each election would lower the risk of machine fraud. The recent Scientific American article on voting machines indicates that adding a headphone audio feedback to the e-voting paper trail reduces erroneous votes better than the paper trail alone. Clean elections are a good thing for us all. Support this bill!

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[ScrewMaster]

The bill shouldn't discriminate between the OS and the voting software.

Couldn't agree more, because the two together comprise a functioning embedded system. Auditing the application and ignoring the operating system is pointless, from a secure voting perspective. The Congressman has it right.

Besides, this is not a supercomputer. This is not an accounting system. This is a goddamn electromechanical counter, a mindless device which could be implemented with vacuum tubes, or discrete TTL, or a BASIC Stamp! There doesn't need to be an "operating system", unless you need it to throw up your colorful corporate logo or justify your "Microsoft Vista ready" sticker. I mean, we aren't talking some incredibly complex technological requirements here, although there are those with a vested interest in making it appear so. For crying out loud it's been done for centuries using pieces of paper. Any corporation that manufactures these things that makes "intellectual property" claims about its "advanced software" is FULL OF CRAP and trying to keep the public from knowing what a shoddy job it did, or worse. If you aren't willing to open up your voting system to public inspection from the chips on up, then you shouldn't be allowed to sell them to our government. Any of our governments.

More to the point, this is just the kind of system that should be only as complex as it needs to be ... and not one iota more. Every extra layer of "sophistication" adds more room for error, more places to hide something.

Re:Ed Felten. Why is daddy DRM interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

whatwhy??

Urge all to watch Hacking Democracy 2007

[Anonymous Coward]

I urge all Americans to watch this video http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808532/ called Hacking Democracy 2007 an HBO production.

It will truely open your eyes on these issues and probably make you sick / mad!!!

Wow

[Jonnty]

It's almost like whoever wrote this bill had a clue.

Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Alwin Henseler]

In all these discussions about e-voting, I don't really understand why the emphasis on Open Source software for voting computers. Why? The whole problem with e-voting is in transparency of the process. Does Open Source inside such a machine change that? How?

Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on? Can you verify that the hardware works as intended (like, no memory errors etc)? I expect that for most (or all) of these questions, the answer will be: no, not really.

That's the whole point of a paper trail. Essentially, it makes the counting black box irrelevant (as long as the paper trail is considered the authoritive result, that is). Wrong vote stored on flash? Who cares, as long as the correct vote is written on the paper output (and the voter can verify that before leaving).

At that point, what's inside the black box doesn't matter much anymore, and basicly serves to make voting easier, or help to get a quick (preliminary!) count of what the end result might look like. Closed source software, or unknown hardware inside? What's the problem as long as the correct votes are printed on dead tree, and verified by the voter?

But also at this point, the 'added value' of a voting computer becomes a mystery to me. Why not just ditch them? If you want quicker results, organise better or get more people to count votes. Good organisation (and paper!) is really all you need for elections that are both fair, and with quick results.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[CastrTroy]

The problem with that, is that the numbers coming out of the black box are considered official, and recounts are hard to get done, especially complete recounts. And paper trails sometimes get thrown out. I'd rather just keep it all pen and paper like it currently is in Canada. No complex machinery to get messed with, and if you're worried about your votes not getting counted properly, well there's people watching the actual counting from all involved parties to make sure nothing is getting miscounted.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[plover]

The whole problem with e-voting is in transparency of the process. Does Open Source inside such a machine change that? How?

There is a little more to an electronic voting machine than simple tabulation. There's the presentation of each individual election, and the presentation of the candidates. What if the Demopublican party's candidate's picture was shown colorful and vibrant, while the Republicrat candidate's picture was washed out black and white? What if the major parties get their candidates on giant buttons, while the Yellow party's candidate is in 8-point font?

Imagine a hotly contested state where voter turnout is expected to be the deciding factor in a Senate race. If enough people turn out, it's likely the Demopublican will win; if few people show up the Republicrat will probably win. A Republicrat sympathizer sneaks in and "changes" the code so that the presidential race is displayed first, followed by the house representative, followed by the governor, then the state house, the state senate, then a dozen district judges, the mayor, the city council, the watershed manager, the dog catcher, and finally the senatorial race. On the bottom of each slate is a giant "I'm done, no more voting for me" button. By the fourth judge nobody's ever heard of, lots of people give up and stop filling out their ballots, or they repeatedly hit "next", "next", "next" until they see "done", then grab their ballot and rush off to work because they're already late. By changing the order of the slates, the Republicrat has affected the outcome of the election, yet the tabulation is 100% accurately counted.

That's why Open Source is important.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[M. Baranczak]

The whole problem with e-voting is in transparency of the process. Does Open Source inside such a machine change that? Of course it changes it. Open source doesn't guarantee transparency, it's just one of the basic prerequisites for having transparency. You still have to verify the DB against the paper trail, audit the software that was used to compile the code, audit the hardware, etc.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[zippthorne]

Interesting. Based on your comment, I think there should be, close to the end but not at the end. One additional ballot question. "I wish to have my ballot counted." If that's not checked, "yes" then no effort needs to be expended actually tallying the rest of the choices.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[plover]

That's dangerously close to literacy testing, used to disenfranchise the black voters during Jim Crow. Theoretically, pictures of the candidates could reduce the need to ask an election judge for assistance in voting by someone who is illiterate. And an electronic ballot could ease language issues, especially on non-candidate questions such as constitutional amendments.

But on the whole, I actually agree mostly with the top level poster in that pencil and paper are perfectly adequate to the task of recording elections. I just listed the only advantages I can think of with electronic voting booths over paper and pencil. Otherwise, electronic solutions are trouble-prone, controversial, and will always be suspect. Speed of reporting results to the news media is not guaranteed by the Constitution -- that's why it provides for two months to elapse between the election and the candidate taking office. Last minute candidate changes are similarly not guaranteed -- the secretaries of state are responsible for distributing ballots, and are typically given a month or more by statute in which to do it. The old system is not broken, and does not require electronics to fix.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[trianglman]

Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on? Can you verify that the hardware works as intended (like, no memory errors etc)? I expect that for most (or all) of these questions, the answer will be: no, not really.

Actually the answer is, in general, yes. The software vendors must turn over "source code, object code, and executable representation of the voting system software for use in an election" (from the bill). And where the answer is no (hardware) it will be tested by NIST. I have dealt with the NIST and they are nothing if not AR.

For once, I have read a technology bill that actually make sense and is well written. What will happen to it in committee and beyond is any body's guess, but as it stands right now, this is a good bill.

As far as your complaints about a paper trail, the point of the paper trail is to have a physical back-up in case of a dispute. In general, the electronic vote is what will be considered. However, at least one precinct per county (plus any disputes) will be audited at random with the results made public. This means that both have their place, the electronic voting machines for easier voter use and verification (the voter has to check the paper ballot and make sure its accurate), and the paper trail, mixed with auditing, to make sure those results are accurate. If this piece of legislation goes through, it will remove the 'hanging chad' issues we saw in Florida, while at the same time giving the people the ability to make sure that their votes don't just go into a black box with the hope that it will come out the same on the other side.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[ppanon]

If you want quicker results, organise better or get more people to count votes.

A good idea, and how we do it in Canada (and many other western developed nations). The problem is that you live in the United States of Apathy.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[neomunk]

1:Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? 2:Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? 3:Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on? 4:Can you verify that the hardware works as intended (like, no memory errors etc)? 5:I expect that for most (or all) of these questions, the answer will be: no, not really. I added some numbers to save myself some cutnpaste... :-)

Alrighty, one at a time...

1: Yes. There are plenty of open source compilers available. But what about the compiler THEY are compiled with? Okay then, lets go back a few decades and start compiling up open source compilers in as many steps as you need to compile a compiler for the language(s) that you're writing the voting software in, starting with some old copy of Bell Labs C or something, where the original binary compiler is assuredly not compromised in any way pertinent to the voting software. Do this once, openly, transparently and get a lovely golden and truely sacred copy of gcc or whatever.

2: Yes, with a little LCD screen with the binary's MD5 or something. It can be done if you really want actual VOTER verification of the binaries. Of course, this is not very hard to verify at the factory, or even at startup by administrators that can follow directions.

3: Yes? I don't understand this question exactly. Yes, you can know what machine the software is running on by designing a voting machine and writing software for it. Can the voter verify this? Well, no, not directly. Well maybe, but that would be complex. BUT, the same goes for tabulation of the vote with paper ballots, although the transparency isn't in the hardware, but the room itself. See, you don't necessarily get to watch them count it (at least not here) but a representative of both of the 2 biggest parties do, if I understand correctly. Now, knowing that there is SOME trust involved, you could have a couple of partisan or independant engineers look it over. If you're talking modification on the level of fake processors and such, well, that level of conspiracy will find a way to infiltrate ANY election more complex than a 'raise your hands'

4: Yes. The vast majority of hardware errors are caught in any reasonable production line. Those that are not are usually very evident if the machine undergoes a good burn-in test battery. The probability of a random hardware error changing the outcome of your vote is ridiculously near zero. Papaer ballot doesn't print? Swap in a new printer, like at the grocery store. You have to vote over again (and any decent software will cancel your vote and TELL YOU LOUDLY THAT IT HAS DONE SO (like that, but with bigger letters, flashing red text and maybe even sound!) at the first sign of problems) but that's not asking too much.

5: Well, that's a whole lotta yeses on the board. It's a bit late, and I don't know if I explained myself right, but I think it's about right. Paper ballots are great, except when some court tells you that it doesn't matter that you haven't gotten the same count twice, it's close enough. When the e-voting get to the point (like this law could likely take it) that it displays the ballot correctly, prints the paper correctly, and counts the votes correctly (with the paper ballot counts *gasp* MATCHING the e-votes) you'll find that paper seems to be the stuff that doesn't matter so much anymore... Still though, I'd like to keep it around, err on the side of caution and all that.

Frankly though, paper ballots have their own problems, mostly due to human corruption. With a proper e-voting machine we could make their bastardly jobs much MUCH harder.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[lonecrow]

Ya, I've never really understood this drive towards e-voting in the US. In Canada we know the results of the election before going to bed. Isn't that fast enough? Its not as if society is going to be any better off if it takes half the time to count the votes. I guess my question is who is leading the charge for eVoting and why? (other then the election machine companies themselves I mean).

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[TempeTerra]

Even if the source code for the voting machine and code for the toolchain are audited, and the hardware is audited too, you just can't be sure that the 'clean' code and machine are what is actually in front of you when you vote. It's just a little bit more difficult for the vote falsifiers. Electronic voting will always suffer from a few people having too much control - the guys who designs the hardware, the guy who assembles the hardware, the guy who delivers the hardware... a conspiracy of half a dozen people could conceivably subvert the entire voting process.

Frankly, I still think that e-voting is a (poor) solution looking for a problem. Just ask all the other democracies that still use paper ballots.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Threni]

> Actually the answer is, in general, yes. The software vendors must turn over "source code, object code, and executable
> representation of the voting system software for use in an election" (from the bill).

Unless you can take their source and compile it yourself into *exactly* the same - byte for byte - executable, using a publicly available open source compiler, then you can't trust the executable.

See: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[aztracker1]

Well, in this case, I don't think it has to conclude that having the source code available implies "Open Source" as defined by OpenSource.org ... but it is a good thing to have it available for public review.

I feel that it also doesn't relieve copyright on the source, though it would prevent any "trade secrets" on any of the process. With regards to eVoting, the process should be completely open, and systems should be allowed to inter-operate with each other.

I feel that there should be provisions for stiff penalties for any blantant copyright infringement from one system to another... yes, if somewhere along the way, you implements a somestring.Substring(...) in a language, then that line isn't a copyright infringement, but if you have a method that has the same name, and identical content, and verbage from one system to another, that one of the two probably cheated.

More than this, it would allow for new systems from competing vendors to work with existing systems for expansion and replacement. Preventing a single vendor from having a lock-in for a particular state.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[StringBlade]

There's the overlooked aspect of environmental impact. How much new or old growth forest is used in making the millions of miles of paper tape used in voting machines? With e-voting (and no paper trail) you use less paper.

Granted, e-voting with a paper trail is rather a step backwards environmentally because now you're not only using up a lot of paper, but you're using a lot of electricity as well. In general though, electronic machines can be made to run more efficiently as their design improves. Electricity can be generated more cleanly as technology improves. Paper cannot be made with the same amount of reduction in trees as technology improves (though possibly less of the tree is wasted).

I would like to see a completely open e-voting system without a paper trail. To some degree the critics are right that we're acting like a bunch of luddites demanding paper trails. But I think that's more due to our distrust of the vendors and politicians more than it is of the technology itself. Once the technology can be proven to be 99.999% tamper-free, then there will be no need for a paper trail.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[yuna49]

People who live in parliamentary democracies like Canada and Britain often express puzzlement at the drive toward e-voting in American elections. That's because voting in parliamentary elections usually consists of casting one vote for the local MP candidate. In US elections, there are often a dozen or so different offices being voted on, not to mention a variety of referenda, so the ballot is necessarily more complex.

Moreover ballot "reformers" at the end of the nineteenth century pressed for the introduction of the "office-block" ballot format, where the race for each office is presented separately. At the time "party-list" ballots were much more common and allowed someone to vote for all the candidates of a single party by checking one box. This enabled parties to mobilize less well-educated voters, many of them recent immigrants, since party-list ballots didn't require a careful reading of multiple offices in order to cast a party-line ticket. Much of this reform effort reflected nativist sentiments among the more prosperous American middle class who feared the transformation of politics that might take place if European immigrants with "dangerous" social ideologies might take power. Party-list ballots are used in many parliamentary democracies, particularly those with proportional representation systems, but aren't at all common here in the US.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on?

Yes, yes, and mostly. The easiest way is to separate the companies. Have the source code written by one company to an industry-standard compiler or interpreter. Use standard, off-the-shelf hardware. If they send you binaries, make sure they also tell you precisely what version of which compiler they used with what flags, so you can precisely duplicate the results. Publish the binaries that will be used and allow bored comp E grad students to go over them with a fine-tooth comb. Offer significant cash prizes for exploits. Let every interested party inspect any machine they want to or do an unofficial recount for any reason.

Sure, it's conceivable that Intel and motherboard companies might put in some secret handling of the election code, but do you think it wouldn't be discovered with a random audit of 3% of the paper records? Especially if, say, the AMD voting machines running the same software didn't fail?

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Sczi]

Open source doesn't guarantee transparency, it's just one of the basic prerequisites for having transparency.

QFT

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[xappax]

There's also the valid concern for the rights of disabled people, who have been put (willingly or not) at the forefront of the US e-voting drive. The problem now is that people who are blind, physically impaired, or otherwise unable to carry out the act of filling out a ballot independently are forced to bring an assistant into the voting booth with them, who guides them through filling out the ballot and possibly does it for them.

People in the US have a pretty strong, well defined right to cast their vote in private, with nobody being able to find out who they actually voted for. It seems trivial, but it's an important part of the democratic process - the right to vote privately protects people from persecution and intimidation based on who they support, and the requirement to vote privately renders the practice of paying people for their votes almost impossible.

So it does suck that disabled people are being effectively disenfranchised when it comes to voting rights when a computerized ballot could help. Personally, I can see the benefit of having 1 or 2 computerized voting machines at each polling place, which allow audio (using headphones) and video output, as well as voice, touchscreen, and some other type of tactile input (i don't know what's easiest for people with certain disabilities). The machine can print a hard-copy ballot, printed in large text and braille, which the person can confirm. They then have it delivered to the ballot box like any other ballot.

This method would address all the concerns of the disabled lobby, while still preserving a reliable, verifiable paper trail. True, it would require some way of reading braille while counting the ballots (perhaps the braille could consist of machine-readable holes punched in the ballot?), but that doesn't seem insurmountable, especially since it'd be a very small percentage of ballot which actually came in this way.

A system like this is not what the e-voting proponents are looking for, though. Nobody can get a clear answer about what's so incredibly important about voting on computers that necessitates billions of dollars to be spent, but we can be sure that they feel it's more important than verifiable and reliable elections, because the considerations for these issues has been token at best.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[trianglman]

You may not be able to trust, blindly, the executable, but if you are presented with the binary, and everything else, you are able to test it to see exactly what it does. You can, if you want, watch as it changes the buffer, registry, etc. You can then watch the same information on a voting machine and verify that it is doing the same actions. Memory locations will obviously change, but if you have the source code you can make sure that the differences match what should happen. Yes, there are ways to mess with the code in a very obfuscated way, but contrary to what the other poster said, it will take much more than half a dozen people to hijack an election.

I still hold that, for all of its possible flaws, if implemented properly, as this bill does, electronic voting can be more secure and accurate than punch cards or optical scanners.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[tbannist]

The Open Source software is just one step of many. If you don't know what the machine is supposed to be doing, then you can't tell if it's doing that.

Verifying the compiler should be a little easier, since the source is open and it should be using a standard compiler it should be possible to create a checksum using the same compiler and verify the compiled binaries match. This is dependent on the source code being open. Without the open code, no external agency would be able to create a checksum. They don't have the source code, and likely wouldn't know which compiler was used either.

Frankly, I think it would be much harder to create a hardware based tamper system, most of these vote terminals seem to run on fairly standard computer hardware. All of the hardware is supposed to be tested before it is used. Of course, nailing that down so that all hardware is tested and securely stored is an education and procedures problem that may need to be addressed in the future. But certification of hardware is already required by existing laws, it's just not done very well.

Also as the Republicans have amply demonstrated it's not just about changing vote totals directly. Imagine if you will, a voting program that includes an additional 10 second wait every time someone votes for a Democratic candidate instead of a Republican candidate (but only on Nov 2nd). This is enough to feel slow but not enough for the voter to go seek help. The effect would be longer lines in Democratic strongholds and shorter line in Republican strongholds. If the longer lines deter 1 in every 100 Democratic voters, that could be enough to swing a close election. Throw in a few more tricks, like fake voter registration drives (so people have to register at the polling place eating up the time of the volunteers) and undersupplying voting terminals so the lines are even longer, and you could theoretically switch a 50-50 dead heat into a 44-50 victory without actually changing one vote result.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Rich0]

As long as there is mandatory auditing of a voter-verified paper audit trail I think that computer-tallied votes are fine.

The problem with paper ballots is the need to determine voter intent. Suppose you have two boxes checked for one office, but otherwise a straight-party ballot - did they intend to vote straight party across the whole ballot? How about a small line in one box and a big one in another. How about a check with an X over it in one box, and a check with a circle in the other? If the race comes down to 5 votes, this will be a big problem.

The advantage of computers is that the ballot can be validated while the voter is standing there to fix errors. If they click on one candidate, another candidate will be automatically unchecked, and so on. Go ahead and print to paper, but let the computers do the part they do well...

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[eonlabs]

I hate to agree with you, but there's an important point in what you're saying... http://linuxreviews.org/dictionary/Backdoor/ It is possible to write a compiler that is capable of recognizing a piece of code to allow for the insertion of a backdoor. It has been done, it isn't that hard. Heuristics would allow it to recognize patterns of code similar to that. Compilers have been written that allow a person to compile the compiler's source, which in turn injects the code to both infect itself if it recognizes itself, or infect a target program if that is compiled. In this way, users can see generations of clean code, and still not see the actual faults. The up-side is that legislation like this is a step in the right direction. More important than anything else, it's recognition that there is the possibility for non-verifiable voting records to get hacked and go completely unnoticed. With a paper trail, there's at least a means for verification. The reason that computerized systems are nice are that IF the system is actually functioning properly, it doesn't require teams of people working for hours on end shuffling through endless amounts of identical strips of paper trying to count little dots. It simplifies the equation, and allows what many people are looking for: instant gratification. That's the point of technology. That's the same reason we have robots in car factories. People break down when asked to perform the same task millions of times. Ideally, this bill gets put in place, people fight it, and the issue will be discussed, contemplated, and eventually solved.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[CastrTroy]

If you can't put an x in exactly one box, then your vote doesn't get counted. Call it an intelligence test for votes. If there are multiple issues being voted on, then each issue should be counted separately, so if you check 2 boxes on 1 issue, they still count the votes for all the other issues you didn't screw up.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Rich0]

That sounds nice as a decree, and if you were dictator it would work fine (of course, we don't even need ballots of any kind then).

The problem is that when the loser of an election loses by 3 votes by people who wrote checks instead of X's in his box, your utopian vote-counting system will face a court trial. Now, checks instead of X's is an obvious case, but now picture EVERY shade of gray imaginable - humans are VERY good at not following directions - unlikely computers...

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[drwr]

Huh. There are lots of better ways to reduce our paper usage. The amount of paper that would be consumed in this way for even one national election is absolutely nothing compared to the enormous mounds of paper that are used, for instance, to wrap all the Big Macs consumed across the country in any one day. If our goal is to reduce paper consumption, we've got a lot of work to do, and it doesn't make sense to start with our election system. (Besides, most states use paper ballots today anyway, so we're not talking about *increasing* paper consumption here--just keeping it at about the same level.)

As to proving the technology tamper-free: first, we'll never be able to prove it tamper free to a 99.999% level; and second, even if we could, 99.999% isn't nearly good enough. (Though it's not quite clear what that number would mean, exactly. But if the tamper-resistance is not exactly 100%--and that's clearly impossible--then someone, somewhere can figure out a way to corrupt the system--and some desparate political candidate will find that person and hire him.)

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[StringBlade]

Methinks you believe our current system to be 100% tamper-free? Of course it isn't and I doubt it is even 99.999% tamper free (stuffing the ballot?), but it goes without saying that e-voting will be held to higher standards than traditional ballot voting simply because it's new and untrustworthy.

I think with a sufficiently large sample size (say millions of votes) collected over a period of time from small elections that 99.999% accuracy could be proven.

And I agree, the paper consumption is a very weak reason to move to e-voting, but it is still there (if you can eliminate the paper trail altogether).

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[sjames]

Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on? Can you verify that the hardware works as intended (like, no memory errors etc)? I expect that for most (or all) of these questions, the answer will be: no, not really.

Actually, yes. Take the published source and compile it using the environment the vendor claims to have used. Does the binary produced match the one on the machine? If no, there's a problem. If you understand the hardware through the source of it's firmware, you can write a memory verifier. While you can't be absolutely sure the hardware is exactly the same, you can make sure that the software samples the touchscreen ONCE for a particular input (meaning what it counts there will be what it prints, no dirty tricks where the samples disagree so the tally and receipt differ).

The really sad thing is that there is so much resistance to this from Diebold et. al. Clearly, they understand the value of a receipt since every cash register and ATM out there produces one. Apparently they believe that democracy is LESS IMPORTANT than financial transactions. That in itself warrants suspicion. Considering that there is absolutely no rocket science in programming these embedded devices, there is no real issue of "valuable IP". It's just yet another case of a company that thinks it deserves a patent every time the CEO visits the toilet.

I suspect but cannot prove that the REAL reason they don't want to submit to verifiability is that they fear a smaller less known company can take part of their market otherwise. They prefer that buying decisions be based on "they're a big company, they won't cheat". Never mind that it's not a logical conclusion, marketing can paper that over. If every vendor is subject to verification anyway, lesser known competition is less disadvantaged.

In short, at best they will happily sell "truth, justice, and the American way" short for a minor marketing edge. Yet another reason why they are not to be trusted. It means that they would also likely push a flaky piece of junk out the door rather than spend the cash needed to fix the bugs. If there's no paper trail, they won't get caught.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[drwr]

It's a question of scale. Our current system is surely tamperable, but only on a local level. A particular person with malicious intent would have to bribe or distract or otherwise compromise the sworn attendants at a particular precinct in order to stuff the ballots. Certainly possible.

In order to influence the election on a larger scale, though, that person would need a *lot* of help, and it's hard to imagine that such a massive effort would not be noticed.

On the other hand, with an electronic counting system, it's theoretically possible for a small number of people, working remotely, to influence the results of a large number of precincts at once. *That* is reason enough to be highly suspicious of black-box electronic voting systems. However, the simple presence of a paper trail is sufficient to reduce this danger to the current (low) level of risk.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[StringBlade]

Except that it's quite impractical and unreasonable to expect voters to keep a copy of their voting receipt to do a full paper recount and since the paper rolls in the machine are as sequestered as the electronic count, the software could easily print the correct vote on the voter's receipt and the incorrect vote on the official tape and no one would be the wiser.

Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[drwr]

No, that's not the way it works. I've actually voted on one of these paper-trail voting machines, and really, it's quite elegant; and voting on it gave me warm fuzzies that my vote would actually be counted.

The machine lets you pick your candidate via touchscreen, and performs basic sanity checking on your vote (it doesn't let you vote for two candidates, etc). When you reach the last page and touch "I'm ready to record my vote", it prints a paper receipt which it displays under glass, for you to verify. Then it rolls the receipt up for storage.

The voter doesn't take a copy of the receipt home. But the key is that the paper has been printed, and now there is a paper ballot that exists somewhere. This makes the system exactly as secure as our current paper-ballot system: in order for someone to defeat this, he'd have to physically gain access to the precinct office and destroy printed ballots. Certainly it is possible to do so, but the point is that it's very hard to do this on a large scale.

If I, as a voter, notice that the machine didn't print what I voted, I'll make a fuss. If multiple people make a fuss in one precinct, that will raise alarms. It doesn't even matter if most people don't bother to double-check the printed ballot, since all that's necessary is that a sufficient random sample *does* double-check.

See? It's no more corruptible than a box full of traditional paper ballots. On the other hand, a box that simply records my vote electronically is potentially *much* more corruptible than a paper-trail machine. If a hacker somehow gains access to the box and compromises the program inside, he can make it record whatever votes he likes, and there is absolutely no way to recover the original votes.

That's the key difference. As long as all e-voting machines print a ballot like that, I'm all for the technology. But not having a paper backup is just asking for trouble.

Fine by me.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

If this bill passes ... [Diebold] can then sell new machines to [all their former] customers.

Or printer and software upgrades.

If Diebold fixes the auditability problem I have no further gripe with the use of their machines. If buying an upgrade from them is 'way cheaper than replacing the machines outright, that's just dandy.

"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing at a profit."

2B

[Anonymous Coward]

Your move!

Nice gesture, but what I would like to see...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like that part that tickles the open source advocate in me, but it doesn't really address what I see as a more serious issue: Certification, verification, and accountability trails.

I would like a record of what source/binary is on the machine I place my vote on, all of it, and on every machine that handles the count of my vote all the way down the chain to the machine that tallies and reports the final official counts. No sequence of 1's and 0's should touch that machine without a permanent copy and record of changes kept.

I want a record kept of where each and every machine is and who (excluding voters) even so much as touches it, from the time they receive their final programming, are verified to have the correct program loaded and further change is locked out, until after final counts are tallied and all audits are completed.

Even before that, each and every machine used (not a statistical sampling) should be verified by an independent party to be of certified hardware, unmodified, and to be in proper functional order. There should also be a public standard toward the certification of these machines outside of the legislation, that it can grow and evolve rapidly to account for the rapidly changing IT landscape.

And there should be very real and very sharp teeth standing behind these requirements. If there is any variation found, all those involved should stand before congress and explain why. Period. If any company even so much as ships uncertified hardware, they must have imposed on them a mandatory 6 year ban. Period. And not just the immediate company, but parent companies, their executives and board members, etc. should also face possible injunctions. No shelters, no skirting responsibility.

And let's not just have the source code available, make public all relevant procedures and process used in the development, manufacture, testing, quality assurance, certification, handling, operation, training, etc. related to eVoting. EVERYTHING!

You want to take part in the market for eVoting? These are the terms, take it or leave it.

I don't know about you, but that would give me the the warm and fuzzies about eVoting.

Doesn't give the source away.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill.

The version of "open source" required doesn't give away any copyright or patent protection, or transfer rights to USE the code to others - especially the competition. (It does puncture trade secret.)

If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source ... ... it would have been ineffective against malware embedded in the operating system - by the OS developers or later black-hats.

This is not a minor issue: With control of the US Government at stake a LOT of engineering effort can be profitably applied to attempts to compromise the system - by political, economic, or foreign governmental interests.

Released code != open source

[Wordplay]

I haven't read the actual law. Does it say the code needs to be publicly available for review, or that it actually has to be open-source? These are high-profile applications, and can be controlled strictly through licensing and audits of election equipment.

Try a hard question...

[raehl]

So if paper is going to be the final word, why waste the money on voting machines in the first place?

Because not all paper ballots are created equal, and paper ballots filled out by humans are more prone to error than paper ballots printed by a machine.

The current paper ballots involve things like hole-punches (hanging chads anyone?), filling in bubbles (fill in too many or too few or only partially), butterfly ballots, etc.

It's the same reason your college professors wanted you to type your papers. The machine, by default, makes the paper much more legible than it would be if the paper were written by hand.

Same with electronic voting. The machine makes the ballot much less likely to have an error on it than if the ballot is done by a human with a pen (optical ballots) or punch (punch cards).

There are other features you get with electronic voting. For example, you don't need to print the ballots in advance. You can just load the ballot into the machine the morning of the election, and when people votes, the machine prints out the office and the selected candidate. So instead of having to 'lock' the ballot a month in advance to allow for the ballots to be printed, you might be able to reduce that lead time to a few days or a week. Then when a candidate dies three weeks before the election, or somebody wins/loses a lawsuit, you have more time to correct the ballot.

You can also do neat things like randomize the order candidates appear on the ballot. One problem with elections is the candidate listed first tends to get more votes than other candidates. With electronic ballots, candidates can all be listed first an 'equal' number of times.

Electronic voting also gives you the ability to accommodate more people with disabilities.

Re:Try a hard question...

[aldousd666]

Well, if the reason you have to have a paper trail is to prevent programming errors from having an effect, then ok, I can see that. But if it's to 'guaruntee that they aren't hacked' then that's ridiculous. If i'm clever enough to hack one memory location, then I'm sure i'm clever enough to hack two. if you don't know where I'm going with this, then, perhaps you need a paper trail to tell you that that's really coffee you're buying at starbucks and not just what someone told you is coffee... they might be lying, and we need a paper trail to verify!

Re:Try a hard question...

[Rich0]

Uh, but in the case of voting the only thing that matters is the ballots. If they hack the paper record then they'll get caught when the voters look at the paper record and see that it is wrong. We're not talking about a paper tape in the bowels of the machine - we're talking about a printout in plain view - possibly behind glass, or possibly given to the voter to drop in a box...

One item this bill is missing....

[raehl]

Voting machines must be allocated to voting districts in a manner proportional to the districts' populations.

Re:One item this bill is missing....

[orgelspieler]

Shouldn't they be allocated in a manner proportional to the registered voters instead of population? While we're at it, screw proportionality. There should be minimums based on previous voter turnout and desired throughput or maximum wait time. For instance, if there's some place that has mostly working-class people who can only vote outside of 8-5, they should get more machines than a district with the same population if they are retirees who can vote any time they want. Just an idea. Probably very hard to standardize and enforce, though.

Closed Source Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

All we need to do is to have some ingenious hacker screw up an election by injecting viruses into the voting machines and having the results come back so absolutely outrageous its not even funny. I suggest if a hacker does this they have 'Adolf Hitler' winning, its just fitting considering the path the US is going down.

[OT] French

[Anonymous Coward]

> In France, electronic vote

C'est << voting >>--une verbe, pas un nom.

> will be used for the next presidential elections

<< Election >>, il n'y a q'une president... ou prèmier ministre :)

> without any of these guarantees and without any open debate with the citizens.

Les mots << with the citizens >> sont impliqués.

> A lot of people are against this evolution

<< change >>, pas << evolution >>.

> People have to trust completely

C'est un <<split infinitive>>. On dit <<to completely trust>>.

> computer scientists originating this petition

<<originating>>? C'est un mot un peu bizarre. On dit <<circulating>>.

> dematerialisation process

<<dematerialisation>>!? C'est un mot très bizarre. On dit <<computerization>>.

> Excuse me for any spelling or grammar mistake, or correct me in french. :o)

C'est <<mistakes>>, il y a plus q'un :-) Mais votre anglais... Je pense que vous parlez meillure en anglais que je parle en français.

Feel free to correct me in return :) My French vocabulary has already atrophied due to my lack of practice :( And my grammar? C'est horrible. The only saving grace is that I can pronounce French reasonably well, even that screwball vowel found in words like "feu" (fire) that's damn near impossible until you know the trick[1] because it doesn't exist in English. Though you get to have fun with words with a non-aspirate H, I guess ("air spray" and "hair spray" are NOT the same thing...), so it evens out. And the Germans have a horrible time with the vowels ui in words like nuit[2] because it doesn't exist in German... :-)

[1] Hold your lips in "oooooo" position and say "eeeeee" without moving them. The vowel is just like this, except that you don't hold it for very long. If it sounds like foo or few, you're saying it wrong.

[2] Nuit is pronounced "new E", but it's just one word, for others reading this. The T is silent.

Dust off those paper shredders

[Anonymous Coward]

-nt

Audio interview with the sponsor of the bill

[ntk]

Here's an interview we conducted with Rush Holt, the congressman who has been pushing for this bill for years. It's about twelve minutes long, but a little more meaty than usual for a politician: Holt has a Physics Ph.D., so he has something of a scientific background, and walks through many of the problems with e-voting the proposal tries to solve (and is also fairly candid about why his bill took a while to catch on). We recorded it just before the last election.

Re:Audio interview with the sponsor of the bill

[Catbeller]

So what happens if the cheating manipulates the margins smaller than that which would trigger a mandatory free recount? Already being done.
The entire layer of computerized gadgets is not necessary by the accepted logic of keeping the paper ballots as a verified trail!
And if the only way we can trust the magic boxen is to perform recounts by margin trigger or random (not so random, see last election) selection of districts to keep them honest, why then not eliminate the entire electronic cloud and simply count the votes by hand the way Canada does? They get the job done in three hours!

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[Dachannien]

There doesn't need to be an "operating system", unless you need it to throw up.

Edited for brevity.

I can see the newscast now

[The Monster]

All we need to do is to have some ingenious hacker screw up an election by injecting viruses into the voting machines and having the results come back so absolutely outrageous its not even funny

With 90% of the precincts of California in, we're calling the race in favor of the surprise write-in candidates "Heywood Jablome" and "Mike Hunt". Pollsters are at a loss to explain this phenomenon. Attempts to locate the apparent President- and Vice-President-elect have been thus far fruitless.

Re:I can see the newscast now

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one. Thanks for the chuckle. I sincerely wish that someone would do that to wake people up.

What is there to be afraid of?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think those who oppose this bill need to be asked the question "what have you got to lose?"

Time/cost are not compelling arguments for anyone who cares about the integrity of the election system. It was never a problem to count ballots by hand before the recent past.

Damn

[quantaman]

This bill identifies the specific problems and concerns with eVoting. It addresses them one-by-one in the logical manner suggested by the vast majority of people educated about eVoting. It is simply a well written piece of legislation.

In other words it doesn't have a hope in hell of passing, couldn't someone at least throw in some ammendment about a program to train Arctic monkies to do the recounts so legislators will consider it?

why not paper ballots?

[swordgeek]

First of all, understand that I'm looking at this from an outsider's point of view. That said, this is an excellent bill--it provides accountability and a barrier to ballot stuffing, the primary barriers to responsible electronic voting.

The question I have is why not paper ballots?

Much of the rest of the world (Yes, including the first world) uses paper ballots that are tallied by humans. Electronic ballots can only be secure from abuse by having a per-ballot paper trail, so what advantage does the electronic ballot provide at all?

Honestly, I'm curious about why electronic ballots are a good idea at all, given the present state of the art.

Re:why not paper ballots?

[cdrguru]

How long did it take to count paper ballots in the last election you are familiar with? When did the news media announce the winner - before or after the votes were counted?

In the US there will be a winner announced before the end of the night after the voting is done. The news media will do this and it can be based on exit polls or real results. Real results could be partial or complete.

Electronic voting gets us back away from news media coronations. The last two presidential elections the news media came dangerously close to declaring the winner long before anyone was sure. And make no mistake about it, if the news media announced Kerry won and then the next day said they were just kidding, Bush won there would be violence in the streets.

Do not believe the news media would care - they would just get better ratings for covering it.

Re:why not paper ballots?

[Catbeller]

Canada gets its national elections counted by hand, to final announced totals, in about... three hours. By PENCIL.

The US is slowed because we hold the election in different time zones, and we have to cycle people through, YES, loooonnngg lines to get to the damned machines. A card and a pencil can be used by an entire crowd simultaneously. We are also slowed by our weird voter verification process. More than slowed. Ground to a halt.

Re:why not paper ballots?

[The Master Control P]

Most of the rest of the world doesn't have to count a hundred and fifty million ballots covering dozens of issues in the shortest possible time.

I agree that "in the shortest possible time" is logically bullshit, but this is what happens when TeeVee gives everyone ADD. The sad thing is that this should be the perfect application for computers, since it's literally nothing but adding 1 to selected counters. *sigh*

Re:why not paper ballots?

[BranMan]

I guess the cynical answer is the best - instant gratification. We in the US have gotten used to the Elections being decided - and tallied - before we even get home from the voting place. In fact, early results are collected and suppressed as the early results were available so early they were affecting the Elections as a whole. If we used paper ballots and tallied them by hand it would take days if not weeks. And what fun is that? We need the huge swings, the states turning colors as we watch - the DRAMA of it all. Nothing less will do for the good ole US of A. We can't go to bed not KNOWING!!!

It's time for mark-sense ballots everywhere?

[MtViewGuy]

I think we should just forget the whole idea of electronic voting machines (which looks like it's just as faulty as the old mechanical voting machines used in much of the USA for many years) and go with mark-sense paper ballots filled out with permanent ink pens or markers.

Not only is it machine-readable, but the ballots can be hand-counted quite easily in case of close elections.

Instead of regulating evoting

[Anonymous Coward]

, eliminate it. It serves no useful purpose and it is more vulnerable to fraud. Best thing to do is to go back to pen and paper.

I just don't get it - THIS ISN'T HARD PEOPLE!

[don_in_agoura]

Why do people pretend like this is hard? I do design engineering for a living so I'm not just talking out of my ass when I say that this is kick-ass easy stuff. Paper requirements? Like that's hard. Confirming paper requirements... just get a damned optical scanner and you can crank though a toilet paper sized roll of paper in no time flat. ("OMG it'll take WEEKS to confirm all the paper backups!!!") Code that is code reviewed by the general public? Using off the shelf electronics (not ASICs) for easy electronics verification? Hash checks to make sure the code is correct? Stable non-volatile system for power outages and the like? It is 100 times more complex to build the stereo in your car than to develop a simple accurate voting machine and yet the whining that is involved with this is amazing. I just don't get it? What are people's ulterior motives in this? With this much BS propaganda flying around there has to be something. don

Re:I just don't get it - THIS ISN'T HARD PEOPLE!

[cdrguru]

Part of the problem is certainly the old public arena requirements/specifications nonsense. But there are also other aspects that drive this. One is the US government is very reluctant to get into the hardware business, either for military or civilian purposes. Public access to the source code would pretty much require that the government take over design. Maybe manufacturing as well.

The problem is that there is no "unique hardware" anymore. Patent protection isn't really going to work either. So someone builds the machine and spends two years developing the software that can be verified according to mil-spec rules. This is also known as "provably correct" and isn't trivial to write code like that. Nor is it easy to collect the requirements for something like that.

OK, then the software is released for review. Two months later, you can buy the same machine for 1/10 the cost with identical software that passes the same reviews. Nobody is going to sign on for that kind of abuse unless the government pretty much guarantees a single supplier. Which would be a violation of so many federal and state laws it isn't funny. Forcing the supplier to be a US based company isn't going to fly either. Ownership rules probably wouldn't really matter. So, this would be a one-time gift to some Taiwanese or Chinese company. Not going to happen.

So the government has to pay for the requirements gathering and the development process. They could then farm out the manufacturing (maybe) the way that tanks were made during WW II. The government provides the specifications and the manufacturer gets to make some small profit on each piece of hardware. Nobody in the US would touch it, but lots of Asian companies would jump on such a deal. Fine, they would get made.

Only problem is the requirements phase of such a government project would probably take 10 years to complete. And it would be the most bloated over-specified piece of junk imaginable because it would embody the compromises needed to get every county in every state to sign on. Even if they got by that, it would still be some topheavy government project. Just like some other big goverment projects we know about for the IRS and FBI.

This could only be done by a private entity that just rams the result down the thoats of the states and counties. Just like what we have today. Keeping the government out of the process as much as possible is where we are today and at least there is something to point at. With the government doing the work or running the show we wouldn't have anything at all until 2012, and it wouldn't see light of day until 2017 at least.

Think I'm wrong? How many goverment projects have been on time and under budget?

Re:I just don't get it - THIS ISN'T HARD PEOPLE!

[Catbeller]

eVoting is not designed to make things easy or verifiable. It is supposedly designed to solve a non-existent problem, lack of speedy vote counting. In the real world, the code is secret, easily modified by dispatched techs during the election, and the fact of its very existence during the act of voting or accumulation is forever unverifiable. The voting machine companies fought like rabid weasels for years to silence questions about their machines. They bought the regulators.

Don't forget that changes can be made up the line at the accumulator boxen. Don't just suspect the touchscreen PCs.

Amazing things happened during the last few elections. Votes swung republican in key counties in both 2000 and 2004 after a little visit from the company reps in Florida and Ohio. A major stockholder in Diebold ran against a Vietnam vet, Clelland, in Ohio and overcame a pre-election poll deficit of double digit proportions. Boys and girls, those machines are being used to cheat in big races that come down to a few districts. After all that I've seen since 2002, we've had Bush reinstalled through a little magic code.

This legislation will not solve the problem, because automatic recounts were already fraudulently pre-selected by voting companies in the last election to prevent a manual recount. They also can manipulate the totals to *just under* the mandatory margin for a manual recount. Not a theory, its already done and few cared. The men who are making a giant mountain range of cash from this administration aren't going to give up because some paper is kept around. Paper has to be counted, and that takes a margin trigger or a very expensive recount by candidate request.

Do it like the Canadians do. Count by hand, call it in to central offices, count those up by hand. Members of all parties present at all counts. They get their national counts done in HOURS, using pencils. And it doesn't cost them billions of dollars to do it. Techies are blinded by the wonders of their PCs. PCs can't do everything, and they aren't needed to do everything. When something infinitely malleable and secret is introduced to a simple, open process, it isn't done to make things easier or safer, but to hide cheating. QED

WinCE will do. It's semi-open.

[r00t]

WinCE developers can get source code already. So the machine has to run WinCE instead of Vista.

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[ScrewMaster]

There doesn't need to be an "operating system", unless you need it to throw up.

Edited for brevity.

Edited for hilarity you mean. I say that as my graphics card just reset itself and Windows XP threw up all over me.

Bradblog has been following e-voting for years

[Anonymous Coward]

The scoop: HR-811 does a lot of good things, but it doesn't go far enough. "Paper Trails" are not the same thing as "Paper Ballots".
Read on for more details.
http://bradblog.com/

That's odd..

[aero2600-5]

Hmm.. That's odd.

I thought April Fool's Day was yesterday!

...

Let's hope they manage to pass it. Common sense is hard to come these days.

Aero

standards for paper audit trail

[msblack]

Let's make sure that the paper ballots printed by these machines are not the heat-sensitive paper type. Sun, heat, fluorescent lighting, and age can degrade these ballots fairly quickly. The conspiracy theorist in me says that many big box stores switch to heat-sensitive receipts to reduce customer returns and warranty claims. Should you require a receipt for tax purposes, better keep a Xerox copy.

Los Angeles County uses Ink-a-Vote which replaced those punch cards with ink blot bubbles. Nothing beats paper for vote recounts. The ink takes a few seconds to dry and if you don't hold the marking device completely perpendicular, it can skip marking the ballot.

Have you ever voted in the US?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've voted in both Canada and the US.

Canadian ballots generally decide a single issue, perhaps four or five. They're printed in 14pt fonts with big checkboxes.

My mail-in ballot in Washington state was a double-sided 8.5"x11" scantron sheet covering federal, state and municipal elections, initiatives, and offices as small as city clerk. The printing was incredibly small.

If you have that many issues on a ballot, hand-totaling is completely impractical except in suspicious cases. This would be true even if the U.S. didn't have *ten times* as many voters to deal with.

U.S. electoral reform needs to include far more than just counting methods.

Re:Have you ever voted in the US?

[CastrTroy]

The "Ten Times" the number of voters is offset by the fact that you have 10 times as many people to count the votes. If India can get by on paper votes, then I'm sure the US can handle it. The major problem is that there's too many issues on the ballot. What's the point of putting someone in office if you can't delegate some of the decisions to them? I like the Canadian system. You vote for your municipal, Provincial, and Federal representatives, and they cast their ballot on all the other little issues you don't have the time to deal with.

Write your congressman!

[caitriona81]

I shouldn't have to point this out, but if you feel strongly about this or other issues before the house, you can
easily write your Congressman from the contact form on the House web site - http://www.house.gov/writerep/
While members of Congress may or may not read Slashdot, they or their staff do presumably read their Inbox, and I've gotten at least cursory replies (usually by snail mail) before.
I've posted the letter I just wrote below as an example, but it's probably more effective if you write your own words rather than using mine:

To the Honorable Walter B. Jones:

I just became aware of pending legislation via a number of technical industry news sites including Slashdot and Arstechnica that I feel is long overdue, H.R. 811: Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007.

As a constituent of your district, and as a registered voter, the integrity and transparency of election processes deeply concerns me.

Of particular importance and interest to me are provisions which provide for voter-verifiable paper trails in elections, provisions that require random auditing to insure that paper records match electronic ones, provisions that require the software used within electronic voting machines be open to public inspection, and provisions that provide for the emergency use of paper ballots in the event of system or equipment failure.

I realize that these measures create an additional burden on the states, however, I strongly believe they are needed to restore accountability, auditability, and voter confidence lost by the widespread adoption of electronic voting machines.

I urge you to strongly consider voting for this legislation when it comes before you, and to resist amendments which weaken or eliminate the strong provisions on election integrity it contains.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Daugherty

Not good enough

[kst]

It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts ...

Make the paper record the authoritative source in any and all counts.

If the paper record (it's called a ballot!) is computer-generated, that's ok, as long as the voter gets to verify it, and as long as everything on the ballot is human-readable. (If it looks like a human-readable ballot but the actual vote is recorded in a barcode, that's subject to abuse; the voter has no way to confirm that the barcode matches the actual vote.)

And I don't think there's any good reason not to count the ballots by hand.

Miss! 4A

[Anonymous Coward]

Try again!

Why is evoting such an issue?

[Froeschle]

I am curious as to why e-voting (however it is spelled) is such a problem? Is the basic technology that different from ATMs which have been around for over 30 years now? Why can't the industry get things straight?

Re:Why is evoting such an issue?

[ScrewMaster]

So far as I'm concerned, when these clowns finally get ATMs to work right maybe they can be given a shot at designing an electronic voting machine. Until then, my vote is for paper ballots.

And to think!

[Anonymous Coward]

All it took was (up to) eight full years in a row of the worst president in US history, and one who most likely achieved said dubious milestone through illegal means.

I sincerely pray that whoever takes the office in 2008 immediately conducts a no-stone-unturned investigation into the 2000 and 2004 elections - something which has been systematically stonewalled, for reasons totally unknown (...)

When will the democrats learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot to bury an important clause which makes killing cute puppies during the electronic voting process illegal somewhere in the guts of the bill. Then when opposition arises from the whitehouse, the propoents of the bill can say, "Surely Mr. President, you're not proposing to KILL CUTE PUPPIES while collecting the vote?!?"... I suspect the veto will be withdrawn. (ironically, my captcha for this post was "congress")

E-Voting more like E-rigging

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we seen enough of rigged elections? E-voting will make it even easier for the gov't to violate our rights. Add E-voting to the list of violations of our rights by the gov't (when it starts being used to steal elections).
They violate the 1st Amendment by opening mail, caging demonstrators and banning books like "America Deceived" from Amazon.
They violate the 2nd Amendment by confiscating guns during Katrina.
They violate the 4th Amendment by conducting warrant-less wiretaps.
They violate the 5th and 6th Amendment by suspending habeas corpus.
They violate the 8th Amendment by torturing.
The violate the entire Constitution by starting 2 illegal wars based on lies and on behalf of a foriegn gov't.
No E-voting, paper ballots forever.
Last link (unless Google Books caves to the gov't and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)

Ummm, not quite.

[NewWorldDan]

This is in no way, shape, or form, the duty of the federal government to regulate voting machines. While I agree with most of the ideas in the bill, they should be implemented at the state or local level. Federal regulation of voting machines is a recipie for disaster.

Re:Ummm, not quite.

[nuzak]

It's the 21st century, and we now have federal-level (presidential) elections that affect all of us. Even congressional seats affect the whole country. Ergo here in my state, I would like Ohio and Florida to follow some goddam standards, even if they have to be forced on them.

Knowing how congress works though, the final form of this bill will probably require closed-source unlocked internet-connected diebold-only machines.

Re:Ummm, not quite.

[zarozarozaro]

While I agree that these laws should be on the state level, recent federal law exists which regulates federal elections(e.g. Help America Vote Act of 2002). In other words, that ship has sailed.

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[TimTheFoolMan]

Excellent point. Bartender, vacuum tubes... all around!

However, the number of vacuum tubes necessary to provide full voting support for the visually or physically impaired, takes a bit of power, and it's kinda cumbersome the way they fill up the room. So let's strike them off the list.

Likewise, doing reliable scanning of hand marked (and mismarked) ballots in an optical scanner requires either a bunch of hard-coded crap, or a whole lotta vacuum tubes to interpret all the variations of "completely filled in" that the average human is capable of.

Then there's the nasty problem of the hundreds of ballot styles that you may have within a given county, and the nasty complexity of counting all those bad boys between the primary, the almost-certain runoff election, and the subsequent general election. For reasonably large counties, we're gonna need a few hundred volunteers to hand-count them, or a library full of vacuum tubes (and a mountain of wire, and several man-years of programming in the ballot logic, and then there's the referendums that they always add at the last minute...).

Valid choices

[badc0ffee]

Something no one has mentioned yet is validation of choices. When there is more than one choice, it can be validated by the machine before the vote is cast. With a paper only ballot the voter can vote for two or more candidates for the same office. The ballot is invalid and becomes a null vote. Some votes for commisions have a choice of say 4 out of 9. Voting for 3 is valid, but 5 makes the entire list invalid. With e-magic voting, only valid votes are cast. Ever try to make more than one choice on a /. poll?

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[CowTipperGore]

The bill shouldn't discriminate between the OS and the voting software. This is not a general purpose machine that requires an advanced OS -- it requires a bare minimum system that can count votes and print ballots! The machines that do these very limited tasks should not be something which Microsoft targets as a significant market for their standard operating systems. And an ATM would seem to fall into this category as well, if not more so (read a mag stripe, manage output to a small CRT, print receipts, dispense cash, and communicate via modem to a private network). Yet, Diebold used OS/2 Warp for years and finally switched to Windows XP a few years ago. The ATMs are PCs inside - consumer-grade mobo, hard drive, processor, RAM, etc.

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[erbmjw]

CTG please note; the voting machines are actually required to do less than an ATM.

1) ATMs are required to have secure communications capabilities, but the voting machines are required NOT to have any communications capabilities.

2) ATM's are required to read a mag stripe, but the voting machines are NOT required to read a mag stripe{or any type of card}

3) ATM's are required to display and print a number of various types of forms and formats, but voting machines are NOT.

So the OS in the category of voting machine can and should have limited capabilities in respect to the OS in the category of ATM.

Offset?

[Anonymous Coward]

There may be ten times as many workers to count the votes. I doubt it. You're assuming election staff participation scales linearly.

You're also ignoring the higher class segregation in the U.S., which makes it more difficult to find educated volunteers with free time who live within a poor district. Workers from other districts are more likely to try faking votes.

Even if election participation did scale, though, you'd still have to deal with the sheer number of ballots at certain key bottlenecks. Phoning the totals in is easier with Canada's votes. Error-checking the totals is easier. Changing the voting system to deal with any inefficiencies is far, far easier.

Don't get me wrong. I agree that all these ballot initiatives and minor offices do not belong on a federal ballot. Unfortunately, the U.S. has chosen this micromanagement to offset the two-party system's sloth. It's far too entrenched to change.

Ironically, my CAPTCHA is "mutable".

Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice

[CowTipperGore]

CTG please note; the voting machines are actually required to do less than an ATM. That depends on what you expect a voting machine to do.

1) ATMs are required to have secure communications capabilities, but the voting machines are required NOT to have any communications capabilities. ATMs used to be abused by people who would capture the dispense packets coming off the modem and then replay them until the machine was dry. I doubt this happens now that they (Diebold, at least) use 3DES. Several of the voting machines did in fact have and use network capabilities (most were via modem). I'm not saying this is the right way to do it, but there clearly is no requirement that voting machines have no communications capabilities.

2) ATM's are required to read a mag stripe, but the voting machines are NOT required to read a mag stripe{or any type of card} How does the voting machine know that a valid voter needs to use the machine? Most implementations use a fob, smart card, USB key, or other removable media that is provided to each voter. Otherwise, what's to stop someone from voting repeatedly?

3) ATM's are required to display and print a number of various types of forms and formats, but voting machines are NOT. Like most ATMS now, voting machines use touch screens for input and output. Any worthwhile voting machine also would have some sort of reciept printer, just like an ATM does.

So the OS in the category of voting machine can and should have limited capabilities in respect to the OS in the category of ATM. I don't disagree that using Windows XP for voting machines (as well as ATMs) is a bad idea. However, I don't follow your attempt to draw such a big line between ATMs and voting machines.

Fatally Flawed

[mrosgood]

Just scanned the replies (3 or higher, nested). Lots of uncritical praise, very little skepticism. If everyone here can take a breather from the mutual admiration and basking in the collective wisdom, as it were, I'd like to set everyone here straight.

First, and please remember this, the ideal is private voting and public counting. Aka "The Australian Ballot".

Computerized voting machines are fatally flawed. Unredeemable. There is no way to have a fully electronic system which protects the secret ballot as well as ensures the public vote count. Can't be done. Cannot. Be. Done. Period. Despite what all the electronic voting enthusiasts tell you. (I'm looking at you, Avi Rubin.) If you don't understand this, then please stop kibitzing, figure out how our voting systems should work (historically) and get up to speed. Thank you.

Second, this bill relies on "auditing" to ensure the integrity of our elections.

That never works. You cannot test your way to quality. Any one working software knows this. If you're in software and don't, please stop pretending and resign your job.

Additionally, by the time the mistake happens in an election, it's already too late. Too late. Because there's no recourse.

Timothy B. Lee, and other electronic voting apologists, like to mischaracterize the opposition of informed and experienced election integrity activists and experts. I can't guess why. My pet theory is unbounded technolophilia. Others suspect darker motives. Who's to say.

Anyone actually concerned about the health of our democracy would do well to read the criticisms of Holt's HR 811. Here's Beware of the Bandwagon -- A concise list of problems with Holt Bill HR 811 and Help Amend HR 811 to prohibit "electronic ballots."

That is all. I'm happy to answer anyone's questions. I'll check back later.