Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
Ed Felten's comments on the bill can be found Here.
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.
By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill.
... ... it would have been ineffective against malware embedded in the operating system - by the OS developers or later black-hats.
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
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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."
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-
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.
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