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."
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.