House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill

Spamicles writes "A vote is imminent for the bill that is a direct response to problems in the 2006 elections. This legislation would create a paper trail for elections, require a manual audit of every federal election, and open the source code of voting software in certain circumstances. The bill currently has 216 co-sponsors and is expected to be brought to the floor of the House and passed any day."

Comments

Regardless of political affiliation...

[gfxguy]

this is definitely a good thing.

Now if we could just get mandatory picture IDs for voting, we'd eliminate nearly all of the election rigging.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[xappax]

Oh yeah, and we could use some actual candidates to vote for.

Not that I'm complaining about the bill, but the idea that my vote for either Corporate Tool A or Corporate Tool B will now be recorded accurately isn't quite enough to make me celebrate the return of American democracy :)

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[AvitarX]

Now if we could just get mandatory picture IDs for voting, we'd eliminate nearly all of the election rigging.

And make sure those pesky homeless don't try to vote.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[bigpat]

Now if we could just get mandatory picture IDs for voting, we'd eliminate nearly all of the election rigging. That this is a major problem is a fallacy spread by Republicans to try and prevent poor people that otherwise have no need for a picture ID not to vote. Make picture IDs free for everyone, not cost $50 or whatever they cost these days and not make people wait more than 10 minutes in line, and I might agree with you.

Better to just make sure people aren't registered in more than one town.

Oh and there should be a requirement for a certain number of polling stations per number of registered voters, otherwise big cities with not enough polling stations are effectively disenfranchising their citizens. Nobody should be made to wait over an hour to vote, while we in the rich suburbs never have to wait more than a minute or two.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[ronadams]

As someone who co-founded a homeless outreach group, I can tell you that, at least by Ohio law:

1. They can use the address of a homeless shelter they are staying at as their legal address, provided they follow the shelter's sign-in rules, which vary from shelter to shelter.
2. They can get a picture ID for $10, if they have a social security card (which they can get for free.
3. There are organizations that will help homeless people who are interested do all of these things, even to the point of fronting the fee for the picture ID, which they often must have for some treatment programs anyway (especially those that involve paid-for housing).

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not have to pay to vote.

$10 may not sound like much, but it is for some people.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[Elemenope]

Im with you on the free but it takes more than 10 minutes now and why should 10 minuted or half an hour make a difference? should voting not have more of a commitment then say the dmv?

Problem is that since Election Day is not a holiday in the USA, taking an hour out of the day to vote can be nearly impossible if your boss is a prick. And job security is something that matters a great deal to the working poor (as it means nearly as much to the working non-poor). Further, bosses in jobs worked by the working poor tend to be more aware of the greater leverage they have over their workers, and are in this specific way more likely to be pricks. Not to mention the fact that in such jobs, bosses and workers have different political interests (due to different economic class) and consequently wildly divergent political affiliations, and so there is no earthy reason why such a boss would want to make it easier for their employees to vote.

As a result, in those communities that are enlightened enough to have polling hours extend significantly past the workday hours, those who must vote after work must vote along with everyone else in the same situation; polling lines swell precisely at the times that people leave work, and remain long from that time until polls close. People not so restricted in their schedule can easily vote during the day, enjoying a miniscule cost in time compared to their working compatriots.

It is not a question of commitment; it is a question of actual discrepancy in the degree of hardship, risk, and cost necessary to cast what is an equally-weighted vote. A vote that is equal in value should also be equal in cost. More numerous and strategicaly located polling places would make it easier to achieve equal cost by reducing line length and thus making it easier to justify work-leave to go vote (as time spent would be a great deal less), or barring that, relieve the after-work vote rush so that the person unlucky enough to have to work all day can vote with approximately as much ease as a person not so burdened.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[Touvan]

So rather than relying on fair legal rules, homeless people should rely on the benevolence of other people? A nation of laws or a nation of people. You decide.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[goombah99]

They can use the address of a homeless shelter they are staying at as their legal address, provided they follow the shelter's sign-in rules, which vary from shelter to shelter. That's what Karl Rove's buddies used to disqualify loads of voters. They send out proof-of-address letters to all registered voters. Those that come back as non-recieved get challenged and purged from the rolls.

Re:Regardless of political affiliation...

[Twanfox]

What happens on the day that you become homeless and no longer have an address to register with to vote? What happens on that day if the reason you're homeless is because the government abused their position and usurped your land for whatever eminent domain project they had in mind, and failed or significantly delayed your relocation? Would you not want the ability to have a say on whether or not the government officials should remain in office?

I know that's a very poor example, but in your black-or-white spin on who should be able to vote and who shouldn't, frankly, I'm of the mind that we're a nation of people. Property, places, and all that can be adjusted and changed. Without the people, you have no one to govern and no one to support your government. Besides, we can have a nation of 'fair legal rules' that is assisted by 'the benevolence of other people'. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, despite your commentary.

I'm Canadian

[CastrTroy]

I'm Canadian, and currently we use pen and paper ballots counted by hand. I'm not going to say our voting process is problem free, but it seems to have a lot less problems then what exists in the US system. Seems to me like fighting for OSS and paper trails in the voting process is the wrong battle, and that you should be fighting to go back to paper, hand counted votes. It's a lot more transparent to the voters that things are being messed with. With software and computers thrown into the mix, most voters have no idea how to verify that the voting is done in a reliable manner.

Re:I'm Canadian

[bidule]

Yeah, the only problem is that we have a vote to cast. Easy to split in stacks. They have 3-4 things to vote in one go. It would be fixable by handling each item separately, I guess.

Re:I'm Canadian

[john83]

The United States has almost 10 times the population of Canada. Pen & paper / hand counting is neither desirable nor reasonable. You could have 10 times the number of people counting the vote. Just a thought.

Re:I'm Canadian

[CastrTroy]

Counting votes is not a serial process. It can be highly parallelized. The fact that you have 10 times as many people also means you have 10 times as many people to count them. Even India uses paper ballots, and if they can do it with their population, I'm sure the US can handle it too.

Re:I'm Canadian

[jon_anderson_ca]

Yeah, seriously. The important thing isn't that the process is fair, it's that everyone knows the process is fair. I don't care how Free a voting machine is, if voters don't have confidence in it, democracy is damaged.

It's not enough for computer experts to say "the system is good"; everyone knows that experts can be biased or bought. Every voter has to be able to look at the process and say, "I trust this". That's why paper ballots rock.

Of course, you Americans would have to stop having dozens of elections and plebicites on the same day. One voter, one ballot, one X means the results can easily be counted by hand.

Re:I'm Canadian

[zstlaw]

It may be due to less money involved in Canadian elections. Checking opensecrets.org I see:

2000 US Presidential election - $528.9 million dollars
2004 US Presidential election - $880.5 million dollars

Predictions for 2008 say the final two candidates will need over 500 million to be competitive . That is a lot of money... And where there is money there is potential graft, embezzlement, and lots and lots of power.

Checking http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html I see:

2004 Canadian elections - ~93.5 million Canadian
2006 Canadian elections - ~100 million Canadian

The difference is that Canada seems to limit how much the political parties can spend rather than how much people can give. So If a party spends a lot of money on one candidate for office then there is less money for other candidates from the same party. Thus there appears to be less money in all Canadian elections than there is in the US presidential election.

Also Canada has many parties so "winning" an election may not give an absolute majority there may still be coalitions of parties able to wrest control and that gives the minorities more power to bargain with and leads to more review of the winning parties laws. Compare that to the "winner take all" system that in the US. Many laws are proposed and voted on without senators being allowed to review the full body of the law. They just know if their pork projects were included and they are told by the leadership which way to vote if they want their pet projects to get in the next time...

USA political system needs a fix. One fix would be to pass many smaller bills instead of monolithic bills with many riders attached. But that means less pet projects to make constituents happy. It is a vicious cycle currently where the US parties are both striving to break the bank as fast as possible so they get the most for themselves.

Re:I'm Canadian

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is correct. As an added benefit, manipulation of vote counts (i.e. rigging an election) becomes more difficult with distributed vote tabulation because getting cooperation among a large group of tabulators becomes difficult.

Re:I'm Canadian

[Red Flayer]

Counting votes is not a serial process. It can be highly parallelized. The fact that you have 10 times as many people also means you have 10 times as many people to count them

Why not have one vote-counter per ballot cast, for the ultimate parallelization? Then counting the votes would be near-instantaneous. It would work something like this:

1. Enter the booth.
2. A random ballot from a previous voter pops up. You count the vote, and enter the result into a touchscreen separate from the touchscreen you use to cast your own ballot.
3. You cast your ballot via the 2nd touchscreen.
Repeat 1-3 for all voters in district; have the district election supervisor count the last ballot.
5. A program then tabulates all the counted votes according to what the counters reported.

This would guarantee that every vote is counted by hand, and wouldn't take any time post-election to do the recount.

I think this would make everyone happy. Does anyone see any problems with this?

Re:I'm Canadian

[CastrTroy]

How many times does it have to be said that you can't give voters the ability to verify at home that their vote was counted for a certain candidate because it takes the "anonymity" out of the voting process. If you can show yourself, and someone else who you voted for, then people can buy/force votes. Also, after watching Hacking Democracy, I would say this also doesn't verify anything. Because they started out 1 candidate with negative votes, and the other with positive votes. In this instance, everybody checking would see that their vote was counted correctly, but the finally tally would still be off.

Re:I'm Canadian

[Duke]

It's all done in the open with members from all political parties watching (but never touching) every aspect of the count.

  Yeah, and that worked so well with the 2000 Florida recount.

The problems in Florida were with punch-card ballots, not with hand-marked paper ballots. Remember hanging chads? Of course, sometimes marks on paper ballots can also be ambiguous.

Re:Bush plans to veto...

[yourexhalekiss]

Let your representatives know how you feel... http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Wow.

[morgan_greywolf]

Some Congresscritters and/or their staff must be reading Slashdot. These are all things that more than one of us has suggested.

Now just one more thing, guys: make the entire system run on Linux or other F/OSS operating system. That will eliminate the use of viruses targeted at the easily-cracked Windows operating system from the McDonald's of operating system vendors (Microsoft).

Can't vote but....

[quoll]

I've seen a number of sensible bills which seemed like a shoe-in, only to be held up, and eventually dropped. I'll believe it when I see it.

On the other hand, if it DOES make it through, then it will go some way to restoring my faith in the US political system. Not just because of the mechanism required by this bill, but the fact that the politicians actually passed it.

Re:Bush plans to veto...

[ronadams]

I'm missing how this bill voices anything but confidence and increased accountability in the American voting process. I understand you're reflecting your frustration with the blanket veto on accountability in our Gov't, but this is one issue that might just get enough steam about it to push through. After all, how many politicians would be keen to put away rumors that they won an election unfairly? Now they can make the token gestures of promoting increased accountability without having to answer to anything past in particular.

I actually think we may see more opposition to the open-source voting machine concept from companies like Diebold and other voting machine manufacturers. This harkens to memory the fuss Scott Ritchie raised about Australia switching from an open source voting software to a closed one. There's some great information in that story about the dangers of closed-source voting software, and its impact on what is supposed to be a democratic process.

"Good Intentions"

[ejoe]

I don't doubt that the original author of this bill was well intentioned (there was so much to fix about HAVA, after all), but this bill is not the answer, and it's _not_ good. We don't want computers enshrined as the method of resolving or counting votes. The Canadian (and the Europeans, e.g., the Swiss) have it right. Paper ballots that are manually marked that _anyone_ can verify are the right approach. Slashdot is what got me involved in this issue originally, and it's thanks to the skepticism of computer professionals that we know how bad these systems are.

This bill is being called the "Patriot Act of Elections"...be sure to get all the facts before you decide it's a good thing, and I'm sure you'll decide it isn't. Here are two great resources to start with:

http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/

http://www.bradblog.com/

(and in particular on the Brad Blog, check out Ellen Thiesen's analysis of problems with this and the Senate bill currently being worked on)

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4678

Re:"Good Intentions"

[ejoe]

There's a key difference between any banking system and voting, and that's anonymity.

EVERY transaction in banking and commerce is fully accountable for any/all parties involved.

Ideally, our votes are completely anonymous, so the analogy isn't quite right.

Take the authenticated identity component out of our banking system and I'll bet people would stop trusting it immediately. "Just slide your money through this slot, I promise you we'll take care of it..."

In this case, IMHO, the problem is "appropriate technology"...and so it _is_ the computers because they are simply not an appropriate technology to provide universal accessibility to our elections...most people have no clue how to operate, verify and thus, trust them. You can count hand marked paper ballots in your precinct by candlelight, now that's reliability, and if we can't trust our neighbors, well, then we've got some other very serious topics we should be discussing.

And, given all the issues we've had with problems such as mass identity theft via millions of card numbers being stolen in a single swoop, do you really consider those systems secure, reliable and verifiable? Do the best of the security experts who read Slashdot feel that way?

PS - Remember, too, that cash still a tangible artifact, and, the most valuable cash in general use is, wait for it...Paper!

Re:"Good Intentions"

[jpop32]

There's a key difference between any banking system and voting, and that's anonymity.

That's not a key difference. That's an implementation detail.

And, given all the issues we've had with problems such as mass identity theft via millions of card numbers being stolen in a single swoop, do you really consider those systems secure, reliable and verifiable?

Dude, wake up and smell the coffee. The discussion is long over, and the verdict is in. Electronic voting is old hat in many places in the world.

Belgium does it since 1991 (!). 60% of French absentee ballots are cast over the internet (first used in 2003.). European Union as a has a initiative (http://www.eucybervote.org/index.html) to enable both internet voting and voting using the mobile phones, EU-wide. First trials have already been carried out. Brazil uses 400000+ electronic voting machines (over 150 million voters), and the final election results are known minutes after the polls close. India experimented with it since 1982. (!!), and is using it exclusively since 2003 (over a billion voters!). If it's good for the biggest democracy in the world, it should be good for the US.

So, just because the US hasn't figured electronic voting out yet doesn't mean it doesn't work at all or that there is something fundamentaly wrong with it. Particular implementation may be faulty, but that doesn't mean that every implementation is faulty. But, in an electroral system where it's perfectly legitimate that a candidate that recieves a majority of the votes isn't elected, and a winner can be appointed by un-elected judges, I can see why you're worried.

PS - Remember, too, that cash still a tangible artifact, and, the most valuable cash in general use is, wait for it...Paper!

Sure it is. If you're posting from 1975. Here, in the 21st century, majority of cash comes in plastic form. Oh, you'll love it once you get here.

Other things in the bill

[morgan_greywolf]

Other things in the bill:

Prohibition of wireless networks for use in voting systems
Prohibition of voting systems connected to the Internet
Excludes the use of COTS hardware and software (what about embedded OSes?)

See the full HR-811 bill.

216 co-sponsors??

[$RANDOMLUSER]

What is this, AOL?

Me too!!

I'm with you

[wonkavader]

I'll believe it when I see it. A nickel says if it passes in the House it'll die at the Senate. There's too many extremely evil people who want elections riggable, and want their machines used to do it.

media picked candidates

[zogger]

The mass media controllers hand pick the candidates *they* want you to focus on,and yes I'll even label it a conspiracy and interference of a sort in the political process. Merely by increasing news coverage and declaring such and such candidate a "front runner" it becomes their self fulfilling prophecy. Words have meaning and advertising/brainwashing works to a great extent, notice how they describe candidates other than their version of the top runners.

    We always have a lot of candidates, just a very few get the bulk of the press.

    The current Republican party disconnect with Ron Paul is a clear example, he has a lot of grassroots support, yet very little national coverage and what he does get is artfully spun negative propaganda, whereas their globalist darlings like giuliani and now fred thompson get the bulk of the positive press. This is on purpose and this controlling the voters mindset is a long running "feature" of having our media controlled by a few people at the top. Their hand picked examples get the bulk of the news, so they turn around and can say "candidates x and y are the front runners, look how much news and interest there is!" Well, duh... These are artificially manufactured "top runner" candidates.

  Want to change things, use the net and embarrass the mass media on their own news blogs and follow through no matter what once you actually get to the voting stage. Dump that lesser of the top two evils "vendor lockin" they always push, it's just plain harmful and results in the political situation you see today and what you have seen over the past generations.

Re:media picked candidates

[c_forq]

Okay, I think there is some merit to what your claiming, but I would like to ask you a few questions. Why do media groups with opposing ideologies pick the same front runners? Who is it that makes the choice of who is to be the front runner? If it is in commercial interest, wouldn't there be competition for which candidate would be best for each empire (for example a candidate good for News Corp wouldn't be good for the Disney or GE media empires)? How do these empires agree on the front-runners?

Re:media picked candidates

[Captain Splendid]

Even when you get past that ideology

What do you mean, passed? After profit, there's very little ideology left to explore in a mojor corporation. You can keep denying it, but until you come up with some concrete examples, just forget about it: The best candidate for GE is going to be just as good a candidate for Disney. Plenty of pork to go around for everybody.

Re:media picked candidates

[Elemenope]

He's not very 'closet' about his Libertarianism. He was the '88 presidential candidate for the LP, and has almost unwaveringly voted consistently in Congress with guidelines best described as Libertarian. However, I have to disagree with your wider thesis. Reaction polling by CNN following the Republican debates named R. Paul the clear winner on many metrics; however, the pundits didn't even mention him when discussing who they thought 'won' the debates, with their comments uniformly gravitating towards the 'front-runners'. Much more attention and coverage was paid towards Giuliani's response to R. Paul's comments on terrorism than was paid to R. Paul's actual comments. And so forth.

Re:media picked candidates

[Laur]

Dump that lesser of the top two evils "vendor lockin" they always push, it's just plain harmful and results in the political situation you see today and what you have seen over the past generations.

I think the two party political situation has much more to do with the voting system used in the US. With the current "winner-take-all" voting method, voting for anyone but the top two really is throwing your vote away. If the US used a proportional system of some type then third parties would have much more power. I wonder why the two parties in power won't pass any laws to help make that happen?

Re:media picked candidates

[AndersOSU]

You picked a pretty poor example. In 2004 the early front runner for the dems was Howard Dean.

Re:media picked candidates

[Irish_Samurai]

You fail to see the base element of big media companies that propagate political information - Revenue. Namely revenue through advertising. This is done in two ways:

• By attracting viewers through perspective slant. Right wing news outlet gathers a right wing base by telling stories with a right wing slant. Left wing news outlet gathers a left wing base by telling stories with a left wing slant. The actual content of the information is a moot point. People will watch and consume media that reflects their perspective. You attract advertisers by saying you have a base of size X. You maintain this base by feeding them information the way they like it, not because its what they like.
• By attracting viewers through targeted content. Right wing media outlet only has shows that cover right wing concerns. Left wing media outlet only has shows that cover left wing concerns. The number of information consumers dictates advertising revenue. The actual content is very relevant here - even if the presentation slant is in the opposite direction.

The disconnect occurs when the Right wing media outlet needs to report on who the Left wing front runners are. The problem is that the Right wing media outlet has almost no sway over the Left wing viewership - so they have to look at who the Left wing media outlet is reporting on for direction. This is true in vice versa. Literally, Fox is determining who is the left front runner by watching CNN, and CNN is determining who is the right front runner by watching Fox. If either news agency went out and reported that there was a front runner in the opposing viewership's party that wasn't mirrored in the corresponding news service - they would lose credibility and ultimately ad revenue.

Its not commercial interest in the sense of the large governing media body, its commercial interest in perspective of revenue stream. The candidates are dealt with through lobbying, not trying to influence the voter body to a specific canidate who suports their corporate mandates.

To the people recommending paper ballots...

[gurps_npc]

We had paper ballots. True, they were punch out instead of ink. That is what the word CHAD meant. It referred to punches that were not fully punched out. And it does not solve the issue of ballot design, which in all truth probably was why Bush got elected in the first place (Democratic fools in Florida accepted the illegal butterfly ballot proposed by Republicans instead of demanding they obey the law.)

I can not see ink as a solution. So we argue about whether that ink mark is dark enough or actually in the box, etc.

Your proposed 'solution' returns us to something we have already tried and found lacking.

Electronic ballots, with paper confirmation, using an open sourced software, is just as verifiable as your old fashinoned paper + ink, but is cheaper, quicker, and harder to 'stuff'. When you have a paper + ink ballot box, all you need do is throw out 1/2 the real ballots and stuff it full of fake ones. Electronics voting with paper ballots, means there are two records, so BOTH must be modified, and they must be modified 'synchronosly', giving us three times the chance to catch you (both records must show the winner you desire and they must match up exactly, including any time, location or other coded stamps placed on the paper and electronic records.)

This is Awful!

[filesiteguy]

I've done my best (writing my congressman and senators) to derail this horrid bill. Unfortunately, like the amnesty bill, it appears to be a foregone conclusion.

Though it makes sense on the surface, the extra costs are - in my opinion - not worth the effort. I still don't see what the problem with old style ballots are. Also, we already do a 1% manual tally here in Los Angeles county. (With 5,000 precincts, that's not an easy task.) Add this new effort into the task of rolling out an election with Precinct Ballot Readers, TEV early voting systems, ballots in eight different languages, and an apathetic population who is sick of the PAC's driving everything and you have a total waste of money.

</soapbox>

Re:Zero Evidence

[Ironsides]

Wanna Bet

Re:Zero Evidence

[sanjacguy]

While interesting sites, I fail to see how a photo ID would help things out - forged documents are forged documents. Merely adding a picture to it doesn't make it secure.

Short of a police presence, photo IDs are useless, unless your goal is to distinguish those who have an automobile from those who don't. Most people (in the US) who DON'T have a car have an income that puts them below the poverty line. And if your goal is to weed out the poor (who tend to vote either independant or democratic in the US), then a photo ID requirement does an excellent job.

EFF write up on this bill

[ukemike]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has written an analysis of this bill that is very useful, quick to read, and well... correct.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005308.php

I have been following the issue of election theft and computerized voting very closely for years, and I say that this bill is our best hope of fixing the elections system. It isn't perfect but compared to what we have now it is an incredible improvement. I'm also not claiming that this will fix any of the other ills of our political system, but this is a critical element to saving our democracy. PLEASE PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE call or write your representative and beg, plead, implore them to support this bill.

http://www.house.gov/writerep/

What does it do?
Requires voter verified paper ballots. The physical paper ballot is the official legal record of the vote instead of some bits in a Windoze PC.

Requires manual audits of 3-10% of randomly selected precincts. This is by far the most important part of the bill because this is the tool that can be used to detect fraud. Note, audits are currently extremely uncommon even in the cases of recounts or close elections. In many cases audits are impossible because the data needed is lost in the electronic counting process.

Would require release of source code of some portions of the voting software to certain people. Okay obviously this is a compromise between opening the source, trade secret concerns, and the practical fact that MS isn't gonna release the source to Windows or Access, which many of these systems are based upon. Still if Slashdot readers don't get that this is a step in the right direction then no one will.

Re:Bad example...

[shaitand]

A pro business stance is the core of the republican ideaology. If you don't take the pro business stance you probably aren't a republican at all since all their beliefs stem from that.

Unless... you weren't one of those who bought into the abortion/religious nonsense/values crap they spout to gain votes from those with imaginary friends were you?

The problem I see is this, both parties have a set of beliefs but there is party that's ideology includes protecting ALL my freedoms. I want a holy grail, I want a candidate that acknowledges the second amendment is about balance of power and abolishes all the unconstitutional restrictions that have been placed on guns and arms of all sorts. I want a candidate who cares about my privacy and free speech. I want a candidate who believes in a free and unregulated market but also recognizes that when the question is raised businesses are NOT people and the interests of flesh and blood people trust the interests of commerce.

Where is that candidate? Why do we have to pick between the second amendment or the first? The parties just erode the rights they don't like and slowly but surely ALL of our rights are eroded.