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

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

[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.

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.

"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

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.

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).

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

[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.

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.