Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals

An anonymous reader writes "In an new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation they say that paper trails increase costs and can actually reduce the chances a voters' choices are accurately counted. Congress is considering a 'Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2007,' which would mandate 'voter-verified' paper audit trails."

Comments

What do you expect ?

[foobsr]

The rest of the board is similar (link).

"Rhett Dawson is President and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). Immediately prior to being selected as President of ITI, Dawson was Senior Vice President of Law and Public Policy for the Potomac Electric Power Company. In the Reagan administration, Dawson was Assistant to the President for Operations. At the White House, he managed the staff and decision-making process for President Reagan and was responsible for three White House support units: the White House Office, the Office of Administration, and the White House Military Office. He also was Executive Director of two presidential commissions, the President's Special Review Board (the Tower Board) that investigated the Iran-Contra matter, and the President's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (the Packard Commission). During the 1980s Dawson was a partner in two Washington law firms. Earlier in his career, he was Staff Director and Chief Counsel for the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Minority Counsel for the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), and Minority Counsel for the Joint Committee on Defense Production. He is a member of the statutory Commission on National Guard and Reserve, and he is Vice Chair of the State Department's advisory committee on International Communication and Information Policy. Dawson received his undergraduate degree from Illinois Wesleyan University, where he was recognized in 2001 as the Alumni of the Year. He was awarded his law degree from Washington University."

CC.

Re:What do you expect ?

[JoelKatz]

I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat. This is not all that difficult to accomplish and the necessary design criteria are widely available in the literature. A paper trail doesn't really help.

The basic idea (and I'm oversimplifying, I apologize) works like this:

1) You go to vote. You are shown a voter ID number on the screen. You are welcome to write it down if you wish.

2) You select your candidate of choice. If you wish, you are given a paper receipt providing cryptographic proof that the voter ID you were shown in step 1 voted for the candidate you chose.

3) If anything goes wrong in steps 1 or 2, complain loudly and immediately. This is equivalent to you not being allowed to enter the voting area or a machine displaying a candidate other than the one you pushed.

4) If you wish, you may opt to receive copies of paper receipts of other votes for other candidates too. (So that someone can't demand to see your receipt to prove you voted for a particular candidate, since you can get a receipt of someone else who voted for any candidate.)

5) When the results are publicized, the total number of votes is checked against the total number of voters. Any voter with a paper receipt not on the final tally knows their vote wasn't counted. (Though they can't prove it was their vote, of course, they can prove that *a* valid vote wasn't counted.)

6) The receipts can be scannable with barcode and groups may, if they wish, stay outside of voting areas and ask voters if they may scan their receipts. A church group, for example, could make sure all of its members votes are counted this way, though they could never be truly sure how each member voted.

Anti-Privacy and Anti-Citizen

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Just a quick browse of their "ITIF in the news" page and it looks like they are big fans of Real-ID and RFID tagging in general. On network neutrality they appear to be in favor of just leaving it up to the FCC to determine on a case-by-case basis what telecomm companies are abusive and which aren't - no legislation required, and their justification seems to be that some of the proposed legislation has been over-the-top (typical FUD about preventing telecomms from 'innovating').

Who funds these people?

Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines?

[WilliamSChips]

The American ballots are also ten times as long because we don't use proportional representation and therefore get to vote for more than just a political party.