US Voting Machines Standards Open To Public

Online Voting writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has published new voting systems testing and certification standards for 190 days of public comment. For all the critics of electronic voting, this is your opportunity to improve the process. This will be the second version of the federal voting system standards (the first version is the VVSG 05). To learn more about these Voluntary Voting System Standards see this FAQ."

Comments

Counterfeiting voting receipt

[Harmonious Botch]

It could be PGP tagged.

Why the continued paranoia?

[grahamsz]

Where does this fear of opening source code come from? Is there really a concern that some competing software vendor will copy their "tally up the votes" routine. I can see why banks and private companies want closed source, but why here?

The only answer I can see is that the machines are badly programmed or they have been rigged in some way.

Re:Sweet

[thatskinnyguy]

Several generations of my family have worked for Diebold. They're a fixture in the community of Canton, Ohio. They're really good at physical security. Hell. They make most of the bank vaults and ATMs that you see.

But when it comes to voting machines, the only thing that separates the voting machines from their other products is strong bias. Tamper with an ATM at the factory, sure some FDIC bank will lose a few thousand dollars but the one doing the tampering gains nothing. Tampering with a voting machine, the perpetrator stands to influence an election in ways they see fit.

Still no access to source code

[simong]

Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.

Re:big problem

[bVork]

Sounds like the problem is with your country's implementation of paper ballots, and not the general idea itself. Here in Canada, voting takes maybe half an hour at most. You show up, verify your identity, get your ballot, go behind a screen and put an X in the circle next to the candidate, fold it up, hand it to the person working the box, watch them place the ballot in the box, go home.

To supervise the whole thing, we require people from multiple parties to be present at the polling station. It's hard to fiddle with something when it has to be verified by two (or more) opposing people at the same time.

I don't understand your references to multiple ballots. Is each party on a separate ballot or something? Why in the world would it be done like that?

Re:I certainly much better now!

[Rob the Bold]

Access to the source of the code running on a machine that you have no control over is useless. You cannot confirm that it is the source of the running code. You cannot confirm that there are no hardware issues - intentional or otherwise - that are affecting the correct operation of the code.

Amen to that. I worked for a temp firm for a contractor to ES&S when they were prepping the code for audit by a 3rd party under the previous version of the voting machine audit standards. The code needed major cleanup to comply with the coding standards (for readability), and we were in a time crunch, so everyone dropped what he was doing and worked on sanitizing the iVotronic code. After it was done, we had beautiful code. All variables were declared at the top of functions and names that made sense. No more globals. Functions had meaningful names and headers describing purpose, input, output, method, etc., etc., etc. We sent that software off to be audited for use in US elections. Of course, that code was never compiled. And it never made it back into the production s/w vault.