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NY Rejects E-Voting, DOJ Trying to Force the Issue
CompaniaHill writes "Hastily passed in the wake of the 2000 election mess, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) supposedly offered funding to help states update their voting systems. In reality, the short deadlines have been used to push the sale of untested and uncertified new e-voting systems. Many states continue to demonstrate that the new e-voting machines are not reliable. The New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) took the time to pass their own voting legislation with additional testing and certification standards which far exceed the HAVA standards. As a result, they missed the HAVA deadlines. In March 2006, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued New York to comply with HAVA. Now, the DOJ is serving a motion to try to take away New York's right to select and acquire their own voting machine systems — in effect, to force e-voting machines on New York anyway. At the moment it's too soon to say how the NYSBOE will respond."
Neither are paper ballots, depending on who's counting them.
This first post was written on a hacked e-voting machine. That is all.
You know Turkish? Do you eat falafel? You just voted Democrat? You are a terrorist!
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With the upcoming primaries and presidential election, this will go rapidly to SCOTUS. And they will stick it up DOJ's ass and break it off - one thing this court is known for is pushing federalism, and telling the states the exact means by which they will hold their elections is a HUGE violation of that.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"Commissioners of the Elections Board, which has been sued by the federal agency for not complying with election-modernization law, voted 3-1 to take up the matter in closed session." Italics mine.
That's a clear sign it's out of the voters hands. I would guess that when they roll over, they've got plenty of public service jobs waiting for them.
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Section 4. The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.
It seems to me that unless Congress mandates e-voting the DOJ has no power to force it upon a state. The HAVA appears to provide funds for but does not mandate electronic voting. Even if it did, a state could mandate voting for Senators at a place with no electrical outlets and Congress could not change that; alternatively, is a voting both a "place?"
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The voting machine chooses you.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Like others, though, I think that SCOTUS will prevail, because ultimately if the federal government becomes overpoweringly strong, there may be a second secessionary movement where many of the states tell the currently empowered federal government to go to hell and start over.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Not to nitpick (don't you love how people say not to _____ when they're just about to _____) but the feds don't have ANY rights.
They have powers, which are based on the rights of the people. So, the better way to say this is "the feds are empowered to protect the rights of citizens by ensuring fair voting".
Please be careful, because the distinction is not trivial, especially in the current political climate.
Well, even as a liberal, the Florida decision wasn't quite so clear cut as that. They ruled that a partial recount was illegal- just recounting certain key democratic counties. They didn't rule on the legality of a full recount. I happen to agree with them on that- you can't cherry pick what to count. Recount them all or recount none.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
we should have nothing but paper ballots. not even mechanical voting machines, and definitely not electronic voting machines
the reason is trust. trust in your voting process is extremely important to the confidence and integriy of society. now of course you can fake paper ballots, lose them, etc. it is just that, for every method you find to "hack" paper ballots, there are 10 more ways to hack mechanical voting, and 100 times more ways to attack electronic voting. increased complexity leads to more attack vectors. simple as that
you can scan the paper ballots with optical machines, certainly, but anything more technophilic than that is not necessary, and perhaps dangerous. voting is not a process that needs to be improved. the poorest country in the world and the richest should all vote the simple way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In Faciest America, the voting machine choose FOR you.
I don't have a face, you insensitive clod!
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Last week I voted and noticed something really odd. It never listed parties. WTF, granted you should really know who you are going to vote for, but how many people really know about council people and just vote a straight ticket for their party. It shocked me.
From a vote-counting perspective, the "gold standard" is a paper ballot that is dropped in a box. The box is observed by interested and neutral parties from the time the empty box is put into service at the start of the election day until the vote count is complete. The individual ballots are observed by interested parties from the time the box is opened after the vote until the last ballot is counted.
From a vote-casting perspective the ballot would be legibly markable by any eligible voter without assistance and the voter would know by looking at his marked ballot exactly how the vote-counters would count it. No hung chads, no unclear marks, no double-marks, no ambiguity.
Anything other than this must be proven just as reliable and just as foolproof.
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To meet ADA requirements for blind and mobility impaired users, you need a vote-printing machine and a generic multi-lingual text-to-speech/translation device. The vote-printing device would mark a paper ballot in accordance with the voter's wishes. As a matter of practice device will likely support multiple ballots and multiple languages. The ballot it prints out will be in both English and in the voter's language.
The text-to-speech/translation device will read the ballot back to the voter and translate it to the voter's native language so the voter knows his ballot is correct. While each precinct would have one of these, voters could bring in their own version as well, or rely on a human to read the ballot back. Not relying on the county's machine for this will deter fraud at the read-back stage. For people who did not need text-to-speech or translation features, this machine would double as a ballot-validator, pointing out ambiguous votes due to stray marks as well as and abstentions.
At this point, the person's ballot is just like a correctly-filled-in-by-a-human paper ballot.
The voter drops it in the ballot box and he's done.
The ballot box MAY have a built-in vote-counter but its results will be subject to a later recount of the paper ballots inside.
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Even the ADA does not require that every voter be able to vote without assistance. It is simply not cost-effective to provide unassisted voting for people with multiple severe handicaps who are eligible to vote. Most of these people will be voting absentee anyways, likely with the aid of a nurse or family member.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At least, that was how they are supposed to work.
As I understand it, they are subject to compromise - failing to set the internals correctly could result in zero votes for one of the switches, for example. Also a sensor which prevented you from pulling the big handle without voting was disabled for mysterious reasons in the mid-60s.
Of course, there is no receipt, no paper trail, and no way to assure that your vote has been recorded correctly, or at all.
Give me mark-sense card systems any day. Even IBM cards, hanging chads and all, are better then these 45 year old antiques. You can see one at http://www.newscopy.org/voting_machines/index.html .
I think it's time for someone with some experience managing open source projects, and a significant bank roll, to start a fully open source voting machine initiative.
I mean open hardware, open software, open everything.
I am pretty certain that the open community could devise something that would be nearly tamper proof... probably using two devices. One, managed by the voting officials in the district that actually records the votes, the second is managed by a 3rd party and is used to verify the results.
For example I vote on one machine, which prints a verification slip that is scanned into the second which display and records my votes. At the end of the day, both machines should have the same count... otherwise one of the two was tampered with. At which point they turn to the verification slips for a manual count.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I am so glad someone stepped in to say what you said. These lever machines have been here forever, and every time this comes up, I write my reps and let them know that I don't want any newfangled, failure-prone computers to vote with. The inspectors where I am are professional, quick, and helpful. The tallies come out quick. We don't have to worry about a power outage. Oh, I suppose there are ways to sabotage the machines, but I imagine doing so without being obvious would be tough.
Anyway, I am so scared that they will take them away from us. Another working tradition ruined to fatten someone's wallet at the expense of simplicity and reliability.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
In Canada, most of the people manning the polls are young. We pay a lot of money for poll staff; the spots go quickly once an election has been called.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?