All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit

according to an announcement made by activist Bernie Ellis at the premier of David Earnhardt's film "Uncounted [The Movie]" all fifty states could be receiving subpoenas in the National Clean Election lawsuit. The documentary film, like the lawsuit, takes a look at the issue of voting machine failure and the need for a solid paper trail. "The lawsuit is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public. The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting machines to record and count the votes at each polling station, and allow tallying of votes by election officials outside the view of the general public."

Comments

Re:Why not have voting machines that print ballots

[ByOhTek]

Sorry, I didn't make it clear - that's why it prints out the readable hard copies; those are used for the tally, not some internal copy on the system.

Very Nice for a change

[Wellington Grey]

In the question and answer period following the screening, an Iraq veteran said he had pledged to protect his country "from all enemies foreign and domestic" and viewed the issues of voting machines as a domestic threat to voters across the country.

It's very nice to hear of a soldier truly understanding the role of patriotism and protection in America these days. Well done, Sir.

-Grey

Re:No EVoting can be "trusted"

[Chandon Seldon]

We can. We, computers savvy people who understand computers and who can test, probe and verify the mechanisms behind the machines. Joe Average cannot.

Can we? I'm about six months short of my bachelors degree in CS, and I couldn't examine a computer voting machine and determine that it was trustworthy in any reasonable amount of time. With a properly marked paper ballot, anyone can tell you what it says and any attempt to change it requires at least couple of seconds alone with it. With a flash memory card, who knows? A person can't say *anything* about what's stored on it without putting it in a reader, and any reader device can trivially and tracelessly change the data in milliseconds.

So not only is your point absolutely correct - it's understated. We absolutely do need a system where "everyone can read" the ballots, and any sort of electronic ballot system is a system where *no-one* can read them. Obviously Joe Average can't, but even the engineers who built the thing can't read the ballots directly.

Re:Right idea, wrong request

[bigg_nate]

Any electronic voting that doesn't suck is no better than pen and paper.

I used to think this as well, but then I saw a talk by a Ben Adida, a cryptographic voting researcher. It turns out there are electronic and hybrid voting systems that allow every step of the process to be independently audited. Individual voters can log into a website and ensure that their vote was recorded correctly (and yes, this is done in such a way that nobody can prove to another party which way they voted). Anyone can get a list of the people who actually voted, so they can check that nobody voted twice and that every voter was valid. Each of the candidates can independently and programatically verify that the tallying was done correctly (again, without exposing any one specific ballot). This is far superior to traditional paper ballots, and there's no technical reason we can't have it today.

Here's a paper that gives some more information. I believe Dr. Adida mentioned that this particular system has a few problems that would prevent it from being used in practice, but it still gives a pretty good example of how a cryptographic voting system could work.