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The First Federally Certified Voting System

Posted by Soulskill on from the at-least-it's-not-diebold dept.

InternetVoting writes "The Election Assistance Commission has announced the first ever federally certified voting system. While the Election Management System (EMS) 4.0 by MicroVote General Corporation has successfully completed 17 months of testing, many questions still remain about the United States' voting system Testing and Certification program. Many systems are still being tested to obsolete standards, the current standards are set to become obsolete soon and cost estimates for future certifications are skyrocketing. The future of improved innovating voting systems does not look bright."

4 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Human factor by WarJolt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Doesn't matter how much testing you do; There is always the human factor. Machines won't change that. I guarantee you either the voter or the administrator will somewhere somehow mess it up.

    1. Re:Human factor by blueg3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course, but that factor is present in voting systems that don't use voting machines, too.

      It's fruitless to expect an electronic voting system will be perfect -- it's probably impossible to prevent all attacks. The important thing is that the electronic voting system is not worse than the already-existing alternatives.

  2. Show me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... the source code?

  3. Re:"Innovative" voting systems? by eyrieowl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As a voter, you, personally, may not get much (any) benefit from any other voting system. As a citizen, it is in your collective's best interest to ensure that voting and counting go smoothly. People writing on paper or punching holes in paper is a system which leads to discrepant results. You can say "fill in the bubble", and the question then becomes, "what percentage of the bubble must be filled in to count?" or "what if another bubble has a mark in it?" or any number of other questions (see the Franken/Coleman recount). And, of course, the infamous hanging chads.... A system which eliminates the variation and which makes it completely clear what votes were and weren't cast is simply superior. The question is, what is that system? Personally, I don't see why this question is so difficult...create electric voting system (yes, there are arguments for different UIs, we'll set those aside). Electric voting system keeps track of vote count. It also prints out human & machine readable paper ballot which citizen places in ballot box (and which has machine's ID # on it for reference). Preliminary results are easily generated from electric vote count. Final results can be determined from scanning paper ballots. Discrepancies lead to audits of the machines which don't match their paper ballots. Personally, I can't imagine why that is not superior to all the voting systems I've had the opportunity to use, but I'm open to other hearing why it isn't.