Public Clearinghouse Proposed For Evoting Failures

Hugh Pickens writes "Alice Lipowicz writes in Federal Computer Week that Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, has reviewed hundreds of reports of problems with electronic voting systems during the last eight years. He is recommending a new regulatory system with a national database, accessible by election officials and others, that identifies voting system malfunctions reported by vendors or election officials and new legislation that requires vendors report evoting failures to the clearinghouse. 'We need a new and better regulatory structure to ensure that voting system defects are caught early, officials in affected jurisdictions are notified immediately, and action is taken to make certain that they will be corrected for all such systems, wherever they are used in the United States,' writes Norden. Adding that election officials rely on vendors to keep them aware of potential problems with voting machines, which is often done voluntarily and that voting system failures in one jurisdiction tend to be repeated in other areas, resulting in reduced public confidence and lost votes."

Comments

How is a Diebold machine like a Pakistani citizen?

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They don't get to vote in America, and we shouldn't let them count the votes either.

Look, I'm an IT guy. I completely get the labor savings, the fallibility of humans, the difference in cost. We ought to be willing to pay the cost for humans to count our votes - if it costs more, maybe we'll let less stupid stuff on the ballot, or vote less than every few months. I get that when people want to cheat, a way can often be found - though most vote-counting setups have multiple interested parties to limit the cheating. I get that the average American voter is mindless cattle whose vote can be bought with sufficient advertising. But still, I'd rather that people tried to get their cheating past other suspicious-minded people than that machines introduced the opportunity to rig elections wholesale in advance and without a trace.

In the mean time until the machines are granted the right to vote, they've got no business counting the vote.

As for the rest of it, well I believe it's been described as the worst system for managing society - except for all the others that have been tried. It's mostly working.

Re:threat

[Sir_Lewk]

Didn't Brazil manage to pull off an election with 128 million votes, and zero miscounts?

No. They had an election and the people in charge of it claim there were no miscounts. The distinction is important.

With electronic voting machines, in the best of all possible circumstances (open source code) only a very small portion of the population is able to truly understand and verify it, and an even tinier portion of people are able to verify that the code that's available to the public is actually the code that is running on the machines when voters use them. The people who are in the position to verify that either A) have absolutely no idea how to do so, or B) are the people who would have installed the incorrect software in the first place.

If you make the machines output a physical copy of the vote which the voter then verifies then the situation is improved, but with a purely electronic voting system the entire thing is FUBAR.