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Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon (theregister.co.uk)
Following the DefCon demonstration in July that showed how quickly Direct Recording Electronic voting equipment could be hacked, Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided it wants to replace their electronic voting machines in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017. According to The Register, "The decision was announced in the minutes of the Board's September 8th meeting: 'The Department of Elections officially recommends that the State Board of Elections decertify all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or touchscreen) voting equipment." From the report: With the DefCon bods showing some machines shared a single hard-coded password, Virginia directed the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) to audit the machines in use in the state (the Accuvote TSX, the Patriot, and the AVC Advantage). None passed the test. VITA told the board "each device analyzed exhibited material risks to the integrity or availability of the election process," and the lack of a paper audit trail posed a significant risk of lost votes. Local outlet The News Leader notes that many precincts had either replaced their machines already, or are in the process of doing so. The election board's decision will force a change-over on the 140 precincts that haven't replaced their machines, covering 190,000 of Virginia's ~8.4m population.
Don't use the computer to take the voter input and then generate a paper receipt, use the paper ballot with on-site optical scan to record the result that the voter marked on the paper. If you want to get 1980s-fancy, implement an on-ballot print technique that puts one pattern of ink dot next to each entry that the voter filled-out correctly, and possibly another next to those that the voter did not fill-out correctly (like those pick 3 entries for county commissioners etc, or where the voter left the field empty) in case later manual review is necessary. Could even go so far as to generate serial numbers on the now-scanned-and-printed ballots, where those ballots that had issues have their serial numbers noted for manual review if necessary (ie, at a minimum if the voting is too close to call for some particular initiatives) and for that serial number to be machine-readable in the future (ie, also helps the computer know the ballot is already scanned, so that it doesn't tally multiple times if scanned multiple times). We had this technology with optical-scan "scantron" forms for school tests from at least the 1980s, if not the 1970s, so this should not be a hard thing to do.
If an election goes well then board of elections can perform a small audit, looking at perhaps a few polling places to confirm that the paper matches the electronic, and then perhaps a random sampling of ballots at other polling places, and then pat itself on the back. If an election goes spectacularly badly, the board of elections can hand-tally each and every paper ballot if necessary, because they were human-readable when marked by a voter. The ballots, not the computer, is the official result of the election. The computer merely helps speed-up the process of counting the results.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That doesn't sound right. As I understand it, Ireland has a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. Under STV, you count all of the first votes, and if no one wins outright then you eliminate the least-popular candidate and redistribute their votes to their second choice. If there's still no clear winner then you eliminate the least-popular remaining candidate and redistribute all of their votes to their second choice if they're still there or to their third choice if they aren't. You repeat this until someone has 50%. You never dump all of the votes out, you only redistribute them from the least-popular candidate.
There are other problems with STV, including some quite odd failure modes. For example, if you have four candidates, A, B, C, and D and 30% vote ABCD, 25% vote CBDA, 24% vote DBCA, and 21% vote BCDA, then candidate A will win. B is eliminated in the first round (because he receives the fewest votes) and all of his votes are redistributed to A. Now A has 51% and so wins, in spite of being there last choice for 70% of the electorate, and B never gets to see any of the second-choice votes in spite of being the first or second choice for 100% of the electorate. Of course, the same problem happens with first past the post, but there you don't have the information required to know that it's happened.
There are some variations on STV that avoid these corner cases, but they make counting harder.
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