New Bill Could Finally Get Rid of Paperless Voting Machines (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bipartisan group of six senators has introduced legislation that would take a huge step toward securing elections in the United States. Called the Secure Elections Act, the bill aims to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines from American elections while promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments. "With the 2018 elections just around the corner, Russia will be back to interfere again," said co-sponsor Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). So a group of senators led by James Lankford (R-Okla.) wants to shore up the security of American voting systems ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections. And the senators have focused on two major changes that have broad support from voting security experts.

The first objective is to get rid of paperless electronic voting machines. Computer scientists have been warning for more than a decade that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and can't be meaningfully audited. States have begun moving away from paperless systems, but budget constraints have forced some to continue relying on insecure paperless equipment. The Secure Elections Act would give states grants specifically earmarked for replacing these systems with more secure systems that use voter-verified paper ballots. The legislation's second big idea is to encourage states to perform routine post-election audits based on modern statistical techniques. Many states today only conduct recounts in the event of very close election outcomes. And these recounts involve counting a fixed percentage of ballots. That often leads to either counting way too many ballots (wasting taxpayer money) or too few (failing to fully verify the election outcome). The Lankford bill would encourage states to adopt more statistically sophisticated procedures to count as many ballots as needed to verify an election result was correct -- and no more.

Comments

Voter ID

[JackieBrown]

As long as they are talking about making voting more secure, they should add into the bill voter ID requirements

Re:Voter ID

[R3d M3rcury]

you go to DMV with something like a birth certificate or SS card and you get a voter ID free of charge.

What if they close the DMV offices around you? So you have to travel 40 miles to the nearest DMV office to get a Voter ID, what's the big deal? You don't have a car? Can't afford one? And there's no way to get there by bus or you'd have to take an entire day off from work to do it?

Re:ballot images

[ctilsie242]

David Chaum has some excellent work on auditable voting systems, with excellent trails of proof. However, it doesn't seem that municipalities really care, as opposed to buying what the lowest bidder has to offer.

No they shouldn't

[rsilvergun]

It's a defacto poll tax combined with voter suppression. Anywhere it's been implemented it's instantly become expensive and difficult to obtain the necessary Id. It's a trick by your friendly neighborhood aristocracy to give you the illusion of Democracy without all the nastiness of the 'wrong' people voting.

Good start

[rsilvergun]

now end Gerrymandering and repeal Citizen's United with a few well targeted laws and maybe we can talk about America being a Democracy.

Re:the less human involvement in counting the bett

[Sarten-X]

Ehhh......

In the interest of understanding, you should know a bit of my background: I used to build robots, and these days I do a lot of work automating manual processes.

I see it as a mixed bag. On the one hand, a manual recount is more error-prone on the surface, but it's also less error-prone in that a manual review can account for more inconsistency. Where a smudge on the paper might confuse an optical reader, a human would have no problem determining the correct result. Yes, that can be resolved with high-end visual sensors (essentially cameras), but those single-purpose devices are also far more expensive than a human's time. Using statistical analysis also means that the one vote wouldn't matter, but such a situation could be problematic if, say, paper ballots were stored incorrectly.

Having humans involved also drastically reduce the attack surface if interference is considered a viable threat. Having a farm of 500 vote-counting machines means one attack can be repeated 500 times with expected success. Having 1000 humans means that 1000 individual corrupting attacks must be executed, and there's just a slim chance they'll succeed... and a good chance they'll alert authorities. As a check to validate a machine-generated initial count, humans are certainly a safer option.

As with any system, defense in depth is the best option. We expect the machines will handle the initial count correctly, but it needs to be verified by the humans. We expect they'll handle the recount properly, but to ensure the correct methodology, the statistical parameters are being prescribed by law, open to public review and criticism. To ensure the law matches society's expectations, we have the democratic process allowing new representatives to revise the law as needed.

No, it isn't perfect, but it's the best the world has to offer.

Re:I like paper ballot

[hey!]

I'm convinced that of the great advantages of voting machines is that you can manipulate an election without rigging the count. You just rig the wait times.

I've been voting for almost 40 years now on optically scanned paper ballots, and I have never had to wait more than five minutes, even in the most hotly contested elections they just throw up another row of cheap, pop-up voting booths. And there's never any machine glitches to deal with either.

When I read about places where people wait for hours to vote, I wonder how it is possible to spend so much money on computerizing a process, only to make it much, much slower and more cumbersome -- unless it was somehow intentional.

Re:ballot images

[Anonymous Coward]

Ballot images should exist, too

Hhhm. I've been on black box voting's mailing list for over a decade. But I'm not so sure I like the idea of ballot images. For a couple of reasons:

1) If they have serial numbers, it threatens ballot secrecy because you can sell (or be extorted) your vote and then prove it by providing the serial number.
2) If they don't have serial numbers, you can still write something on the ballot to make it identifiable as your vote.
3) If the serial numbers are consecutive its likely that someone could de-anonymize votes given access to other data (like smartphone location data showing who was at the polls at certain times).

Every choice in system design is a trade-off, but BBV seems to be a little naive to the risks here since ballot images are theoretically public documents and they are explicitly advocating crowd-sourcing their verification.

Re:Only half the problem. Need stronger voter ID'i

[HornWumpus]

We should just follow UN best practices.

Which call for voter registration, picture ID, thumb marking, paper ballots, see through ballot boxes and immediate public counting.

It literally has all been worked out. But, for some reason, we're special.