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