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

ballot images

[phantomfive]

Ballot images should exist, too.

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.

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.

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:Voter ID

[Ol Olsoc]

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

Absolutely, but a particular group always tries to bring that up right before elections. This ends up becoming a dogwhistle to make certain that the faithful get out to vote.

The fix for this is very simple. When you register to vote, you get a photo ID taken, and a card issued. If you are already registered you get one the next time you vote. And in addition to the photo id, it goes into a database that you have the id. If you cannot find your ID, your drivers license wil be cross referenced with aanother form, such as Driver's license, oyu ar eissued a new ID, and you can vote.

Then it is phased in over a couple election cycles.

Then along with the ID, you cannot be denied the ability to vote - indeed keeping a person from voting should be a third degree felony for the polling place manager(s) Give them an incentive for promotion of enfranchisement. Lines with a wait time longer than an hour will be a misdemeanor, and must be addressed by a new group of poll workers and a solution. As well, the Voter should get a confirmation that their vote has been counted.

Any problems with that? Disenfranchisement as a felony will probably be the one most people doen't like. But some groups like issuing felonies, so maybe that's a win win?

Now the interesting thing is that I am holding in my fat little hand, a voting ID card. Seems they already exist. Standing by to hear why my proposal won't work.

Re:Voter ID

[penandpaper]

How do you get to the DMV if you live 30 miles away from the closest one, and have to work two jobs just to put food on the table?

Same way you get to the polling station?

if you don't have a birth certificate or SS card, what then?

I am not sure. What do we do if someone can't prove they have a legal right to vote which is what I thought the point of a voter ID was supposed to address?

This is discriminatory, and is intendedt to be so.

HOW?!?! I don't understand. They can get to the polling station but not the DMV (as an example, I am sure they can get the ID in other government facilities that the law would spell out. Hell allow over the phone or by mail to solve that problem). They can't prove they have a legal right to vote but they can still vote but it's discrimination if you ask for proof of who you are?

There are 12.5 million illegal immigrants in the US. In California, they are given a drivers license which is enough to be able to vote. How many votes swung the last election? Clinton had 3 million more but actual swing votes? 60,000 maybe in key districts? Do you think maybe that could have an influence on our election, more so than spurious anonymous sourced Russian meddling?

Re:Voter ID

[EndlessNameless]

There are 12.5 million illegal immigrants in the US. In California, they are given a drivers license which is enough to be able to vote.

Calling bullshit right there. You have to be a citizen before you can register to vote. A driver's license doesn't get you on the voter rolls.

I know this may be confusing, but you can do two different things at one place. The DMV can both issue licenses and register voters---and they can have different rules for each thing. Amazing, right?

Anyway, if you think I'm as full of bullshit as you are, feel free to read it yourself:

http://www.sos.ca.gov/election...

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.

Re:No they shouldn't

[ghoul]

I feel the electronic voting machines should have a few questions on the constitution and civics and only after you answer them correctly should you be shown the screen which allows you to vote. Too many people who have no idea of what democracy means vote hence making the whole exercise a farce where the one with the most TV time (and by extension the most corporate lobbies) wins because most people dont know what they are voting for.
The questions can be pulled from a rotating questionbank so no 2 people get the same 5 questions and if some party is willing to educate their voters on the right answers to all 5000 questions well now you have an informed voter.

Re:No they shouldn't

[Ichijo]

Also remove every "(R)" and "(D)" from the ballot. Let's not make it quite so easy for people to vote along party lines.

Re:No they shouldn't

[JackieBrown]

Do I need an ID to purchase a gun?

Scantron is fast, but not reliable

[raymorris]

At my last job exam scores were calculated with Scantron machines. Though the Scantron was faster than grading by hand, it is unreliable, so every sheet had to be double-checked by a human. The people had to correct the Scantron results rather often.

One Scantron machine was noticeably less reliable than another; perhaps some maintenance, aligning and cleaning it, makes a big difference.

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.

We need this ...

[CaptainDork]

... and USPS, and landlines, and fax, and credit card imprinters.

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:I like paper ballot

[ghoul]

There is a very simple way to do this. Have an electronic voting machine with a paper printout. Voter votes, prints out his ballot and puts it into the ballot box. When counting the electronic count is used but with 10% of the paper votes counted by hand to verify the counts are good. If the counts dont match up statistically or the election is close the backup paper ballots get counted by hand. You get speed and you get accuracy. You have a national level organization standardize the machine format to be used by all local authorities. Heck in India there is a National Election Commission whose only job is to conduct elections. They are pretty multipartisan as their terms overlap across elections and every party which comes to power gets to put its appointees on the commission but that would never work in US as the US distrusts federal solutions.

Cost

[michael_cain]

The big question is, "Congress might mandate it, but are they willing to pay for it?" In most states the cost of the voting equipment falls on the counties. Any that bought voting equipment in the last decade are going to fight tooth and nail against having to replace it. I have a friend who works in the electronic voting machine business; she tells me that they're still doing repair work on 20-year-old machines because of counties who don't have the money to replace them.

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.