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.

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: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: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: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.

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: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.

Re:No they shouldn't

[JackieBrown]

Do I need an ID to purchase a gun?