US Voting Machines Standards Open To Public

Online Voting writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has published new voting systems testing and certification standards for 190 days of public comment. For all the critics of electronic voting, this is your opportunity to improve the process. This will be the second version of the federal voting system standards (the first version is the VVSG 05). To learn more about these Voluntary Voting System Standards see this FAQ."

I certainly much better now!

[e9th]

From the EAC's FAQ:

Q: Will the source code be available to the public? A: No.

Can someone please...

[graviplana]

Tag this story as "inaccurate", "badtitle", or "badsummary"? If the source code isn't open to the public then this is basically a dog & pony show, IMO.

Software independence is required.

[zestyping]

For those of you who have wanted voter-verifiable paper records, the new VVSG says:

Software independence means that an undetected error or fault in the voting system's software is not capable of causing an undetectable change in election results. All voting systems must be software independent in order to conform to the VVSG.

See section 2.4 [eac.gov] for a discussion of "software independence." The draft guidelines present "independent voter-verifiable records" (IVVR) as one method of achieving "software independence," though it leaves the door open for other innovative ways of achieving the same goal (such as end-to-end cryptographic verification).

I definitely recommend reading the guidelines. There's a lot of stuff in there.

Re:Still no access to source code

[swillden]

Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.

The reason that's not a requirement is that if the other requirements are defined correctly, access to the source code is irrelevant. If the other requirements are not defined correctly, access to the source code is also irrelevant, because there's no practical way to be sure what code is actually running on the voting machines.

The only reasonable way to do electronic voting is to define a system such that there is no way the software could manipulate the vote without being detected, no matter how malicious the software. It should be possible to contract the software development to Halliburton and let them keep all of the code top secret, and *still* have no worries that voters ballots aren't counted exactly as the voters intended.

Tall order? Not really. A voter-verifiable paper trail accomplishes this rather easily. If you want to get really serious about it, David Chaum's punchscan [punchscan.org] system provides every voter with the ability to verify their vote was recorded correctly, but without enabling them to prove how they voted to anyone.

Of course, I have no objection to open source voting machines. In fact, I think it's a really good idea for economic reasons. But in terms of eliminating election machine-driven election fraud, open source is neither necessary nor sufficient. It's irrelevant.

Re:big problem

[zestyping]

People keep saying how fast Canadian elections are. (I'm Canadian too.) But they're missing a huge difference.

In Canada you usually have one contest.

This [nist.gov] is why hand-counting doesn't work in the United States. Chicago, November 2004: 10 pages, 15 elected offices, 74 judges, one referendum. That's 90 contests.

See more at NIST's ballot collection [nist.gov].

120 Days + 120 Days... Don't procrastinate.

[dhj]

The press release http://www.eac.gov/vvsg/News/press/eac-seeks-public-comment-on-tgdc2019s-recommended-voluntary-voting-system-guidelines-online-comment-tool-now-available [eac.gov] says the VVSG will be open for public comment for the next 120 days. After the 120 days they will internally review/modify the document and then re-open it for comments for another 120 days. If you have posted some brilliant, insightful bit of wisdom here on slashdot for karma... PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO LEAVE A COMMENT IN THE RELEVANT SECTION OF THE VVSG. I am guessing comments that get posted in this first 120 day period will have more influence than those posted in the second 120 day period.