Joseph_Daniel_Zukige writes
"I'm still trying to figure out who is doing what here. It looks like the typical bureaucratic mess, but it looks like NIST, operating under the Help America Vote Act has set up a Technical Guidelines Development Committee to advise the 'independent bipartisan' United States Election Assistance Commission. So, the TGDC is going to hold some public hearings, and they've invited members of the public to help them out: 'One hour will be reserved at the conclusion of each day for members of the public to provide up to five minutes of testimony.'" Read more below, including how to register (today is the deadline) for the meetings, which will take place in central Maryland later this month.
Update: 09/15 18:04 GMT by
T : Irvu writes
"You can submit online comments to NIST's Technical Guidelines process. The link is here. Just click on the link marked 'Submit Comments or Position Statements.' Alternately you can e-mail your comments to vote@nist.gov."
Joseph_Daniel_Zukige continues "I can't make it. (Very long drive across a very deep ocean, or plane tickets I can't afford.) Twelve people per session is not going to allow a lot of people to testify. I'm sure Microsoft has someone going to sell a MSWxx based voting machine. I hope somebody from the EFF is going. Think it would be possible to pack this thing with enough Slashdot geeks to convince the government at least that electronic voting absolutely requires a human-readable ballot to be produced?" The meetings are taking place on the 20th through 22nd of this month; you have only until 5 p.m. today to register, though.
From the linked PDF: "The meetings will be held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology North Campus, 820 West Diamond Avenue, Room 152, Gaithersburg, MD."
Truthfully, the key role is in motivation (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, getting people to vote for the right reasons.
IT is less of a concern, I would preffer people vote responsibly, than use funky technology.
Re:Truthfully, the key role is in motivation (Score:1)
If technology is a key role in future (Score:3, Insightful)
PAPER BALLOTS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada gets it's paper ballots counted extremely fast. They need to hire some election consulatants from Canada and find out how they process paper ballots so quickly, and follow their recommendations.
Re:PAPER BALLOTS! (Score:4, Informative)
Canada's election consultants are doing their best to replace paper ballots with electronic systems.
The Chief Election Officer of Ontario has issued a report in favour of trying out electronic and Internet voting, and has already issued an RFQ for a technology pilot project.
You can read more about it on my blog Paper Vote Canada [papervotecanada.ca]
Re:PAPER BALLOTS! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PAPER BALLOTS! (Score:1)
Additionally this allows a person to vote even if all the "computerized ballot markers" are tied up. Just take a pen and sit down at a table... (subject to the individual voter's desire for privacy).
Reserve the machines for those who need (or really want) to use the machine.
Re:PAPER BALLOTS! (Score:2)
The whole point of a computer to count, really really fast, and really really accurately. And at relatively low cost.
Hiring a whole bunch of expensive, failable humans to count is a not a good alternative.
Re:PAPER BALLOTS! (Score:2)
The forms are a little goofy to get used to, but it's nearly impossible to make a mistake because you have to make a 1/2" mark on the paper...and if
I can't make it, but here are my reccomendations: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:1)
Who is proposing a "voting receipt"? That would be a terrible idea. I don't think any political party would support that.
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that this box should accept the ballot kinda like a vending machine accepts a dollar bill. This way both the touchscreen system and the ballot box will keep a tally, if the results
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:3, Interesting)
How can you be sure that function hasn't been tampered with? If the machine has it's own "self-check" program, if you were going to tamper with the box, wouldn't that be the first thing you'd fix? The only way to be sure is to have a computer engineer with hardware-level access manually check the thing out.
Electronic
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:2)
And that's exactly what the election inspector would do.
Depending on exactly how the device is designed, the inspection should consist of two parts: Checking the hardware, and checking the software.
The hardware would be checked in the same manner that current voting hardware is checked. It's not all punch-cards out there, you know. There's lots of old school equipment that is used to collate th
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:2)
Needless to say (I thought) the costs of doing this would totally outweigh a tradional voting system. Every attempt trying to make computer voting more reasonable only ever shows how innately infeasible the whole idea is. The benefits (what benefits?) do not outweigh the costs.
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I think a voting recipt that the voter leaves with is a silly idea. However, I would be in favor of some kind of window that lets the voter see the paper copy as it's printed out. I mean, what if someone tampered with the code in such a way that you could vote for candidate A, it would get counted for candidate B, and the printout said you voted for candidate B?
So, not only should there be a paper trail, but the voters should be able to visually confirm that the printout was correct.
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:2)
paper trail / receipt (Score:2)
There is a maxim that goes, "A man with one watch knows the time; a man with two watches is unsure."
What's going to happen when the electronic count and the paper count are wildly different? Suppose the electronic tally has candidate A over B by X number of votes. What happen
Re:paper trail / receipt (Score:1, Insightful)
How is printing a paper ballot a risk to the secrecy of the vote, any moreso than it is now?
How is printing a receipt with a checksum of some random token (user-generated passphrase, some unique identifier of the user, etc.) + their vote choices, and allowing the user to keep that receipt a vulnerability? By "checksum" I mean a cryptographically secure hash like SHA1. Maybe you could reverse it with NSA hardware
Re:paper trail / receipt (Score:2)
They could be destroyed by accident or otherwise. While ballot security has always been important, under a dual count system an attacker who hacks the electronic system to add votes for a candidate calls into question whether some ballots were destroyed. We wouldn't be sure.
Did I say printing a paper ballot
Re:paper trail / receipt (Score:2)
<example 1>
So Bob, me and this nice, big, gentelman with the Colt
Re:paper trail / receipt (Score:1)
The whole point of having them is for the voter can confirm her vote, and then put it in a ballot box as with current election technology. Of course, people are stupid, and some of them would carry their "recount chit" off with them, or in fact use it as proof of voting for candidate X, so we put the printer behind a piece of glass and don't let the voter t
Re:paper trail / receipt (Score:2)
What's going to happen when the electronic count and the paper count are wildly different? Suppose the electronic tally has candidate A over B by X number of votes. What happens if the total number of paper ballots is less than the electronic count by an amount O(X)?
This raises a question in my mind. I don't think I can put it concisely, but please bear with me. It's starting to convince me that we should
Re:paper trail / receipt (Score:2)
Voter goes into a booth, and enters his votes in the computer. He presses the "done" button, and the computer prints out his vote and displays the resulting printout to the voter under a sheet of glass. If the voter likes what he sees, he presses an "OK" button, the printout
Re:I can't make it, but here are my reccomendation (Score:2)
plain old paper-ballots (Score:4, Interesting)
You have a paper-record with valid or un-valid votes that are easy to count. No interpretation of punch-cards needed because the voting machine was too complicated or otherwise flawed.
Re:plain old paper-ballots (Score:2)
Bipartisan = exclusionary (Score:2)
Good use of scare quotes. As a member of a third party, I've learned to be wary of any "independent" organization that calls itself "bipartisan". The very name implies that they will be offering "election assistance" to plans that entrench the current R-D duopoly.
So don't look for them to advocate any sort of Instant Runoff Voting (or Condorcet Voting, for those who want to require higher mathematics to understand the results).
Re:Bipartisan = exclusionary (Score:2)
Recorded, voter-verifiable printout... (Score:3, Insightful)
All you need to do is have the voter machine print the voter's response on a cash-register-type tape roll that is visible under glass (but not accessable - so as to prevent the kind of dirty tricks that Bejing is putting on Hong Kong's pro-democracy advocates). That way you have a hard, difficult to falsify record of every voter's preference.
The software to do this is almost immaterial, but the source code needs to be accessable to anyone for review.
Re:Recorded, voter-verifiable printout... (Score:1)
Sure you can look at it and see that it says Nader instead of Kerry but unless the system includes some way to correct the mistake we havn't solved the problem.
That is why I'm in favor of separate vote/count machines. If the voter has to physically carry their ballot to a counting machine, they have a chance to verify what it says (and if necessary get it corrected) before the vote is
Written submissions anybody? (Score:2)
Or at any rate, maybe they could be asked to do that?
-wb-
Online Comments can be sent. (Score:2)
I spoke to one of the committee members Allan Eustis. He stated that their mandate is to provide "Initial Recommendations of Voluntary Guidelines" this coming April. These guidelines will likely follow and overlap with the FEC2000 Guidelines and will apply to all parties in the "voting community" (States, Vendors, etc.). He stated that they would
Remember the Easter Egg. (Score:2)
Then point out that, instead of running an Easter Egg and Taxi across your screen, if you were dealing with a E-ballot box, it could have brought up a screen allowing you to modify the vote count.
This cannot be tested for after delivery because, no matter what testing regime you come up with and execute, I can come up with an ea
Just registered (Score:1)
Also, Mr. Eustis did indicate that though the draft agenda said they would have an hour for public comment each day, he was going to try to allocate more t
Open source and secure? (Score:2)
The recommendations of www.blackboxvoting.org (Score:4, Informative)
1) Open source. Not necessarily GNU licensed, but the source code of all voting systems must be publicly available on the vendor's website plus at least one gov't website if not multiple - choices include the county elections department's websites, the Federal Election Commission, state SecState sites, etc. ALONG WITH the compiler and operating system makes and versions under which the code was compiled; that will allow us geeks to do our own compiles and generate our own hash results so that we can compare with "in the field" binaries. (I have to disagree with Dr. Dent on his point #2 in that I don't want to have to trust somebody else's hash numbers...I want to roll my own.)
2) Voter verifiable paper trails. The best such schemes are similar to the one Avante developed - your vote is printed on a paper strip "behind glass". You get to look at it, make sure it's OK and if you like it, hit "OK" on the touchscreen. A "robot snipper" clips off that piece of paper, it drops to the bottom of a sealed bucket and it's the official vote of record in case of recount. You don't use a take-up reel because then you can cross-ref the voter order with the vote order and figure out who voted for what. The voter cannot later prove who they voted for (it's not a "reciept") - that way "Guido" can't breaka you legga for voting "wrong" or pay you for voting "right". Oh, and the paper vote of record has an encrypted bar code strip to ID false "extra bits of paper", and minor mistakes in the dot-matrix print that are hard to spot but form their own second tamper-code.
3) This is the major piece that Bev Harris has contributed. Harris used to be a forensic accountant, meaning she dug into financial fraud for a living. In any accounting system, there are auditing procedures and steps at EVERY step of the way as cash is handled. Votes need to be handled the same way - there's documentation every time they change hands, there's a REAL audit trail, and similar steps that need to come from the CPA community. As one example: in a real audit trail, if data entry was done wrong and needs to come out, it isn't erased. It's MARKED (and datestamped) as "not valid" but it's still in there so you can see what happened. None of the current systems do this, with the possible exception of Avante (I'd have to take another look on that point.) Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S and Hart sure don't!
4) Mandate Read-Only-Memory storage of votes at the terminals! This is another thing Avante got right - and no, they ain't paying me or BBV.org a red cent. Their voting terminals burn the vote data to CD-ROM. Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia burn data to PCMCIA memory cards...which can be stuck in a laptop, encryption cracked and the data messed with as happened in Volusia County FL, Nov2000.
---------------
This is PRELIMINARY and should be viewed as such, but it's a pretty good guide to where our heads are at. Blackboxvoting.org [blackboxvoting.org] (not just a website, we're a non-profit public interest educational/research foundation) will be meeting to discuss a formal proposal ASAP.
Jim March
Member of the BBV.org [blackboxvoting.org] board of directors (Bev Harris is our Executive Director)
I'm also a co-plaintiff (with Bev Harris) in the current lawsuit against Diebold in California which State Attorney General Bill Lockyer just joined.
Re:The recommendations of www.blackboxvoting.org (Score:2)
#3...working in IT though I'd say corperate accounting is still in the stone ages using IT... but mearly because it's time consuming and difficult to set up such structures...and the CEO's are always making a "moving target" by changing minor things on an almost quartely basis.
#4...I think you meant to say WORM...Write Once Read Many storage. Again, it would do just what you Want in #3...because it can only Add records it would add the stamp to void #34567 rather than simply deleting it..ver
Re:The recommendations of www.blackboxvoting.org (Score:2)
Think about how a bank deals with cash: there's a paper trail AND electronic trail every step of the way, including use of publicly available encryption algorythms - NO use of "security by obscurity".
There are decent PC accounting programs today that meet these standards (business grade programs that is...) which proves this is doable.
Too many of the people advocating
I already wrote up my ideas for a local paper (Score:1)
Re:I already wrote up my ideas for a local paper (Score:2)
Only if you assume that the paper has to be counted by machine. If the paper is countable by hand, it is verifiable by hand in the event of a recount.
Re:I already wrote up my ideas for a local paper (Score:1)
Venezuela: Well, it was a report based on a study from a group at MIT not the WSJ particularly. Go read up on the Venezuelan election and you'll see what I mean. The election results strongly disagreed with the
Politics v. YRO (Score:1, Offtopic)
Slashdotting t
Whole debate missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I digress.
Electronic voting does not encourage more people to vote, they still have to get off their backsides and go to a polling station regardless of whether they are greeted by a CRT or a pencil and paper. This idea that electronic voting is better for democracy is nothing but a myth.
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Totally agreed. Oregon's on a much better track- if we ever have electronic voting, it will be over an SSL connection, because we already have no polling places left. Yes, folks, all the voters of Oregon are on the equivalent of
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:2)
We'll see if THAT survives the next election- Measure 36 ammends the State Constitution to forbid it- but one thing you can be sure of, no husband is presuring his wife to vote a certai
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:2)
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:2)
Many people who use absentee ballots don't check their local laws and election rules, and are surprised when you mention they should check into this possibility. And severely disappointed that their votes haven't been co
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:2)
Re:Whole debate missing the point (Score:2)
Voting's a good start (Score:2)
But a far easier and cheaper democratic tool lies on the horizon, thanks to computer technology: taxpayer (as opposed to legislative) control of the budget. Many of us already file our tax returns electronically- it wouldn't be hard at all to add a few thousand questions to te form on how the government is allowed to spend the money.
Re:Voting's a good start (Score:2)
[x] Defense spending
[x] Education
[ ] Public funding for obscene art
[ ] Congressional Pay raise
[ ] Internal revenue service
[ ] HUD
[x] Saving cute endangered creatures
[ ] Saving endangered vultures
It'll all be in the wording.
Re:Voting's a good start (Score:2)
In the sci-fi novelette I stole this from, if you had money left over at the end of the list, you got to add a new category that you wanted the government to work on. The main guy in the story, who had lost several family members to war, added "Everlasting World Peace", and it attracted so much money it was accomplished within 12 months.
gentle reminder (Score:2)