US Paperless Voting Bill Advances

A couple of weeks back we discussed the effort to require voting paper trails in US federal elections. Now WhiteBoxVoter writes: "Democrats and Republicans in the US House of Representatives agreed today on a compromise that will push through a bill banning paperless voting machines and requiring a voter-verified paper record for every vote in the country, after government sanctioned hackers showed how they could break into all three of the top voting systems used in California." The NYTimes reported on Thursday that even if it passes the House, voting-machine reform that would take effect before the 2008 elections may die in the Senate.

One more chance...

...to rig an election

Why?

``voting-machine reform that would take effect before the 2008 elections may die in the Senate.''

Because, for some reason, politicians (not only in the USA) seem to be opposed to verifiable, reliable voting methods.

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``voting-machine reform that would take effect before the 2008 elections may die in the Senate.''

Because, for some reason, politicians (not only in the USA) seem to be opposed to verifiable, reliable voting methods.

Well, yeah, because if they allow the technology to mature, then no longer will one candidate be able to waste tax payer money by suing for another vote count. One click of the mouse and voila, there is your recount. Want another? *click*

Re:Why?

Yes, and what a reliable recount that is to. What an amazing technological advance it will be to be able to instantly recount the same corrupted vote totals whenever you want.

Re:Why?

I've worked in a recount. I'd much rather have the corrupt count be at least efficiently generated, instead of through the sweat of misinformed, underinstructed, and ultimately ignored temp workers. The 2004 Washington gubenatorial debacle is just one of a million examples of the seemingly obvious truth that if the first vote was too close to call, recounting it is merely reshuffling the same deck of dubious cards. Just because you counted again doesn't mean the same statistical errors and intrinsic problems in vote counting aren't there.

Re:Why?

Well, yeah, because if they allow the technology to mature,

Voting technology is centuries old and is already constrained by game theory to be as mature as it can get- if all players play optimally in a struggle for power within a democracy, they will necessarily have to assume that all other players share the wish to gain an unfair advantage by perverting the election process. Absent any compelling reason for a change voting technology cannot be "improved" upon without eroding confidence in the integrity of elections and shrouding them in suspicion. And no electronic system will ever be able to dispel mutual suspicion as effectively as paper.

When we run out of trees and can't print ballots anymore, perhaps the appearance of a conflict of interest will go away. Until then, the appearance means it is a conflict of interest- without a very good reason for screwing with them, it is simply not safe to assume that the true motive behind any effort to "improve" elections isn't theft. This makes the way we vote now unimprovable unless it becomes well understood by everyone involved that we need to improve it for a good reason. No such reason currently exists.

Bubbleheads on cable TV have sold many of us on the idea that democracy is in crisis somehow if they can't announce a winner within hours of election night- which is totally absurd. Recounts are quite cheap, we have months to get it right, and if we rush, the losing side has a legitimate, reasonable complaint that the election might have been unfairly decided. To put it delicately.

then no longer will one candidate be able to waste tax payer money by suing for another vote count.

As a taxpayer I am quite willing to pay for a vote count. An undisturbed recount in 2000 for example could have saved me a lot of money.

One click of the mouse and voila, there is your recount. Want another? *click*

That makes a lot of sense- optimize for speed when the demand is for accuracy. I weed guys like you out in interviews.

Re:Why?

Bubbleheads on cable TV have sold many of us on the idea that democracy is in crisis somehow if they can't announce a winner within hours of election night- which is totally absurd.

Thank you! This need on the news providers' part, to "call" the election before that night's Late Show, has somehow infiltrated our mass culture to the point that plenty of folks accepted the dominant Republican talking point for the 200 recount: "But it'll take tiiiiiime! And mooooney!"

For chrissakes, people, the election is held over two months before the inauguration. We've got time. Perhaps the news providers are just concerned that our country's population of historical amnesiacs will forget there was an election by the time a fair hand count could be completed, but that's hardly a reason to fuck up peoples' expectations of their democracy.

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plenty of folks accepted the dominant Republican talking point for the 200 recount

Wow, didn't even catch that typo with two previews.

I would like to point out that, yes, I am aware that emperor Caracalla was unelected, had already served a couple years by

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Not true at all. Voters (at least in the United States) largely do NOT vote their self interest. If they did we would have a whole lot fewer people voting republican while making little more than minimum wage just because that candidate talks favorably o

Re:Why?

If they're making "little more than minimum wage" then their self-interest is to keep things the way they are. Raising the minimum means some of 'em will lose their jobs. People all over will choose to make a little less money in exchange for a smaller chance of making zero money.

Just because you have shallow economics skills doesn't mean that the people currently at the bottom don't understand the fundamental problem.

Minimum Wage Hikers like to pull out the "rising tide raises all boats" phrase that is also used by supply-siders to justify lowering taxation. But the problem is that a minimum wage increase isn't a rising tide. It's a boat-lift on a large number of small boats, which in a fixed volume of water means the tide itself actually lowers.

The supply-siders are also a bit shallow in their understanding, though. It's not the taxes, per se, that constrict the wealth generating power of the economy, but inefficient central spending. Inflation is just another kind of tax.

Re:Why?

I'm divided on two levels.

The first level is whether to respond to you earnestly or snarkily, as it seems that while you are somewhat flamebaiting, the ideas you are expressing are not exactly uncommon amongst the Slashdot crowd. Would it do to point out merely that many (probably most) of the monsters in humanity's history (and their many apologists) were earnest students of politics, history, art, sociology, science, and world history? Or does it bear mentioning that education and intelligence of a superior caliber is nearly universally consummate with superior arrogance and ambition? Or the further obvious fact that studying those things does not free a person from the grip of a desire to self-aggrandize or seek to support their own interests at the public expense?

The second level is my ambivalence regarding the underlying point. I'd sure like to believe that smart and well-educated people make overall better decisions in the public sphere. Certainly it is true that stupid and ignorant people make spectacularly bad decisions in that same sphere. On the other hand, the democratic model outright assumes that people, smart or stupid, will vote their interests and not their beliefs (and one might add that interests and beliefs ought to match in equivalent proportion to intelligence); if people don't do that then many of the underlying assumptions that validate elections and public politics are vacated. It is in the general domain of smart people to assume that being smart is superior in all conditions, much in the same vein that rich people assume that being wealthy is a superior condition to all others. And equally fallacious, for pretty much the same reasons.

Personally I find your brand of cynicism offensive, and for my part have met enough educated people to pray that academically inclined folk never ever wield disproportionate power to their numbers. They are the ones who are ruled by ideology to the exclusion of reality, and with overweening senses of self-adulation seek to save the 'dirty masses' from their ignorance and conditions. I am not impressed. Surely there are other ways of viewing the world that are equally destructive, and those I would also never wish to possess power wielded in excess of the numbers of people who possess them; this is why democracy is the worst system except all the others, and the one I'd rather try to get to work rather than spew pointless invective upon it.

Interestingly, with occasional recent counter-examples I will admit, stupid people tend to choose people smarter than themselves to represent them.

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"I don't need an auditable paper trail to prove that most voters are self-serving "what can you do for ME" idiots. People who can't tie their shoes, have no teeth, vote based on what the candidate says about baby jesus or what kind of free government servi

Very wierd that the richest country in

the world cannot come up with a good fail-proof electronic voting system.
We need to learn from the successful all-electronic voting system from the world's largest democracy India [slashdot.org].

I hate to see some many trees being cut down in the name of democracy to create those paper ballots.

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If India jumped off a bridge, would you?

Just because they did it doesn't mean everyone else should. And just because you haven't heard about major problems caused by it, doesn't mean there weren't any.

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``just because you haven't heard about major problems caused by it, doesn't mean there weren't any.''

And even if there hadn't been any, that doesn't mean there couldn't have been any. If we're making an effort to improve the voting system, we might as well

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Countries don't come up with voting systems, people do. And people in the US have come up with some very good systems indeed.

Unfortunately, support for better voting systems has been lackluster at best in the circles where the decisions about them actually

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"Paper" could mean as little as a few names and base-64 numbers printed on recycled thermal paper. It just has to identify who voted what. And India's voting systems have never exactly been known to get the job done perfectly.

Re:Very wierd that the richest country in

Actually no, it does *NOT* identify who voted what. That would destroy the secret ballot, a cornerstone of democracy. Or do you want bosses threatening your job if you don't vote the right way? The job of a paper ballot is to allow the voter to see that the ballot is correct, and to allow for recounts.

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... It identifies what was voted where (polling place).

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The job of a paper ballot is to allow the voter to see that the ballot is correct, and to allow for recounts.

While that sounds cool and all, the question is, how difficult would it be to for them to program it print out the votes the way the voter put them in and then to count votes differently? It would only have to happen in a few different places to affect th

Still a safeguard

If the result varies signifcantly from the exit poll then one party is very likely to demand a paper recount. When the two don't line up the vendor will come under pretty intense scrutiny.

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Which is exactly the reason for printing the votes.

If somebody suspects the counting was rigged, they take the paper votes and count that, by hand.

To avoid something slipping by you could do a sanity check, by counting X% of the paper votes, and verifying

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"While that sounds cool and all, the question is, how difficult would it be to for them to program it print out the votes the way the voter put them in and then to count votes differently?"

Yes, the main issue is not the kind of ballot used, the issue is

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Or do you want bosses threatening your job if you don't vote the right way?

This is an absurd argument, which I've heard even from people who oppose no-excuse absentee ballots. It is extremely illegal for your boss or anyone else to make such a threat. If

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Illegal as that may be, secret ballots have other implications too. If I call my congressman's office advocating against, say HR 42, which would regulate the sales of science fiction novels, I don't want to have my opinion discarded cause I voted for the

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Except that there's a long and storied history of exactly this happening in the past. Study US elections in the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in New York and other major cities.

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The system in India is not voter verifiable. Nuff said.

Were the richest country.

Now we are very much a debtor country and getting poorer quickly. The very wealthy have been moving their money (and companies) out of America, because the Dollar is dropping against everything except the chinese yuan where it is fixed against our dollar.

Like A Paper Trail Means Anything

Print one thing and record another.

Why should you having a piece of paper saying you voted some way mean anything? Last election the exit polls indicated a result significantly different than what was declared official.

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...and that is why you'd have a voter-verified paper trail instead. And recounts, don't forget the recounts.

Re:Like A Paper Trail Means Anything

You spot check. Count the vote in N% of the precincts. If the count doesn't match, automatic full recount on the paper ballots.

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Someone already said to spot check, and that's important. But you also have the ability to have a far more accurate recount in the case of a close election.

If every voter has verified that the paper version of his/her ballot is correct, then a hand recount

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In an anonymous system, it is (by definition) impossible to match up a single paper vote with a single electronic vote - always assuming the electronic votes are kept separate at all.

The ONLY workable system is to keep all individual votes separate in bo

Why must we go with e-voting?

I don't see why we must go completely electronic. In the county I live in, we fill in very large circles on paper using a marker. That paper is then fed into a machine that electronically counts the votes. It's just as efficient (time-wise) as completely electronic voting, but it doesn't require the complexity that the e-voting machines require. It also allows for an easy-to-read paper-trail system (unlike the "hanging chad" problem back in the 2000 election) for when a recount is required.

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I've always wondered about the security of optical scan voting machines. Wouldn't they be susceptible to many of the same problems as the DREs? I mean, they're still just a computer, and must decipher the various marks on the ballot to determine which are

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I'm a proponent of paper ballots and of a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), and I find optical scan ballots to make a lot of sense. But I can see where electronic voting machines (not necessarily DRE), if designed properly, would be superior to an

Exactly ....

where I live we mark our choice on a piece of paper ... when the polls close actual people open the boxes and count who voted for whom ... scrutineers from both parties watch the counting to make sure all is well .... results are still in by 10pm .... our

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What do you do with half-filled circles and stray marks? What if they fill in Bush but write in Gore?

That is the big problem with paper ballots - they can be incorrectly filled out.

I'm for a hybrid approach - GUI for ballot validation, secure voter-verifi

Probably offtopic, but

I think we should keep voting as a solid paper trail until we fix something far more important that just HOW we vote: who votes.

I find it odd that our country spends the GDP of some small countries in campaign spending, and yet there is one small change that I think would revolutionize the way people vote: make Voting Day a holiday. Yes, just like the 4th of July, all companies close, school is out at all levels (elementary, middle/high school, and college.) Make kids realize that this is something important. I think anybody would be hard pressed to argue that celebrating the 4th of July is more important historically or iconically than voting.

Re:Probably offtopic, but

Maybe, but I think a lot of people would just go party or something instead of using the time off to vote. And companies are required by law to let their employees have time off to go vote. With all of the news coverage on election day, I think that just about everyone is aware of what is going on, even if they don't care enough to vote. It also wouldn't be possible for all companies to close. What about news stations, telecommunications providers, restaurants, security and custodial staff in many companies, etc.

I'm not saying that making it a holiday would hurt, I just don't think it would actually get too many more people to vote.

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While we are at it, let's make the Republicans and Democrats the only legal parties so as to reduce ambiguity, save money, and remove the third party spoiler effect.

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What about the service industry? A good-sized chunk of our nation's population (myself included for several years between undergrad and grad school) works in retail, food service, etc. These places will certainly still be open even if Election Day were d

Open Source Voting System ?

Why don't the Open Source communities in America try to join forces and develop an open voting systems specification (software, hardware and communications protocols), one that is completely open and free to use and implement, and which the individual states can produce themselves (or at least have local companies do it) if they so choose?

Basic demands for any electronic voting system is that it is open, safe and that the results are verifiable. That means that the voting set-up/definitions as well as the machine output and logs must be in plain text (signed to prevent/detect tampering of course) and be made publicly available for all to verify. Not to forget the paper trail.
Ultimately, any voter should be able to plug in a USB drive, and get a complete dump/snapshot of the voting machines software - source and binaries, logs and it's latest hardware certificates.

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Ultimately, any voter should be able to plug in a USB drive, and get a complete dump/snapshot of the voting machines software - source and binaries, logs and it's latest hardware certificates.

No, you shouldn't be able to do that. Why? It provides a f

Next election? That's rather wishful.

There's not going to be a next election.

There. I said it.

Please let me be wrong.

-FL

Black Box Voting

Anyone really interested in this should read about this bill (the "Holt bill") at both http://blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org] and also http://blackboxvoting.com/ [blackboxvoting.com]. Note that these two sites have very different takes on this bill!!! IMHO, they both have valid points.

No difference between Democrats and Republicans?

I read this idea often on slashdot: There's no real difference between Democrats and Republicans.

So I ask those who say this: Would this legislation have come to be in the House under the Republicans? (Answer: it didn't) Yes, it was a bipartisan compromise, but we all know that the compromise wouldn't be possible with the Republicans in charge.

Re:Won't someone please...

Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for temporary preservation of trees deserve neither trees nor liberties!

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Use an electronic voting machine with a paper receipt. one goes to the voter, the other one is displayed through a glass window to the voter to make sure that the system "tallies" it correctly.

No, no NO!

NO RECEIPT goes with the voter. This would create a

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Oh you're one of those eh? "The Democrats do it too!"... so it's fine when the Republicans do it!

By the way, did you notice this story? [slashdot.org]. This is all about the brand new Secretary of State in California, Debra Bowen, giving the DRE manufacturers hell.