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Programming Government Politics Technology

Building Tools to Track Election Problems 21

Posted by michael from the fighting-the-good-fight dept.
grugnog writes "The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of tools to assist Election Protection Organizations and their members to record and react to election day incidents and irregularities. Volunteers are needed to both code the EIRS system (which is based on open source systems: AdvoKit, PHPSurveyor, MapServer, and geocoder.us) and to volunteer technical expertise to logic & accuracy testing of voting machines and poll watching through the Verified Voting Foundation."
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Building Tools to Track Election Problems More

Building Tools to Track Election Problems

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  • Some independent observations... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by w3rzr0b0t5 ( 816100 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @03:18PM (#10545752)
    ... would be welcomed. There's too much knee-jerk reaction against electronic voting. If we tackle this as a technical issue and try to eliminate some of the reactionary mistrust from the process, I think we can come up with a way to satisfy everybody of the efficacy of electronic voting.

    I agree that there are some issues here, and perhaps you need a paper trail to begin with. In the future, there's not going to be a paper trail at all. But we need to get confidence in the process before that happens.

    From what I see so far, the left is against this, and the right is for it. The left in this country is traditionally seen as doing the most ballot-box tampering (i.e. Mayor Daley, dead people voting, etc.), and the right is traditionally seen as doing the most voter intimidation (i.e. misinformation campaigns, pointing people to the wrong precincts, etc). What will an electronic voting system do to these stereotypes?

    What remains to be seen is what safeguards can be put in place to guard against tampering and data loss. I'm curious to find out what sort of tamper-proof designs have been put in place, and are issues like battery-backup and power surges being dealt with as well?
    • How about an open-source alternative to voting? It would obviously require quite a bit of funding, but here's the general idea:

      1. A website where people can record the way they voted.

      2. There needs to be a way to keep people from voting more than once; this is more difficult. We don't want to be able to keep track of the individual votes, merely who has already voted, and the Social Security Number "should be" a unique identifier for each citizen, but of course there are issues with using that for any

    • Re:Some independent observations... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @04:41AM (#10549182)
      No, you will ALWAYS need a paper trail. Period. If you don't have a paper trail and if that paper trail is not counted, then you have no way of making sure that the electronic vote is correct. You can make the software on the machines open source, you can put in all the encryption you want. It won't matter. The people interested in hacking it have access to the physical hardware.

      If you have physical access to a machine, you win. There is no way to make a machine unhackable if you have physical access- with physical access you can change the software, and remove any encryption chips and whatnot. To ensure the vote is counted correctly, something the voter can verify needs to be printed out.

      To make voting secure, there's only one way of doing it. The same way mainframes do it, the same way NASA does it- redundancy. You need multiple ways of counting the votes, to ensure that the ways match. Have an electronic system, and have it print out a paper receipt. Have the receipts OCRed for a second count. Have the receipts hand counted for a third. Have the 3 counts done by separate groups. If all 3 votes match within a reasonable error, we have a winner. If 2 match and the 3rd is off, the off count is rejected and the 2 matching counts are used. If all 3 are off, the election is invalid and must be redone. With a system like this, you need to break not 1 but two separate counting groups. This kind of redundancy is the only way you can make vote counting secure.
    • I'm all for electronic voting, but there needs to be accountability built into the system. My vision is something like this:

      Go into voting booth, key in votes, voting machine spits out two (or three, depending how redundant you want to be) identical bar coded pieces of cardstock or material of similar thickness, maybe plastic.

      Leave the voting booth and go to the next station, insert one bar coded piece of card stock. This machine counts your vote and files your paper vote.

      Go home or to public librar

    • By what definition is Richard M Daley Jr. (or his late father) "left"? Is conservativism a purely Republican vice now, not allowed for Democrats? (Not allowed by whom?) Neither are all conservatives Republican nor nearly all to the left of Bush Democrats.

      Unless all source code on any voting device is available for examining and compiling by any requesting voter, I think any voter is justified in mistrusting the enumeration of votes.

      Unless the ballots are available for re-examination, there is no way of

  • Does it really need much ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @04:41PM (#10546246)
    Electronic voting machines the print out a ballot that is human verifiable and machine readable should resolve about 95% of the problem. With this type of setup and random recounts of the ballots in a small portion of locations, A high level of confidence should be able to be achieved. You also gain the added advantage of not worrying about what goes on inside the voting machines as long as you can verify that they are all running identical versions, MD5 summing their roms should take care of that as well.

  • I have two tools (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 )

    I have two tools not to track but to solve the election problems:

    1. pen
    2. paper

    Novel idea, isn't it?

  • help? (Score:2)

    by gabe ( 6734 )
    From what I understand they're already finished developing EIRS, they just need to test it now.

  • Volunteers (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My friend Chad and I will hang around to help!
  • oh.. election problems.. sorry
  • Developers: Building Tools to Track Election Problems

    We Already Have Tools In This Election. The tools I refer to are the Republican and Democratic parties!

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