CA Proposes Rigorous Voting Machine Testing 172
christian.einfeldt writes "During her successful campaign for California Secretary of State, newly-minted California Elections Czar Debra Bowen spoke repeatedly of the need to use free open source software in voting machines to ensure the integrity of California's elections. Now that Secretary Bowen is acting on that campaign pledge, closed-source voting machine vendor Diebold worries aloud that rejecting its black-box voting machines could snarl California's elections. Diebold's concerns come at the same time that it is suing Massachusetts for declining to purchase those same voting machines." Quoting: "California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could [have the result of banishing] ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state. For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with 'red teams' of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes."
As much as I dislike CA.... (Score:3, Interesting)
And, wait... are you complaining that your car has stricter emissions standards? I'm certainly not, living in the second-most smog infested state in the US. If it weren't for CA emissions being standard on so many vehicles sold outside that state, it might be even worse here...
Re:novel idea (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Create software for electronic voting. Use pictures of candidates (and their names, of coz').
2. Add a printing plugin that spits out a little chit with the picture of the candidate that the voter selected, as well as a bar code that includes the name of the candidate.
3. Place chit in voting box for validation if required - used in case recounts are requested.
4. Profit!!!
Re:As much as I dislike CA.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Many car companies might, this is true. But I'd be willing to bet that some car companies would make it an option, albiet an expensive one.
As other posters have pointed out, there are cars sold that don't meet the CA standard. There's packages of solder that don't contain the "This product blah blah state of California blah blah" label. The point is, CA is deciding what's best for it, not for anyone else. It's not their fault if many large companies go along for the ride.
This should be so simple... (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, I think even _I_ could design such a system:
- Buy a standard issue PC with a standard issue laserprinter
- Make a simple voting program
- Give every voter a Live CD with a unique hard coded serial.
- The CD is inserted under the supervision of election workers, and the PC is booted up.
- The voters goes behind the curtain where they find a screen, a mouse and a printer.
- The voter casts his/her wote. The vote and the unique ID is stored on the local HD, and two coppies is printed out on paper.
- The voter comes out, ejects the CD AND KEEPS IT, and puts one paper vote in a ballot box. Keeps the other copy.
- The computer is powered down before the next vote.
This way one can always check the DB against the paper ballots afterwords. AND: Every citizen who thinks the election has been tampered with can A: Review the software on their CD. B: Check the official "election website", punch in the unique ID from the CD/paper coppy and verify that it's registered correctly.
This is not complex, this is not expensive, this is not difficult, and as far as I can see; this is practicaly fool proof given a certain degree of random manual chek of wotes. (To eliminate the factor involving electorial workers doing nasty stuff to the PCs etc.)
Or am I over looking something here...?
Re:novel idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Shouldn't the list of requirements for Calfornia's voting machine aquisitions have a clause about "Company should not have repeatedly lied to California legislators, covered up known flaws, nor violated deployment policies by modifying units in the field without validation of those modifications"?
Diebold has been in trouble with California before. The fact that they can continue to even try to offer voting machines in that state kinda surprises me.
Nice to see (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/bio.htm [ca.gov]
Re:Nice to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Go Debra go! So nice to have a real, live she-geek in public office!
How hard can it be to program a voting machine? (Score:4, Interesting)
They just take votes and record them. The only remotely novel programming problem should be the security, and they don't appear to have implemented any! How can these machines keep screwing up when ATMs keep on not screwing up?
I'm not a computer scientist, but I know many of you are. Is there some hidden level of difficulty here? Some reason why making voting machines should be such a challenge for Diebold?
Re:How hard can it be to program a voting machine? (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft, who sells into a huge and varied market, has to worry about copyright and competitors swiping their intellectual property. Diebold deals with a much smaller customer base which is easily audited. Do you really think that county election officials are going to risk buying their voting machine s/w on the black market?
It is not uncommon for vendors to provide the source code for critical systems with embedded software for quality control purposes. Its just a matter of getting an NDA signed, which with responsible customers, isn't a big deal.
Re:This should be so simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
One minor nit... This is a bad idea because it makes buying and selling votes more reliable. With a scheme like this, the vote-buyer can verify that the vote-seller really followed instructions before payment is made. As it is now, vote-buying is unreliable (at the retail level) because the buyer can't tell if they got what they paid for.
But, overall there are plenty of good solutions to the problem of voting machines - any of the thousands would do, but closed source is a component of none of them!
Re:Unaccaptable failure rate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Las Vegas manages to operate thousands of video gambline machines that are far more complicated mechanically speaking(it has to dispense stuff) that have to pass extremely rigorous standards, there are millions of ATM machines that have incredibly low error rates.
Sure, we could build it. It'd likely be more complicated to set up than the diebold stuff. It'd certainly be more expensive. ATMs used to have more problems and offer more limited service. There used to be some easy ways to fool with slot machines and such.
Still, right now I happen to like the idea of #2 pencil style OCR paper ballots. They're simple, human readable while still giving you most of the speed of electronic.
Besides, why do we need to know the winners *now*? They won't take office until months down the road anyways.
Re:Unless the vote is on paper... (Score:3, Interesting)
As I've mentioned before when this issue is raised, computers should only be used for electronic ballot preparation. The actual ballot which you use for casting your vote should be prepared in the voting booth, and be done using OCR characters and/or a bar code (or something simple but easy for a voter to evaluate). At that point, who cares what company has actually designed the equipment for the vote processing?
You can establish standards for both document preparation as well as being able to "load" the current election data that lists all of the "official" candidates that have previously registered with the local election board, and all other ballot questions. Writing such a standard would be a generally trivial exercise, and could be easily extended to take care of unusual voting situations (like instant run-off votes or other crazy schemes to count votes).
By having such standards, anybody including a small group of hackers could develop a system for sale to their local election officials, and have some tests to verify that the software and system actually does what it is supposed to do. And more importantly, it could commoditize the election supply business instead of being locked in by one single company like Diebold. Of course Diebold could offer their equipment for sale as well at a competitive price, but that doesn't matter.
Besides, if the voter looks at the ballot and verifies that the information is correct, that is a voter certified election. And it can be recounted dozens of times and get the same results. The largest problems with elections is that voters sometimes mess up the ballot by marking beyond the lines or vote for two people when only one vote is valid. Electronic ballot preparation deals with all of those problems and more. It even helps to stop some types of voting fraud, as these prepared ballots would be easy to spot something that has been tampered with.
There is no reason why the same machines that are preparing and helping voters to cast their ballots should be used to do the counting of the votes. This also helps with the unfortunate situations where you have equipment malfunctions when a voter is in the middle of casting their ballot. They can stop, move to another machine, and perhaps start from the beginning but they have a real chance of making sure their votes actually count for something. Any partially printed ballots can be discarded, and each voter can be verified with the use of tickets or some other system to make sure they only vote once. So even if they sit and press "finished" a dozen times and have a dozen ballots prepared, the judges can accept only one of those ballots and it is up to the voter to decide which one of the ballots they made would be their actual ballot cast for that election.
If casting a ballot with a Dibold machine when you are half way through voting or worse if the machine crashes as you are finishing up your selections, you are screwed as a voter and there is a real possibility that you will become disenfranchised for that election.
In short, a paper trail, while a good start, is not the best possible option. The voter needs to be directly in control of the process of casting their vote, and not trust the reliability of some machine that is known to be tempermental.