E-Voting Reform Bill Gaining Adherants

JeremyDuffy sends us to Ars Technica for a look at an e-voting bill making its way through Congress that is gaining the support of the likes of Ed Felten and the EFF. Quoting: "HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available."

Re:Good, but so what?

[unclethehornet]

If you want a real e-democracy that can make a difference....

http://www.blognow.com.au/edemocracy [blognow.com.au]

Congratulations, you just killed it

[ericfitz]

By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill. Do you think Microsoft and Sun are going to sit by and watch a market opportunity vanish? Do you think Linux advocate lobbyists are going to show up at Congressmens' doors with campaign checks?

This is a case of sacrificing the good by demanding the perfect. If the bill had instead required that only the voting software installed on the voting machines be open source, then the bill would not have alienated so many parties with enough money to kill it.

Yes, I did RTFA and I read the relevant text of the bill (section 247(C)9). The languange doesn't differentiate between platform software and software specific to the e-voting task.

France ...

[koxkoxkox]

If only the French government did the same thing ... In France, electronic vote will be used for the next presidential elections, without any of these guarantees and without any open debate with the citizens.

A lot of people are against this evolution, as shown by a petition on the Internet : http://www.recul-democratique.org/About-us.html [recul-democratique.org], and they demand approximatively the same requirements. People have to trust completely the result of the elections and they can't rely on the report of a private expert claiming that the program is secure. So it means open source for the computer scientists originating this petition and paper trail for the vast majority of the population who don't feel completely safe about the whole dematerialisation process.

Excuse me for any spelling or grammar mistake, or correct me in french. :o)

Re:There is no Excuse for laziness.

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, it's amazing that it even took this long to get a bill that's at least partly decent, since the previous electronic voting bills (both passed and proposed) were so weak on common sense and good functionality. Like LBJ said,

You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.

This bill at least reduces a lot of the possible bads.

More business

[Anonymous Coward]

What else would Diebold want? If this bill passes it would invalidate all the machines they
sold. They can then sell new machines to these customers.

spoofing voting an election

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently audited a local election in vote-buying prone Eastern Kentucky. Had I access to the voting machines, I could have pre-loaded the paper tapes with my desired results- all the observers would have signed off, seeing the printouts come out of the machines. In order to compare and count the voter sign-in sheet to the count generated by the voting machine, the candidate that lost the election would have had to spend thousands of dollars for a "re-count" (vs a re-canvass). One could not even count the signatures in the sign in sheets and compare that to the voting machine count under the "re-canvass" rules. Requiring a paper trail, and a statistical audit for each election would lower the risk of machine fraud. The recent Scientific American article on voting machines indicates that adding a headphone audio feedback to the e-voting paper trail reduces erroneous votes better than the paper trail alone. Clean elections are a good thing for us all. Support this bill!

Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway?

[Alwin Henseler]

In all these discussions about e-voting, I don't really understand why the emphasis on Open Source software for voting computers. Why? The whole problem with e-voting is in transparency of the process. Does Open Source inside such a machine change that? How?

Can you see what compiler was used to turn source into binary? Can you verify that published source/binaries are the same as what's inside the machine in front of you? Can you verify that the hardware is the same as what the software is expected to run on? Can you verify that the hardware works as intended (like, no memory errors etc)? I expect that for most (or all) of these questions, the answer will be: no, not really.

That's the whole point of a paper trail. Essentially, it makes the counting black box irrelevant (as long as the paper trail is considered the authoritive result, that is). Wrong vote stored on flash? Who cares, as long as the correct vote is written on the paper output (and the voter can verify that before leaving).

At that point, what's inside the black box doesn't matter much anymore, and basicly serves to make voting easier, or help to get a quick (preliminary!) count of what the end result might look like. Closed source software, or unknown hardware inside? What's the problem as long as the correct votes are printed on dead tree, and verified by the voter?

But also at this point, the 'added value' of a voting computer becomes a mystery to me. Why not just ditch them? If you want quicker results, organise better or get more people to count votes. Good organisation (and paper!) is really all you need for elections that are both fair, and with quick results.