Huffington Post blogger Robert D. Atkinson recently posted a column opposing HR 811, Rep. Rush Holt's bill to require a voter-verified paper record of each vote, because he feels that new technology which has never been used in a government election might come to the rescue at some point in the indefinite future.
Let's remember the problem that HR 811 will solve. Many states and counties still use paperless electronic voting systems. There is no way to tell whether the recorded votes in these systems have any relation to the votes actually cast.
This problem is urgent. Only a few months ago, the Secretary of State of California commissioned a large team of world-class computer security experts to evaluate California's current electronic voting. The team demonstrated that three different systems in current use could be completely taken over by a single anonymous poll worker, who could control how the machines recorded and reported every electronic vote in a subsequent election.
Atkinson's solution? To wait, indefinitely. He promotes theoretical proposals by cryptographers to provide "universal verifiability," while preserving ballot secrecy, and concludes that our highest priority should be to accommodate these voting methods, which have yet to be used any any government election. (Ironically, almost all of these schemes rely on some form of paper ballot.)
Cryptographic voting is definitely not ready for prime time. A few years ago, I tried to organize an expert evaluation of one of the systems discussed at length in the ITIF report. The cryptographers I tried to recruit responded with comments like: "Why don't we just use paper ballots?" If that's how many experts feel about these systems, it's hard to imagine the general public embracing them.
The greatest difficulty with cryptographic voting is lack of transparency. Is a system "universally verifiable" when only a few mathematicians can understand why it can be trusted?
Atkinson's column fails to answer the most important question: What do we do about the horribly insecure paperless electronic voting systems in use now, especially given the results of California's review? How many unbelievable elections are we going to have while we wait for "universal verifiability"?
I would like to see research in cryptographic voting continue, and I hope that, someday, there will be practical results in that area. If and when there is a practical method, legislation can address it at that time if necessary. Meanwhile, we need to deal with the urgent problems we have now, with the technology we have now.
Cryptographic voting is a distraction from dealing with our real problems. That's why it's suddenly so attractive to proponents of electronic voting.
That said, the end-to-end verifiable voting systems do exists although I do not think that they are yet ready for wide deployment. I do think:
* that they should be discussed and seriously considered
* that additional funding for basic research of E2E verifiable technologies should be supported
* that limited deployment of E2E verifiable systems should be allowed and encouraged
* laws that frustrate any of the above are misguided
I encourage people to read up on such systems, many of which do not involve electronic voting machines. For example, punchscan:
http://allaboutvoting.com/2007/07/27/the-punchscan-voting-system/
I have some detailed reviews of the ITIF eVoting report here. Start here:
http://allaboutvoting.com/2007/09/19/buzz-about-itifs-evoting-report/
What problem or difficulty is there, to what has just been described, that the "punchscan voting system" solves or makes easier?
I linked to the allaboutvoting page referenced to in the above post, and finding no physical description of what "punchscan voting" was, then linked to the punchscan.org "learn more" page, and after watching the tutorial that physically described the "punchscan voting system" (which seems to involve a multi-step process of simply 'punching' a hole through, or otherwise marking a ballot, and then placing that ballot before an electronic scanner), I'm left to ask:
What problem does this hybrid system of punch-cards and electronic scanning solve?
As opposed to the method I described above, why is an electronic scanner (expensive to buy and maintain, and impossible to fix by anybody other than a qualified technician of the vendor's) needed?
And if I'm wrong in thinking that the ballot was in someway "punched", and was instead simply marked, then why is it called "punchscan" voting?
Again, what problem or difficulty does the "punchscan voting system" solve or make easier?
>ballot by an election official, on which there
>was printed the names "Bush" and "Gore", with
>check-boxes next to each of those names; and
>that person then makes a check or an "X" or
>some other definite and indelible mark, in
>one or the other box; and then hands that
>paper ballot back to the election official,
>to be counted; or otherwise places it
>themselves in a ballot box, to be counted...
>
>What problem or difficulty is there, to what
>has just been described, that the "punchscan
>voting system" solves or makes easier?
Punchscan's answer, as written in their FAQ:
http://www.punchscan.org/faq.php
21. Wouldn’t good old-fashioned paper ballots counted by hand in each polling place provide a higher level of integrity for election outcomes?
The reasons for automating in the US actually included improving integrity as well as the difficulty of counting the many contests. It might be possible to get enough people to observe and count in the US today in order to achieve a high-level of integrity for basic voting. But such an approach cannot secure absentee ballots traveling through the mails, a significant and growing fraction of voting, that has different demographics/statistics and thus cannot be ignored as far as integrity. Also, polling-place counting cannot provide privacy to provisional voters, which would significantly diminish this important voter protection now required under US law. (Punchscan should be able to accommodate both absentee and provisional voting with full integrity and privacy as mentioned in question q9.) Also, vote buying and coercion are facilitated, because whole ballots are shown (see q15), bearing vote patterns, potentially deliberately identifying marks and write-ins, thereby allowing checking by vote buyers and coercers. Not to mention all the time-tested tricks for clandestinely altering, substituting, and invalidating traditional paper ballots.
>[Dem02020]Were someone to be handed a paper
>ballot by an election official, on which there
>was printed the names "Bush" and "Gore", with
>check-boxes next to each of those names; and
>that person then makes a check or an "X" or
>some other definite and indelible mark, in
>one or the other box; and then hands that
>paper ballot back to the election official,
>to be counted; or otherwise places it
>themselves in a ballot box, to be counted...
>
>What problem or difficulty is there, to what
>has just been described, that the "punchscan
>voting system" solves or makes easier?
My answer:
End-to-end verifiable systems address several problems with conventional voting systems.
Some of the problems:
1. Just because you drop your ballot into a ballot box how are you confident that your vote is counted? What if after you leave someone removes your ballot? What if someone stuffs the ballot box with bogus ballots? What if someone alters your ballot to change or spoil your vote? What if some of the votes are "lost"?
2. Vote buying or coercion may be possible if someone with inside access to the voting system can look for your ballot which you mark in some identifiable way. For example, the local 'political machine' can say "Write your name in for county judge and vote for our man for mayor. We will see your ballot and know if you did as we said."
These are not just paranoid theoretical possibilities. The US has a long history of election fraud. For example, there are arguments that the careers of 6 out of 11 post-WWII US presidents were heavily influenced by election fraud:
http://www.rangevoting.org/PresFraud.html
Something as simple and as understandable and as time-honored as the manual recording casting and counting of paper ballots is, and these neurotics think "everything's wrong" with it, and they have a brilliant idea how to fix it.
And just like everybody else who goes about fixing something that isn't broken in the first place, they make a mess of it, and keep adding things that require more things, and more things are required on top of them, and then you have to make sure that you have this, to be sure of that, and...
And what they wind up with, in place of the simple understandable time-honored thing that wasn't broken in the first place, is something that looks like those cartoons that Rube Goldberg used to draw.
And oh yeah, theres also a kind of person who may not be neurotic in the least, but they're trying to sell you electronic voting (either for the wealth from selling and maintaining and operating electronic voting machines, or for the power they would have, to control and corrupt election results); and this type of person plays on and fires up, the type that thinks "eveything's wrong", and that the manual recording casting and counting of paper ballots, needs to be fixed.
...needs to be "fixed"
Yeah right, our elections sure will be "fixed", if we allow these con artists and would-be "election czars" to sell us electronic voting; and if we allow those neurotic voices in the debate, to convince us or anyone else, that "everything's wrong" and they know a brilliant way to fix it.
>time-honored as the manual recording casting and
>counting of paper ballots is, and these neurotics
>think "everything's wrong" with it, and they
>have a brilliant idea how to fix it.
But something is wrong with most voting systems including paper hand-counted ones. They can be frauded in a way that is invisible to the voter. The US has a long history of election fraud, mostly on paper systems.
http://www.rangevoting.org/PresFraud.html
I don't have the time or the inclination to research your allegations, so perhaps if you could cite at least one, and perhaps three, instances of the fraud you find so widespread (three out of what must be thousands, doesn't seem too many to ask for).
And please, restrict your citations to either U.S. Congressional elections or Presidential elections or Gubernatorial elections (don't bother me with a crooked County Supervisor or City Council election please)...
And how about keeping it at least in our lifetime, let's say since 1970.
Because I try and stay up on national events, and have been for some years now, and I have not the slightest awareness of the problem, that you seem to think surrounds us all.
Thanks.
Look, folks. Flip a single instruction, often a single byte, and you're screwed. Even worse, the voting machine people are not required to submit their software or firmware to government scrutiny.
I live in Florida--indeed, Volusia County, FL--so I haven't a clue as to whether my votes over the past decade have been tallied as I intended. That is totally unacceptable.
Too few Americans vote as it is. If we know our votes might either be discarded or, worse, flipped to our candidate's opponent... Then why vote at all?
runs the country, what relevance does voting
really have, anymore? Sure, you can push the
little buttons, mark the little fields on
the ballot paper, but what's REALLY going on,
here? Way back in Y2K, the election got handed
to Curious George. Remember that? That's when
we first realized that the vote is a feel-good
exercise, and that there's Something Rotten In
Denmark.
I think they should do like at the grocery
store, someone gets FIRED if that tally is
wrong, and temporary store clerks could be
enlisted to do double duty at polling stations
to fulfil a similar function as proctors/vote
counters, to make sure they get it right.
Alternatively, if they think they've got it
together, they could go with web-based voting,
the ultimate in Albore's e-government. That'd
save time, money, and confusion, but the question remains as to how the accuracy
could be independently confirmed, prevent
hackers from taking over the election and
modifying the results, etc. Someone somewhere
will think of something, no doubt....
Given that election challenges can drag on, and that the invested parties likely will have plenty of money to spend on computers time, I have trouble believing that even a state of the art scheme would be perfectly safe, especially when there is a necessary time and technological lag between implementation and use of the system.
Anyone who proposes crypto-voting at this time is deluded or just ignorant.
Here's how it can work: when you mark your ballot, or punch it or what-have-you, you slide it through a reader which ... firt, with a light rotating brush, removes any "chads" ... then, with an optical scanner, checks the ballot for completeness and readability. If the light goes "green," the ballot is good and it goes into the box. If "red," it's spit back out at you.
Problem solved.
The computers can easily record the tallies from the "green" counts, giving a quick-but-unofficial electronic tally of the votes that are inside that box.
A physical collection of known-to-be-readable ballots is securely locked inside of that box.
Oh and knute, I think that it might require two hours worth of Iraq funding, and aren't the Marines supposed to be guarding the embassies, and the people in them? Oh wait, that's blackwater, sorry!
Are elections in the United States now merely a sop to voters, an empty charade that has no relationship to what government actually does?
I think it's a fair question. Based on the evidence, in practical terms our national elections are meaningless. We have apparently evolved a political class that, regardless of their claimed ideology or membership in any particular party, all agree between themselves on policies that bear no relationship to the desires of the people.
It appears to me that voter fraud is the least of our problems.
You can argue that the last two presidential elections shouldn't have been close and that there are many similarly critical problems that contributed to that - and I would agree. But this has to get fixed immediately. It can be fixed quickly and inexpensively... the other problems are tougher to solve in short order.
Yes!... and often bear no relationship to what is legal or constitutional as well.
I don't think it is useless to handle voter fraud-that seems to me to be important to address, along with post election behavior by elected officials which reflects the requests of their constituents and the values of their party.
Hopefully, alternative press will allow for those requests to be something other than what corp news sources think is in best interest for our citizens.
Accuracy in elections. It's not only a good idea. It's the law.
Umm?
I know!
What about a Paper Ballot where you punch out the,,, chad,,,, with butt of an INK pen, and also make a mark beside your choice?
If there is a hanging ,, CHAD,, they could confirm your vote with a look to the adjacent box where you have made your mark in indelible INK.
My view? INK should be on Ballots, NOT fingers.
We could use the recycled paper, ride our bicycles to the polling places and glare at others that would kill our children and destroy the earth.
To finance these printings, we could suspend all payments going to Iraq for one hour of war expense and hire Marines sworn to uphold the Constitution and would DIE for its preservation to guard the Ballot Boxes and see to it they are not tampered with.
Just a thought.
All the best
Knute (Neo-LIB)
I'd emphasize where you point out that the votes are counted, in the same place where they're cast.
And also the time it takes to count them accurately: I'd have said twenty-four hours, or two days, or three or five...
Three weeks? Sure. Why not.
Who the heck thinks we're dealing with a house on fire, or a sinking ship: those are situations that yes, you're in a mad rush.
We're not in a mad rush to count the votes that decide the election of our lawmakers and ministers of government and whatever else.
There's no house afire, or sinking ship: take the time, and be certain of the tally.