Study raises concerns as states rush to buy electronic voting machines

Interesting in view of the fact that civil-rights groups are sueing California, claiming the recall will require the use of the old punch-card systems, which apparently their members are too stupid to figure out. These new machines were supposed to be their saviors.

The touch screen machines are easy to use, but then so were punch cards. The real issue is the security of the system. It is real nice to know that there is a piece of paper to fall back on, even one with partly dislodged chad.

I lived in Florida for a good part of my life and voted many times with punch cards. It was easy, simple, did not take extraordinary hand strength and was cheap.

One hidden agenda is to put a paper receipt in the hands of every voter, showing for whom they voted, supposedly to "guarantee the integrity of the system". In many areas, that piece of paper would be worth $10 - $20 on the street outside.

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

Maybe the 'salvaging of the Republic' will be symbolic and America will be destined to be reborn as the republic it was founded as.

errr wrong thread

I don't trust any method of voting that does not physical human readable records of each vote. I like the optically scanned ballots my county uses. They are easily and quickly counted with optical scanners located at each precinct, but they are easily counted by humans if necessary.

One really big problem with computerized voting machines is that computer technology changes rather rapidly compared to the frequecy of elections. Why spend thousands of dollars per machine for technology that will be obsolete in two or three years when most places hold one or two elections plus primaries per year on average.

One hidden agenda is to put a paper receipt in the hands of every voter, showing for whom they voted, supposedly to "guarantee the integrity of the system". In many areas, that piece of paper would be worth $10 - $20 on the street outside

I can imagine thugs surrounding voting places demanding to see those receipts.

I don't trust any method of voting that does not physical human readable records of each vote. I like the optically scanned ballots my county uses. They are easily and quickly counted with optical scanners located at each precinct, but they are easily counted by humans if necessary.

One failure of most paper voting systems (including those with punched cards, optical scanners, or human-readable X's) is that a validly-cast ballot may often be altered so as to yield a differently-validly-cast ballot. For example, if 15% of the ballots in the governor's race contain no vote for governor, the ballots could be easily altered to vote Bustamante, and such alteration would be undetectable.

One solution to this would be to require ballots to be indelibly marked with a count of how many offices were or were not voted. Unfortunately, I know of no system which requires such a thing, and Democrats would insist that it was unfairly complicated.

One really big problem with computerized voting machines is that computer technology changes rather rapidly compared to the frequecy of elections. Why spend thousands of dollars per machine for technology that will be obsolete in two or three years when most places hold one or two elections plus primaries per year on average.

If I were in charge of setting up an electronic voting system, I'd probably use a Z80-based micro with the code stored in a removable bipolar PROM cartridge, which would record votes on a removable bipolar PROM cartridge. The cartridges would be constructed with clearly-visible seals and serialization markings; these would be made visible to voters using the machines.

The vote recording process would be quite simple, all software would be fully open-source, cartridges would have permanent write-protect fuses, and would be verifiable by any interested party representatives before or after the election.

Although some encryption and one-way hashing would be done when counts were reported to the central counting facility, the actual vote records themselves would not be encrypted but merely encoded to protect against alteration [e.g. at the end of each record, write out the number of "0" bits in the record. Since bits in a PROM all start out in one state and, once changed to the other, cannot be changed back, writing out such a count would mean that any alterations to a data record would be detectable.]

Unfortunately, from what I can tell, the systems people are looking at rely upon encryption rather than hardware to protect votes against alteration, and they use flash media to store votes. Consequently, anyone with access to the encryption keys would be able to rewrite the memory cards holding vote data without such rewriting being detectable.

One advantage I've often seen cited for DRE machines is handicapped accessibility. How about instead of using DRE, using a machine which had a front-end like a DRE, but which instead of counting votes would simply fill out an optical-scan ballot which would be counted with all the other optical-scan ballots? People who wanted to simply use a pen and do their optical-scan ballots that way would be able to, but those who were blind or otherwise unable to use the optical-scan ballots directly would have their votes counted the same way as everyone else.

The touch screen machines are easy to use, but then so were punch cards.

We converted from punch cards to the touch screens, too. The touch screens are easy enough for the voters to use, but were far beyond the ability of the poll volunteers to control.
In the primaries, many voters got ballots for the wrong party, and the poll workers didn't know how to change it. A lot of the poll workers quit after that fiasco, so the city used their staff during the general election (and everyone just sort of ignored the fact that that was illegal).
The new poll workers didn't realize that it would take an hour or two to bring the computers up, so many polls didn't open until late (missing the people who usually vote on their way to work).
And then they weren't all clear on how to collect the votes. The machines were supposed to be able to send the totals over the Internet to central collection points, but the workers weren't always sure how to do that. Many just drove the discs to the central collection points, making tabulation late.
And I wouldn't doubt that some successfully transmitted the votes, then weren't sure if they registered, so took the discs to be counted as well. The system has no way to trace votes to individual voters, so I wouldn't be so sure that some votes weren't counted twice.

Any time we insist on an overnight solution to a problem (particularly a problem that is only political), we do more damage. These touch screen voting systems are expensive and probably less accurate than punch cards.
I just wonder how many years it will be before one party (probly the Dems) decides that they have been ripped off by the voting machines again.

I can imagine thugs surrounding voting places demanding to see those receipts.

There are a variety of good reasons not to let people have a receipt they can take with. If you have a machine which prints out a person's ballot when they're done voting, but the person is required to surrender that ballot to the counting machine before the vote will be counted, then anyone who tries to show their ballot to the thug outside would thereby invalidate it.