Glass Box Voting

Interesting article on the costs of voting machines. A spokesman for Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold Election Systems) is quoted saying:

“An ATM is significantly a more expensive device than a voting terminal…” said Riggall. “Were you to develop something that was as robust as an ATM, both in terms of the physical engineering of it and all aspects, clearly that would be something that the average jurisdiction cannot afford.”

Glass Box Voting was founded on the premise that that statement is not true.

The article also reminds us of the fun fact that Diebold Accuvote-TS machines can be opened with a standard minibar key.

I do not agree with the premise of the headline that money for improving voting machines has all gone to Iraq - our government has the resources to fund multiple priorities, and the integrity of the voting process seems to me to be an important priority. I agree with Ed Felten:

“It all depends what you compare it to,” said Felten. “If you compare the amount of money we spend actually administering the election versus the amount that’s spent trying to convince people to vote this way or that way, it looks pretty small. It you compare it against the importance of getting the outcome right, it also looks relatively small. So, to me, it’s an investment that we should be willing to make.”

Hat tip to infodiva and slashdot. Also want to remind new readers of an old post: The difference between an ATM and a voting machine.  Edit - oops, meant to link to Voting as a security problem.

Another article about public discontent with electronic voting machines, the complaint is lack of VVPAT.  I had not heard of Danaher machines, will have to learn more about those.

From New Jersey, reports of reliability concerns with Sequoia machines.

From Ohio, news of a speaking tour by two representatives of the Secretary of State’s office to raise awareness of the results of the Everest Study (pdf link), concluded in December 2007.

On gmiller’s OSDV blog, which I found from the Facebook group .

[UPDATE]

I’m in favor of unmoderated comments.  Once I figure out how to set this site to do that, I will.

Interesting article in today’s Post.

In addition to machines, I believe most jurisdictions need more citizens to take part in election administration beyond just election day, both before the day (getting trained in election procedures generally) and after (auditing).

Glass Box Voting will not be able to supply certified machines for the 2008 elections, but we will have some ready for municipality-scale elections by election day 2009.

[UPDATE]

The administrator mentioned not knowing if the money is there. That’s a problem between him, Virginia, and the Electoral Assistance Commission, of course, but as far as I know, there are still billions in unallocated HAVA funds. What he lacks are products that are easy to administer, flexible enough to meet local requirements, and secure enough that the public will accept them. What a shame.

A good article on recent history and where things stand today with voting machines. A quote:

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

Generally a good article, although it tends to oversimplify - touch-screen does not have to mean paperless, for example. There’s a bit in the last page that points out that optical scan ballots are not a panacea:

Still, optical scanning is hardly a flawless system. If someone doesn’t mark a ballot clearly, a recount can wind up back in the morass of arguing over “voter intent.” The machines also need to be carefully calibrated so they don’t miscount ballots. Blind people may need an extra device installed to help them vote. Poorly trained poll workers could simply lose ballots. And the machines do, in fact, run software that can be hacked: Sancho himself has used computer scientists to hack his machines.

A DRE+VVPAT system can offer accessibility features that a sheet of paper alone cannot do, and can also simplify complex ballots. I spoke to an election judge from Half Moon Bay who described just how complex the paper balloting procedure is during a primary election. They must have ballots on hand for each of twelve registered political parties, with instructions written in any language spoken by more than 5% of the local population, which in his case is English, Chinese and Spanish. The resulting thirty-six ballots are difficult to handle.

The Problem With Voting Machines

Bruce Schneier is a vital information source to keep track of news in the area of cryptography and security. In 2004 he published an article on his blog entitled The Problem With Voting Machines. At the start of that article he summarizes the four required characteristics of a voting system: accuracy, anonymity, scalability and speed.

Accuracy means both correctly capturing voter intent in a cast vote record of some form and then protecting it from modification, loss or forgery. Anonymity is the same as ballot secrecy or voter privacy - the principle that a voter’s identity can in no way be determined from the cast vote record. Scalability refers to the ability for the systems to handle the large surges of usage that come on election day, as well as the complexity of overlapping jurisdictions. Speed means the ability for the system to produce official results rapidly.

Schneier’s recommendation is twofold - first that all DREs must use VVPAT and second that software must be open to public scrutiny.

Why Johnny Can’t Vote

Barbara Simons is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and expert on voting systems. In March 2005 she wrote a valuable editorial in the APS News. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but her conclusion is worth quoting in its entirety:

The issue of e-voting should have been primarily a technological issue—one involving computer security, human factors, reliability, and efficiency. Instead, because of the vast sums of money involved, e-voting has been heavily politicized.

Election officials were told that DREs in the long run would be cheaper than alternative voting systems. They were told that DREs had been extensively tested and that the certification process guaranteed that the machines were reliable and secure. No mention was made of the significant costs of testing and of secure storage of DREs; no mention was made of the inadequacy of the testing and certification processes, to say nothing of the difficulty of creating bug-free software.

Technologists are attempting to educate election officials, policy makers, and the public about the risks of paperless DREs. It is critical for the continued existence of democracy throughout the world that we succeed.