On electronic voting...
Oct. 29th, 2006 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redneckgaijinThis morning I was corrected on something I'd misremembered: the study of Diebold voting machines, and the effective impossibility of verifying any true results from them, was done at Princeton, not UMaryland.
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
I've been thinking about electronic voting for quite some time, and here's my proposal:
A voter goes up to an electronic voting machine. They push the buttons for the appropriate candidates or proposals. Once everything's been voted for, they push a button, and a ballot is printed.
The ballot is legible to the naked, unaided eye. In addition to listing the candidates the voter supports in English, there is a bar code at the bottom- similar to the thing scanned at your local checkout- with a series of numbers printed below the code in correspondence to the code.
The voter checks the paper ballot and then either trashes it in a nearby shredder or deposits it in a ballot box.
The votes are counted by machine, scanning the bar code and entering the tally on computer. It is the PAPER BALLOTS which get counted, not the running total on the machine that printed the ballots. If there is a dispute, the ballots can be counted by hand.
The system combines all the claimed benefits of electronic voting with the relative security and trackability of paper ballots. More to the point, it could probably be implemented using off-the-shelf technology for as little as $300 per unit. It's such an obvious solution I'm honestly surprised no one has marketed it.
Yet nobody has. Nobody is. Every single electronic voting system currently in use in the United States produces at best a paper tally- often not visible to the voter at all- but relies on the electronic code alone for results. This code is inherently insecure and untrustworthy... and that, I'm convinced, is WHY it's being used.
I'm glad this county still uses paper ballots, for the moment. If possible, get an absentee paper ballot, send it in, and then demand that all absentee ballots be counted.
In the meantime... any holes in my proposal?
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
I've been thinking about electronic voting for quite some time, and here's my proposal:
A voter goes up to an electronic voting machine. They push the buttons for the appropriate candidates or proposals. Once everything's been voted for, they push a button, and a ballot is printed.
The ballot is legible to the naked, unaided eye. In addition to listing the candidates the voter supports in English, there is a bar code at the bottom- similar to the thing scanned at your local checkout- with a series of numbers printed below the code in correspondence to the code.
The voter checks the paper ballot and then either trashes it in a nearby shredder or deposits it in a ballot box.
The votes are counted by machine, scanning the bar code and entering the tally on computer. It is the PAPER BALLOTS which get counted, not the running total on the machine that printed the ballots. If there is a dispute, the ballots can be counted by hand.
The system combines all the claimed benefits of electronic voting with the relative security and trackability of paper ballots. More to the point, it could probably be implemented using off-the-shelf technology for as little as $300 per unit. It's such an obvious solution I'm honestly surprised no one has marketed it.
Yet nobody has. Nobody is. Every single electronic voting system currently in use in the United States produces at best a paper tally- often not visible to the voter at all- but relies on the electronic code alone for results. This code is inherently insecure and untrustworthy... and that, I'm convinced, is WHY it's being used.
I'm glad this county still uses paper ballots, for the moment. If possible, get an absentee paper ballot, send it in, and then demand that all absentee ballots be counted.
In the meantime... any holes in my proposal?
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-22 10:19 pm (UTC)It is still vulnerable to a deliberate fraud: making the bar-code not agree with the printed output. Given the large number of people who believe the Diebold voting machines are intended to perpetrate electoral fraud, your suggestion doesn't fix everything.
Most of the rest of the world uses crosses on a ballot paper, which are read by hand. That's about as close to foolproof as you can get, because the large number of people needed to do the count makes wholesale fraud very difficult to manage.
It seems to me that elections are too important to allow computers to do the counting.