Re: Touch Screen Voting systems

From: Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr (winston_at_SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:24:54 GMT

In article <410A739B.C8554F6@teksavvy.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@teksavvy.com> writes:
>Bob Koehler wrote:
>> The vendor (ESS) added an electronic, battery-backup "paper trail"
>> that could be reprocesed to reproduce the counts. In testing this
>> is sometimes unreadable after a crash.
>
>Haven't any of these guys heard of flash memory ?
>
>While modern flash memory cards seem to act more like RAM than flash, it
>should still be possible to have the behaviour of the older flash memory where
>you can't really erase anything (unless you reformat the chip (erase everything).
>
>A machine could have dual flash memories which would be read by 2 separate
>counting machines to authenticate the vote.
>

The problem here is that it gives no stage where the voter gets to verify that
what gets recorded into memory is what the voter wanted it to be. A paper
ballot leaves a physical object which is verified by the voter, is not very
much subject to remote hacking, and can be independently verified later - so
recounts are meaningful.

(Of course, there's a long history of paper ballot abuse too - pre-filled
ballots stuffed in ballot boxes, etc - but you pretty much have to do it
retail, precinct-by-precinct. Closed-source, no-paper-trail voting machines
give the opportunity for wholesale vote fraud, whether because the
manufacturer as policy inserted trapdoors (which is what the people who noticed
the Diebold exec talking about his commitment to deliver his state's electoral
votes to one candidate were worried about), or accidentally inserted trapdoors
(perhaps because staff were corrupt, playful, or just incompetent), or had
their code hacked by outsiders before the machines were deployed, or, in the
ill-advised idea of COTS-based machines which report vote totals over the
Internet, hacked by anybody handy.)

>
>Because our votes are simple (vote for one person only), they count them
>manually and this works well.
>
>In the USA, because votes include multiple votes (president, senators,
>governors, attorneys, various resolutions etc), it isn't so simple to count
>the ballots.

San Mateo County, where I vote, uses a scheme where you use a thick black pen
to draw a line indicating your vote. This is quite legible - though obviously
not good enough for blind voters - and machine countable; the ballot is in a
single-column format, and I've never found the layout confusing.

I've never understood why the disability lobby _objects_ to a paper trail.
Maybe it doesn't do them any good, but it doesn't do them any harm either,
and it does the accountability of the election process considerable good.

-- Alan 

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 Alan Winston --- WINSTON@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
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