From A Damaging Paper Chase In Voting by Timothy J. Ryan for the Washington Post comes this piece opposing HR811. Among other things it points out that HR811 would conflict with voting systems that cannot provide a paper trail (like Prime III, an Auburn University project that I am not familiar with and hence do not endorse in any way) or cannot preserve all paper records (like punchscan) I would be interested in hearing the reaction of people involved with punchscan to this piece.
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, punchscan, security, votingmachines
Avi Rubin is a professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University who is famous for bringing to light vulnerabilities in Diebold Election Systems’s Accuvote electronic voting machines.
(read about his book about the experience: Brave new ballot; The battle to safeguard democracy in the age of electronic voting)
Continue reading
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
From the Ballot Access News:
HR 811, the bill in Congress to require vote-counting machines to produce a paper trail, will not be taken up in the House until September 17 at the earliest. Congressman Rush Holt (D-N.J.) had hoped it would pass the House this week, but it has fierce opposition, both from elections officials who don’t want a paper trail, and from activists who want to eventually eliminate all electronic vote-counting machines. Thus the bill has enemies from both directions.
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
Quoting the New York Times (care of the Brad blog):
It is unfortunate that the bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines. A touch-screen ban would encourage states to use optical scan machines, which rely on paper ballots read by a computer, like a standardized test form. Optical scans are less expensive and less vulnerable to vote theft.
There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting. If the House fails to do so, the Senate should, and it should fight for it to be in the final bill.
There has been a spirited debate about how quickly to require reforms to be implemented. There have been calls for putting a solution off until 2012. That is too long to wait.
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
A good summary from Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog:
H.R. 811, the e-voting bill originally introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, is reportedly up for a vote of the full House of Representatives tomorrow.
…
H.R. 811 gets the big issues right, requiring a voter-verified paper ballot with post-election audits to verify that the electronic records are consistent with the paper ballots.The bill is cautious where caution is warranted. For example, it gives states and counties the flexibility to choose optical-scan or touch-screen systems (or others), as long as there is a suitable voter-verified paper record. Though some e-voting activists want to ban touch-screens altogether, I think that would be a mistake. Touch screens, if done correctly — which no vendor has managed yet, I’ll admit — do offer some advantages.
Posted in EFF, electronic_frontier_foundation, HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
Burried in my summary of the broadcast of Dan Rather presents “The Trouble with Touch Screens” is a description of allegations of incompetence and/or fraud by Sequoia voting systems in their production of punchcard ballots for the 2000 election.
These are the punchcards that were used in Florida and taught Americans terms like hanging chad.
There are serious allegations. It is important that these allegations are investigated:
Here is a summary of what was revealed in Dan’s report:
Continue reading
Posted in dan_rather, fraud, news, votingmachines
Are you unhappy with the incompetence, poor quality, and allegations of fraud that are revealed in Dan Rather’s “The Trouble with Touch Screens”?
Then do something about it!
Go sign the petition demanding that Congress investigate the allegations made in the report.
Posted in calltoaction, dan_rather, news, votingmachines
The trouble with tribbles touchscreens
The full hour of the Dan Rather presents “The Trouble with Touch Screens” is now available online. It is a very interesting show to watch! The name of the show is actually misleading as the show covers three major topics:
Posted in dan_rather, fraud, news, votingmachines
From the Brad Blog comes this news that Dan Rather reports presents conclusive evidence of touch screen voting machine failures. To air Tuesday, August 14 at 8:00 p.m. ET and 11:00 p. m. ET.
Posted in dan_rather, news, votingmachines
(I’m continuing my tradition of blogging about conferences I have not attended.)
The 2007 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop was held on Aug 6 in Boston. A lot of interesting people were there.
Joe Hall kicked off the post-lunch session with a discussion of election contracts and how they may prevent proper oversight. This is dry stuff, but it is likely incredibly important. He pointed out specific clauses in vendor contracts that prevent any analysis of the equipment and software. Some contracts even declare “unit pricing” to be trade secret, which, as Joe points out, is in conflict with normal government public budget reviews. Funny thing: the restrictions are so strict that the contracts then specifically carve out “permission for the voter to use the equipment for voting.” And of course, the contracts themselves are often considered confidential.
…
Amnon Ta-Shma presented an approach to cryptographic voting that does not reveal the plaintext of the vote to the voting machine, yet remains “bare-handed.” He provided some background on Chaum, Neff, and Ryan’s schemes. He then explained the conflict between preparing a ballot in the booth (privacy), and preparing a ballot at home (coercion). Amnon concurs with Josh that privacy cannot be fully guaranteed, only made more likely. His scheme involves the voter bringing an encrypted ballot for each candidate, and having the booth
reencrypt the one he wants. That way, the booth doesn’t know the plaintext (privacy), and the voter doesn’t predict the ciphertext (no coercion). There were numerous questions about whether it’s workable to use cryptography in the first place when voters may not be very
tech savvy.
…
Overall, a fantastic day with lots of high quality talks. EVT is shaping up to be the de-facto conference for voting developments. I remain a little bit disheartened by the continuing gap between the crypto and applied security crowds. The crypto folks (me included)
need to do a better job pitching this stuff, especially now that there’s an opening to improve the technology in places like California.
Here is Warren D Smith’s writeup:
Some interesting and talented people were there. That’s the good news.
The bad news is, there also were a lot of bad talks (I did not like Rivest’s talk about my own work, a fact which particularly grated) and the press did not show up. That’s a pity sonce there were several things that really deserved press.
…
Also very good talks were those showing how to hack voting machines and demonstrating the absolutely awesome level of incompetence among their manufacturers/designers. (It is so hard to be that bad…)
There are also a few posts about EVT 2007 at the election technology blog.
Posted in EVT2007, news, votingmachines
All About Voting 