Category Archives: votingmachines

EVT

Daily Voting News for 2007 elections

Posted on November 8, 2007 | Leave a comment

I’ve got a backlog of election material to talk about so I’ll do a little bit of link-blogging to catch up.

John Gideon’s Daily Voting News (DVN) links to a plethora of post-election Tuesday articles from this year’s elections:

This is a typical post-election day DVN. Lot’s of reports of failures and problems. Part of the problem with today’s technical elections is that they are “high tech” and probably too “high.” Voters don’t understand it all and election workers don’t understand even when they are supposed to have been trained. Most Election officials clearly don’t understand what is happening so they blindly take the word of the vendors. The single county with the most problems last year seems to have repeated its poor record. Marion Co (Indianapolis) Indiana has a real problem with elections administration and the machines.

The DVN covers all sorts of election news but it is primarily focused on election integrity and voting machine issues.

Daniel Castro’s response to my ITIF review

Posted on October 5, 2007 | 1 comment

Daniel Castro has responded to review of the ITIF eVoting report that he wrote.

In that review I agree with his thesis that “end-to-end verifiable” voting systems should be encouraged and be part of the debate on electronic voting and I basically agree with his recommendations. But I strongly disagreed with his assessment of the relative risks of paper systems, electronic voting systems, and electronic voting systems that print a voter verified paper trail. I also found much of the tone of his report offensive.

My assessment is:
e2e verifiable system > paper system > eVoting with voter verified paper trail > eVoting

His appears to be:
e2e verifiable system > eVoting > eVoting with voter verified paper trail > paper system

And I believe that we both agree the e2e voting systems need more support and some trial runs but are not yet ready for widespread deployment.

To put it pithily, “I agree with the thesis of this disagreeable report“.

Here is his response. This is posted with his permission:
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Posted in fraud, HR811, itif, legislation, punchscan, security, votingmachines

transcript for Texas legislature clip

Posted on October 1, 2007 | Leave a comment

Regarding the remarkable clip of rule breaking Texas legislators voting for their colleagues, here is the transcript, including a statement from Alexis DeLee, Spokesperson for House Speaker, Tom Craddick:

There’s been a lot of debate at the State Capitol on bills relating to voter integrity. Some lawmakers are pushing for measures such as requiring voters to show a photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot.

Another bill would criminalize anyone who delivers a ballot for someone unable to drive to the polls.

With so much emphasis on one vote for one person, you’d think lawmakers would make sure they follow the rules, too.

In this CBS 42 Investigates, Nanci Wilson found many don’t.

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Texas Legislators vote multiple times?

Posted on October 1, 2007 | 1 comment

This is an astounding video showing Texas legislators voting for absent members.
Such votes are against the rules of the Texas legislature but are apparently common practice.

Open questions:

Does willfully violating the rules mean that the legislators are violating their oaths of office?
Are these votes courtesy votes done with the consent of the absentee member or are a mad mercenary attempt to get as many votes as possible in the rule-breaking voter’s favor?

[Update: here is the transcript]

I’ve been part of a lively debate about some of the issues raised by this video in this forum. I have a number of comments there, so be sure to check it out.

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Posted in fraud, legislation, multiwinner, news, texas, votingmachines

More thoughts on Rasing the E2E Profile in the Public Eye

Posted on September 26, 2007 | 1 comment

A bit more brainstorming about ways to aid the end-to-end verifiability meme. Other suggestions are welcome.

Have a forum for discussing E2E verifiable systems. For example a yahoo group or a google group. Initially I would suggest an open all-purpose forum covering both technical discussion and general advocacy and discussion.
Have a website promoting the general idea of E2E verifiable systems – not just specific systems
Each E2E project should have a website dedicated to it with clear descriptions of how it works intended for non-academic readers. (It should of course also include sections targeting academic readers) The Punchscan web site does very well here. But many others do not – even projects involving the same people.
Some examples:
- Scantegrity does not include an HTML treatment
- I can not casually find a site describing Ron Rivest’s and Ben Adida’s scratch and vote system; The best link I can find is a Technology Review article and a PDF on his site
- Rivest and Warren Smith’s descriptions of ThreeBallot, VAV, Twin, and variants are not written and presented in a way intended for a general audience. There is a press release and some pdfs.

1 Comment

Posted in fraud, motivation, punchscan, scratch_and_vote, security, three_ballot, votingmachines

ITIF’s eVoting report: point-by-point

Posted on September 20, 2007 | 2 comments

Here is my point-by-point review of Daniel Castro’s ITIF eVoting report.

This is a long post. I recommend that you first read a summary of my views.

I am basic agreement with the thesis of the report which is that the debate about eVoting should move beyond voter-verified paper audit trails to include systems that can prove to a voter that their vote was counted as cast. However, I found the tone and focus of the report disagreeable and I disagreed with much of the material in the report advocating for eVoting and against voter-verified paper audit trails.

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2 Comments

Posted in fraud, itif, legislation, motivation, news, punchscan, security, votingmachines

summary of ITIF’s eVoting report

Posted on September 20, 2007 | 7 comments

I’m writing up a full point-by-point review of the ITIF eVoting report. [Update 9/20/07: It’s written. Here is the point-by-point review]

For now, here is a quick summary of my impressions.

I agree with the basic premise of the report that the debate about electronic voting needs to be broader and include other verification technologies than voter-verified paper audit trails. I am in basic agreement with the policy recommendations of the paper but I feel that these recommendations need some caveats. I discuss the recommendations below.

I disagree with much of the setup of the report. The susceptibility to fraud of electronic voting machines is downplayed too much as is the ability of voter-verified paper audit trails to mitigate that. The tone of the report when talking about organizations promoting voter verified audit trails or promoting distrust of eVoting is absolutely poisonous and Mr. Castro should be ashamed. I suspect that much of the poor reception this paper is getting is due to that.
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7 Comments

Posted in fraud, HR811, itif, legislation, news, punchscan, security, votingmachines

Buzz about ITIF’s eVoting report

Posted on September 19, 2007 | 13 comments

[Update 9/20/07: I have read the report and review it here: summary and points-by-point]

I just got an interesting comment from Daniel Castro, the author of an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) report on electronic voting. Castro’s comment:

I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the report we just released on electronic voting. We discuss the limitation of paper audit trails, alternative technologies (to paper) that can be used for audit trails, and suggest that we should focus the national discussion not on whether or not we should have paper trails, but rather on how to implement universally verifiable (or end-to-end verifiable) voting systems.

From the report’s teaser:
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13 Comments

Posted in fraud, HR811, itif, legislation, news, punchscan, security, votingmachines

seeking clarity on ‘Software independence’ in voting systems

Posted on September 11, 2007 | 4 comments

In response to the Timothy Ryan op-ed “A Damaging Paper Chase In Voting”, Rick Carback (one of the punchscan developers) wrote about HR811:

…the article makes an excellent point — mandating a specific technology (which has been known to be problematic since the inception of voting) is a bad idea. By contrast, the authors of the bill could have taken the approach of Software Independence, where the outcome of an election can be determined independently of a piece of software. Any software independence approach would rule out paperless DREs, a hidden audit trail printout, and other ill-conceived technology. DREs with unreliable printers for a VVPAT approach could also be excluded, but you would need to add a reliability requirement (not hard to do). Our system, and similar systems like PAV, would more easily fit into such a definition.

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4 Comments

Posted in fraud, HR811, legislation, punchscan, security, votingmachines

washingtonpost points out that HR811 conflicts with systems like punchscan

Posted on September 10, 2007 | 5 comments

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.

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5 Comments

Posted in HR811, legislation, news, punchscan, security, votingmachines