Voting System Reform - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

MSD · 11-09-2004, 12:05 PM

I don't want to discuss the problems with our electoral system here, all I want to address right now is a way to make the hardware and process foolproof, idiotproof, and tamperproof. This was originally posted in the thread about an electronic error giving Bush extra votes. In that thread, I whined and lamented as follows:

Quote:

If it can screw up on a small scale, it can screw up on a big scale. Bush won, that's not the question. The question is about what we can do to make sure that unreliable voting machines are not allowed to become so widespread that our election result becomes a roll of a die. I don't see a conspiracy here, I see plain old stupidity and human error.

If a machine can report seven times the number of votes that were actually cast, what can stop them from accidentally throwing the election to a random candidate? Bush got this one, what if the other two in the room rolled a die and came up with Nader? I don't claim to know what everyone's thinking, but I sure as hell don't think he represents the people of my country. What if my candidate won? I would be thrilled to see him as the president, but I can think of a few hundred million who aren't ready for that kind of dramatic change and would be as happy with him in office as I am with any of the mainstream candidates.

What if we had some really undesirable candidates who got enough signatures from their supporters (real or fictional) to be on the balot in enough states to win a majority of the vote? If we can't stop voting machines from thowing votes around, our election could move from a roll of a die to a spin of the chamber and a pull of the trigger.

I don't want my political system to be a gamble. I don't want it to be a game of Russian Roulette. I want a system with multiple levels of redundancy, electronic records and a paper trail, and a mechanism that can be inspected by whoever wants to see it. I will not have confidence in our political system until we can be sure that every last vote is counted and that every last vote is counted right.

After I ranted, I decided that instead of just complaining, I should offer an alternative to our current system if I wanted anyone to listen to me. Here's what I came up with:

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While I favor minimal government regulation in almost every aspect of life, private corporations have proven that they cannot be trusted to handle our election. Therefore, I propose that we adopt a system, mandated by the federal government, in which:

-We institute a univeral system of optical voting both for on-site, provisional, and absentee ballots in which the ballot itself is the primary paper trail, and that writes an on-the-fly disc (cd-r or dvd-r) inside a removable locked box within the machine, the only key to which is held by the county's election supervisor. At the close of the polls, these boxes will be removed from each machine and delivered via police escort to the town election office, and from there to the county office via an armored vehicle.

-After each voter is finished with his/her ballot, he/she will place it into the machine, and the machine will clearly display to the voter the selections that teh machine has red from the ballot. After this, the voter will press a button to either cast the ballot or reject it. At this point, the machine will clearly display either "YOUR VOTE HAS BEEN RECORDED" or "ERROR: YOUR VOTE WAS NOT RECORDED." If the vote was not recorded, a small receipt will be printed on thermal paper verifying that the vote was not recorded, a message will appear on the poll worker's monitoring screen (used in the same way that the button and counter on a lever-type machine) and the poll worker will destroy the ballot in accordance with proper ballot destruction procedures (next section covers this procedure) and a new ballot will be provided.

-Ballots are printed on cardstock and marked with serial numbers, and if, at any point, a voter at apolling place wishes to be given a new ballot in order to change his/her votes, the serial number will be recorded by a poll worker as having been destroyed, and the ballot will be shredded into pieces no larger than 1/8" square, in plain view of the voter and all persons in attendance at the polling place. This shredded material will drop into a water-filled bin so that the ink used to mark the ballot will be diffused, making reconstruction of any voter's ballot impossible.

-Every voting machine is programmed with an identical source code that can be compiled down to machine code that can and will be run without a proprietary operating system

--This code and the schematics of every machine that runs the code can be reviewed by anyone who requests the information. To allow for the correction of any flaws, reports may be filed by anyone who inspects the source code that are guaranteed to be reviewed by those who are producing the code.

-The transmission of data to election centers will occur in the following way:

--Each machine will be equipped with its own 65536 bit key pairs. The private key will be delivered on the morning of the election to each polling place in a tamper-evident envelope, and the public key is stored on the server and available to the public.

--Election data is saved to a file that is encrypted with this key and is inspected on both ends through the use of a hardware-based cyclic redundancy check. If this check fails, the data transfer will be retried, with a total of 3 tries if necessary, and on the third failure, a flag will be set in the tabulator's system, and the election data will not be finalized until the data backup from the locked box is physically loaded into the tabulator and verified.

--When the data is to be transmitted, the machine will place a call to the central election tabulator (which is subject to the same regulations as the individual machines) and transmit a predetermined code to the tabulator, encrypted in the same way as the vote record. The tabulator will decrypt and verify this code, and the machine will hang up. After the machine hangs up, the tabulator will call back, a poll worker will press a button on his/her monitoring screen to authorize transmission of vote the record, and the encrypted data will be transmitted and checked.

I recognize the inherent fallability of any system. What I want to see is the minimization of the effects any single error will have. I welcome comments and criticisms of this proposed system, but at this point I'd like to keep it to the technical side of things, not consideration of costs incurred.

quicksteal · 11-09-2004, 12:52 PM

Tell me if I summarize this correctly:

1.) Voter fills out a paper ballot
2.) The ballot is put in the recording machine. The selections that are read by the computer are shown on the monitor.
3.) The voter can either accept the results of the selections and press ok, or reject the reading the computer made.
4.) If the voter rejects the reading of the ballot, the ballot is destroyed, and the voter can fill out another one and try again.
5.) When the voter accepts the reading of the ballot, the computer records the ballot.

This would be fine with me. In my precinct in Alabama, we still use paper ballots, and we fill in the arrow that points to what we want to vote for. It's not all that hard to do. If someone wants to screw up voting, it's nearly impossible to prevent.

And for the record, the computer errors in Ohio could be caught when they perform the official count. The error that you mentioned was red-flagged b/c there was such a large statistical discrepancy that lots of people noticed it.

11-09-2004, 12:52 PM	#2 (permalink)
quicksteal Crazy Location: Auburn, AL	Tell me if I summarize this correctly: 1.) Voter fills out a paper ballot 2.) The ballot is put in the recording machine. The selections that are read by the computer are shown on the monitor. 3.) The voter can either accept the results of the selections and press ok, or reject the reading the computer made. 4.) If the voter rejects the reading of the ballot, the ballot is destroyed, and the voter can fill out another one and try again. 5.) When the voter accepts the reading of the ballot, the computer records the ballot. This would be fine with me. In my precinct in Alabama, we still use paper ballots, and we fill in the arrow that points to what we want to vote for. It's not all that hard to do. If someone wants to screw up voting, it's nearly impossible to prevent. And for the record, the computer errors in Ohio could be caught when they perform the official count. The error that you mentioned was red-flagged b/c there was such a large statistical discrepancy that lots of people noticed it.