Wisconsin Requires Open Source, Verifiable Voting 375
AdamBLang writes "Previously covered on Slashdot, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle today signed legislation that "will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source. Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used." Madison's Capital Times reports "the bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.""
Thank you very much (Score:2, Interesting)
Question is, why aren't other states doing this?
Re:KISS (Score:4, Interesting)
This offers the advantages of multi-language ballots with brail, audio prompts, etc. And the resulting ballot is standardized so it can be read by both machine and human - and no "hanging chads".
The ballots can then be easily counted by another machine - and human validated as necessary.
The ballot-generating computer never needs to "count" - but it could do so as a spot check against the counting computer.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
as long as the fraud is in electronic voting (Score:1, Interesting)
it's how the human brain works. electronic is seen as the next step.
so the good guys have to be electronic too.
if people try a completely different route, that entire class of technology is going to be ignored.
it's idiotic but true.
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
The Board of Elections is responsible for ensuring that the correct software is loaded, and you, as a voter, will check the Board of Elections.
Elections don't just happen, they are overseen by people you put there, directly or indirectly.
The open source element just ensures that even if the Board of Elections has no idea about what the computer code is actually doing, that the greater community will be able to make that check and balance.
With a punch card or even a mechanical voting machine, you can see and understand how it works. By making the code for these machines open source, that same consumer/voter check and balance is being provided-- or, at least, that's the idea.
This does not address the other tampering that can happen. If you want to ensure that your elections are clean and untampered, then make sure you pay attention next time your local board of elections is up for appointment or election.
Re:KISS (Score:3, Interesting)
Not the count, but the recount that's important... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/links/
Links have broken with time, but here's an updated link to Open Voting...
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/modules.php?n
Their systems are reallly neat and they've had a lot of smart people looking at the problem. I've not been involved in it, but have read some of their documentations, and promised myself that I'd speak up and give them google-juice anytime voting came up. Some highlights:
- Commodity hardware / software
- Open source code
- Paper "receipts" that can be verified by:
* Sight
* Barcode
* Audio / Visual
* Separate "reader / recounter"
- Accurate computer counts (ie: select count(*) from votes group by person)
- Paper trail for recounts (re-count manually or computer assisted the receipts), with useful information hidden in the water-marked receipts (kindof like scantron stuff, where both computers and humans can read it).
--Robert
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nonsense (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't give Doyle credit.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would expect this is only a ploy to make it seem like he cares about the voting irregularities which occurred in WI during the 2004 Presidental election, causing several leading Milwaukee Democrats to be investigated.
Reading the requirements, not only does no one currently offer such a machine, but most machines in the state wouldn't live up to it today.
OSS isn't enough (Score:2, Interesting)
That's great that their system will be open source, but that isn't quite enough. There are a few things that I think would make the systems more trustworthy in addition to the open source requirement:
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you whole-heartedly, but there are several factors keeping things from being that simple.
The ballots here in the US usually contain a huge number of elections. In the last presidential election, we were asked not only to vote for the president, but also for congressmen, judges, city councilmen, county board members, and other various municipal elected officials, not to mention the three to five different local resolutions on each ballot. The butterfly ballot system (which became famous in Florida in 2000 for the Pat Buchanan situation) is simply a way to condense a large amount of information in an anonymous way onto a small ballot card. These things are literally books, usually with ten or more pages of elections to vote for. It's not a perfect system, certainly, but putting all the same information on a single sheet of paper with room for marking a candidate, clearly delimiting the various elections taking place, allowing for instructions in both English and Spanish, and making the text large enough to read makes for a rather large sheet of paper. And asking people to read candidates off one sheet and mark their choice on another sheet creates all the same confusion and problems people had with the butterfly ballots.
I think our best bet in the US for paper ballots is to create printed booklets with instructions and a single election on each page. The actual listed candidates and boxes for marking a vote would be contained on a perforated sheet like a coupon, which the voter rips out and stuffs in the ballot box. The voter would keep the booklet after voting. The creation of these booklets could be automated without much fuss; each municipality could retrieve their booklets as a PDF file and have them printed and stapled before the election. It's not like ballots are secret until the day of the election.
But truly, in any voting system, accuracy boils down to the skill of the people recording the votes. In paper voting, that means the people counting, the people recording the votes, the people calling in the numbers to state headquarters, and the people assisting voters with questions. In computerized voting, that means the people who designed and built the hardware, the people who wrote the firmware, the people who wrote the software, and the people in charge of the networks doing the reporting to a central agency. Mistakes will be made, and recounts will happen. If automation does not help fix the mistakes that are made, and in fact creates many more problems, then it is not worth the trouble.
Re:KISS (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The ballots themselves are recounted
2) The voters who showed up are verified to ensure that no one voted who shouldn't have. (e.g. Dead people.)
The system is tedious, but it works. The problem that has arisen, however, is that districts want to streamline voting by using electronic ballots. Since it can be difficult to *prove* that a counted vote wasn't changed after the fact, we have various stories like this one pointing out the many problems with E-Voting.
Where is an open-source voting machine? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:KISS (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't, other than by inspecting the source. Once we cast our vote using a paper ballot, how do we know it was actually counted? We don't, other than by having observers present. Source inspection is the digital analogue of human election observers.
IMHO, having computers count is more accurate than having people count. Remember, as Stalin may or may not have said [about.com], "those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 showed us that. Computers have no motivation to lie, and I can inspect a computer's source code. I can't inspect the mind of the person counting my paper ballot. To me, computers have more accountability.
Voting System Proposal (Score:3, Interesting)
Based on suggestions I've read in the comments, how about this:
Voter enters polling place, name scratched off list as usual. Voter enters booth. For each office up for election, voter types* a name or names+ into the voting machine. A blank vote or "Nobody" would indicate no vote for that office. Referendums etc. could be indicated with some predefined response (preferably more than a simple "yes" or "no" in order to avoid Windows-dialog-box-style confusion). When finished, the voting machine prints out the completed ballot. The format is importantly both human readable and machine readable via OCR. Surely if the machine knows the font beforehand, OCR can be fairly quick and highly accurate...? A ballot would essentialy be a list like:
A ballot may contain special marks to help a machine reader align the text, but the actual vote info must be human readable (i.e. not a barcode). The voter reviews the ballot and either destroys it and creates a new one, or submits it to the ballot box. Ballots are then machine tallied after all ballots are collected (it is important to not tally instaneously for the sake of voter anonymity). Hand recounts may be conducted as necesarry.
The good parts about this are 1) machine countable, 2) human countable, 3) transparent (voter puts physical paper ballot into box rather than bits into a database), 4) tamper resistant (difficult to invalidate votes by marking or tampering with the ballot after the fact) 5) anonymous.
One problem is: how to type a candidate's name. Keyboard? What about those with disabilities? I'm not really familiar with alternate text entry systems, but surely some exist.
* The biggest problem is, of course, determining who is meant by "John P. Doe", since there may be many John P. Does in America. I don't really like the idea of requiring people to "get on the ballot" because anyone who doesn't know who to vote for will almost certainly pick a candidate who is on the ballot. But I don't really have a solution for an all-write-in system. Please address this as a separate issue. In lieu of requiring a typed name, the system could easily offer a selection of candidates as is common now. (How do write-in votes work now? I assume they are silently ignored unless it's clear that a majority of votes are not for someone on the ballot which almost surely never happens).
+ Some offices may allow multiple candidates. Some voting systems may allow multiple votes, possibly ranked, for a single final winner. This voting method lends itself well to these alternative (surperior IMO) methods.
Discuss.
Re:KISS (Score:2, Interesting)
This seems to be a BS political move (Score:3, Interesting)