If I was charged with installing computerized voting machines, I would start with "fault tolerant" servers and jam-proof thermal printers. These items have been available for decades, but too many people just run to Radio Shack or search the Dell & Gateway web sites for PC based solutions. Once we've got reliable hardware, then it is time to tackle the real problem - verifiable, fraud & hacker-proof software.
Voting Machines - Elections - Ballots - Politics - New York Times:
"As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish."
Elections are often won by just a few votes. Voters deserve to know that their votes are actually being recorded & counted accurately, while still preserving their privacy. This is important and doesn't seem to be getting enough serious attention from the responsible officials.
Having said that, I have to admit that Arizona's voting machines seem to work very well. We mark a paper ballot that can be used for recounts and scan them ourselves with a machine that can accept the ballot just about any way you can insert it. (At smaller sites we just place the ballot in a box and it is counted manually.) Results are tabulated by PCs that pass them on to the appropriate offices - apparently with few problems.
Referring to the description below, there is nothing inherently wrong with having a powerful processor and Windows in each voting booth, but there are a lot of vendors who could provide something that was both simpler, and harder to hack. Dedicated processors presenting a list and recording the choice(s) aren't exactly new or high-tech. Such processors (and their OSes) have the advantage of
not being primary targets of the hacker community. Made in quantity, dedicated processors can be provided at very low cost.
Storing votes on flash-memory cards isn't an awful idea, but I wonder if those cards have clearly readable & unalterable serial numbers that can be traced back to a specific voting booth. I also wonder about the amount of (volunteer) labor involved in collecting these cards, and I wonder how they determine that some of them aren't lost or altered on the way to the election headquarters.
Networking the machines would enable the election headquarters to produce preliminary counts quickly, and the cards or paper tapes could be queried in the event of a recount (of course now you need a secure network and confirmation that every packet is delivered).
Paper tape printers are used to monitor security systems and scientific instruments unattended for long periods of time - there ought to be some useful products available that don't jam. Printing the vote in a small font doesn't make sense if the voter is to verify it. The voting screen should point an arrow to it and ask "is this correct?" - before dismissing the voter ("
Thank you for voting & have a nice day"). Alternatively, the voter could be required to press the window over the paper tape to record each vote (give them a nice visual and audible feedback when this works - like a flashing light and a chime).
"IN THE LOBBY OF JANE PLATTEN’S OFFICE in Cleveland sits an AccuVote-TSX, made by Diebold. It is the machine that Cuyahoga County votes on, and it works like this: Inside each machine there is a computer roughly as powerful and flexible as a modern hand-held organizer. It runs Windows CE as its operating system, and Diebold has installed its own specialized voting software to run on top of Windows. When the voters tap the screen to indicate their choices, the computer records each choice on a flash-memory card that fits in a slot on the machine, much as a flash card stores pictures on your digital camera. At the end of the election night, these cards are taken to the county’s election headquarters and tallied by the GEMS server. In case a memory card is accidentally lost or destroyed, the computer also stores each vote on a different chip inside the machine; election officials can open the voting machine and remove the chip in an emergency.
But there is also a third place the vote is recorded. Next to each machine’s LCD screen, there is a printer much like one on a cash register. Each time a voter picks a candidate on screen, the printer types up the selections, in small, eight-point letters. Before the voter pushes “vote,” she’s supposed to peer down at the ribbon of paper — which sits beneath a layer of see-through plastic, to prevent tampering — and verify that the machine has, in fact, correctly recorded her choices."
We need to seriously consider whether this is appropriate technology for something as important as voting.
"THE QUESTION, OF COURSE, is whether the machines should be trusted to record votes accurately. Ed Felten doesn’t think so. Felten is a computer scientist at Princeton University, and he has become famous for analyzing — and criticizing — touch-screen machines. In fact, the first serious critics of the machines — beginning 10 years ago — were computer scientists. One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.
This is because computer scientists understand, from hard experience, that complex software can’t function perfectly all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. Myriad things can go wrong. The software might have bugs — errors in the code made by tired or overworked programmers. Or voters could do something the machines don’t expect, like touching the screen in two places at once."
Voting machines are paid for with public money and entrusted with a sacred right - the public should be able to determine that they do the job correctly. Voting machines and their source code should be in the public view - open source for both the hardware and software. This enables the public to ensure vendors have done their job. Done well, open source software is
more secure than proprietary, because it is reviewed and revised from many more viewpoints.
". . . the truth is that it’s hard for computer scientists to figure out just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like most software firms, they regard their “source code” — the computer programs that run on their machines — as a trade secret. The public is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess it for flaws and reliability can’t get access to it. Felten and voter rights groups argue that this “black box” culture of secrecy is the biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted."
. . . "ES&S and Sarasota correctly point out that Jennings has no proof that a bug exists. Jennings correctly points out that her opponents have no proof a bug doesn’t exist. This is the ultimate political legacy of touch-screen voting machines and the privatization of voting machinery generally. When invisible, secretive software runs an election, it allows for endless mistrust and muttered accusations of conspiracy. The inscrutability of the software — combined with touch-screen machines’ well-documented history of weird behavior — allows critics to level almost any accusation against the machines and have it sound plausible. “It’s just like the Kennedy assassination,” Shamos, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, laments. “There’s no matter of evidence that will stop people from spinning yarns.”"
