Paper Vote Canada

Electronic voting has, unfortunately, moved from the realm of science and statistics to conspiracy theory by overheated partisans. Sonia Arrison and Vince Vasquez puncture the myths of the conspiracists in their paper. Even leading Democrats such as Joe Andrew, Bill Clinton’s handpicked chairman of the Democratic National Committee, have pointed out that while problems remain that demand vigilance, electronic voting aids the poor, the elderly, minorities, and is more accurate. Last year, Mr. Andrew lamented that “When it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts.”

While it is true that no system is tamper-proof, it is also true that it takes significant expertise and plotting to hack a machine, ironically making the system more secure than traditional paper ballots.

Historically, paper ballots were overly manhandled, being placed into boxes, moved around and passed through the hands of low-level poll workers to precinct supervisors and county officials. Fraud was less detectable, and more prevalent, because prescored ballots could be easily corrupted or votes altered with a simple punch through a hole, or mark of a pen. With DRE, features such as remote vote storage and a visual verification screen of voter selections are innovating these problems out of existence. America's voting system could become even healthier if other new procedures are adopted at the same time.

E-voting opponents demand a verified paper-trail backup to make sure votes are counted properly. But paper trails are meaningless if manual counts and voter verification are still prone to fraud and human error. And verified paper trails for DRE's have proven to be expensive, potentially bankrupting cash-strapped counties and eroding the efficiency of voting management. The back-up issue is serious, but there are less-Luddite solutions, such as electronic or audio verification.

The real key to making sure that the electronic back-ups are secure will be in reviewing the code that runs the machines, a simple procedure that counties should make part of the normal election-preparing process. And all indications are that the public approves of such a move. Indeed, despite the newness of the use DRE technology, public approval for electronic voting remains strong.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 5:38 am (0) comments /

The First Minister was dazzled by dancing robots and shown the latest developments in electronic voting as he visited Scotland's oldest university.

Mr McConnell opened the Gateway and John Cole buildings, two state-of-the-art facilities at St Andrews University. About A£10 million has been invested in the buildings, which house the university's schools of management and computer science.

Staff and students from the computer science department showed the First Minister how the latest hi-tech electronic voting software could be used in future elections.

[30 April 2003]

On the eve of the elections, a computer scientist in St Andrews is researching the possibilities of voting over the internet in the future.

Tim Storer, a Computer Science PhD student at the University of St Andrews is working with Microsoft under their studentship scheme to investigate Remote Electronic Voting over the internet. The system he is investigating could see the possibility of voters being able to vote from home or anywhere in the World via email or text messaging.

Tim began the £50,000, three year project with Microsoft last September, and will go to Washington this Saturday for a three week internship to inspect voting machines currently used there. The e-voting project is a combination of Tim’s main interests of politics (especially electoral history and statistics) and computer science.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:37 pm (0) comments /

Young people in British Columbia can now use their mobile phones to make their voices heard on key voter issues, thanks to a new mobile network developed by the University of British Columbia’s Mobile MUSE Project.

Political organizers in British Columbia are hoping to use cellphone text messaging to get young people interested in politics.

The non-partisan group "Get Your Vote On" plans to blitz the cellphones of its young members with polls and alerts in anticipation of the May 17 provincial election.

The program is based on the idea that young people need to be engaged on their own terms, said group spokesperson Olive Dempsey. She thinks the future of democracy may rest with the cellphone.

"Democracy does not begin and end with a ballot box," said Dempsey.

"Democracy is about building democratic habits and it is about engagement and that is what we are going to be doing."

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:13 am (0) comments /

a couple weeks ago, the chairman of the E.A.C. [Electoral Advisory Committee] announced the introduction of electronic voting of which fingerprinting of voters is a feature.

ORDERS FOR the procurement of 40 machines capable of triggering a ballot by matching fingerprints are likely to be placed with the two overseas-based companies shortlisted for the purpose within the next two weeks.

The machines should arrive in the island in time to be used in local government elections due by September, following a pilot test to determine their effectiveness.

The cost of the equipment has not been disclosed although the chairman of the Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC), Professor Errol Miller, told The Gleaner some time ago a budget had been set aside for the purpose.

He told The Gleaner on Monday that the technical committee set up in April to determine the specifications to which United States-based Cogent Systems Ltd, and French company SAGEM, would build the equipment had completed its work.

...

Mr. Brieffs [senior vice president at Cogent] confirmed Jamaica would be the first country to use the equipment in an actual election, but said he anticipated no major problems.

According to him, "it does not matter what the system is being used for. Whether for immigration purposes or for border control, the concept remains the same." He said the software designed for Jamaica was "user friendly and designed to keep the election flow."

...

With the cost likely to run into millions of dollars, the EAC is already exploring other uses to which the equipment can be put when not being used in elections. Areas being examined are law enforcement and the education and social security systems.

The House of Representatives on Tuesday (March 1 [2005]) amended three Bills paving the way for the electronic voter identification system to be introduced to the island's electoral process.

...

The system, which depends on finger print identification, will issue a ballot paper once the fingerprint has been applied and is found to be the appropriate fingerprint for the elector, who has presented it. Voting will then take place in the normal way.

The Bill also makes allowances for the presiding officer to revert to the original system in situations where the mechanism malfunctions and in such a case, the individual will be required to prove his identification by other means.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:23 am (0) comments /

A senior Australian election official will attend a conference this week on electronic voting to be organized by the National Election Commission, Korea's top election watchdog.

The Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, ..., will share its experience at the "E-voting and Electronic Democracy: Present and the Future" conference in Seoul, March 17-18 [2005]

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:13 am (0) comments /

An experimental online vote for the parliamentary elections will take place on March 20 in 50 different Bulgarian towns.

An initiative committee will start a campaign for popularizing the e-vote among the people aged 16 to 25 across the country, the initiators announced Monday in Veliko Tarnovo.

The March 20 e-vote will begin 7.00 a.m. to end 7.00 p.m. and more than 1,000 young people are expected to cast their vote. The experimental vote will be organized although there is no e-vote law adopted in Bulgaria.

It was earlier announced that building Bulgaria's online-voting system will cost at least BGN 4 M.

Bulgaria's MPs have introduced a bill for e-voting in general and presidential elections, as well as in the election of Bulgarian members for the EU Parliament. According to the bill, those who want to take part in the vote online would have to file applications three weeks earlier. A few days later, they would receive user name and password in a registered letter.

Lawmakers hope that introducing the e-vote can boost polls turnout.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:11 am (0) comments /

Comfidex Corporation of New York, New York will introduce a secure, Web-
based e-voting system that provides paper-based audit trails for
recounts while preserving the anonymity of both the vote and the voter.
VoteFiler is implemented using commodity PCs, and is designed to
transparently coexist with traditional voting systems so that it may be
adopted at a pace acceptable to the voting public.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:05 am (0) comments /

The Nagoya High Court on Wednesday declared void a city assembly election held in Kani, Gifu Prefecture in July 2003 after finding a temporary malfunction of electronic voting machines had gravely affected the election result.

According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, the ruling is the first to nullify the result of an election using an electronic voting system.

...

A total of 189 electronic voting machines were set up at 29 polling places for the city assembly election held on July 20, 2003.

But the voting system was halted temporarily for between nine minutes and 83 minutes due to overheating of the servers and other reasons.

...

Prof. Shigeki Yokoi of Nagoya University's graduate school said the Kani municipal government did not hold a trial election to verify whether the voting system properly worked. He said it was necessary for municipal and prefectural governments planning to employ electronic voting to test the system thoroughly. He added the central government should provide financial help for the introduction of electronic voting system because they are expensive.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:36 am (0) comments /

A review of voting machines used in Maryland's most populous county for the November elections found that 7 percent of the machines had problems such as frozen screens or failed to boot up.

An additional 5 percent in Montgomery County had vote tallies that were considerably lower than other machines used in the same precincts, causing elections officials to deem them ``suspect,'' according to the report released Tuesday. It was drafted by the county in December for the local election board.

But state officials disputed those figures, saying a review of the county's machines conducted by the state and the equipment's manufacturer showed that only 0.4 percent had significant problems in the Nov. 3 election.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 9:32 pm (0) comments /

The municipal government of Niimi, Okayama Prefecture, which held the nation's first elections using electronic voting, will return to the traditional handwritten voting system for its April 24 mayoral and city assembly elections, following a merger with four neighboring municipalities.

The municipal government, which used the electronic voting system for its past two elections, proposed the electronic system for upcoming elections to the four municipalities that will merge on March 31.

However, the plan was rejected on the ground that there was not enough time to prepare for the next election.

...

The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry's election department said 10 municipalities had used e-voting in 12 elections and predicted that the system would become widely used in the future.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 9:30 pm (0) comments /

DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005 [PDF]) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 10:07 pm (2) comments /

The ongoing cost of maintaining electronic voting machines was discussed again at the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee today.

Questions were raised about the big variations in the cost of storing and insuring the machines in different parts of the country.

The total cost of maintaining the machines is likely to run to €1 million each year for the next 20 years.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:41 pm (1) comments /

Despite the recent decision in the U.S. to use printed records to improve the credibility of electronic voting, it seems unlikely that electronic voting will be used widespread in Australia, according to a spokesperson for the Australian Electoral Commission.

...

Tim Evans, the director of elections systems & Policy for the Australian Electoral Commission, does not believe that widespread electronic voting will be useful in Australia

...

"First of all, for electronic voting to spread throughout Australia, there would need to be an amendment to the Australian Commonwealth Elections Act. This will only happen if Parliament is persuaded that it would create advantages to voting, and the security of each vote would be maintained or improved.

...

Despite electronic voting trials being successful in the Australian Capitol Territory, Evans, believes that this is only because the region is different to the rest of Australia.

"ACT has a very complicated voting system. Many people cannot access many of the 100 voting stations in the region and the electoral process has complicated layers attached to it, so it takes a long time to count the votes. So electronic voting is useful for this region. However, there are over 8,000 polling stations in the rest of Australia, which are within easy access to populations.

"It would take a much bigger effort to transform 8,000 polling stations into electronic voting stations, than it took to build these systems in ACT.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:50 pm (0) comments /

An independent assessment of the electronic voting system has cost the state €640,000 in less than a year.

The Commission on Electronic Voting was set up last March to advise the government on the safety and accuracy of the system. It has run up a bill of €640,000 up until the end of last year and its final cost is likely to be substantially higher. The group is planning to hire experts to run extensive tests on the voting system — which could take nine months — before it will be able to determine if it is usable. The technical work is likely to be costly.

Computerised voting was set to be rolled out last June in the local and European elections but was withdrawn at the last minute amid concerns over its accuracy. The government was attacked for failing to assess the reliability of the €52m system fully before purchasing it.

The 6,200 electronic voting machines are now being stored in warehouses across the country at a cost so far of €660,000.

“The system is flawed and will always be — the government should cut its losses. Spending more and more money on it may not be a wise thing to do. It has already cost a fortune and it doesn’t make any sense to keep throwing money at it in the vain hope that they will be able to use it in the future,” said Joe McCarthy, a chartered engineer and a strong critic of electronic voting.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:35 pm (0) comments /

The risk analysis identified 5 material risks in connection with the use of the system at the June elections:

* error in the system as a whole;
* error in voting machine software affecting all machines;
* tampering with software to alter election result;
* tampering with ballot modules during transportation;
* damage to machines before elections.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 4:22 pm (0) comments /

The prototype that Diebold Inc. is now touting is exactly what some critics of the ATM-like machines have been demanding for several years.

Even so, paper records alone are not enough to satisfy computer scientists who say transparency in the electronic machines' design and software must complement paper backups.

...

Critics of North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold say the AccuView Printer Module is a step in the right direction but doesn't address the potential for buggy software or malfunctioning hardware that could misrecord votes or expose voting systems to hackers, deletions or other disasters.

...

Computer scientists also are concerned that the handful of private laboratories licensed to certify voting equipment, including the printer module, still operate in secret and without any federal guidelines.

"It's a very, very small step forward in terms of security of elections," said Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute of Johns Hopkins University and co-author of a scathing report on Diebold machines.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 4:12 pm (0) comments /

Officials ... are due before the Oireachtas public accounts committee today to answer questions about the electronic voting debacle.

The department spent around €50m on the initiative, which was then shelved due to security concerns.

The Government was planning to introduce the system nationwide during last year's local and European elections.

However, this plan was abandoned six weeks before the vote after an independent commission expressed concern about the accuracy of the voting machines and the possibility of electoral fraud.

A lack of public confidence in e-voting means that the Government may be forced into writing off its EUR50 million investment in electronic ballot systems

...

The government was due to introduce e-voting at local and European elections on 11 June 2004 but had to abandon its plans following the publication of an interim report of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting (ICTE) [Ed. note: should be CEV] which raised doubts over the accuracy of the software used in the system.

According to the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting (ICTE) submission to the CEV, the chosen Nedap/Powervote electronic voting system had a fundamental design flaw because it had no mechanism to verify that votes would be recorded accurately in an actual election. Consequently, results obtained from the system could not be said to be accurate, claimed the five-member independent body.

Other flaws in the system identified in the ICTE submission included possible software errors and the use of the graphical user interface programming language Object Pascal for a safety-critical system.

Although the commission's remit was advisory, the government abided by its recommendation that the system not be used until further testing had established just how secure it was.

However, Michael Noonan told the Irish Times that even if the system was found to be safe, few ministers would give it the go-ahead because the public would have little trust in it.

...

"The criticisms contained in the report of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting make it clear that this was a fiasco of the highest order," said Fergus O'Dowd TD., Fine Gael's spokesman on the Environment. "Considering all the information that is available to him, Minister Roche needs to fully explain the findings of these inquiries."

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 5:43 pm (0) comments /

The Voting System Performance Rating (VSPR) project ... [will provide] a set of tests will be published that will let e-voting systems be evaluated in areas such as privacy, accessibility and accuracy.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:48 am (0) comments /

Diebold Election Systems, a target of many electronic-voting critics during the 2004 U.S. election, announced Thursday it has completed the design for a printer that would give its e-voting machines a paper trail.

The Information Technology Association of America, which has defended e-voting machines as accurate and safe, says

the following to help protect the financial gain of corporations:

Diebold's move appears to be focused on the demand for paper-trail ballots. "It's a situation where companies are going to provide what their customers want," says Bob Cohen, executive vice president of the ITAA, which counts e-voting machine makers among its members.

ITAA officials have questioned if voter-verified paper trails will provide a significant benefit while adding costs to e-voting machines. Though the ITAA maintains that widespread attacks on e-voting machines are unlikely, officials there suggest that programmers smart enough to change ballots inside e-voting machines could also manipulate the printouts.

"Our point all along is that paper-based solutions are one alternative," Cohen says. "It gets to be as much an issue of peace of mind for the voters as anything else."

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:22 am (0) comments /

"It's amazing to see people's faces when they drop the ballots in the box ... Many have waited their whole lives to vote," said Copeland, who also described Iraqis dancing and singing in the Maryland hotel parking lot. "People were clapping when their families voted."

Unlike the high-tech electronic voting and short paper ballots seen in November's U.S. election, Iraqi ballots were four 8-inch-by-11inch pages that listed 111 political entities and more than 7,000 candidates, Copeland said.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:21 am (0) comments /

Does voting by any method other than traditional polling booths and paper ballots jeopardize either voters' right to privacy or their guarantee that their vote will be counted fairly? Not only has it been debated, but the issue has been settled for several municipalities right here in Canada.

Talk to John Hollins, the chief electoral officer for the Province of Ontario, and he'll give you the story. "It started back in 1976 when East York and Mississauga brought in punch card voting and evolved in the eighties with the optical scan in places like Etobicoke and Scarborough. At the time they used a centralized optical scan where you brought all the ballots into one place and the machine scanned them."

By the 1988 elections Toronto and North York went with the optical scan at the polling level because they didn't like the idea of ballots travelling from the polling locations. "They started with one machine for every three or four polls, but they ran into a few problems, so by 1991 they brough in scanners to all the polls."

By 1996 the experiment was working well enough to encourage the Ontario government to advance things... During the voting on Metro Toronto's amalgamation the City of North York used telephone voting. They had so much success that other municipalities followed suit."

Why did Ontario decide to forsake the tried and true for something that, almost by defintion, has a margin of error? ... Elections -- at least the operational side -- are about credibility. So why did Ontario municipalities opt for systems which were, if only slightly, less credible?

According to Hollins, the quality of the people who were staffing the polling stations was not what it had been, or what it should be

The feeling was that by introducing new voting techniques and technology into the mix they could weed out incompetent staff, thereby increasing the quality and accuracy. In addition, voting by mail or phone would improve accessibility. Finally, it would be more efficient.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 10:40 pm (0) comments /

Blackwell orders counties to use optical scanning
Touch-screen voting out in Ohio

COLUMBUS - Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell took the option of computerized touch-screen voting machines off the table yesterday and ordered all counties to deploy optical-scan devices using paper ballots by the November election.

"We have a tight election reform deployment schedule, too few allocated federal and state dollars, and not one electronic voting device certified under Ohio's standards and rules," he said.

Blackwell's demand to install optical scans angers counties

COLUMBUS - County elections officials yesterday voiced frustration over what they perceive to be another shift in direction for Ohio when it comes to updating voting systems.

"We have got boards [of elections] that have been working as long as two years toward [touch-screen voting], and all of a sudden the secretary of state has given us approximately five weeks to change course," said Keith Cunningham, Allen County elections director and incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 10:16 pm (0) comments /

And [this digital transformation] will change democracy. Today millions of consumers vote for "American Idol" finalists using their mobile phones. How long before they expect to cast ballots the same way?

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:33 am (0) comments /

Telecom Paper (subscription) - Houten,Netherlands
The majority (54 percent) of the Swiss adults with voting rights, would
use electronic voting if that option was available, according to gfs.bern's
study ...

The vote électronique - the elektronsiche casting of votes - has under the voter a Mehrheitspotenzial, as an evaluation of a special part of VOX analyses shows in the years 2003 and 2004.

e-voting today under be correct one and voter knows the scarcely majorityable Potenzial. The most important requirement e-voting from citizen view is the simplicity of the instrument on. The most important doubts concern the different aspects of the security of the casting of votes. Primarily it might come to a substitution of the brieflichen casting of votes; it can come however in second line also to a change of the composition of the being correct. The use will be coined/shaped by three generation-specific experiences with political participation

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:12 pm (0) comments /

Congress on Thursday certified President Bush as the winner of the November election, despite efforts by a handful of Democrats to stall the process by protesting alleged electronic voting irregularities in Ohio.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 10:40 pm (0) comments /

Falling participation rates in elections and referenda and the perception that many citizens are losing interest in politics are concerns common to many Council of Europe member states.

Some member states are already experimenting with e-voting, or electronically enabled voting as it is also known, in the hope that modernising their electoral methods and allowing voters to cast their vote via electronic voting machines or even from their PCs will increase participation as well as providing a quicker and more cost effective means of organising public consultations.

But if e-voting has the potential to bring about many benefits, it also carries with it certain risks. How to ensure the security and secrecy of the vote in this new environment? How to ensure that e-voting is accessible to all?

The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, entrusted the Multidisciplinary Ad Hoc Group of Specialists on legal, operational and technical standards for e-enabled voting (IP1-S-EE) with the task of developing a set of standards which could be used as a reference by member states considering the introduction of e-voting programmes. The Integrated Project “Making democratic institutions work” provided the Secretariat for this group.

These standards are set out in Recommendation Rec(2004)11 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on legal, operational and technical standards for e-voting, which was adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 30 September 2004 at the 898th meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:59 pm (0) comments /

This seems to be the first time Russian electronic system for counting paper ballots has had such major glitch.

...

Apparently, what the electronic system for counting paper ballots had displayed had little to do with reality! Distrustful observers from the majority of candidates preferred to stand in close proximity to the electronic counting devices and counted each ballot manually. Hours later, the elections results were announced.and as it turned out, the results did not match at all! In fact, they weren't even close! Nonetheless, representatives of the elections committee refuse to conduct hand recount of the ballots. "This isn"t America!" they claim in unison.

Here is a real paradox: electronic machine manual FORBIDS hand recount of paper ballots. The situation resembles events in Abkhazia, Georgia and Ukraine.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:21 pm (0) comments /

Prior to 2000, few people ever bothered to look at the mechanics of voting. Elections were like the sausage factory—people wanted to enjoy the end product without thinking too much about what went into making it.

The 2000 Presidential election vote counting fiasco in Florida brought a huge dose of sunlight and scrutiny into the nuts and bolts of our voting and vote counting processes. Basically lots of people started looking under the rock and we are finding that oversight and security of our voting systems is miserably inadequate. We’ve also learned that election security is incredibly complex. There are thousands of voting jurisdictions in the United States, all with their own systems and procedures.

The loss of transparency has been underway in this country for 40 years, ever since punch card voting was introduced. In most places, the software that is used to tabulate the vote is not verified. This is propriety software, made by private companies, which is being managed by thousands of people with limited computer skills. This software is not required by federal law to meet any security, accuracy or reliability standard. It is unregulated by the federal government and in most states, is poorly regulated.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:47 pm (0) comments /

Q. Under what circumstances may an elector be offered a ride to the polls or be paid an allowance or provided with a benefit to cover travel expenses to a polling place?

A. Basically, a ride that's a bribe is prohibited, a ride that is not, is not caught.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 9:12 am (0) comments /

Key steps towards electoral modernisation

Public engagement, convenience and confidence in the electoral system are the key themes of the Government's responses to The Electoral Commission's reports Voting for change: an electoral law modernisation programme and Delivering democracy? The future of postal voting. Our responses to these reports were jointly published on 9 December by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

In responding, the Government has reaffirmed its goal of multi-channelled elections, a vision shared with the Commission, as the way to offer voters the choice they want about how they can cast their votes.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:15 am (0) comments /

The U.K. government will launch a Parliamentary inquiry next year [2005] into the practicalities of electronic voting. The House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee will carry out an inquiry on the first steps towards electronic voting, working with a sub-committee of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. They have requested public testimony and evidence by Jan. 14 [2005].

The U.K. government has long prized the benefits of e-government, though it has been struggling to meet its own deadline of putting all government services online by 2005. The government sees electronic registrations as the first building blocks for electronic voting.

...

The committees are requesting that written evidence be submitted in an electronic format, preferably by e-mail, in either Microsoft Word or Rich Text format. The e-mail address for sending information to the inquiry is odpmcom@parliament.uk .

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:07 am (0) comments /

More than 4,000 votes vanished without a trace into a computer's overloaded memory in one North Carolina county, and about a hundred paper ballots were thrown out by mistake in another. In Texas, a county needed help from a laboratory in Canada to unlock the memory of a touch-screen machine and unearth five dozen votes.

In other places, machine undercounting or overcounting of votes was a problem. Several thousand votes were mistakenly double-counted in North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, and Washington state. Some votes in other areas were at first credited to the wrong candidates, with one Indiana county, by some quirk, misallocating several hundred votes for Democrats to Libertarians. In Florida, some machines temporarily indicated votes intended for challenger John F. Kerry were for President Bush, and vice versa.

In the month since the election, serious instances of voting machine problems or human errors in ballot counts have been documented in at least a dozen states

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 9:06 pm (1) comments /

A columnist in The Washington Post recently suggested that nostalgia for paper ballots, in today's reliably computerized world, must reflect a Luddite disdain for technology in general or an Oliver Stone-style paranoia about the schemings of the political world.

Not at all. It can also arise from a clear understanding of how computers work - and don't. The more you know about the operations of today's widely trusted commercial computer networks, the more concerned you become about most electronic-voting systems.

The phenomenal reliability of the systems we trust for banking, communication, and everything else rests on two bedrock principles. One is the universal understanding in the technology world that nothing works right the first time, and maybe not the first 50 times.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 9:21 pm (0) comments /

And we’ll examine whether and how to modernize our voting process, use technology better, and make it easier to vote.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 3:29 pm (0) comments /

TENdotZERO, a pioneer in standards-based solutions, today announced that it is opening up the code base for TdZ e-Vote, its e-Voting software, to the Open Source Community on a Dual Use License basis.

Simon Bain, CTO of TENdotZERO, said: “We have decided to release the TdZ e-Vote code under the GPL license, to provide a firm foundation for other developers and users to take a proven product and adapt it for their own requirements.”

The original software was developed alongside the software which helped manage a number of the UK local government pilot elections in 2003. This new version additionally provides cross-platform compatibility, enhanced security, and easy management.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:18 pm (0) comments /

Six Democratic congressmen have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate reports of voting irregularities in the Nov. 2 election, many of them involving electronic touch-screen voting machines.

A Nov. 5 letter to Comptroller General David Walker cited news reports of problems in California, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio in which thousands of votes were erroneously recorded, deleted or added.

Signing the letter were Reps. John Conyers of Michigan, Rush Holt of New Jersey, Jerrold Nadler of New York, Robert Scott of Virginia, Melvin Watt of North Carolina and Robert Wexler of Florida.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:28 am (0) comments /

A Victorian parliamentary committee has called for public comment on the issue of e-democracy following the release early this month of a discussion paper.

Victorian Electronic Democracy: Your say in the future raises what the committee believes are the key issues, including such questions as how new technologies can be used to draw citizens into policy development, whether parliament has the resources to use interactive technologies and the security implications of using technologies such as online voting systems.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:16 am (0) comments /

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 -- For eight months, the Election Verification Project, a national coalition of technologists, voting rights and legal organizations, has worked to raise public awareness of the need to reduce computerized voting risks, and ensure that votes will be recorded and counted as cast.

On November 2 more voters cast paperless ballots than ever before in a U.S. election: roughly 30 percent compared to 12 percent four years ago. The Election Verification Project is not questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election results. Instead, we are questioning a voting process in which 30 percent of the ballots cannot be verified and, of the remaining 70 percent, most will not be verified.

While there was no nationwide meltdown, the election was far from error-free. Our preliminary analysis of nearly 900 reports of e-voting irregularities, gathered by the Election Incident Reporting System, indicates that electronic voting machines need much improvement. Problems were reported with all vendors and across most of the states that use e-voting. Electronic voting machines lost votes in North Carolina, miscounted votes in Ohio, and broke down in New Orleans, causing long lines and shut-downs at polling places.

The documented problems with touchscreen machines, vote-counting irregularities, and the fact that votes cannot be verified or recounted show us how vulnerable our democracy will be in the future if there is a disputed or unclear result.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 5:45 pm (0) comments /

Last weekend the New York Times published an editorial that found "no evidence" of vote fraud but called electronic voting "a problem" all the same. After all, the editorial noted, there is "no way to be sure" that votes weren't changed "by secret software" inside the machines. If you're tempted to believe that analysis is rational, just ask yourself this question: Are you really sure that your bank isn't using secret software to steal $9.72 from your retirement account every week? And if the answer is no, why aren't you up in arms about that, too?

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 5:25 pm (0) comments /

What:

A national coalition of voting rights and computer security experts will hold a post-election press conference to provide a preliminary analysis of electronic voting problems and solutions, and their implications for increasing voters’ confidence in the legitimacy of elections.

Who:

-- Kim Alexander, California Voter Foundation

-- Lillie Coney, National Committee for Voting Integrity/Electronic Privacy Information Center

-- David Dill, Ph.D., Verified Voting Foundation

-- Will Doherty, Verified Voting Foundation/Election Incident Reporting System

-- Chellie Pingree, Common Cause

-- Matt Zimmerman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

When:

Thursday, Nov. 18, 10:30 a.m. to 12 Noon

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 11:21 pm (0) comments /

FREDERICTON (CNB) -- Amendments to the Municipal Elections Act were introduced in the Legislature on March 31 by Justice Minister Bradley Green.

The legislation includes two different types of amendments. The major amendment gives the Municipal Electoral Officer authority to modify aspects of the electoral process, to allow the use of vote counting machines or other equipment or procedures in particular elections.

The immediate reason for this amendment is to allow the use of vote tabulating, or counting, machines in Saint John for the triennial municipal, district education council, and regional health authority elections being held in May. Saint John does not have a ward system, so all council members are elected at large, and municipal elections in the city normally attract a large number of candidates.

"Traditional ballots in Saint John create difficulties for both voters and poll workers. Voting can be a slow process, leading to line-ups and frustrations at the polls," Chief Electoral Officer Annise Hollies said. "Counting the votes with such ballots is a time-consuming job, with some polls not reporting until 5 or 6 a.m. the day after polling day, making it difficult to find people willing to work the polls in the city."

"Vote counting machines will take the counting burden off the shoulders of poll workers," Hollies said.

Current legislation does not allow the use of such machines in New Brunswick, but Elections New Brunswick has observed their use in other places and is confident that the machines are easy to use, reliable, accurate, and will vastly improve the process of voting, counting and reporting election results in Saint John.

"The use of vote counting machines in Saint John is something of a pilot project.," Hollies said. "Elections New Brunswick will review the results of their use there, and if everything goes as well as expected will consider the feasibility and desirability of using such systems in other parts of the province in future elections."

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:27 pm (0) comments /

Why are Tabulation Machines being used in Saint John?

For the 2004 Municipal Elections, it was decided to use Vote Tabulation machines in The City of Saint John. The city does not have a ward system, so electors are confronted with a long ballot where they may select 1 candidate for mayor and up to 10 candidates for councillor, normally from a list of over 25 candidates. In addition, electors receive ballots for District Education Council and Regional Health Authority Elections.

The time required to sort, count, and return this large number of ballots (sometimes over 1000 ballots per poll) results in delayed results reporting, the possibility of counting errors being made, and forces the election officials to work a very long day at the polling station.

What is a Vote Tabulator Machine?

A vote tabulator is a digital optical scan machine that reads and records how ballots are marked and produces election results. This is the same technology used in grocery stores.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:08 pm (0) comments /

The City of Ottawa (GEMS-1-5-10) has reported that
When downloading to Memory Card the Program Memory Card screen changes the status from Modem to Accu-Vote. I have tried to duplicate this without success using GEMS 1-7-5.

They also reported when uploading in the Receive Election Results screen that the status changes to Accu-Vote from modem after the first transmission.

In fact it does and locks out any further uploads from other Accu-Votes at different locations. It appears that it retains the line and allows successive Memory Cards to uploaded without having to redial.

The port must be highlighted, then the Stop key clicked, highlighted again then Start to reactivate for the next reception.

There does not seem to be any process to terminate the mult-card upload and reset for the next Accu-Vote.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:22 am (0) comments /

Global Election Systems Inc. (TSE:GSM.) announced today its voting system sales of AccuVote and AccuVote-TS (touch screen) for the year ended June 30, 2000.

...

Contributions to the sales figures come from Global's further expansion into the Canadian marketplace. Global reports add-on sales of 60 AccuVote systems to the City of Ottawa and 70 to the City of Hamilton as well as first-time sales of 60 AccuVote-TS systems to the City of Barrie and 70 to Dynabec, Global's authorized distributor for Quebec.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:06 am (0) comments /

The City of Barrie first used touch-screen technology in its 1997 municipal election, and in its last election, on Nov. 13, all voting stations were converted to touch-screen kiosks.

...

The system is successful because it’s convenient for voters, says John Sisson, Barrie’s deputy city clerk. Centralized voter lists on mainframe computers allowed Barrie residents to vote at any station in any ward during the city’s Nov. 13 election. Polling stations also opened six days in advance, allowing residents to choose the most convenient day to vote.
The AccuVote-TS computer makes paper ballots obsolete. It sends encrypted voter decisions to a central computer.

"We thought it was a way to enhance participation," Sisson says. "The city provided an opportunity that few municipalities can offer."

But Barrie’s city council went to great lengths to convince voters these machines would not reveal their identities and that the system was hacker proof.

The possibility of intrusion always exists, but the suppliers of touch-screen systems to Barrie say they are taking all possible precautions.

"The data is all double encrypted," says Rickards.

"If the information being transferred has been tampered with, we find out about it through our audit trail at the other end."

The Vancouver-based Global Elections Systems Inc. has teamed up with Soza and Co., a Washington-based computer software firm that does encryption for such organizations as the U.S. defence department.

In case of power outages, each of Barrie’s machines has a backup battery. There are several memory systems built in to each machine, and they can be recovered in the event of a complete system failure.
"The legislation is still written towards a system that we’ve had for over 100 years of hand voting."

Though each touch-screen system costs around $5,000, they will save money down the road, Rickards argues.

"You save on the number of man-hours and the cost of paper," Rickards explains. "The machines can pay for themselves over the course of two and a half federal elections, if they were held about once every three or four years."

The Canada Elections Act has been the ultimate barrier to automating the federal election. It currently does not allow the use of automated equipment, and the process to change it has been stalled for three years.

"The legislation is still written towards a system that we’ve had for over 100 years of hand voting."

Rickards has been talking to [Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre] Kingsley for the last eight years about automating Canada’s federal elections. Kingsley is sympathetic, says Rickards, but it’s taking a "horrendous amount of time" for new provisions to be legislated.

Until the federal government makes the appropriate changes, Elections Canada will continue to be stuck in the '70s using an "ancient system that is slow and inaccurate."

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 11:45 pm (0) comments /

Canadian interest in electronic voting has been slower to take hold
federally and provincially, with political parties perhaps waiting for "the go-forward solution," said Jonathon Hollins, Canadian director of Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb.

Unlike the U.S. willingness to adopt the latest technology, Canada "is not quite there," explained Hollins, who's based in Pickering, Ont. "We don't put as much emphasis on voting technology. I think it becomes a bit of a cost issue. We don't have as frequent elections up in Canada."

Federal ballots are less complex than those at other government levels, generating less interest from Elections Canada to replace them with more costly electronic voting, suggested Adam Froman, president of Delvinia Interactive Inc. , a digital marketing and applied research agency in Toronto.

Voting on standalone touch-screen machines (Direct Recording Electronics), however, which also caters to the visually-impaired through an audio ballot, has been used in municipal elections held in Toronto, Edmonton, and the Ontario cities of Vaughan, Brantford, Oakville and Mississauga, said Hollins.

In Ontario, Markham and Prescott have also flirted with Internet voting, which allows people to vote at home, at work, in libraries or at the polling station. The city of Vancouver and the province of Ontario are also exploring online voting for their next elections, according to Froman.

"For municipal elections, they're very complicated –– the ballots," including candidates running for mayor, town council and school trustee, added Froman, whose agency conducted online and in-person surveys of Markham voters.

"From our point of view, there will always be risks with any form of electronic voting that have to be managed and monitored...but the demand is overwhelming from the voters themselves," said Froman.

"From the voters' point of view, (people) weren't concerned about security" of voting online, Froman said. Rather, he said, the administrators of Internet voting were worried that the real voter may in fact not be casting a ballot.

The town of Markham had a different take on the experiment, though. Although the systems are secure, said John Swan, client adviser in Markham's IT department, voters still take a skeptical view of the online voting process, specifically the accurate undertaking of a re-count or updating voter information.

"With e-everything these days, and hackers and security issues -- I think that's really what's holding people back," said Swan, adding that Markham's discussions with the province have also unearthed similar concerns.

Swan said one of the reasons Markham introduced this more sophisticated voting option was to capture the vote of tech-savvy youth. The democratic pilot project failed from this perspective, though. But it did work for those who were out of the country during the election but registered for the online option before leaving, he said.

Markham is uncertain whether it will repeat its online voting episode. Showcasing a solution from Election Systems & Software, the town's e-election cost $25,000, about four times less than what the price tag would be next time, said Swan.

"If we had to do it full-blown to attract that small segment of the marketplace, it becomes a very expensive option for the town."

Experts agreed that Canada is unlikely to focus strictly on electronic voting, but instead may adopt multi-channel voting, such as voting by phone, voting by mail, advanced voting or voting on election day.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 11:02 pm (0) comments /

Some Estonians will be able to vote online next year, as Tallinn plans trials with electronic voting software that is the first step toward a nationwide e-voting system, officials said Friday.

Toomas Sepp, spokesman for Tallinn's city government, said the virtual system - which will be used for the capital's local elections in the fall - requires that voters have an electronic ID card, ID-card reader and Internet access.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 10:56 pm (0) comments /

And, asks the Ned Ludd in me: Why is this even an issue? What's the problem that technology is intended to solve? Is a hand-count too slow? Okay, get more people. Or just f---ing wait a bit longer. It seems to work just fine in Britain. Are ballots too complicated to be completed by hand, or counted by hand? Okay, simplify them. Separate off Federal-level votes from State-level votes if need be.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:59 pm (0) comments /

Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:

1. Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else’s vote, ballot stuff, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.

2. Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.

3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India’s June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil’s October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.

4. Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day’s election before bedtime. It’s less important in other countries, where people don’t mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:51 pm (0) comments /

Q: What chances are there that we will see electronic voting in the near future? What about internet voting?

A: I've received several questions on electronic and internet voting. Currently Federal elections must be conducted by paper ballots. The law could soon be changed to allow a limited use of electronic voting, but don't hold your breath waiting to vote on-line. Countries like Brazil and India have recently conducted elections using a form of electronic voting. This obviously raises the question as to why a wealthier nation like Australia does not do the same.

If you are going to switch to electronic voting, which is almost certain to be more expensive than the current pencil and paper methods, you have to define some benefit to be gained from the extra cost. To push for change simply because more exciting technology than pencil and paper is available falls into the trap of technological determinism.

...

However, computerising the count would be a very expensive process when you remember we have 8,000 polling places and most of the technology would be used for only a single day. That is before you even look at the problem of how to provide a safe and secure audit trail and how the secrecy of the ballot is maintained.

...

The Australian Capital Territory has experimented with computer voting. It was first used in 2001 and will again be used in October 2004. Most pre-poll votes will be cast electronically, and a small number of election day polling places will also use computers. Paper ballots will still be available as an option.

...

But such voting is not cost-free. Based on the 2001 experiment, the ACT electoral office produced an estimate for full electronic voting which was not achievable on current budgets. The cheaper alternative was to abandon a single polling day and conduct the election over a longer period at a smaller number of polling places. This was judged not to be an acceptable option.

...

As for thinking electronic voting will mean we know the result more quickly, think again. As it is, we almost always know the result on election night. In close elections, you need to wait for the one-in-five votes cast by pre-poll, absent, postal and provisional votes. That means waiting up to 10 days.

It is the Electoral Commission's job first to get the result right, and second to get the result as soon as possible. As the problems of voting in Florida showed in the 2000 US Presidential election, using technology is of no use if after the event you can't check to make sure everything was done correctly.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 7:21 am (0) comments /

The key to maximizing the benefits of technology is to use *appropriate technology*. For voting, the appropriate level of technology is a paper ballot marked by hand. Electronic voting technology introduces unreliability and removes transparency from the voting system. I have a website about this issue, Paper Vote Canada, http://blog.papervotecanada.ca/

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[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:26 am (1) comments /

While I know that Internet voting, or true reliance on technology to solve issues will not be in this year's Christmas stocking, it is coming. With all the Canadian talent we have, I can see opportunities for us to take a leading role. In the meantime, all you voters out there start making noise. Hound your MLA or MPP, Councilor, Mayor, and whoever you can think of to get this ball rolling.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:13 am (0) comments /

In a recent article, David Canton stated "Canadians have not been exposed to electronic voting."

While it is true that there is no electronic voting in Canada at the federal level, it is widespread at the municipal level. Primarily this consists of optical scanners, but touch screens were used in a limited way in Edmonton this year, and Markham Ontario even used Internet voting in 2003.

Electronic voting systems are unnecessary, unreliable and expensive. If Canadians want to continue our tradition of transparent, trusted elections, we must oppose the use of these systems. I have a website on the issue, Paper Vote Canada, http://blog.papervotecanada.ca/

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:09 am (0) comments /

One by one, we removed the memory cards from the machines. I held them in my hand as chief judge Marie was ready to load them into one of the machines that we designated as the accumulator. How fragile. All of the votes from the entire precinct in my hand. Substituting those cards with five identical looking cards, one could replace all of the ballots that were cast with bogus ones.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 8:45 pm (0) comments /

Canadians have not been exposed to electronic voting. Elections Canada has no official position on electronic voting. A 2003 recommendation was made to allow eligible voters to register to vote online, but has not been adopted by Parliament.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 4:51 pm (0) comments /

Did those controversial electronic voting machines properly record Americans' votes yesterday? We'll never really know. Without a paper trail, there's simply nothing to check against in order to verify accuracy.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 5:32 pm (0) comments /

To defend the heart of democracy by challenging the use of electronic voting systems until such time that the idea of converting to electronic voting systems is abandoned or that a system exists that will allow for the accurate, safe, and reliable counting of votes that will uphold the basic required elements of the electoral process.

...

At this time this site has the specific goal of exploring and defending the integrity of elections in Ontario. More specifically, in the counties of Stormont and Dundas.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:42 pm (0) comments /

About 50 million Americans are expected to vote on the touchscreen machines on Nov. 2. Officials insist they have been tested, and can indeed be trusted.

...

"I'm not sure which is a greater concern -- that the machines will fail, or that they'll be rigged," Rubin said.

As a result of the controversy, record numbers of people are choosing to vote in advance, on paper ballots.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 6:33 am (0) comments /

Joanne Kartchner goes out to her garage every morning to check on the electronic voting machines that were dropped off early last week.

The garage is locked and the machines are sealed in special bar-coded tamper tape, but Kartchner, a longtime election worker who volunteers her Palo Alto home as a polling place, wants to be double sure. ``I make sure they are all there,'' Kartchner said Saturday.

The registrar of voters began delivering electronic voting machines to 822 polling places in Santa Clara County last weekend, among them at least 20 community or senior centers, 50 apartment complexes or mobile home parks, and 80 private residences.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 3:52 pm (0) comments /

Votergate is the investigative documentary feature film uncovering the truth about new computer voting systems, which allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret.

...

This 30 minute Special Edition is designed specifically to help viewers navigate past the fear and spin being thrown at this critical issue.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 1:01 pm (0) comments /