Paper Vote Canada

PBS.org - March 11, 2004
Prints of Darkness
A Year Into the E-voting Crisis, Shouldn't We Have Noticed the Printer That's Already Built into Each Diebold Voting Machine?

seen in Slashdot thread San Diego Diebold Poll Worker's Report Posted

I read the Vanity Fair article. It focuses mainly on Bev Harris of the Black Box Voting site(s). It gives a reasonable overview of the situation looking mainly at who runs the companies, who they give money to, with some information about the technical concerns as well.

USA Today Calif. senators want decertification of e-vote systems. Via Google News Alert.

"California has a lemon law which protects consumers if they buy an automobile that doesn't work. So far, electronic voting in California is a lemon. It needs to be fixed," said Sen. Ross Johnson, R-Irvine.

This month's Vanity Fair has an article "How Unsecure Are This Election's Voting Machines?". They don't seem to have any content online.

Elections always run smoothly in Canada, right? We never have any problems.
Except...

Copps appeals nomination loss

Stronach team calls for delay of leadership vote

IEEE P1583 Voting Equipment Standards. Via upa-evoting.

The UPA has a project Voting and Usability. Via upa-evoting.

foundation for information policy research: e-Democracy news has lots of e-voting links but doesn't seem to have been updated since September 2003. Via upa-evoting.

Yahoo has a group upa-evoting: UPA Discuss international e-voting

You have to write an email saying why you would like to join.

UPA is the Usability Professionals' Association.

The group is created/run by Louise Ferguson.
Her blog also reports

Monday, March 08, 2004  

UPA workshop and panel on voting

We're running a panel and a workshop on voting at the Usability Professionals' Association conference in Minneapolis this summer.

She links to the workshop page at http://www.upassoc.org/conferences_and_events/.../Workshops/VotingSystems.html

This workshop will look at the social, civic and methodology issues in ensuring the usability of voting systems and new voting concepts currently being trialed. The goal of this workshop is to bring together practitioners, officials and researchers from around the world to look at the issue of e-voting/e-participation through the lens of usability and user-centered design.

The workshop is on Monday June 7 2004, 8:30 – 5:30.

From comp.risks

Extended Call for Papers: Voting, Elections, and Technology

Micah Altman Micah_Altman@harvard.edu
Thu, 4 Mar 2004 19:22:28 -0500 (EST)


Due to the scheduling of other journal issues, the SSCORE editor has given
us an opportunity to extend the original deadline for submissions to this
special issue until June 15.

Call for Papers: *Voting, Elections, and Technology*
a special issue of _Social_Science_Computer_Review_

This special issue of Social Science Computer Review will bring together a
collection of high quality academic work that extends, refines and
challenges our understanding of the use, state of the art, and challenges
associated with voting and election technology, broadly conceived.

This special issue will bring together papers that investigate specific
cases of the use of technology in voting and elections, as well as analysis
of policy, and reviews of the state of the art. Papers from a broad range of
social science perspectives are encouraged. Submissions can be in the form
of full papers (maximum 20 printed pages) or in the form of short papers (5
printed pages). Post-graduate students are particularly encouraged to submit
early work in the form of short papers.

*Sample Topics*: E-voting, Online voter survey methods, Technologies for
election forecasting, Agent,based models of voting behavior, Web,based
campaign fundraising, Redistricting technology, Policy implications

[Abridged for RISKS. For more on SSCORE, see this URL:
http://hcl.chass.ncsu.edu/sscore/sscore.htm
]

Black Box Notes links to a Mother Jones article Diebold's Political Machine.

I must emphasize: even if all of the conspiracy theories are completely, utterly false, electronic and Internet voting still undermines democracy.

http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html

For some inexplicable reason, the U.S. is rushing to eliminate the only physical record of the mark made by each voter, going to straight touch-screens with no paper trail. Canada doesn't allow this. Neither does Japan. Why are we so casually throwing away the only real audit trail that protects our vote?

Canada must continue to use paper.

Civilization.ca - A History of the Vote in Canada

Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio, USA) - Thu, Mar. 04, 2004
Issues delay E-vote rollout is a good overview of some of the security and certification issues. Via Google News Alerts.

There is a fundamental underlying problem.
The equipment vendors are all-American capitalists.
There is a false belief that somehow private enterprise will always provide the best solution thanks to the wonders of competition.
Ford used to say "At Ford, Quality is Job One".
Which of course is baloney. At Ford, as at any public company, shareholder return had better be job one.

Shareholder return is maximized by selling the cheapest product at the highest price.

So Diebold's self-interest as a company is to make the shoddiest machines possible that the market will accept.

Note how this does not align with the interests of the voters.
Now, after several generations of competition this might improve.
However, these devices have to work right the first time.

If these companies were really serious about making good elections, rather than making good money, they would have followed the well-established Threat Risk Assessment procedures and would be constantly striving to improve the security of their products.

However, they are instead doing what companies normally do, which is resist any changes to their product by fighting tooth and nail, accompanied by furious marketing spin.

The promoters of the "market is perfect" theories love voluntary guidelines.
If we still had voluntary guidelines in the automobile industry, there would be only a tiny number of cars with seatbelts.

Companies like revenue.
They don't like changes. Or costs.

If you listen to the tone from the election equipment vendors, instead of saying "isn't it great that computer security experts are guiding us to making our equipment even better" you can see it is more like "oh, what a bother and trouble all these geeky nit-pickers are causing for our important business, forcing us to spend money that should have been profits".

Black Box Notes collected together a bunch of reports from US "Super Tuesday".
For non-US readers, this is a day when many Presidential primaries are held in various states.
In the primary, party members vote for the candidate they would like to run for President in the November elections. This is why some of the reports refer to "smart cards coded with party affiliation".

Super Tuesday Watch

The Perfect World of Electronic Voting: A Deafening Silence as Democracy Expires.
Located via this posting to USENET.

Then the machine displayed this message:

"Recording Vote. Please Wait."

A couple of moments went by, then the machine displayed this final message:

"Vote Recorded, Thank You"

I waited for the output. Nothing happened. Ok, I guess I was done voting.

It would have been a wonderful experience except for one thing. There was something missing. Something very important.

There was no human-readable, physical evidence that my vote had been captured and stored the way that I had intended.

Slashdot linked up a story on

My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County by Avi Rubin

He talks about what he witnessed (the election used Diebold machines) and how it changed his evaluation of some of the threats and risks - some that he was worried about he became less concerned about, while he discovered new issues.

Wired News
E-Vote Glitches Found in Election

Scattered technical problems were reported in the early hours as voters in 10 states, including California, New York and Ohio, went to the Super Tuesday polls to choose a Democratic presidential nominee and decide primary contests for congressional and state races.

Advocates of electronic voting say paperless ballots save money and eliminate problems common to old systems. But the technology brings a new breed of security concerns, like software errors and hackers that could make the results unreliable.

Via Google News Alerts.

More from the recent Slashdot thread

Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland

Netherlands

(Link from previous Slashdot story.)
Electronic voting in the Netherlands