I find the idea of computer voting booths designed and implemented by closed-source companies to be distressing.
Anyone for trying to put together an official statement of the LUG, which would be sent to the kcstar as a letter from the LUG -- agreeing with that sentiment, and offering to create or obtain a free and open source alternative to the computerized voting systems discussed in today's newspaper, made with common off-the-shelf hardware?
I am pretty sure we could even undersell the money figures given in the article -- $1000 per voting booth for an attached printer? -- I really don't see why state-of-the-art hardware would be needed to run a touch-screen voting machine, or even what the advantage of touch-screen over keyboard might be. To select from the candidates on this screen press a number key on the keyboard. Did you select 32, "Chuck Steak" running in the Mauve party, for the position of director of parks department division of drinking fountain maintenance? press the "YES" button.
I dunno about touch-screen technology -- the data comes in from the touch screen like mouse click coordinates, right?
Aha -- http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ exists.
So we propose a petition in the form of an open letter to government that the OVC solution should be considered, and offer to, as an organization, integrate and maintain it.
The politics at KCLUG are clearly a mixed bag, so we otta be totally immune from accusations of partisanship :)
-- David L Nicol this document can be opened in any word processor, including LyX
On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, David Nicol wrote:
<snippp>
I really don't see why state-of-the-art hardware would be needed to run a touch-screen voting machine, or even what the advantage of touch-screen over keyboard might be.
It's simple, really. If sombody were to trojan a keylogger onto the machine, then they might be able to tell how someone voted, or even, heaven forbid, total up the actual votes. I think that the threat to our American Electoral System is pretty obvious in such a worst-case scenario.
The politics at KCLUG are clearly a mixed bag, so we otta be totally immune from accusations of partisanship :)
What, you mean some KCLUG members' political views are totally incorrect, clearly wrongheaded and/or hopelessly naive? Preposterous.
Regards,
-Don, Far Centrist
On 9/23/05, Don Erickson derick@zeni.net wrote:
If sombody were to trojan a keylogger onto the machine, then they might be able to tell how someone voted, or even, heaven forbid, total up the actual votes [and determine a number that does not match the official results.]
Australia has open-source voting machines...
maybe a petition to congress to amend the voting systems money bill so it mandates that the funded systems must have publicly inspectable source code?
Does open-source advocacy, to the mainstream, seem like a fringe activity of privileged whiners? ("the geeks are trying to grab power")
Composing lucid arguments for mandating open-source ("how far behind Australia are we willing to lag, in basic freedoms? We cannot afford to have a freedom gap!") can be fun...
but not in not-here-first KC?
-- David L Nicol We cannot afford to have a freedom gap!
On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, David Nicol wrote:
On 9/23/05, Don Erickson derick@zeni.net wrote:
If sombody were to trojan a keylogger onto the machine, then they might be able to tell how someone voted, or even, heaven forbid, total up the actual votes [and determine a number that does not match the official results.]
My expressed concern was that somebody might discover the actual vote total.
It certainly looked like satire from this chair...
Composing lucid arguments for mandating open-source ("how far behind Australia are we willing to lag, in basic freedoms? We cannot afford to have a freedom gap!") can be fun...
This argument looks more like an appeal to national pride and emotion, but that seems to be what sells these days. Lucid arguments can only have an effect on lucid people. Everyone else you're going to have to bribe, and the closed-source advocates have more money than you.
Regards,
-Don, realist.
On 9/23/05, Don Erickson derick@zeni.net wrote:
Lucid arguments can only have an effect on lucid people.
Right. s/lucid/effective/g
-- David L Nicol this document can be opened in any word processor, including LyX
I'm as much of a technogeekfanboi as anyone, but I think that "computerized voting systems" are a bad idea. The best voting system is what we now use in Wyandotte County, which is ironic considering our political history: We have paper ballots with ovals to be darkened by Sharpie. The voting 'booths' are 2'x2' square tables with folding legs and a 3-sided privacy shield, all of which is designed to fit inside the table itself, making for a very compact space for transport and storage. The ballot is placed inside a cardstock privacy sleeve, and taken to the scanning machine, where it can be tested for 'overvoting' and immediately rejected, so that the voter can request a replacement for the spoiled ballot. The scanning machine can return totals for the precinct as soon as the polls close, and the preliminary county totals are available shortly thereafter. In the event that the scanner fails for some reason, you lose the ability to fix overvotes but retain all of the other advantages of this system: An absentee or provisional ballot can be physically identical to the other ballots (possibly with a checkbox designating it as such), reducing the cost of running the election. There are solid pieces of paper that can be audited, with no hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads involved. No need to hold a card up to light to try to divine the intent of the voter. Either the oval is filled, or it isn't. (OK, it might just be partially filled, but that's something that can be dealt with more easily; it's pretty straightforward to have a cardstock template that an election official could place down to frame the oval [but not reveal the name of the candidate] so that a true double-blind assessment can be done by other election officials) It should be required by law that a judge will randomly select a certain number of precincts to be audited, (and each candidate should be able to specify a certain number as well) after the vote totals have been certified by the election officials, such that no one who wanted to game the system would know ahead of time which precincts would be audited. We must have complete confidence that the votes are not being manipulated. That having been said..... If someone wants to produce a computer system that prints out a paper ballot, with the appropriate votes indicated, so that the voter can visually inspect same before putting it into the box, especially to consolidate a lot of races to fit on one side of a sheet, with OCR characters indicating the voter's choices for all (if you've ever seen what tax preparation software makes to send to Topeka, you'll get my drift here)... That would be just fine with me. And it wouldn't matter what software that computer produced the paper ballot, because the criteria for verifying the accuracy of ballot totals are based on human readability.
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David Nicol -
Don Erickson -
Monty J. Harder