Not Quite a Blog 2.0

What do you do when you get tired of your old running routes and want a new one? Maybe even a bit longer? Well, you can combine two old ones into a new one! It's like recycling.

The run above combines my Oakland Ave. -> Piedmont run and my Lake Merritt run into one uber-run. It's pretty and about 8 miles (although it really feels like about 9).

(full res. here, EFF press release here)

Chance, a popular Scientific American-like journal for statistics, has published a cover piece by Arlene Ash (BU) and John Lamperti (Dartmouth), “Florida 2006: Can Statistics Tell Us Who Won Congressional District-13?”

The piece explores a range of statistical arguments to show, with high probability, that the currently seated candidate, Vern Buchanan, was not the candidate the voters of FL-13 intended to elect.

The piece can be accessed in PDF here.

It also includes two commentaries... one by myself, “Statistical Solutions to Elections Mysteries” and one by Walter Mebane (U Mich), “Counting Frustrated Voter Intentions”.

Aaron Burstein (UC Berkeley Law) and I just finished a large regulatory filing that will be of interest to any of you election technology geeks out there. Enjoy and be sure to let us know if you have feedback (there's another round of comments sometime in the future on a revised draft).

http://accurate-voting.org/2008/05/05/accurate-vvsg2-comments/

ACCURATE Submits Comments on the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

5 May 2008

A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) submitted public comment today to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on their draft Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), urging the Commission to adopt certain key features fo the draft. The VVSG provides a national certification framework for U.S. voting systems against which 40 states require their voting systems to be certified.

ACCURATE's comments laud the new draft as a groundbreaking and badly needed overhaul of our national voting system standards while making constructive suggestions for further development.

The most significant element of the draft VVSG is the requirement for software independence, which would require voting systems to be designed so that undetected flaws in the voting system software cannot cause changes in the vote count. ACCURATE fully supports requiring software independence as the backbone of a robust and comprehensive next-generation voting system certification regime.

The commentary goes on to emphasize the importance of welcome features of the draft: adversarial vulnerability testing, volume testing, the new framework for usability and accessibility testing and comprehensive voting system documentation requirements. The comment closes by pointing out areas of the VVSG that will require increased institutional support outside of the VVSG process, including the crucial innovation class and a closed loop for incident reporting and feedback.

ACCURATE plans to participate further as the draft VVSG is modified and extended.

Jennifer Atkins starts her 2nd 24-hour Mammalathon tomorrow, where she illustrates one mammal per hour for 24 hours. Jennifer is a gifted illustrator and all the money goes to a worthy cause. Donate $35 or $50 bucks and get your own mammal (for the higher price, she'll matte it so that it's ready for mounting).

Architects and urban planners take note: we desperately need cellphonebooths.

“Huh?”, you ask. Well, think about it. How long has it been since you’ve last used a pay phone in a phonebooth? Most payphones don’t even have booths these days... take a look around next time you're in a city. You’d be surprised how many payphones have non-working payphones or no phone at all.

However, with the increasing use of mobile devices and cell phones, there is a growing need for sound isolation, even in places where traditional phonebooths haven't existed. For example, in open-plan office spaces, it can often be a nuisance to take a phone call. I hardly need to mention taking an important phone call while you’re walking down a busy street.

Architects could design cellphonebooths into office floor plans and office furniture firms, like UC’s supplier Steelcase, could produce modular cellphonebooths. Urban planners could design public versions, even with a charge and timer of some sort (power and internet access for an additional fee?).

The new cellphonebooth should probably be designed differently, though. For example, to first order, just an old phonebooth without the phone would be ok. However, what if you need to pull out your laptop or have a reasonable working surface? Maybe they could offer a place to sit and a working surface on a slightly larger footprint.

UPDATE [2008-05-07T13:53:44]: A Steelcase employee responds in the comments to the effect that Steelcase does have such a thing, called the Cell Cell:

OFFICE CONFIDENTIAL: Conversations are hush-hush in the Cell Cell, designed by Steelcase to give cube dwellers cell-phone privacy and spare the rest of us from TMI. It lights up when occupied, and boosters aid phone reception

I’ll be giving my PhD thesis talk in 202 South Hall (UC Berkeley) on 5/14 (Wed) at 10am. Abstract below...

Public Policy Mechanisms for Increasing Transparency in Electronic Voting

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, UC Berkeley School of Information

Abstract:

In the early years of the American republic, only white male landowners could vote, and then typically by expressing their preferences in a public setting, for all to witness. Our electoral system has changed drastically since that time; now almost all Americans cast votes with the assistance of computerized equipment. While much good stems from the use of computerized equipment in elections---notably increased efficiency, enfranchisement and flexibility---unintended consequences of this mechanization have left us with complicated, insecure and opaque voting systems.

My PhD thesis focuses on the issue of transparency in e-voting; that is, what public policy mechanisms can serve to make our voting systems less opaque? After exploring what we mean by “governmental transparency”, I examine the question of e-voting transparency on three fronts. I analyze the role of disclosed and open source software in election systems and conclude that, while fully disclosed source code is a valid goal, limited disclosure to experts serves many of the same goals in the short-term while preserving vendor trade secrecy. I investigate how contractual provisions between local election jurisdictions and voting system vendors serve to frustrate transparency and find that election officials need to be more careful in these negotiations. Finally, I turn to the question of auditing black box elections systems; that is, since we cannot know how these systems work in the full-disclosure (“white box”) case, possibly because of contractual provisions that limit investigation, what methods and procedures can we use for “checking the math“ behind our elections?

I am no longer in New York during passover and a papal visit (which means the chance of my actually being able to say “Good yontiff, pontiff”, has now dropped back from astonishingly faint to none).

-- Neil Gaiman (“Fair Use and other things”)

Some of you may know that I've been working, for over two years now, with a bunch of other people to develop a set of generic procedures that California counties can use to conduct their manual tally. (The manual tally is a legally-mandated "automatic recount" of ballots cast in 1% of precincts.)

Well, I've finished this set of procedures and you can find them here:

http://josephhall.org/procedures/ca_tally_procedures-2008.pdf

Comments welcome!

I have an academic paper outlining how we constructed these procedures but I can't yet share that document.

Note that we worked closely with officials in San Mateo county and more indirectly with Alameda, Marin and Yolo counties to do this research. San Mateo uses a more specific set of procedures in their elections, adjusted for their county and voting system.