Not Quite a Blog

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/politics/campaign/19vote.html

"Switching [voting systems or election technologies] now, approximately 40 days before the election, would probably introduce more security problems than it would avoid," said Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who brought many of the vulnerabilities in voting systems to light.

Amen... what he said! (gesticulating towards my local RoV)

(Besides the fact that Roy Saltman, Rebecca Mercuri, Peter Van Neumann, Ronnie Dugger, Doug Jones and others were the ones that actually "brought many of the vulnerabilities in voting systems to light.")

Switching Elections Technologies Late in the Game

There is a movement sponsored by VotersUnite! to try and pass federal legislation to require that federal offices use paper-only ballots in the coming November election.

This is a bad idea. Not only is it questionable that ballots meeting all 50 state's ballot printing standards, laws and regulations can be printed by November 2, but the money required to do so is not trivial. Where will that come from? The Feds? As well, training poll workers and elections staff to do an all-paper election (or even, god forbid, a hybrid with paper and some other technology) is also not trivial in time and fiscal expense. Further, some counties haven't used paper for decades and have effectively lost the organizational memory required to correctly administer such an election. This is where we might "introduce more security problems" as Avi spoke about above.

We are better off staying whatever course we are on, fitting machines where feasible with VVPAT printers to give them an independent audit trail and, above all else, conducting a coordinated observing campaign that will examine the vote counting at all levels of the canvass.

A Y2K for Voting Machines?

Granted, Yuri has mentioned to me in public the following argument: By instituting such a heightened level of scrutiny on the electronic voting machines, we'll actually be supporting the assertion that the machines are trustworthy if we find no problems on November 2; a sort of Y2K for voting.

First, there will be problems. There always are with heterogeneous, large-scale deployments of elections systems. We believe that reconciling these problems will lead to a vote count with a high-degree of trust and integrity. That's a good thing.

Second, if there are no problems, than at least we've created an infrastructure and movement that will greet all elections in the future with heightened scrutiny. And there are still legislative remedies (HR 2239 and S 1980) that will require an independent, permanent and robust audit trail for use election administration.