at Democracy for America (used to be Dean for America)
http://www.democracyforamerica.comHelp do citizen audits in the fall elections: email Bevharrismail@aol.com with "volunteer" in the subject
It's an Auditing ProblemE-voting: Let's simplify. It's not a computer problem, it's an auditing problem.
Many people are frustrated by the e-voting issue. But we have been trying to debate an auditing problem by discussing computer programming issues.
Counting votes is just bookkeeping. When you frame the debate that way, most objections to voter verified paper ballots simply go away.
"Regardless of the accuracy of an e-voting machine, it is preposterous to have an unauditable system of collecting data. Think about it."
-- (Jim Hogue, Vermonters for Voting Integrity, and the author of Vermont T S.202 banning e-voting: it passed.)
Most people don't want to go through a learning curve to discover how voting computers work. Instead, we simply want to know: How can we make sure the machines get it right?
We can encrypt and test and certify until the cows come home, but a better solution is auditing. And what is auditing? It simply means that you compare one set of data against another to make sure they match. We can do many different kinds of audits, as long as we have physical records to enable them. Regular people can do audits. Your Aunt Martha can understand auditing. You can help audit elections, and you don't even need to be a public official to do it.
E-voting boils down to policy issues, not computer debates. Our democracy was never designed to be "of the programmers, by the programmers, and for the people." Democracy is supposed to be made up of everyone, including you and me.
Auditing isn't particularly expensive and need not be time consuming. Any election should, at a minimum, require four audits.
1) Compare the number of voters who sign into the poll book with the number of votes cast. This is generally required by state law. But voting machine vendors are developing systems to abandon this audit in favor of electronic poll books using secret software. As citizens we must reject that idea and insist on retaining our physical poll books verified by human beings. The poll book audit has caught hundreds of e-voting discrepancies.
2) Compare polling place results with central tabulator results. We vote in polling places. Then our votes are taken to the central tabulator computer which adds up the votes from each polling place. Polling place results must be made available to the public in a physical, permanent form before they are transmitted to central count, and they must match what shows up in the central count room. This will help catch vote alterations after they leave the polling place.
3) Compare voter-verified paper ballots with machine counts.We must audit every election for errors, whether intentional or accidental. We call for an audit of at least 5% of the voting machines - hand-counting the machine-tallied ballots to ensure that the machines gave us the correct totals. If there are errors, the hand-counts need to be expanded. Note that we have been talking about "ballots" not "trails" throughout this essay. There is no legal definition for a "trail," but there is for a "ballot." Whether printed by a machine or filled out by hand, the verified paper ballot is the key to this audit.
4) Compare the number of absentee ballots received by the post office with the number counted by the elections division. This audit would best be done by using Business Reply Mail, which gives a precise count for the number of pieces received at the post office. In any case, the post office should provide a certified receipt of the number of absentee ballots it receives, and this number must be compared with the number of absentee ballots counted.
None of the above audits are costly or time consuming.
By framing the problem as an auditing problem, you make the debate much easier to understand, solve real problems with election integrity, and put the people back into "We, the people."