After the news that Florida is moving toward a paper ballot system by 2008, many might have thought that voting system concerns could be moved safely to the back burner.
Wrong.
If Congress does not act soon, as many as 35 million voters, in at least 13 states, will vote for the next President of the United States on unreliable, insecure paperless electronic voting machines. We have a chance to prevent this from happening.
More on the flip.
Rep. Rush Holt's bill HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, has 216 cosponsors, including 20 Republicans. It is out of committee, and should get a vote in the full House soon. The bill would require that all jurisdictions in America offer voters a durable, individual, voter-verified paper ballot. All voting machines in use in the 2008 Presidential election would have to have some form of voter-verifiable paper record. Most important, HR 811 requires random mandatory hand audits of the paper records.
Call your Representative and urge him or her to support HR 811: 202-224-3121. Sign the MoveOn petition to Congress for the bill. This bill is our only real chance to stop paperless voting in 2008.
There's more material than a diary can reasonably address, so I'll start with one of the best sources outlining the urgent need for reform: the Brennan Center report. Last year the Brennan Center for Justice's Task Force on Voting System Security published a comprehensive security analysis of the voting systems used in the United States. The report, "The Machinery of Democracy," looked at paperless direct-recording electronic voting machines, or DREs, at DREs that have a voter-verified paper trail, and at optical ballot scanners. They concluded:
"All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections."(page 3)
The Brennan Center task force concluded that malicious attacks on voting systems could evade even a well-conducted testing process (pp. 43-44), leave no trace in the audit logs (pp. 45-46), and require only one to three informed participants to alter a statewide election (pp. 50, 62, 78-79).
Who were these task force members, these paranoid Luddites? From page ii:
Georgette Asherman, independent statistical consultant,
founder of Direct Effects
Professor Matt Bishop, University of California at Davis
Lillie Coney, Electronic Privacy Information Center
Professor David Dill, Stanford University
Jeremy Epstein, PhD, Cyber Defense Agency LLC
Harri Hursti, independent consultant, former CEO of F-Secure PLC
Dr. David Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and
Chair of the California Secretary of State's Voting Systems
Technology Assessment and Advisory Board
Professor Douglas W. Jones, University of Iowa
John Kelsey, PhD, NIST
Rene Peralta, PhD, NIST
Professor Ronald Rivest, MIT
Howard A. Schmidt, Former Chief Security Officer, Microsoft and eBay
Dr. Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security
Joshua Tauber, PhD, formerly of the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT
Professor David Wagner, University of California at Berkeley
Professor Dan Wallach, Rice University
Matthew Zimmerman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
The task force concluded that we need routine, transparently random audits of the paper:
"The voter-verified paper record, by itself, is of questionable security value. The paper record has significant value only if an Automatic Routine Audit is performed (and well designed chain of custody and physical security procedures are followed).
Now to the bill. HR 811 has strong support, but it has its critics.
Many election officials say that the 2008 deadline is unrealistic, but states have proven that it can be done. Florida is going to prove it can be done by 2008. New Mexico proved it in 2006; read Bill Richardson's excellent piece urging support for the Holt bill. Other states have implemented major overhauls in a matter of months.
The has been criticized for not banning direct-recording electronic machines altogether, including even those that are equipped with "toilet paper roll" paper trails that prints the voter's choices for her to review.
There is a strong case for banning DREs. With secondary paper printouts that the DREs offer for the voter verification, we don't know if the voter has verified the record or not. With voter-marked paper ballots, such as used with optical scan systems (scan-trons, like the SAT or ACT), we know that the voter has given the paper record focused attention.
HR 811 has met enough resistance as it is, so it is not hard to see why banning DREs was never really in the political cards. But the bill, with its requirements that DRE machines offer durable, individual paper ballots, nudges states strongly in the direction of paper ballots and optical scan. If Holt passes, there will be a lot fewer DREs in use in November 2008. That is the judgement of the Tennessee election officials watching the bill move forward, the House Administration Committee's minority staff (p. 79), as well as David Dill of Stanford University, founder of VerifiedVoting.org.
HR 811 has also been criticized for not requiring full disclosure of election system software to the public, and entrenching secret vote-counting. Such arguments were ably dismantled by Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation strongly backs 811, and EFF is no fan of corporate interests or government secrecy. HR 811 begins what will be a long process of reform leading to truly transparent and verified elections.
A note about the title of this diary. Diebold machines, whether DREs with a paper trail, or Diebold's optical ballot scanners, will be around in 2008 even if HR 811 passes. But they will at least have a verifiable record. And Diebold, though richly deserving criticism (see here, here, and here), is not the only poor performer on the block. ES&S's iVotronic isn't much better. But on Kos, one either hooks folks with the title, or awaits the Rescue Rangers:)
So call your Congressman and urge him or her to support HR 811: 202-224-3121. Sign the MoveOn petition to Congress for the bill. If this does not pass, we will choose the next President of the United States with tens of millions of unverifiable votes.