[Oh, wait, you want details, don’t you? Details, yes, I have more details than you want to hear. :þ
But I will be selective this time. If anybody wants an advanced course, we can discuss it.
I have been struggling with how to explain voting systems for a bit. I conclude that one Diary won’t do it, in large part because so much of the argument has been fact-free.
In particular, far too many people are attached to the fantasy that plain paper ballots and manual counting will solve everything. In the real world, plain paper ballots have been hacked for as long as they have existed. See Landslide Lyndon Johnson for an example.
But this will be a good start.]
Well, Yes, if we can control the behavior of the humans in charge. That should mean strict laws that we do not presently have, with mandatory prison time for intentional violators, and also serious penalties for incompetence. The first order of business of Congress in January, H. R. 1 in the House, will include a new and improved Voting Rights Act to outlaw gerrymanders and voter suppression, among other things. It cannot pass the Senate in this coming session, but things will be different after the 2020 elections. The House will hold hearings on all of the issues around voting. Get informed, and let your voice be heard.
I am a founding member of the Open Voting Consortium (OVC), which has brought together Computer Scientists and experts in security to identify flaws in existing voting systems, and then design a combined computer/paper ballot system in which each component overcomes critical shortcomings of the other to address all of the known issues. Our system has been publicly demonstrated, and presented to election officials and lawmakers, some of whom are considering how and when to implement it. The San Jose Mercury News, the leading newspaper in Silicon Valley, called it
The Holy Grail of voting systems.
The OVC system uses a touchscreen computer to present the ballot and accept the voter’s choices, and run various consistency checks on those choices. This completely prevents overvoting, as on the infamous Butterfly ballot in 2000. It catches all potential undervoting, as in one of the ballots in Florida in 2018, where the Senate race was placed below the instructions, in violation of well-known best practice.
This was an error by Democratic election officials that changed the outcome of the race, throwing it to the Republican, much like the Butterfly ballot in 2000. That was also misdesigned by Democratic officials, resulting in thousands of spurious votes for Pat Buchanan (who disavowed them, saying, “These are not my people.”) and overvotes for both Gore and Buchanan, and threw the outcome to George W. Bush in 2000.
Voters would have to confirm an intention not to vote on any omitted races or ballot measures.
When the computer and the voter agree on the voter’s intent, the OVC system then prints a paper ballot which is the actual vote. It is human-readable and machine-readable, with a number of security features.
Printing the ballots eliminates spoiled and mismarked ballots to start with.
Each ballot has a random number assigned to it, which appears on the ballot. All of those random numbers are checksummed, with cryptographic signatures, so that anybody can verify whether any ballots have been added or removed. The voter’s choices are also checksummed, so that anybody can verify whether any ballots have been changed. The essential results are included on the ballot as text and numbers and in bar code form.
When voters check their printed ballots they eliminate the possibility of the machine taking in one choice and changing it to another, as happened in the Senate race in Texas in 2018.
We propose that every voting location have ballot readers available to voters, programmed independently from the voting computer/ballot printers, so that voters can verify whom they are voting for, and see that the computer-readable data and the human-readable data agree.
The system will use published Free/Open Source software, so that anybody can test it, and knowledgeable programmers can comb through it to see that it does what is specified, with no hidden backdoors and no possibility of behaving differently under test and during actual elections. Compare this with the Volkswagen fraud, where the computers in its diesel cars, running VW proprietary software, followed the rules during EPA testing, but the cars were seriously polluting when driven on the road.
OVC has discussed the requirements for secure, verifiable, auditable, trustworthy voting software with the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST), the US standards organization. There is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard in preparation on voting systems, and others on voter registration systems and canvassing (vote counting) systems.
The OVC system can accommodate any computable voting algorithm, whether first-past-the-post, ranked choice, approval voting, proportional voting, or any of a multitude of others.
Questions?