OT? A solution to the e-voting machine problem

The problem for accurate voting using IT is quite trivial, but there seems to be a problem of who owns the machine manufacturing companies.

If you can solve that you may possibly free the US, but get put in Gitmo for your troubles

martin

Virtually all voter fraud starts with crooked poll workers, including the now famous Diebold hack (someone needs to swap out a cartridge at exactly the right moment without getting caught). Even that will get detected if the total vote count doesn't match. There are 2 paper trails of the voter actually voting here. If someone can come up with a counterfeit cartridge they can come up with a phony printout tape to match the vote on that cartridge. I think they should throw all the machines away and start with a blank page. They should lose all that GUI interface and just use a paper overlay on a machine with switches for the "vote". Then the whole thing could be hard wired with no embedded code to hack. It should be burning a ROM media and also printing a paper tape. Program this thing with a patch panel or a PROM. The only fear with all of this accountability is losing the idea of the secret ballot. You could count backward down the printed tape and cross reference that to the voter sign in sheet and figure out who voted for whom.

The "paper trail" they talk about is retained at the polling place. Some machines in use now print a paper tape of the summary that you can look at before the machine "eats" it. The problem is you might be able to back track down the tape and figure out how people voted.

The machine needs to print a card that drops into a ballot box with a seal on it. 1 for each machine. The voter gets to view the card and approve it before it drops or discard it and do over. The box to be opened and counted if there is question about that machine's tally.

I used to work for a guy who ran a video game distributorship; now they do slots for casinos.

Security on slots is astonishingly hard to break - so I'd amalgamate that technology with existing touch screen tech. and any small printer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have an invention here. How many of the members of the thread want to sign up for a piece of the action if we get a contract? :-)

Cheers! Rich

I think the OP was suggesting a touch screen system to fill out a paper ballot, not print a receipt. The ballot stays at the polling place (in the ballot box).

Anyway, the printed receipt scam has been surpassed by camera phones. You snap a photo of your ballot and show it to the official on the way out.

Because Lotto is more important than who happens to be president?

For some reason these people think there is a better chance of winning the lottery than having their vote counted.

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Having a touch-screen or other e-vote terminal print out a sheet with your votes would go a long ways towards establishing confidence in electronic voting. People could check the paper before pressing the "final send" button,and go back and make corrections or alert election officials if needed.The machine can then be tested on the spot and removed if defective. The voter can take the paper receipt with them.

Of course,the optical-scanned paper ballot works VERY well,and very simple.

So far, so good. At least mostly.

No. You put it in a locked box so they can get it for a recount.

You don't get a copy of your old/current paper ballot do you? The problem is that an official copy of how you voted would set things up so you could sell your vote. With the current system, the buyer has no way to tell if you did what they paid you to do.

Print it with one of those funny x-y bar-codes (hologram?) like on the lottery tickets... containing ALL the information... one marked "receipt", one marked "ballot".

Machine count... if dispute, count the ballots... or simply scan all ballots, as in AZ.

...Jim Thompson

How about you go find open voting consortium? But then, they are devoted to open source, and do not pay much if at all. You could also look at what IEEE-CS and ACM.org has to say about it.

In the last one here in Whittier, you sign in, they hand you a ballot that's made of the same cardstock as Hollerith cards. It has circles on it, like a Lotto card, and the machine that it slides into looks just like a chad-puncher, but instead of punching a hole, it makes a black dot. The machine is essentially just an alignment gage/jig.

But the card itself is pre-printed with a serial number, and perforated so they can tear off the receipt, which has the same serial number. You complete your ballot, go over to the guy, he takes a look at it, checking for dots not in circles or whatever, tears it into two pieces at the perforation: the receipt and the ballot. He hands you your ballot, which you put in the box, then hands you your receipt and your cute little "I voted" sticker, and make you sign the sheet.

Cheers! Rich

I suppose if you were really worried about the secret ballot you would wonder if the guy checking the dots was keeping track of who voted for whom. When I was working with IBM card systems a lot I could read unintrepreted cards just about as fast as an intrepreted one. The government aparachicks in the Florida recount got pretty good at it too.

Used to be in AZ, I haven't been to the polls in years... I vote mail ballot, you slip your ballot into an envelope, with the stub sticking out. The poll worker tears off the stub and YOU place envelope with ballot into box. Poll worker can't see what's on the ballot.

...Jim Thompson

Who cares? Somebody's got to count them anyway. And why should I be worried that anybody knows I voted Libertarian? I'm _proud_ of it!

Cheers! Rich

Why a secret ballot anyway? Are people ashamed to let people know who they voted for?

Or is it to prevent strong-arming the meek?

Thanks, Rich

That is the way the card system worked in Florida. Unfortunately that allowed improperly punched cards (hanging, dimpled, pregnant chads) to get in the box if the voter was too dumb to check them, in spite of directions to do so.

We used to use those cards as well. I can't recall any problems with them, but we abandoned them about the time Florida had "issues" ;-)

...Jim Thompson