|
Internet Voting
|
|
By New York Times
|
|
September 05, 2008 |
This editorial was published in the New York Times on September 5, 2008.
The words “Florida” and “Internet voting,” taken together, should send a chill down everyone’s spine. Nevertheless, Florida’s Okaloosa County is seeking permission from the state to allow members of the military to vote over the Internet in November.
Internet voting is fraught with problems, including the possibility that a hacker could break in and alter the results. The Okaloosa plan, in particular, has not been sufficiently vetted.
It is laudable that the county, home to a large number of active-duty military, wants to take aggressive steps to help military voters cast ballots. The plan would set up Internet voting kiosks near American military bases in Germany, Japan and Britain. The votes would be sent to the United States over secure lines similar to ones used for bank transactions.
The problem is that too little is known about precisely how the system would work. For Internet voting to be trustworthy, it must be clear that there is no way for a hacker to break in and voters must have complete confidence in the software being used. Okaloosa has not persuasively made that case.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
General Topics
|
|
By Kim Zetter
|
|
September 05, 2008 |
This article was posted at Wired.com's Threat Level Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
 This year, as a result of a lot of changes in voting machines around the country, numerous voting districts across many states will be using new voting equipment that has either never been used in an election or has never been used in a national election involving millions of voters.
When new systems are used, problems often arise either with the equipment itself or with election officials and voters who are unfamiliar with it.
To see what equipment you and your state will be using in November and to familiarize yourself with it before the election, VerifiedVoting.org, an election integrity group that led the movement to get voter-verified paper audit trails added to touch-screen voting machines, has produced a comprehensive interactive map identifying the voting systems being used in election districts across the country. As far as I know, this is the most up-to-date list of voting equipment that exists.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
General Topics
|
|
By Verified Voting Foundation
|
|
September 04, 2008 |
Verified Voting announced the publication today of its 2008 Verifier map of voting technology used in the United States.
“People want to know how votes will be cast and counted this fall. Voters can benefit from knowing in advance how they will vote in their polling places,” said Verified Voting president Pamela Smith. “The Verifier map provides a comprehensive picture of America's voting technology that is useful to interested voters, journalists, researchers, and advocates.”
At http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier users can access an interactive national map of voting systems to be used in the fall. Users can click on a state to view state or territory-level maps of voting systems, and then to local election jurisdictions to obtain detailed information on voting equipment vendors, machine models, as well as the name and contact information of local election officials (see images below and on the following page). In addition to a comprehensive map, the Verifier provides a map of equipment used throughout the nation to serve voters with disabilities. The Verifier is provided as a public service at no cost to users.
|
|
General Topics
|
|
By M. Mindy Moretti, electionline.org
|
|
September 04, 2008 |
Officials move sites for a variety of reasons, from accessibility to availability
The following article appeared in electionline.org's weekly newsletter and is reposted here with permission of the author.
When the H.D. Cooke Elementary school in Northwest Washington, D.C. was closed for renovations, the Board of Ethics and Elections moved Precinct 38 out of the basement of the building to a building a block and a half away. Unlike the school, the new precinct is accessible for people with disabilities. But it is also smaller and likely to be more congested than the school.
For registered voter Charles Boone, the move, while not logistically difficult, proved difficult mentally.
“I’d been voting at Cooke for years and don’t get me wrong it had its problems [inaccessible to handicapped voters], but the move to the Festival Center has been one of those things that’s taken me a while to get used to,” Boone said.
Although Boone has had several elections to get used to the new polling site, thousands of Americans will be facing new polling locations for the first time on November 4.
The reasons why polling places need to be relocated vary as do the facilities used, from people’s homes to fire stations to churches. But one constant is change.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
General Topics
|
|
By Dan Wallach, Rice University
|
|
August 20, 2008 |
This article was posted at Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
It’s
a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting
systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other? How
can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by
optical scan systems with DRE systems (with or without VVPAT
attachments)?
There’s a clear disconnect on this issue. It shows up, among other places, in a recent blog post by political scientist Thad Hall:
The point here is that, when we think about paper
ballots and absentee voting, we do not typically think about or
evaluate them “naked” but within an implementation context yet we think
nothing of evaluating e-voting “naked” and some almost think it
“cheating” to think about e-voting security within the context of
implementation. However, if we held both systems to the same standard,
the people in California probably would not be voting using any voting
system; given its long history, it is inconceivable that paper ballots
would fail to meet the standards to which e-voting is held, absent
evaluating its implementation context.
Hall then goes on to point to his recent book with Mike Alvarez, Electronic Elections,
that beats on this particular issue at some length. What that book
never offers, however, is a decent comparison between electronic voting
and anything else.
I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while: there must be a
decent, quantitative way to compare these things. Turns out, we can
leverage a foundational technique from computer science theory:
complexity analysis. CS theory is all about analyzing the “big-O”
complexity of various algorithms. Can we analyze this same complexity
for voting systems’ security flaws?
I took a crack at the problem for a forthcoming journal paper. I
classified a wide variety of voting systems according to how much
effort you need to do to influence all the votes: effort proportional
to the total number of voters, effort proportional to the number of
precincts, or constant effort; less effort implies less security. I
also broke this down by different kinds of attacks: integrity attacks
that try to change votes in a stealthy fashion, confidentiality attacks
that try to learn how specific voters cast their votes, and denial of
service attacks that don’t care about stealth but want to smash parts
of the election. This was a fun paper to write, and it nicely responds
to Hall and Alvarez’s criticisms. Have a look. |
|
Voting Rights
|
|
By Truth in Immigration
|
|
August 20, 2008 |
In a recent segment, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs told viewers that substantial evidence suggests that large numbers of non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, are voting in federal elections and could be the deciding factor in November’s elections. The story primarily cites a recent report published by the Heritage Foundation. The report is written by former recess-appointed FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky, whose troubling record on voting rights caused him to withdraw his name from consideration for a permanent FEC seat. Von Spakovsky’s report contains gross distortions and represents an attempt to support a policy agenda that would disenfranchise many U.S. citizens.
Truth in Immigration has written a report scrutinizing the claims of the Heritage Foundation study. To read the report, click on this link. |
|
Election Assistance Commission (EAC)
|
|
By EAC Commissioner Gracia M. Hillman
|
|
August 19, 2008 |
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has posted the following response to "Officials Say Flaws at Polls Will Remain in November", an article which appeared in the August 16 edition of the New York Times.On August 16, The New York Times (NYT) ran an incomplete and
outdated article that reports on “a government backlog in testing (voting)
machines’ hardware and software.” The article suggests that the backlog has
been created by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) voting system
certification process and leaves the impression that EAC is doing nothing while
States are left to fend for themselves to fix problems before the November
elections.
The essence of the NYT article reports on “flaws” in voting
machines and needed software fixes or upgrades that presumably won’t be fixed
before the November election in states that require federal (EAC)
certification. The systems at issue were certified by the National Association
of State Election Directors (NASED), which terminated its program toward the
end of 2006, just as EAC was finalizing the details of its own voting system
testing and certification programs, as mandated by the Help America Vote Act.
Information about EAC’s programs is available at www.eac.gov under Program
Areas (http://www.eac.gov/program-areas).
EAC’s testing and certification programs, which took effect
in January 2007, contain all of the right components to provide rigorous
testing. The programs require that all systems, whether currently in use or
newly manufactured, undergo and pass end-to-end testing before they can receive
EAC certification. A period of transition is underway from when NASED ended its
certification and when the first systems will receive EAC certification. Caught
in the abyss are the NASED systems that have “flaws” and need software fixes
and/or upgrades.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
General Topics
|
|
By VotersUnite.org
|
|
August 19, 2008 |
“As we approach the 2008 general election, the structure of
elections in the United States — once reliant on local representatives
accountable to the public — has become almost wholly dependent on large
corporations, which are not accountable to the public,” states a report
released today by VotersUnite.Org, entitled “Vendors Are Undermining the
Structure of U.S. Elections.”
The report — based on interviews with state and local
election officials, news reports, reports from governmental agencies, vendor
contracts, and other public documents — focuses on the pervasive control a
handful of voting system vendors exercise over election administration in
almost every state and how officials and ordinary citizens can strengthen
public control before this year’s election.
While local election officials across the country are
legally accountable for election administration, decisions at the federal and
state level have rendered most of these hardworking public servants unable to
administer elections without the equipment, services, and trade-secret software
of a small number of corporations, whose contracts disclaim all accountability.
Case studies of local jurisdictions show a sampling of the
difficulties this double bind causes for state and local officials and
illustrate some of the ways in which vendors exploit the situation.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
Federal Legislation
|
|
By Senator Dianne Feinstein
|
|
August 12, 2008 |
This letter was published by the New York Times on August 11, 2008
Washington, Aug. 6, 2008
To the Editor:
 “A Bad Electronic Voting
Bill” (editorial, Aug. 3) criticized the fact that a bipartisan bill
being considered by the Senate Rules Committee would require that all
states provide voters with a paper record or other means of verifying
votes on electronic voting systems.
I have said over and over
again that I personally favor voting systems with paper ballots that
are read by optical scanners. But I am convinced that there is no way
we could move such a bill through Congress. Such paper-only efforts
have failed in the House, and have no bipartisan support in the Senate.
About 35 percent of the voters currently use touch-screen
systems and another 55 percent use optical scan systems. Therefore, the
important thing is to see that these systems are accurate, reliable and
secure.
I believe that the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform
Act, which I sponsored with Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah,
is the best we can do right now. So I am pleased that my ranking member
joined me through long rounds of negotiations to produce this bill. Dianne Feinstein
Chairwoman, Senate Committee
on Rules and Administration
|
|
Voting Rights
|
|
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
|
|
August 11, 2008 |
This article was posted at AlterNet and is reposted here with permission of the author.
The first large block of voters to be disenfranchised in 2008 are the
wounded warriors from recent wars and homeless veterans living at
hundreds of Department of Veterans Affairs facilities across the
country, according to veterans and voting rights activists.
"President
Bush and Karl Rove are attempting to block voter registration of at
least 200,000 and possibly as much as 400,000 veterans," said Paul
Sullivan, president of Veterans for Common Sense, referring to injured
former soldiers from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in various VA
treatment facilities, veterans living in the VA's nursing homes, and
homeless veterans living in VA shelters.
"We may have all kinds
of hurdles," Sullivan said. "We may have the clock running out on us,
but we will not give up. This needs to be shoved in the face of every
single elected official in the country. We can fix this in a second We
are talking about two or three sentences in legislation. We are talking
about the integrity of our democracy."
In recent months, the
Department of Veterans Affairs has resisted efforts by U.S. senators
and top state election officials to allow voter registration drives in
its facilities. Just last month, the VA issued new rules that banned
election officials -- whether local registrars or secretaries of state
-- from registering voters, saying it was a partisan activity that
interfered with its medical mission. In most states, any time a person
changes their residence they must update their voter registration in
order to vote. |
|
Read more...
|
|
