Wednesday, June 08, 2005
New Report from the Election Center - Flawed Conclusions?
An initial examination of the report issued Tuesday shows that once again the vendors are potentially looking to advance their agenda for DRE-based solutions. While at the same time throwing up obstacles to other approaches (principally paper ballots with optical scan) with subtle interpretations around core issues in VVPAT and HAVA legislation pronouncements (or lack thereof). This does however focus in on much that has yet to be truly clearly defined.
The article here :
http://www.katu.com/stories/77600.html
gives an excerpt of the ideas around using "Motor Vehicle Admin'" style centers - for voting, instead of today's local small centers (school facility based). And then postal ballots for people who cannot reach those large centers.
While on the surface this seems appealing - there are a number of significant issues with this.
This probably heightens the need for verifiable paper ballots - because a lengthened period of time dramatically increases the opportunity to commit fraud, both from external threats and internal threats.
The key is access to the voting process. Once someone gains access - they are trusted and allowed to place a vote. Extending that windows offers scope for many more access based frauds (and if that worked on Monday, it can work Tuesday and so on). But also the potential for program based manipulations of voting records spread out over many days adds to the complexity of the task of reconciling votes and detecting those manipulations - especially in close elections.
The basic TLV process would need to be extended to include continuous daily reconcilation of voting records at an election center in order to provide safeguards for this.
Certainly the cost issues appear to make good sense - but securing postal ballots and the trusted process makes this MVA-style approach problematic - and definately not something a simple standalone DRE-only based approach is going to come close to safe guarding. And while the report mentions electronic electoral roll and voter registration, it fails to mention the need to separate such systems operationally completely from the DRE voting systems. One can imagine in a voting center this may not be the case, and thus opens up a Pandora's Box of issues in recording votes. Centralized voter record databases incur their own overheads and costs too. Just simply keeping up with peoples' change of address, and so on.
For examples issues with postal balloting - see the UK Government Commission report:
http://www.electoralcommission.co.uk/
Missing from the cost estimates is the protections and safeguards and staff time needed to ensure software and process is secure within a voting center itself.
On the other hand if the idea was to provide open source, collaboratively developed voting solutions that conform to international voting standards in these voting centers then that of course would be a different matter. Even these would need to be re-tested daily to ensure no tampering had occurred during the voting process. But using such open source based solutions would potentially net significant cost reductions.
Clearly the vendors sponsoring the Election Center work are not envisioning such an outcome!
It's a pretty large download file report - but an abridged copy of the text without the heading graphics is available here - for pages 6 to 66:
http://drrw.net/misc/Election-Center-Report-abridged.pdf
Overall this report appears to be generating as many issues as it seeks to solve. Some ideas may be of merit, but the full implications of these are yet to be fully examined.
The article here :
http://www.katu.com/stories/77600.html
gives an excerpt of the ideas around using "Motor Vehicle Admin'" style centers - for voting, instead of today's local small centers (school facility based). And then postal ballots for people who cannot reach those large centers.
While on the surface this seems appealing - there are a number of significant issues with this.
This probably heightens the need for verifiable paper ballots - because a lengthened period of time dramatically increases the opportunity to commit fraud, both from external threats and internal threats.
The key is access to the voting process. Once someone gains access - they are trusted and allowed to place a vote. Extending that windows offers scope for many more access based frauds (and if that worked on Monday, it can work Tuesday and so on). But also the potential for program based manipulations of voting records spread out over many days adds to the complexity of the task of reconciling votes and detecting those manipulations - especially in close elections.
The basic TLV process would need to be extended to include continuous daily reconcilation of voting records at an election center in order to provide safeguards for this.
Certainly the cost issues appear to make good sense - but securing postal ballots and the trusted process makes this MVA-style approach problematic - and definately not something a simple standalone DRE-only based approach is going to come close to safe guarding. And while the report mentions electronic electoral roll and voter registration, it fails to mention the need to separate such systems operationally completely from the DRE voting systems. One can imagine in a voting center this may not be the case, and thus opens up a Pandora's Box of issues in recording votes. Centralized voter record databases incur their own overheads and costs too. Just simply keeping up with peoples' change of address, and so on.
For examples issues with postal balloting - see the UK Government Commission report:
http://www.electoralcommission.co.uk/
Missing from the cost estimates is the protections and safeguards and staff time needed to ensure software and process is secure within a voting center itself.
On the other hand if the idea was to provide open source, collaboratively developed voting solutions that conform to international voting standards in these voting centers then that of course would be a different matter. Even these would need to be re-tested daily to ensure no tampering had occurred during the voting process. But using such open source based solutions would potentially net significant cost reductions.
Clearly the vendors sponsoring the Election Center work are not envisioning such an outcome!
It's a pretty large download file report - but an abridged copy of the text without the heading graphics is available here - for pages 6 to 66:
http://drrw.net/misc/Election-Center-Report-abridged.pdf
Overall this report appears to be generating as many issues as it seeks to solve. Some ideas may be of merit, but the full implications of these are yet to be fully examined.
# posted by DRRW @ 11:44 PM 
