Backup Voting -- Could Be a Mess
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A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year as they were in 2000 could cause Election Day problems.
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Blog: Does it make sense to have multiple document standards? Upcoming votes consider this and other technical factors.
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(CBS/AP) It&#39;s possible you may have looked at a &quot;blog&quot; to help make your decision whether re-elect the &quot;incumbent&quot; during the recent &quot;electoral&quot; process.
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This paper introduces some techniques for making backups without needing to stop the business applications. It also describes ways to simplify and reduce the cost of system operations.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Voters living abroad face an unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted.
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Paul Reinheimer, one of two behind the funcaday website (providing details on one PHP function each day and special content on the weekends) has posted a supplement to this weekend's posting covering escaping.   The disadvantage with the escape for now, not for later approach is simple. If you save a user's post to the database, then that user's post is displayed 2,000 times there will be some serious differences. [...] You will need to balance your security concerns with performance needs.   The comments on his post back up his suggestions (and include other tips like a recommendation to cache on an even higher level - page blocks).
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After a series of tests on e-voting machines, a U.S. government auditor still doesn&#39;t know what contributed to 18,000 unmarked ballots in a Florida congressional race in 2006.The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) checked the firmware and the ballot display and ran calibration tests on a sample of Election Systems &amp; Software (ES&amp;S) iVotronic e-voting machines, the agency said in a report released Friday. Those tests, combined with others done by the GAO and state of Florida, &quot;have significantly reduced the possibility that the iVotronic [machines] were the cause of the undervote,&quot; said the report, authored by Nabajyoti Barkakati, acting chief technologist for the GAO&#39;s applied research and methods division.The GAO believes the ES&amp;S machines have been adequately tested, the report says. &quot;Given the complex interaction of people, processes, and technology that must work effectively together to achieve a successful election,&quot; other factors, including intentional undervotes or ballot interaction problems, may have caused the undervote, the GAO said.Democratic candidate Christine Jennings lost by 369 votes in the 2006 13th Congressional District race, but more than 18,000 people who cast votes in other district races failed to have votes recorded in the congressional race. About 4,000 more votes were recorded in the Sarasota County Southern District Hospital Board election than in the House race.Jennings is again running for the congressional seat this year.The GAO report &quot;leaves most of the major questions unanswered,&quot; said the Verified Voting Foundation, an advocacy group critical of e-voting machines. The GAO report didn&#39;t address potential problems with touch-screen sensitivity and low batteries, or reports of undervotes in other races, the foundation said in its own report , based on a leaked copy of the GAO report.&quot;The GAO report leaves us with almost as many questions as before, and the most important one -- what caused the ... undervote problem -- is left unanswered,&quot; the foundation report says. &quot;The nature of the complex voting system in question, and the difficulty in auditing such a system, may mean such questions will remain indefinitely, but it is clear that more can and should be done to resolve the outstanding issues.&quot;The foundation suggested auditors could conduct more tests, including tests of touch-screen sensitivity and a check for software bugs beyond the GAO&#39;s check that the software matched versions certified by Florida.&quot;As someone who&#39;s interested in what happened in this election, my questions aren&#39;t answered,&quot; said David Dill, the foundation&#39;s founder and a computer science professor at Stanford University. &quot;I don&#39;t think we&#39;re going to get any idea about what happened in that election without a lot more investigation.&quot;The GAO report &quot;cannot be interpreted as a clean bill of health for the machines,&quot; Dill added. &quot;They did three little tests ... out of a spectrum of a lot of things, and they aren&#39;t the most important things to look at,&quot; he said.ES&amp;S, in a statement, said the GAO report shows its machines &quot;performed well&quot; in the election. GAO&#39;s findings echo studies by Florida State University and the Florida Department of State, both saying there was &quot;no evidence&quot; of ES&amp;S machine malfunction, the company said. &quot;The collective findings of these and other tests demonstrate that Sarasota County&#39;s voting system performed exactly as it was designed to function,&quot; the company said.The Election Technology Council, a trade group representing ES&amp;S and three other e-voting vendors, said the report suggests that a paper ballot to accompany the e-voting machines wouldn&#39;t necessarily solve problems. The Verified Voting Foundation and other groups have pushed for printouts to be used with e-voting machines.Elections include people, processes and technology, said David Beirne, the council&#39;s executive director. &quot;Paper is not a magic bullet,&quot; he said. &quot;It can provide an additional layer of verification for the voter, but it alone is not going to satisfy all of the stakeholders, which is why it is important to look at all of the circumstances surrounding an election to determine its overall performance.&quot;The GAO report shows the need for assurance tools that verify the operation of the e-voting machines&#39; software, Beirne added.
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For some, voting day will be violent and disappointing. For others, just plain confusing. And the Sunnis may have to be drawn in after the fact
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As the primary season continues, observers of the electronic-voting scene ask whether it's possible to tally the ballots efficiently while restoring Americans' faith in the process. Random, mandatory audits of cast ballots show promise, but even after demonstrated successes, not everyone's on board.
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QUESTION: What is the best approach to protecting me from ID theft and related activities? Will a software package work best, or must I go to a hardware firewall?
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Electoral authorities in Florida say they will resend tens of thousands of absentee ballots on Friday, after failing to determine the fate of 58,000 ballots that were sent out but not received by voters.
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Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said Tuesday that some of them could still be used in November if a software patch is installed.
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If voters in Colorado decide to divide their electoral votes, we may have another contested election
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(InfoWorld) - The U.K.'s trial of e-voting and e-counting technologies during last month's local elections resulted in crashed computers and technicians scratching their heads while posing new concerns about the systems' security and reliability, a new report has concluded. In one area of England, a manual recount performed after e-counting equipment was abandoned because of delays turned up a raft of uncounted votes, said Jason Kitcat, e-voting coordinator for the Open Rights Group, which deployed observers to polling sites in England and Scotland. The group, which has been critical of e-voting and e-counting, has submitted its 64-page report to the U.K. Electoral Commission, which will publish its own report on the trials on Aug. 3. The Department for Constitutional Affairs, which oversaw the pilot programs, said it welcomed the role of observers but would reserve comment until the Electoral Commission publishes its report. The Electoral Commission also did not comment. The U.K., which embarked on a voting modernization program in 2000, held trials in 13 administrative areas in England. Scotland replaced manual counting with e-counting technologies for the first time. The government has backed e-voting technologies, including postal voting and Internet voting, to increase voter participation. Open Rights Group volunteers watched how polling stations conducted e-voting, but much of the process was opaque due to the nature of how e-voting machines work, Kitcat said. The majority of polling stations experienced technical problems, ranging from laptop problems to unreliable electronic registers, the report said. Employees of vendors whose equipment was deployed refused to interact with observers, Kitcat said. "No one would really say what was going on," Kitcat said. "It was all so mysterious." However, observers did identify potential security problems. The report includes photographs of PC workstations and hubs with open ports, a possible security risk. "Network hubs were left on the floor with power and network connections loose," the report said. "In one case in Edinburgh, a hub was observed in easy reach of attendees, with ports free lying beneath a table providing an opportunity for unauthorized access to the e-counting system's network." E-counting scanners proved finicky due to incorrect paper sizes, scanner sensitivity and trouble in handling low-quality perforations on ballots. The most curious error in e-counting occurred in a ward in Breckland, England, where voters were give two ballots: one each for district council and parish elections. Officials tried an electronic count, but came up with far fewer district ballots than parish ballots when the two counts should be roughly the same, Kitcat said. A manual recount turned up about 56 percent more district council ballots. "We haven't been given an explanation by the election official or suppliers," Kitcat said. In Scotland, observers noted that election officials could log into the e-counting software merely by scanning a bar code on their identification badges, which the Open Rights Group cited as another security concern. Some election officials were positive about using new election technologies, but "the lack of general technical understanding and knowledge about the e-counting and e-voting systems across election staff was perturbing," the report said. Â
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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The 100,000 electronic voting machines in use in Tuesday's election have a big downside: Candidates who dispute the results won't have a way to conduct a meaningful recount. Analysis by Kim Zetter.