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E-voting reform bill scheduled for House vote this week (ars technica)
ars techica takes a look at a bill coming up for a vote in the US House of Representatives. The bill would mandate voter-verifiable paper trails for electronic voting machines. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of several advocacy groups calling for legislators to vote in favor of HR 811 despite its deficiencies. As the EFF points out, the current text of the bill still establishes a compulsory paper trail, a crucial reform that limits the potential for exploitation of security vulnerabilities and decreases the risk of serious problems in the event of machine failures. The EFF also expresses 'profound disappointment' with the removal of source code disclosure provisions. 'Our support for HR 811 is tempered by profound disappointment that one of the bill's pillars has been watered down to the point of ineffectiveness due to pressure from the proprietary software industry,' the EFF said in a statement. 'We call on Rep. Zoe Lofgren and the other members of the Elections Subcommittee to promptly fix this provision... before the bill makes it to the floor of the House.'"
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Interesting info from congresscritter Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:07 UTC (Wed) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] I just called my rep (DeLauro, 3rd, Connecticut), and her staffer said she'd been getting ``a lot of calls'' on HR811, and all of them pro. Go, democracy!
Holt is a very bad bill Posted Sep 5, 2007 20:08 UTC (Wed) by mgb (subscriber, #3226) [Link] The Holt Bill is a devious piece of legislation which requires a "verifiable" paper trail but allows the actual counting to be done electronically with no requirement that the "verifiable" paper trail ever be verified.
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is not supporting Holt. Representative Dennis Kucinich has withdrawn support for Holt. The Brad Blog - which has been first to uncover many of voting shenanigans of the last few years - adamantly opposes Holt. Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.Org who supported earlier versions of Holt opposes recent versions because it will "legitimize that 'ballots' need not be counted" and "endorse the practice of secret vote-counting."
It is of course being pushed by politicians of the same parties which have raised gerrymandering to such a fine art in this country.
EFF has been on the wrong side of issues before but few as serious as this.
stupid, stupid people Posted Sep 5, 2007 20:12 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link] It's sad to see how glad people are with paper trails:
- Either the e-voting can be trusted and verified, or not. If it can, paper trails don't add much. It also implies that e-voting is less secure than paper voting, and if that's the case, the e-voting system used is inferior and shouldn't be used in the first place.
- With paper trails there is yet another system to keep secure. When attacking a system you go for the weakest part, so adding a paper trail only increases the oppurtunity to commit fraud.
End result:
They can only be used to check if the e-voting system counted the votes correctly, they can't be used to know the real result (because you don't know where the fraud is, and it can be used to damage your opponents). Because there are always people who don't trust the voting, the paper trail will be always be checked.
Conclusion: paper trails degenerate e-voting to paper voting.
Or in other words, it's a longwinded and expensive way to do traditional paper voting.
If you don't trust the e-voting, then demand high verification standards, or other measurements which do make you trust the e-voting. If no e-voting system passes the tests, so what. But adding paper trails isn't the answer.
It also gives false feeling of security, and in the case that both the e-voting and the paper trail is rigged no one notices.
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