BBV, AADP Opposition to Voter Verified Paper Ballots

[ParanoidPat]

http://www.aapd-dc.org/dvpmain/votemachines/paperballots.html



VOTER VERIFIED PAPER BALLOTS

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AAPD Opposes Voter Verified Paper Ballots.

Opposition to Voter Verified Paper Ballots

* Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Oppose Voter Verified Paper Ballots.
* League of Women Voters Against Voter Verified Paper Ballots.

Leading Computer Experts Oppose Voter Verified Paper Ballots

* Professor Michael Ian Shamos Press Statement.
* Electronic Voting "Evaluating the Threat" by Michael Ian Shamos, Ph.D., J.D.
(MS Word) (Text) (pdf)
* Security in the Georgia Voting System. (MS Word) (Text) (pdf)
* Letter To Kevin Shelly, Originator Of The Adhoc Task Force For DRE In California.

Lewis testimony before the CA Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Committee on Voter Verified Paper Ballots.
(MS Word) (Text) (pdf)

California Secretary of State Report on Voter Verified Paper Ballots. (MS Word) (Text) (pdf)

Contact Jim Dickson 202-457-0046 (v/tty)

Anyone feel like calling them and explaining our view of the situation? :evilgrin:

[TrogL]

1. I don't get it?

Don't these people understand the term "paper trail" or "document of record"?

I've been involved as a scrutineer in a scanner election and everything worked fine. The thing is, though, that the original mark-sense paper ballot is the "document of record" and they find that threatening.

[ParanoidPat]

2. Ironic, isn't it!

To protect the rights of the blind, NO ONE should be able to 'see' the ballots! :shrug:

[qb]

4. If a recount is ordered, they can just hire legions of the blind to do it.

[SharonAnn]

3. Just a quick answer, some comments, and an email

I find the following statements in Dr. Shamos' letter of 7-9-2003 to be interesting, "I have been led to believe that the DRE-based Brazilian election in 2000 was able to report an unprecedented 99.8% of 106,000,000 votes electronically."

He has "been lead to believe"? What kind of data is that?

And then there is "Requiring voting machines to be secure will eliminate fraud." What kind of statement is that? Why don't we just "require all votes to be counted"?

Anyway, I sent an email to Mr. Jim Dickson at the address on the Website. Here it is:

"I couldn't disagree more with the information on your Website about the supposed "perfection" of touch screen voting without voter verified paper ballots.

As a computer programmer with 37 years experience, and one who has worked with punch card ballots and set up and monitored their counting equipment, I can assure you that touch screen voting machines can be compromised even more easily than punch cards and may have already been compromised. The fact is that if they are compromised, there would be no record of what was done to compromise them. The "large-scale improvements" you quote may instead be opportunities for "large scale fraud". These systems don't meet even the lowest level of "security standard" required by the U. S. Government for DOD (Department of Defense) systems. And the "lowest level" is not even one that I would think of as adequate for voting systems.

You talk about the possible"accidental miscount" of ballots and I state that it is definitely possible that could happen. As you should know if you use ANY computer hardware and software, bugs and other errors exist with these systems. There is no reason to expect that voting systems would be immune to this widely know and admitted situation. The little information that has been provided to the public about testing tells us that the testing is not adequate and that new software versions are installed in the field without being tested.

You discount the possibility that a "rogue programmer will steal an election" and I state that it is definitely possible that could happen. Just as there are people who write all the "viruses", "worms", and "Trojan horses" that wreak havoc on the Internet and our personal PCs, there will be people who try to do this with voting systems. Worse than that, a programmer could intentionally write code to ensure a certain outcome (for personal, ideological, or financial reasons) and could program the machine to make sure that outcome happens.

The reason for adding the requirement for a voter verified paper ballot is not to disenfranchise people with disabilities, it is to be sure that we are not ALL disenfranchised. A voter verified paper ballot provides the means to do a recount of an election and without that there is NO WAY to do a real recount. Without that, there is only what the programmer caused to be tallied and/or printed - it could be very different from what the voter selected.

I want to answer the four primary reasons you oppose it by answering each of them briefly:

1. The VVPB requirement does substantially address the issue of election fraud because it at least provides a way for fraud to be detected. Without the Voter Verified Paper Ballot, there is NO way to detect fraud if it occurs.

2. The VVPB requirement does not violate the accessibility requirements under HAVA. The same accessibility is provided as without the Voter Verified Paper Ballot and there are ways to even have the information on that ballot provided to the disabled person.

3. The VVPB requirement will not raise the costs of local "honest" elections and will not threaten Title III funding. Having an honest, accurate election is not a matter of deciding to do it only if it is "cheap" enough. Honesty and accuracy can be provided affordably, probably even more cheaply than some of the current proposed systems and their prices. Remember, these companies are in it for the money - we have to be in it for the accuracy. If we're not, we'll have no democracy.

4. Touch screen voting systems can have a VVPB installed as part of the configuration and tested. After all, one year ago many touch screen systems hadn't even been tested. As a matter of fact, I'm not really convinced that any of them have yet been tested adequately since there is no public information available on the testing procedures and testing results. That's unusual for this type of equipment.

As we try to be sure that disabled people are enfranchised, please don't disenfranchise the rest of us."

-----------------------
Don't know if this will help but I just had to get it off my chest.
BTW, Dr. Shamos appears to be knowledgeable about designing for human and machine interaction. He's just not knowledgable about what's behind that interaction and how it can/will be compromised.

[RedEagle]

10. Great Line!

This is a great way to put it!

"The reason for adding the requirement for a voter verified paper ballot is not to disenfranchise people with disabilities, it is to be sure that we are not ALL disenfranchised."

[SharonAnn]

5. Comments on Dr. Shamos' Press Statement

He made the following statement "If you can trust your life to the computers in an airplane, the Powerball can trust $240 million to a computer in a convenience store and banks can conduct their entire business with computers, then the same technology can work just fine for voting."

Here's where his analysis and conclusion breaks down.

1. I trust my life to the pilots in the airplane who can override the computer if it goes astray.
2. The Powerball trusts $240 million by printing receipts (ballots) for customers, keeping a journal entry in the machine at the store, AND keeping a record on the central computer.
3. Banks conduct their business with computers with some of the following requirements:
a. Customers get a printed (or printable) receipt for any transaction
b. Banks are subject to state and federal audits on a frequent basis
c. Banks are not allowed to keep their processes secret and expect the public and the auditors to simply "trust" them.
d. Bank audits do not rely on one record of a transaction, they compare many records, many reports, and many processes. Bank auditing and IT (computer system) auditing are well defined.

And even with the above, there are planes that crash, Powerball awards that go unclaimed, and embezzlement occurs at banks.

[Gordon25]

6. I am getting so tired...

...of hearing this argument that the rights and needs of the disabled should trump the right and need for secure and accurate counts of votes in elections.

It is a falsely posed either/or question.

This argument is easily refuted with a single question: "Do you believe that if we were to line up a hundred or even a thousand disabled voters and asked them whether they preferred to vote on a system which required someone to assist them in casting and verifying their vote, or on a system which didn't require that assistance, but which was demonstrably flawed security wise, easily hacked, and which provided results which would forever be in question because of those unfixed flaws; do you really believe anyone who would prefer the faulty, untrustworthy system just because it allowed them to vote without assistance?"

Certainly we must take the disabled population's voting needs into consideration and provide for them, but let us do it with a system which works for everyone, not one which pretends to benefit the disabled at the expense of election vote count integrity.

Gordon25

[punpirate]

8. There are many powerful ADA groups in the country...

... and they have a main goal of integrating the disabled into everyday society to the greatest extent possible, with as much independence as possible, and I don't see anything wrong with this.

Unfortunately, they're not listening because some of the manufacturers are telling them that the manufacturers' technology will achieve this for the disabled without the need for paper. They're not keeping up with the news.

At least one manufacturer (Avante?) takes the printed ballot output, scans it with their version of OCR and then converts that to speech, telling the blind voter through headphones what's been printed. Voila! Paper and voter verification by the blind.

Can that be gamed? Yes. But, open source software would go a long way to minimizing that possibility.

Particularly with the disabled advocacy groups, I think they've been listening to what they want to hear--something that they feel meets the needs of their constituency, and like most people, have made up their minds. They need some serious re-education, but that message can't be couched in an argument saying, in effect, "for the good of the voting system, your constituency must do with a little less." That simply won't work. They need to know that requirements for a paper ballot do not trump the needs of their constituencies.

On edit, should have attached this reply to an earlier message to which Gordon was replying....

Cheers.

[RedEagle]

11. As I understand it...

Avante's system reads back audibly to the visually impaired the information being fed TO THE PRINTER.

I don't know if they have a scanner.

Accupoll is supposed to have the bar code or OCD scan.
They are also open source Linux.
But the ballot goes to the voter to put in a ballot box, and some don't want the voter touching it.


However, both systems put a code on the paper ballot that correlates to the random number assigned to that vote by the machine. There are other checks and balances too. If you correlate the paper ballots with the electronic ballots, you can pretty much eliminate the ballot box stuffing thing.

Low tech checks high tech, hi tech checks low tech.

Use both and sounds to me like you can come up with a pretty tight system.

[ParanoidPat]

7. Kick to keep the night crew awake!

:evilgrin:

:kick:

[Eloriel]

9. Excellent letter, Pat

Has anyone looked into this guys ties with other organizations and corporations?

Eloriel