Voting Research Center Opens

[Wilms]

The Johns Hopkins News-Letter

Voting research center opens

By Patrice Hutton

September 09, 2005

The Johns Hopkins University, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, announced in August the opening of A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), which will blend public policy and computer science in an attempt to create stronger and more accurate voting technology.

ACCURATE, funded by the National Science Foundation and in cooperation with the help of five other research institutions, will be based at Hopkins and seek to assuage mounting concern about the increasing use of electronic voting machines.

In a statement released by Hopkins, Avi Rubin, who will be directing ACCURATE, said, "This center will develop the fundamental science necessary for secure, accessible, trustworthy and transparent voting."

-snip/more-

http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/09/09/4320cdc069d06

[klook]

1. Important initiative

I hope they'll also be focusing attention on how to retrofit existing voting machine technology so that it's reliable and accurate. If states and municipalities are going to get on board with ACCURATE, it will have to involve a way to improve confidence in voting technology that doesn't require throwing away millions of dollars of investment in machines made by Diebold et al.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

5. they may recommend throwing away some machines

if the machines are as bad as Diebold, which I recall Avi Rubin as saying once that the system would have to be scrapped and built from the ground up, because it was so bad.

The idea is, you have a million lines of source code, a significant amount of flaws in it, it may be impossible to clean it up.

I would love to see every Diebold machine there is thrown out, or put in a landfill for toxic waste, or recycled into some other object.

The optical scanners are junk, the touchscreen machines are junk.

[autorank]

2. This is good but it "benches" some heavy weighte, e.g., Rubin, because

they can't seem partisan. Hope they do an initial assumptions report. That would do it!

[Wilms]

3. kick n/t

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. how can we employ computer systems as trustworthy election systems when

"Our country moved to electronic voting in public elections before the technology was ready," Rubin said. He noted that the use of mark paper ballots and optical scan readers should have been continued at the precinct level rather than electronic voting machines.

In a press release from Johns Hopkins, Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science at Rice, spoke on behalf of the ACCURATE proposal. "The basic question is how can we employ computer systems as trustworthy election systems when we know computers are not totally reliable, totally secure or bug-free," said Wallach, who will serve as the associate director of ACCURATE.

"In voting, this is complicated by the fact that potential adversaries include everyone from the voting system designers, elections officials and voters to political operatives, hackers and foreign agents," Wallach said.
http://www.jhunewsletter.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/09/09/4320cdc069d06