The voting network..
The problem we have in building a honest and reliable voting network is that we’ve got a couple of opposing goals.
First of all, we’d really like to be able to test that every single vote arrived in it’s appropriate bucket, and no single user voted more than once. These things would seem, on the surface, to require some form of good authentication and user-tagging.
But on the other hand, we really want users to feel free to vote their concience, without worrying that other people might find out what they’ve voted. This would seem to require a completely anonymous system.
Then there’s the matter of tallying the votes. Ideally, we would like each vote to be sent several places for tallying, rather than tallied at one place, and the results of the tallies compared.
I really think that, especially given that this is new technology that will by its very nature be buggy, and in some sense at least the fate of the world rests on the results of this system (one could argue that that’s true of any system because everything is so interconnected, but I think in this case it’s more true than in most) we need the ability to verify our votes after they have been posted. This will require us to have some way to authenticate ourselves to the network – I’m thinking something like a ATM card, issued to every voter, with their name and SSN encoded on it. It could probably even just be a magstripe on a conventional ID like a drivers license.
Anyway, some completely anonymous (as far as any outside snoop could see) token should be either assigned to or generated out of the name and SSN, and attached to the ‘envalope’ of the ballot. That way the user could go home and with their web browser, hit up www.whatdidIvote.gov and verify that their vote was in fact sitting there, and had been counted.
Also, because this is completely new technology, I think it’s important that it be open-source. The open-source community would probably rally around a project to build a voting machine network that was honest using nothing but PCs, and because it was open-source it would be possible to verify that it had not been coded to favor any particular canidate in any way.
[At the moment, the situation we have is that the vice president of the u.s. has stock in the government-favored electronic voting machine company Diebold.. if anyone knows of something that smells more of conflict-of-interest than that, please don’t tell me about it because I’m really afraid to know]
Bleh. Must go shower. More later.
March 11th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Quite aside from Diebold mostly consisting of ex-felony-conviction asshats who are overwhelmingly Republican and refuse to discuss how their systems work or why precisely it is that a monkey — literally — can be taught how to make their systems miscount and misreport thousands of votes… And it wasn’t monkeys who were running things in Ohio in 2004, where 80,000 votes might’ve made the difference in who won the election.
The only drawback to pencil-and-paper is that people are demanding to know the vote results two hours after the polls close. Other than that, inefficiency is our best friend because the more inefficient and bulky the voting system, the harder it is to rig. It’s who counts the votes, as Stalin said, so let’s distribute that. Failing that, blackbox.org and the other opensource groups that are proposing touchscreen voting systems that print out ballots for voter verification, that are then fed into tallying machines, retaining the paper for recounts, sound like they’re on exactly the right track. Hand-checking and crossing out names on printouts on presentation of suitable ID does a great job of ensuring that everyone only votes once, and printed ballots keeps the tally-machine-makers honest.