“Disruptive innovation” is what we need to fix America’s broken voting system, Mitch Kapor, the election reformer and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Lotus 1-2-3, said on Wednesday night in Los Angeles.

Kapor made his remarks at an event sponsored by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) at the home of Hollywood film producer Lawrence Bender. The event was intended to introduce the Hollywood audience to the OSDV’s Trust the Vote project and its mission, to “re-invent how America votes in a digital democracy.”

Kapor was joined on a panel by Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan and friends of Why Tuesday? OSDF co-founder Gregory Miller, Heather Smith from Rock the Vote and CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Kim Zetter covered the event for Wired Magazine, and said that the main piece of news to come from the event was that the OSDV’s open-source voting code, the type of “disruptive innovation” Kapor was talking about, is now ready for a transparent public review. (more…)

Posted in Election Reform, Electronic voting, Friends of WT?, Open Source | 2 Comments »

If you’ve ever used an ATM, chances are you’ve used a Diebold. If that name sounds familiar to you, you may remember that in April of 2008, I interviewed Ed Felten via Skype, the Princeton professor who was able to hack a Diebold voting machine, one of their other ventures. The AP reported last week that Diebold is selling it’s voting machine unit for millions of dollars to Election Systems & Software, giving them a pretty firm hold on the voting machine market in the US.

Diebold, based in North Canton, announced the sale of its Allen, Texas-based subsidiary Premier Election Solutions Inc. on Thursday and said it will get $5 million plus payments representing 70 percent of collections of the unit’s accounts receivable as of Aug. 31.

Diebold said it would disclose the additional payments at a later date.

Diebold expects to recognize a pretax loss on the deal in the range of $45 million to $55 million.

[snip]

Candice Hoke, an election law professor at Cleveland State University, said the sale raises questions about the consolidation of election services. “It’s a massive consolidation of voting-system vendors,” she said.

The increased size and influence of ES&S could make it harder for smaller, innovative companies to enter the market, she said. “The market power (of ES&S) will be so significant,” she said.

At the same time, Hoke said, ES&S’s growth could allow it to spend more on research to develop better voting machines.

We’ve followed closely stories about voting machines here. For the whole bunch of them, check out our electronic voting archive.

Photo of Diebold ATM via jeffwilcox on Flickr.

Posted in Electronic voting | 1 Comment »

An election reform bill (S. 3212) sponsored by Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinsten and Republican Senator Robert Bennett of Utah was panned by the New York Times this morning in an editorial. The Times says election reform is indeed necessary, but not in the form put forth in this bill. Here’s a quick look at the Times’ POV:

Voters cannot trust the totals reported by electronic voting machines; they are too prone to glitches and too easy to hack. In the last few years, concerned citizens have persuaded states to pass bills requiring electronic voting machines to use paper ballots or produce voter-verifiable paper records of every vote. More than half of the states now have such laws.

There is still a need for a federal law, so voting is reliable in every state. A good law would require that every vote in a federal election produce a voter-verifiable paper record, and it would mandate that the paper records be the official ballots. It would impose careful standards for how these paper ballots must be “audited,” to verify that the tallies on the electronic machines are correct.

For the complete editorial, click here.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: As we constantly mention here, election reform shouldn’t just be about looking at the ways we vote, but the day we vote as well. In 2006, we caught up with Senator Feinstein in California to talk to her about why we vote on Tuesday. Do you know why? To see whether Senator Feinstein knew the answer (most members of congress don’t know) check out this video. If you don’t know the answer, you can find it right here.

ABOUT US: If you’re new here, we invite you to learn more about our nonpartisan mission at Why Tuesday? including who we are and what we do.

Posted in Election Reform, Electronic voting, Existing laws, Why do we vote on Tuesday? | Comments Off

Next week in San Francisco a voting machine that runs on open source software and was designed by the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit with the stated goal of moving towards “trustable and open voting systems,” will be put to use at LinuxWorld, where they will be holding a mock election. Apparently 100,000 people are expected to participate. Here are some of the details from the San Francisco Chronicle:

The LinuxWorld conference is held every year in San Francisco to discuss open-source software - software whose code is designed and maintained by volunteers. The conference takes its name from Linux, computer operating system designed by Linus Torvalds in the 1990s that has a passionate following. It competes against Microsoft Windows and has spawned software for numerous devices, including voting machines.

Open-source software is free for anyone to use, although licensing restrictions apply - changes to the code, for example, usually need to be given back to the community. The code that runs this voting machine is based on the work of a former Berkeley student, Ka-Ping Yee, who now works at Google.

At a price of about $400, the new voting machine is a tenth of the cost of proprietary machines - less if made in quantity, Dechert said - because it’s simply designed and based on free software. Its workings are transparent, he said, unlike some of the electronic voting machines that California decertified for security problems.

People who attend the conference will vote by scanning a bar code on their badges, then selecting a candidate from a computer screen. When they’re done, they will print their ballots, which will include their bar codes. A separate machine can scan the bar codes and read their votes back to them if they choose.

Votes can be audited in several ways - by manually counting the ballots, scanning the bar codes, or processing pictures of the ballots to see if the text on each ballot matches its bar code.

The article goes on to say that this particular could be certified and ready to roll in real (not mock) elections by 2010. I’m down in Los Angeles now and will be next week, and might try and make it up for LinuxWorld if I have the time. This sounds pretty cool.

Click here for a look at our past coverage of electronic voting, including an interview with a Princeton professor, the Mayor of Philly and more.

Posted in California, Election Reform, Election administration, Electronic voting, Open Source | 1 Comment »

Yesterday I spoke to Pennsylvania Department of State Director of Communications Leslie Amorós about our look into the trouble with the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine in New Jersey, and how the same machines will be used on Tuesday in Pennsylvania. In response, she sent me the following statement:

From: [Leslie Amorós]
Subject: RE: Edward Felten Interview
Date: April 17, 2008 6:04:10 PM EDT
To: [Jacob Soboroff]

Thank you for sending me the link.

As we discussed earlier, two of 67 counties in PA uses the Sequoia Advantage, and one of the counties has used the system since 1996. Since the 2006 implementation of using voting systems that met Help America Vote Act requirements, Pennsylvania successfully has conducted 4 elections.

The PA Department of State is committed to holding fair, accurate and accessible elections. To keep informed, the Department of State consistently monitors various news, studies and literature regarding elections.

In Pennsylvania, electronic voting systems must undergo a statutorily required testing process. The system must be tested by a federal independent testing authority. Then, unlike some states that only require the federal testing, Pennsylvania law requires a second tier of testing. The state testing is conducted by two independent testing examiners. After successful results of both testing processes in Pennsylvania, the Secretary of the Commonwealth certifies the system for use in PA. Counties then select the system that they will use from the list of certified systems.

Keep in mind that holding successful elections is a result of many factors, not just the voting systems. Poll worker training and numerous security measures are implemented to ensure an efficient election. For example, before voting systems are used by voters, the county conducts logic and accuracy tests to ensure that each of the voting the systems are tallying votes correctly.

The link referred to in the e-mail is my video-chat with Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten. For a look at what the Mayor of Philadelphia, the Governor of Pennsylvania and a Pennsylvania Congressman think about this issue, click here.

Posted in Election 2008, Election Reform, Electronic voting, HAVA, Pennsylvania | 2 Comments »

Why Tuesday? Board Member Norman J. Ornstein

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is one of the good guys in Congress — smart, thoughtful, decent and hardworking. Now, fortunately, he is turning his attention and considerable energies to election reform, a broadly defined issue.

It is fortunate for two reasons: First, there are big issues out there and enough people distrustful of the electoral process or cynical about it to create a real crisis of governance the next time we have a very close election. Second, precious few lawmakers have decided to devote their time and attention to this topic.

Despite the emotions raised by problems with voting, this is not a slam-dunk winner of an issue politically. And those lawmakers who were instrumental in passing the Help America Vote Act in 2002 have either lost interest in the issue, are exhausted from it or believe we should wait awhile before acting again.

They are wrong. We do need to be careful about rushing to major reform without considering the costs and consequences; we are paying now for the rush to employ touch-screen devices known as DREs, or direct-recording electronic machines. And every major reform has to be absorbed by hapless election administrators who have neither the resources nor the trained personnel to make big changes on a frequent basis.

(more…)

Posted in D.C., Election Reform, Election administration, Electoral College, Electronic voting, Existing laws, Vote Centers, WT? in the news, Weekend voting, Why do we vote on Tuesday? | Comments Off