Brad Ideas - Open Source voting machines - Comments

AngryVoter — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 11:33:57 -0800

Your idea sounds good there Brad, but its missing one thing. Paper is too flawed, it rips, it tears, it creates hanging chads. I suggest some more hard. Like plastic cards, just like the one your drivers license is on. I have a whole explaination on this, and have an entire way of getting the vote done quickly and efficiently without fraud coming in as a major factor. And no chads either. However, i can not find anyone who will listen to my idea.

aaron — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 17:27:46 -0700

"In many European countries, paper ballots are
used and counted by hand." - In Russia they count paper ballots by hand also. And Russia is a huge country. I also think there is no need in voting machines.

Faxanadu — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 07:48:14 -0800

The guys who run the software for these voting machines just happen to be the guys who 'accidentally' messed up some lottery software which gave the operaters a bigger slice of the pot than the laws allowed....... honest error, could happen to anyone and they did fix it, when the error was finally pointed out............

European — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:41:41 -0800

In many European countries, paper ballots are
used and counted by hand. Polls close at 6 P.M.,
and FINAL, OFFICIAL results are in by 10.00 P.M.
If there is ever a question, one can do a recount.
There is never any question of bad counting etc.

It seems that the U.S. has voting machines because
they are cool and modern, not noticing that they
are really not necessary.

Open Source voting machines

brad — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 11:46:22 -0800

As I noted earlier, there are all sorts of risks with remote voting over the internet, even if I suggest a way to make it doable. However, this is different from the question of voting machines. Like the folks at Verified Voting I believe that a voter-verifiable paper ballot is the simplest way to make computerized voting more secure. And I like voting machines because they can improve access and even make preferential ballot possible down the road.

But I look at the huge cost we are paying for voting machines. I propose breaking the voting machine process into two steps. The first is the ballot preparation machine. It helps the voter generate their ballot, and then prints it out on paper, in a human readable form that is also machine readable. You need lots of those.

With paper ballot in hand, you walk over to the scanning machine, which is stage 2. This machine reads the standard-format paper ballot, does OCR on the human readable text and confirms the ballot is readable as the voter desires. It also counts it. The ballot is then placed in a locked ballot box.

The scanning machine will be expensive, and secured, and built by an audited vendor. However, you need only a small number of those. The voting stations, which you need many of, can mostly be cheap. In fact, they can be free.

That's because you would generate a voting program that runs on standard PC hardware. On slow standard PC hardware. Probably an open source program, meant to run on Linux, and audited and verified by the open source community. They would love this job.

Then you ask the public to donate their old, slower PCs. Give them a small tax deduction if needed, but frankly I think you would get so many machines you wouldn't even need that. You could even be strict on the hardware requirements. Wipe the bios and put in a fresh one, possibly put in a cheap hard disk with the voting system installed. Get donated laser printers. You don't have a lot of security concerns with these machines because there is not a lot they can do to bollux the election.