Open Source, Open Democracy

I've been following the news in Iran, as I'm sure all of you have. And this may surprise you, but I've been reticent to take a stand on whether or not their election was corrupt. How can you tell if an election is flawed from the outside? If their system is like ours, it relies on the secret ballot, which theoretically protects individual voters from being punished for exercising their right. If you vote for the loser, there is no list that publishes that data so you can be jailed by the dude that won. When you approach the ballot box there are no guards to "help" you fill in the forms correctly: it's just you and the ballot. And that's why I am so fascinated watching all the unrest and the conjecturing about whether or not Ahmadinejad or others altered the totals when the Iranian ballots were counted: there is really no way to know. Unless you have a system that checks the results and somehow verifies votes with the person who cast them, it would be impossible to know after the results are in.

Unfortunately, this is the same situation we're in in the United States. I'm not denigrating the secret ballot, but if you are going to have such a feature in a voting system, the chain of custody for the ballots becomes the most important check on malfeasance. And there are huge, documented problems with our chain of custody. I'm not talking about Acorn registering Superman and the Dallas Cowboys to vote... I'm talking about the 2000 and 2004 elections, which many people were very concerned about here. We just weren't concerned enough to riot, the way the Iranians are doing. If you google for stories about stolen elections though, there's a lot to be worried about.

That is why I wanted to pass on this note from my friend, Alan Dechert. If you cannot check the results with any certainty, then the system must be transparent enough for us to keep track of the ballots after they're cast. He's invented such a system and it was tested last year at LinuxWorld.


And it works. The difference between the Open Voting Consortium's system and the systems we usually use for electronic voting, is that we're all entitled to see how that system works. The typical electronic voting machine will let you cast your vote, and then it sends your choices off into the ether somewhere. Often you will get an opportunity to check the ballot on the screen and make changes, but how do you know that what you selected is what is getting sent?

The short answer is, you can't. That ballot only exists digitally. There isn't a record of it that you could ever expect to find. Like grains of sand, these things just accumulate somewhere to be counted, and who knows if any of them reflect your choices? You're not even entitled to see the code that runs on the machine to see if it adds or removes data.

The OVC's machine in contrast, isn't a machine at all. It's just code on a disk. You're free to look through it line by line, and if you pop it into a computer, your computer becomes a voting machine. All it can do is present you with a ballot for you to fill out. Once you've made your choices, it prints out a hard copy, so you can verify that your vote says exactly what you wanted. And then, you place it in the box. There is absolutely no trust required for using that machine. You can watch it in action here:



And did I mention its price tag is a fraction of the machines we use now? How many times have you waited to vote because there weren't enough ballots or machines for your precinct? How much easier would it be to print your ballots as you need them, instead of ordering expensive, preprinted ballots? Imagine how much more easily you could add new nominees and propositions.

This is why I'm passing along this note from my friend, Mr. Dechert. He's been working on this system for years. He can't do this alone. This is our country, and our responsibility. This morning, he asked me for help. So now, I'm asking you. The Iranian election should be a wake up call for all of us who wondered if Bush really won those elections in 2000 and 2004. We don't have to be trusting when we can be smart.

Dear Friends of Open Voting:

I need your help today. As you may recall, US Representative Rush Holt has introduced several badly flawed voting reform bills in the past few years. We have opposed them for a variety of reasons.

Last week, Holt introduced his new one: The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 2894)
http://holt.house.gov/voting.shtml

In general, the bill is not as bad as the previous. Some provisions are good. Ban DREs, ban wireless, provide some funding for voting software that would be publicly available. However, overall, the bill is still bad. The deep flaw with this bill, generally speaking, remains the same: it would put the federal government too much into running the voting system. Holt is trying to do too much and making a mess of it.

Parts of it are outrageously bad. The main offending part for me is where they say the machine for individuals with disabilities must allow the voter to "independently verify and cast the permanent paper ballot without requiring the voter to manually handle the paper ballot;" No machine has this capability currently, and such a machine would be many times more expensive than necessary. Potential solutions would solve one almost non-existent problem and create several others -- besides the expense.

It's the same mentality that led to adding the expensive printing mechanism to the DRE voting machines. Vendors didn't mind doing it as long as the government was paying for it. Guess what? Government paid for it. No wait, YOU paid for it. Now those machines are getting junked. So, tax-payers underwrote stupid voting architecture. Diebold et al got paid to develop it and sell it. Now the stupid machines go in the trash and Diebold keeps the money.

If we can't get this changed, the bill must be killed. Other parts of the bill should just be removed rather than fixed. We might support it if chunks of it were simply removed.

SEC. 102. ACCESSIBILITY AND BALLOT VERIFICATION FOR
INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES.
...

(II) allows the voter to privately and
independently verify and cast the permanent
paper ballot without requiring the
voter to manually handle the paper ballot;

I need your help contacting Congress in opposition to this bill.

I also need your financial support so OVC can continue to develop and demonstrate sensible open source voting technology, and defeat crappy legislation like this.

PLEASE DONATE NOW
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The PayPal button on our web site http://openvoting.org is probably the quickest and easiest. This is the address for PayPal: donation@openvotingconsortium.org

If by check, please send to:
Open Voting Consortium
4941 Forest Creek Way
Granite Bay, CA 95746

Thank you again for helping OVC to continue progressing toward the establishment of OPEN VOTING.

Alan Dechert
President, Open Voting Consortium
http://openvoting.org
alan@openvoting.org