Iowa Voters

Howard Stanislevic, a computer network engineer in NYC who has been studying the intersection of elections and computers, sees a clear path ahead despite the rancor among election activists over current legislation. At his blog he has proposed these five steps, only one of which is currently met by Iowa:

1. Publicly disclose and audit all Ballot Definition Programming before each election. Follow up with rigorous Logic & Accuracy tests.

2. Aggregate precinct totals transparently and independently after posting and witnessing them at the precincts on election night.

I’m not sure how transparent Iowa’s process of tallying is, but I know precinct totals are not posted at my precinct.

3. Audit within-precinct tallies (using paper and hand-to-eye counts) with a statistically accurate, fair and efficient (SAFE) method.

You’ll be hearing more from me about these SAFE audits.

4. Follow up on any discrepancies found until correct outcomes can be confirmed with very high certainty (prior to certification of course). Ninety-nine percent has been shown to be feasible for all recent federal elections without excessive administrative burden.

5. Have plenty of paper ballots on hand in case of DRE failures (or ban the DREs altogether until someone can get them right)! The 9.2% failure rate allowed by the federal voting system standards makes DREs an unacceptable technology for running elections, especially when other methods are used in other jurisdictions within the same State.

That last one should be already met by Iowa. It’s in the code anyway.

Notice Howard can guarantee the election was properly decided even without examining source code. This avoids the problem of trade secret software, and the problem of trying to spot every possible error in the software even if it is made public.

Howard goes on to compare these five steps to current legislation (HR 811, the Holt bill). He conditionally endorses the bill even though it falls short of his 5 steps.

Voters have gained the right to register as members of several more political parties, thanks to a lawsuit by the Green and Libertarian parties that has finally been settled.

See the new on-line newspaper Iowa Independent for details.

from OVC
GRANITE BAY, CA — John Edwards has become the first presidential candidate to support “open source code” for election systems. In a letter dated June 21st addressed to Alan Dechert, the Edwards campaign stated that, “To ensure security, these machines should be programmed with an open source code for complete transparency, and election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records.”

Currently, software used in election systems remains the proprietary property of vendors. This situation has created a continual problem when anomalous results have been reported and independent experts are denied the ability to review how the systems work. A growing body of critics oppose this privatization of the voting system.

“Open source” means that the computer instructions written by programmers are publicly available. Open source software is rapidly replacing proprietary software in other applications, including the Internet and military applications.

“We congratulate Senator Edwards for taking a leadership role in the fight to restore public oversight of the voting system,” said Alan Dechert, president of Open Voting Consortium.

Barak Obama in Boone this week:

He was asked what can be done to restore America’s democracy. That brought up the election issues.
“I want to make sure the voting system has integrity,” he responded. “There needs to be a paper trail for every vote,” pointing out that much of today’s voting is done on electronic voting machines.

Reported in the Ogden Reporter.