Elections are coming up, and once again, lots of places will be using touchscreen machines. Many of the exact same machines were proven to be compromised in 2004 and 2006, and one of the main companies, Diebold, was taken to court in California and eventually settled for millions of dollars and changed its name.

Anybody who knows me knows that I love technology though. I think that the current electronic systems are terrible (enough that I voted early as a permanent mail ballot voter), but I also think that they offer the potential of having elections that are more fair and verifiable than old fashioned hand-counting. Here are my ideas for how to do it.

1. Do not have any external ports (like USB, firewire, and memory card slots) on the machine, and make sure that all internal ports and necessary cables are physicially soldered to prevent any tampering. Just to be safe, also do not allow people to bring memory cards of any kind into the voting booth.
2. Give voters a paper card with the source code for the voting software printed on it. Then, when users approach the voting machine, have the computer display the source code for the program it is running. Voters will be able to hold the card up next to the machine and compare to make sure it’s the same, even though most people won’t know what the programming means.
3. Also, put a unique, randomly generated identification number on the card. After voting is done, allow them to log on to a web site, enter that number, and see whether or not their vote was counted and what it was recorded as.
4. Do not have the machines connect to any other machines outside the building they are in. As an added level of safety, incorporate modern, strong encryption into the machines.
5. Print a paper ballot receipt, just like ATM’s do, and have poll stations collect these printed ballots. Let the computers count the votes for the first tally. Then, if a candidate challenges the results, use the printed ballots that you collected.
6. Do not store votes on the voting machine itself, even temporarily. Have the voting machines connected to multiple tabulation machines, which will each store redundant copies of data.
7. Immediately prior to voting and again the very minute voting ends, allow people from the major parties as well as some independent non-partisan watchdog groups to examine some of the voting machines and some of the tabulation machines. Allow people to watch (from behind a line or something, sort of like how people are allowed to come and watch court rooms), and also film it and make the footage available.

Does anybody else have any ideas to make it harder to corrupt electronic voting?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under All Entries, Politics, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.