Lee Nichols, a political writer at the Austin Chronicle (liberal paper for Central Tx) has been doing due dilligence on the voting issue, keeping abreast of issues, writing articles etc. He just wrote the following article and can't understand why he hasn't received ANY feedback response, pro or con, from readers. We need to support his efforts and provide him with that feedback he so needs. Please Please Please take the time to READ this article and email him with your comments. We need to support writers like this and provide constructive criticism.
How Safe Is Your E-Vote?
Elections go digital, but experts fear a crashIt's either the best thing ever to happen to elections, or the stupidest blunder our elected officials have ever made; the savior of our democracy, or a conspiracy to steal it; an idea whose time has come, or a hapless symbol of society's naive faith in technology.
Electronic voting hasn't completely boiled over into the nation's greater consciousness ... yet. But it's on a high simmer. It has staunch defenders, passionate detractors, and one way or another, it will make a huge impact on the 2004 elections.
The push for computerized voting gained momentum after the 2000 presidential election, also known as the biggest electoral fiasco in U.S. history. An appalled nation learned what an imperfect science elections are – hanging chads, allegations of fraud, and butterfly ballots making Jews vote for Pat Buchanan. Surely, we were told, in our modern computer age, we could do better than this.
In some eyes, computers seemed the obvious answer. No chads. No stray marks. No spoiled ballots (in fact, no paper). No need for human judgment about "voter intent" at all. The result was the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act – which does not specifically require electronic voting, but does provide funding to help states replace punch-card and lever voting systems. Many jurisdictions all over the nation are choosing "direct recording electronic" systems.
But while election administrators are generally enthralled with the new technology – and a number of companies are rushing to meet the demand – others are not embracing DRE voting. And the critics are not just the usual conspiracy theorists. The strongest condemnation is coming from the people who best know the limitations of computerization: computer scientists.
What will electronic voting mean for Travis Co. (and the rest of Texas) and how might our experience compare to the rest of the nation?.....cont'd
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-02-20/pols_feature.html----------
He talks about Austin's e-voting solution (e-Slate), but I don't understand enough about computers to know if it is, in fact, a good solution. If you have some expertise to share with him, or think of questions he should be asking other experts, please let him know:
...Hart's product is called the eSlate – a small electronic tablet, of sorts, specialized for casting ballots in elections. In the summer of 2002, Travis Co. Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir purchased several hundred eSlates and gave them a successful trial run in the early voting period of the November 2002 elections. The county went whole hog into e-voting in the spring 2003 Austin municipal elections, scrapping its optical scanning system altogether. DeBeauvoir says her choice of eSlate was not simply an attempt to Buy Greater Austin, but that Hart InterCivic's machine has several obvious advantages over its rivals.
Unlike Hart's major competitors, the eSlate does not use a touch screen. "I had trouble with calibration issues on the touch screens," DeBeauvoir says, meaning that the onscreen "buttons" that the voter presses sometimes slip out of alignment with the proper sensors underneath the screen. "Not all of them, but some of them. It's what happened in Dallas ; you end up maybe casting a ballot for the other candidate and don't realize it. They've done some things in the industry to try to improve it since I first looked at it, so in fairness to them, I think they have improved their product, but at the time I was doing the review I found it troubling."
Instead, eSlate uses a wheel-and-button system – the voter turns a dial until the candidate of choice is highlighted, and then presses a button to select the candidate, never touching the screen. (As in all DRE systems, the voter can correct errors before finally pressing the "cast ballot" button.)
Secondly, eSlate does not use "smart cards," credit-card-sized devices given by the election workers to voters, who plug them into a voter terminal, letting the machine know that the person standing before it is indeed a legitimate voter. The Rice/Johns Hopkins researchers say that it would be terribly easy to "homebrew" such cards, which an attacker could then sneak into the polling place and use to cast multiple votes. The eSlate voters, in contrast, are assigned unique personal identification numbers when they show up at the polling place, which they then enter into the voting machine. The number's validity expires either upon casting the ballot, or, if unused, within a few minutes of its assignment.
Perhaps most important, the eSlate system has no external connections – no hookups to phone lines, the Internet, or an intranet.....
His email: lnichols@austinchronicle.com
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