Trade secrets ruled over voting transparency

[SHRED]

You remember ES&S?
Republican Chuck Hagel's old company.

The most vital aspect of our Democracy is corporatized and now legally shrouded in secrecy.


Our vote.



Court: Protecting trade secrets takes priority over election transparency

By Ryan Paul | Published: June 25, 2007 - 08:26AM CT

A Florida appeals court has upheld a lower court decision that denies requests for an independent source code audit of voting machines used by Florida's 13th district, which suffered election irregularities in a highly controversial congressional race. The appeals court has chosen to support a lower court decision which asserts that forcing voting machine maker Election Systems and Software (ES&S) to provide source code access to independent security auditors would amount to "gutting the protections afforded those who own trade secrets."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070625-florida-appeals-court-says-trade-secret-protection-takes-priority-over-election-transparency.html

[mod mom]

1. So why should be care-they're easier to vote on right?:

Nearly half of voting machines tested fail

Montgomery officials tested the 5% of machines that drew complaints; 56 of those 125 machines failed.


By Lynn Hulsey
Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007

DAYTON — After two days of tests, the results are in: About 2,500 people cast ballots in November on 56 malfunctioning electronic touch-screen voting machines in Montgomery County, said Steve Harsman, county board of elections director.

He said it is impossible to know how many people finalized their electronic ballots without realizing that the Diebold Elections Systems machines were inaccurately registering their votes. But people had three chances to review their votes before finalizing them, and all the machines accurately tallied the votes that were finalized by voters, Harsman said.



On Tuesday, county election officials completed testing of 125 machines identified in voter complaints collected by Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, which called for the investigation. Some 2,530 voting machines were used in the county on Election Day.

Harsman said several malfunctioning machines were clustered at certain precincts, indicating they may have been damaged during delivery by a trucking company that hauls the machines to the polls.

-snip

http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/local/2007/03/21/ddn032107elex.html

I know different machines, but they both use proprietary source code. Is it fascism, yet?

[rucky]

2. It's one of those stories you hate to recommend..

but feel like you have to.

[mod mom]

3. Would you mind cross posting to the Election Reform forum.

I have to be so bold as to cross post someone elses thread, and there it will get more attention and stay on board longer. thanks.

[librechik]

4. read it and weep

:kick:

[garybeck]

5. the only cure for secret software on voting machines

A-U-D-I-T-S


doesn't matter how secret the code is, nor how badly it is written. If it's stealing votes, an audit can find out.

the question is what kind of audit, and how large of an audit is necessary to effectively detect fraud or errors in the code.

but it's been said and it's pretty true that even if they had open source code, they could mess with it and we wouldn't know if the machines are running the same code we've been shown. so even then, we need AUDITS. Big audits, and lots of them!

[midnight]

6. I don't care about their secret source code. Get rid of it. Let's

have a paper ballot vote on it.

[tbyg52]

7. That's fine, because I don't want to audit their source code

I want to THROW THEM OUT!

[ljm2002]

8. There are many approaches that could work...

...the one I would recommend is to impose a law that any code used to count votes is open source and vetted by the large open source community -- i.e. anyone who chooses to look at it, analyze it and look for bugs is free to do so.

All voting machines would produce voter verified paper ballots that can be counted in lieu of the machine count.

In addition the law would be very explicit about controls: machines would be incapable of receiving normal devices that could be used to alter its operation (e.g., we don't want to see a USB port where someone could stick in their portable USB-stick and change the whole thing). For any new machines, there would be a mandatory period -- say, 2 or 3 or 10 election cycles -- where there is 100% cross checking of the voter verified paper ballots against the system's internal count. After that, there would be random cross checking for 25% of all voting machines in all elections where they are used. Actually, given how much trouble and expense the cross-checking would be -- and how necessary it is -- it would be better to simply require counting the paper ballots, period.

Now if we do all of the above, then the machines are simply glorified input devices. However, you could also make them more functional: they could show all of the printed election materials right there -- for example, before voting for a judge you could read their candidate's statement -- things like that could actually enhance the voting experience. But when it comes to counting the votes (and in remembrance of Andy), there is only one right answer: Voter Verified Paper Ballots