PA Voting Machine 'Fair' -What should I be looking for?

[canichelouis]

Today in Pittsburgh Pa there is a Voting Machine Fair for the residents of Allegheny County. We are mandated to change over from our good ol' big lever machines. The public is invited to offer comments and suggestions.
So I'm going to go look at a bunch of 'testers' I suppose. What in the world am I to be looking for in a good choice?

Can anyone recommend a good link?

[DebJ]

1. PAPER TRAIL. PAPER TRAIL. PAPER TRAIL.

Here in York that is what our activist groups are doing Saturday. That and finding out (speaking for myself) who is going to make the decision, because if they choose no paper trail, we will endlessly berate and disgrace them, as publicly as possible.

[annabanana]

3. Voter Verified Paper Ballot

a "receipt" is not enough. The vote of record MUST be the paper record, that the VOTER has had a chance to see and verify.

DRE (touch screen) are the least reliable, most hackable and most expensive. Each polling place will require several of these.

Optical scan machines can be one per polling place, and thus are less expensive.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE!! We can't have companies sending out techies to get the final result of our elections. It isn't a secure and transparent situation if there is private, proprietary software.

We have to be able to trust that our votes will be counted accurately or our whole system is illegitimate.

"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed".. (where have I heard that before?)

[brooklynite]

2. Ask about calibration...

One of the incidents I experienced in when I did voter rights protection work in Florida was people using touch screen machines selecting one candidate and having the name of another one light up -- NOT because the machines were rigged but because they were mis-calibrated, so you had to touch an inch above, below or to the side of where the name appeared for the vote to register (similar to what you sometimes enocunter with ATM touch screens). The question to ask is, given the generally negligible level of technical training of election precinct workers, how easy will it be to fix problems like this?

[Land Shark]

4. History of problems, and

1. history of problems and issues, how were these allegedly overcome?
2. WARRANTIES: in the actual purchase contract, what do they promise (usually they try to waive implied warranties -- the basic promise implied by law that they will work for intended purposes -- and substitute sometimes a one or three year limited warranty, carefully defined and limited by legalease. what doesn't the written wrranty cover?
3. What's claimed as trade secret? who gets to supervise vote counting and/or get information about it? can citizens monitor the vote counting to insure its accuracy? How so and why is this meaningful?
4. Can we bring these machines to our own independent tester?
5/ Can we have a manual for operations? Technical manual?
6. NIST (national institute for standards in technology) has verious threat assessments for voting machines. Are they familiar with them, which ones are they actively protecting against and what are the mitigation measures taken?
7. What are the threats for security to which themachine is still vulnerable (if they don't know150), they aren't thinking about it)
8. Can it do a real recount, i.e. counting actual ballots by a different method?
9. How many voters can vote on this per minute? Given slow periods how many voters can vote a GENERAL election ballot per day? (probably no more than 150) given rush periods, how many of these machines do we need to purchase to give a five minute service guarantee (no voter waits in line more than five minutes). it will be an ungodly sum, and morethan they plan on spending.... (these and all voting machines are expensive BOTTLENECKS)
10. How will you guarantee as a vendor that rich counties don't get to vote with convenience while poorer counties wait in long lines?
11. Without giving away your source code are you willing to make every other aspect of vote counting completely transparent to citizen groups that wish to monoitor the elections?
12. Why do you sometimes lie about HAVA which only requires accessible machines for the disabled (not electronic machines or replaced machines for EVERYONE)? Accessible does not mean DRE, but DRE is only one example. Why can't we just have one accessible machine per polling location, for use by the disabled who need assistance, and by fools who don't? (nothing should come between a voter and their ballot except that which is necessitated by disability)

[DebJ]

5. kick

[FogerRox]

6. kick for the Dean avatar- LS and PA