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Voting Equipment Integrity
House Bill 211 is sponsored by John Dougal, probably the most technically savvy legislator on the Hill to protect the integrity of Utah’s voting equipment. The bill is a direct response to some of the perceived laxness in the RFP that the Voting Equipment Selection Committee issued last year. The bill does the following things (all good):
- Requires voter verification and ability to change ballot prior to pre-cast (lines 71-72).
- Requires “an unalterable record”; permitting inspection and verification to audit results and insure integrity (80-82)
- Allows the Lt. Gov. to purchase post-cast voter-verified functionality (88-91)
- Institutionalizes the VESC (97-105)
- Allows the Lt. Gov. to grant access to applications (124-126)
- Requires public “review and comment”(127-129)
I’m afraid that the language, as currently in the bill, however, doesn’t quite go far enough. As I read the bill, the voter could be verifying the vote on a screen and the unalterable record could be some kind of write-only memory device. This doesn’t protect against many kinds of fraud since the machine could let the voter “verify” the ballot on the screen and then record something else in the unalterable record. These have to be combined such that the voter verifies what’s on the unalterable record independent of the machinery recording the vote. What kind of technology satisfies that requirement today? Paper.
In related news, Ohio’s Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, has stated his intent to deploy and optical scan voting system statewide. Ken and I served together on the Kennedy School of Government’s eGovernment panel and I have a lot of respect for him. He’s smart and he gets the technology. He’s no luddite—he’s one of the biggest proponents of eGovernment. So, why does he favor optical scan? Because its the best way to ensure the integrity of the voting system.
The press release I link to above includes a
Posted by windley on January 21, 2005 02:41 PM
