Re: testing DREs - what a mess

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Neal McBurnett wrote:
>
> So this is another reason to avoid DREs and vote recording machines.
> With a ballot marking machine, this sort of test is far less important
> since the voter verifies the paper results on the spot.

You can verify the paper reflects your votes; but you can't verify
that the scanner/computer combo counts them. And under the law, ONLY
the scanner/computer combo is allowed to count them. The paper is
false "verification" unless a judge ORDERS that it be counted by
people instead of the machine. To my knowledge this has never or
almost never happened in 30 years across the country.

Evan

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>
> Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
> Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60
>
>
> http://coloradovoter.net/bcv-archive/msg00010.html
>  From: Moon Lee
>
>  http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/15/riverside_voting_machines/
>
>  Riverside County, Calif., invited citizens to observe a test of its
>  computerized voting systems. One participant was not impressed.
>
>  Jeremiah Akin, a 28-year-old computer programmer who recently
>  observed one of these tests in Riverside County, Calif., says that
>  what he saw did nothing to mitigate his concerns about electronic
>  voting -- indeed, the whole thing made him more worried than ever.
>
>  >> Describe to me how the test was run. <<
>
>  Well, I was picturing that people would go up and touch the touch screen and verify that what they had pressed was registered as a vote. But the way it's run is, they have a test cartridge that they pop into the back of the machine, and it runs a script -- it runs several hundred different voters, like some type of emulation.
>
>  >> Sort of a simulation of what would happen during a day of voting. <<
>
>  Yeah. But the touch screens themselves weren't actually pressed. Nobody got to touch those. So we didn't see what was on them, and we didn't see the input that was put into the machine. All that we saw was the output that came out later. And, I mean -- that's like telling somebody that your calculator can add 2 plus 2, then pressing some buttons behind a screen, and then showing them that it says 4.
>
>
> [the rest of the article is also worth a read - see
>   http://coloradovoter.net/bcv-archive/msg00010.html]
>