Fwd: Voting Methods

["Joe Pezzillo" <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>]

FYI - This is from a correspondence earlier today with a (hopefully new member) citizen we met via Tom Halicki who is interested in this issue, and has both similar and different perspectives from some of those in our group, so I've invited him to join us to share in the concern and effort.

Hopefully, he's on the mailing list by now and will introduce himself and his interests separately, as well, please join me in welcoming him.

Joe

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Joe Pezzillo <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: December 17, 2003 12:28:28 PM MST
> To: "Nicholas Bernstein" <nicholas.bernstein@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Voting Methods
>
>
> Thanks for your thoughtful reply. You should really be a member of our mailing list, and this should be there. I'm sure you'd be glad to see that others are thinking about these issues as deeply as you are, even if they may reach different conclusions about the need for paper ballots.
>
> Also, please be sure to see the four points that our group has adopted as consensus.
>
> Do you mind if I forward this to the list?
>
> I hope you will join us at our next meeting, your input would clearly be valuable and I think you'd find many of your perspectives and opinions would be in good company.
>
> Joe
>
> PS - We are trying to work on the recount law, and we think Vote Marking machines will provide the benefits of technology without sacrificing the crucial physical artifact of the vote.
>
>
> On Dec 17, 2003, at 12:16 PM, Nicholas Bernstein wrote:
>
> > Joe,
> >
> > Thanks for the quick response. I just watched the streaming video and I understand where you are coming from. However, I still oppose the use of paper ballots.  Ultimately, all physical methods of of recording voter intention suffer from the same problems; optical scanners will never be 100% accurate, erroneous marks as well as undervoting and overvoting will not go away until we have a digital way of recording voter intent.
> >
> > As you point out in your presentation, people are leary of DRE systems. But people were also leary of ATMs when they came out. That doesn't mean that DRE system are bad. It means that some effort will be required to restore that confidence. Open source code, extensive review, and clear explanations will address this public resistance. And yes, bugs exist in every system. But proprietary optical scanning code is just as succeptable to errors than open source DRE software, if not more so.
> >
> > The intent of the Colorado Recount Law is a good one. Unfortunately, the letter of the law is a little stricter than the spirit of the law.  Every business in this country accepts a receipt as proof of purchase. You don't need to physically mark your money or show your checkbook to prove it. Why shouldn't a voting receipt be just as valid? Instead of just accepting  the Colorado Recount Law as it stands, I believe that we should be working to have it include receipts as acceptable media for a recount.
> >
> > I don't understand your opposition to taking a receipt out of the voting place. There are garbage cans in polling places. No one can force you to take a receipt. In fact printing them could be entirely optional. Vote buying can exist now. This system may not stop it, but I don't believe it encourages it. As far as the 'cryptic single-character indications', a receipt could contain as much or as little information as desired (remember we're talking about an electronic system). The system we currently have doesn't have ANY way for a voter to ensure that their vote has been counted. This is a huge improvement. Mail-in ballots are particularly bad in this case. Any postman could 'lose' mail from a part of town known to vote a certain way on an issue, and no one would know that their ballots weren't counted. But this can also happen in polling place voting. Remember those ballot boxes that were found in the basement of the polling place in Florida a week after the election? Voters need a way to ensure their vote has been counted. This will provide the 'public confidence' you seek.
> >
> > Lastly on a somewhat different topic, I hope your group does not end up endorsing instant runoff voting (IRV). IRV provides the illusion of fairer voting, but in reality suffers from a number of problems, including  the paradox that sometimes voting FOR your candidtate of choice can actually cause him/her to LOSE the election. Check out electionmethods.org for an explanation. A quick read will explain why Approval Voting or Condorcet (Pairwise comparison) are much better systems.
> >
> > Nick

> Nick-
>
> Thanks for getting in touch, I'm sorry we haven't seen you at our meetings and I hope you'll join us next time (we don't have a meeting scheduled now, we're awaiting the Commissioners Public Hearing).
>
> Unfortunately, due to Colorado Recount Law (CRS 1-10.5-108) as it stands, only Paper Ballots will give you the audit trail that you are seeking. Otherwise, if the count is conducted by DRE, then any recount is required to be conducted using the same method, unless the Secreary of State or a court of competent jurisdiction were to intervene, and as you can imagine, we don't want our Democracy hanging on that. That is, your audit trail receipts will never be looked at. We are also in contact with Congressman Holt, Senator Graham, and Colorado State legislators Madden and Keller regarding legal remedies to the voter verification issue and modification of State election law reform to clarifiy the validity of an paper receipt.
>
> Our group has been working on this issue for months and we have examined many systems, including some that have concepts similar to yours -- I can't remember the name now but there is a prominent crypto researcher who has a very similar concept with a two-part ballot. Also, there are concerns about being able to leave the polling place with an official record of how you voted, which could lead to vote buying. Plus, you also would not want people to hold a slip of paper in their hands that has only cryptic single-character indications about how they voted, did you really mean to vote "Y" on 204, wouldn't you want to see the full text of the issue to verify that's how you wanted to vote?
>
> We have become lay experts at HAVA, Colorado HAVA, Colorado Election Law and our group(s) in Boulder and Denver also consist of members of both the IEEE and NIST groups looking at the systems.
>
> We are not luddites, most of our members are high-tech professionals, and we have come to the conclusion after months of research that a single voter-verifiable, full-text, physically marked Paper Ballot is the only acceptable solution, and I hope you will find a wealth of information on our site to understand how, after all this research, we arrived at that answer.
>
> Many people around the country have commented that our 10-minute presentation to the Commissioners is among the most clear explanations of our position of any citizen's group in the Country.
>
> The streaming video is available from our website at:
>
> <http://coloradovoter.net/moin.cgi/Resources>
>
> Where you will also find archives of our mailing list (which I hope you will join), MP3 audio and PDF slides of the presentation, and much more. I would also suggest you check out the Declaration, for which we have secured the endorsement or support of all four of Boulder County's political parties.
>
> Also, please bear in mind that concerns about DREs are only one of many issues related to problems with EVoting, for example, the Denver Group (Coloradans for Voting Integrity) is also looking at the ePollbook issue, which is attributed with dropping tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls in the Florida 2000 election (do a search for "ChoicePoint and Katherine Harris").
>
> I hope this is useful to you, I'd be glad to talk in person at our next meeting, and you will find that we have a number of extremely knowledgeable and insightful folks who have been looking at these issues for quite some time, more than a decade in some cases.
>
> Again, thank you for getting in touch, please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any additional questions.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Joe Pezzillo, Spokesperson
> Boulder County Citizens for Verifiable Voting
> http://www.coloradovoter,net
>
> personal public e-mail: jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx
>
> cc: Tom Halicki
>
>
> On Dec 17, 2003, at 8:47 AM, Nicholas Bernstein wrote:
>
> > Joe,
> >
> > I just talked to Tom Halicki and he suggested I get in contact with you. I'm concerned that the push for paper ballots and optical scanners is misdirected. I have an idea that  addresses CVVs concerns and has all the benefits of a DRE system. I've sent my ideas to Congressman Rush Holt, but I would love to share these idea and get feedback on a local level as well.
> >
> > In short, my idea has two parts
> > 1. Open source code
> > Any code used in the voting should be fully open source. There are enough volunteers that would write code for free. Benefits:
> > A. save money        B. ensure robust code through peer review (i.e. no hidden code)
> > C. get more people involved in politics
> >
> > 2. Voting Receipts
> > A DRE system would work fine as long as you can ensure two things: the votes were recorded accurately, the votes were tallied properly. This can be done effectively with printed paper reciepts. Each voter would receive two receipts with a unique randomly generated voter number. One receipt would be dropped into a ballot box in case a recount is needed (which would be rare in a DRE system). The second could be held by the voter and checked against a public list of votes (listed by anonymous voter number). This method of receipts provides significant advantages over all the current and proposed systems that I've heard about.
> >
> > I'm very interested in your thoughts on this,
> >
> > Nick Bernstein