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Re: Wait just a friggin' minute!



Surely you are not saying that the security and reliability of DRE's are not
limited by physical constraints. You seem to infer so. Surely you are not
saying a DRE or a memory card is safe from theft or a firebombed voting
place. You seem to infer so.

Yes, that is what I am saying. An electronic ballot does not exist in the physical world, so it doesn't have physical constraints. You can make as many duplicate ballots as you want and save them (physically) on myriad media (hard drive, memory card, remote drive, minidisc, etc) in multiple formats. You might be able to destroy one physical copy, but destroying 10 digital copies spread out physically and implemented in several ways and checksummed, is next to impossible.


Have you answered the basic question?  How does a voter VERIFY that the
digital ballot has recorded exactly what the voter intended and only what
the voters intended?

Yes I have. Check out my whitepaper at osl-www.colorado.edu/~bernsten/dualvoting.html

We discuss the problem of verifiability in two parts -- voter recording and
vote counting.  The ballot box is the link between the two.

There are more parts than that. Vote "counting" should be split up into many parts.
1. interpreting the ballot.
2. recording the intepreted ballot
3. summing the results locally
4. reporting the results to larger area (repeated up through district, city, county, state, and national levels)

A voter can only 'verify' voter recording with a paper ballot. In a DRE, steps 1 and 2 are eliminated because the votes are already in the form that you need them

Only the voter can verify what is recorded -- after all we do believe in a
secret ballot.  Only the voter can verify their votes and only the voter can
place their verified ballot into a secure ballot box.  Clearly, the security
system that prevents stuffing the ballot box is an exposure -- but is
manageable.  The possibility of a voter voting YES, and getting a receipt
that says YES and the DRE recording NO is real, and if we follow the press
is happening.  A voter verified ballot does not say that it is counted
correctly, only recorded correctly.

Read the white paper. I address this issue.

It is definitely possible and relatively easy to verify that votes recorded
on paper ballots are counted correctly -- as long as it is agreed what votes
are marked. This is a function of process design and transparency -- as you
well know.

This may be logically simple, but it doesn't mean it's trivial. You've got lots of votes to count. Keeping track of numbers is easy for computes, hard for humans. How many tries does it take you to ballance your checkbook so that it agrees with what the bank says?

Unfortunately, the votes on ballots are not always unambiguous.
Where absentee ballots account for 20% of the vote, there is often
considerable ambiguity. The accuracy of the vote count is complicated by
this ambiguity. Recounts that do not take the interpretation of ambiguous
ballots into account are flawed.

Thanks for supporting my point. There is no abiguity in a DRE, it is digital. That's a good thing.