Re: Hand count or open source - voter verification - more...

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 12:13:18PM -0700, Nicholas Bernstein wrote:
> Comments interleved...
> 
> Paul E Condon wrote:
> 
> >On further thought I realize that the one-time unique ID can't 
> >work with paper ballots, which I feel should be preserved. 
> >
> >The reason is that in the poll booth where the voter is making a note
> >to himself of what to type into the web site, in that situation, there
> >is no computer present. The unique code must already be generated and
> >already printed on the ballot in a form that can be read by the voter,
> >so that he can make a note of it, and a form that can be read by a
> >computer scanner, so that it can be made part of the database of
> >counted votes.
> >
> > 
> >
> You can still have paper ballots with a computerized interface.

The one time unique ID must be recorded *on the ballot* so that when the
ballot is scanned into the vote tallying computer system, it is there 
*with the ballot data* for inclusion in the database of all votes,

**and**, so that it is still there in any possible recount of the votes,
***and***, this must be done while the voter is waiting in the polling
place. 

I think these are requirements for voter verification to be meaningful.
I don't think they are easily met, just that they are requirements of
voter verification that uses one-time unique ID on a paper ballot.

If one accepts 'electronic ballots' other things are required, but I
was writing about voter verification of paper ballot elections.

> 
> >And another complication: It is not enough to let the voter see a true
> >record of his vote in a database, he must be able to repeat the whole
> >tally of his precinct, including the true record of his vote, and see
> >that this new tally matches the published tally for his precinct. This
> >is needed because a fraudulent tally can be done and true records of 
> >each individual vote kept, in order to cover up the fraud. 
> >
> > 
> >
> The precinct tally should be published in the simplest form possible.
> I'd suggest a table of tab separated values. A check of the tally could
> be performed by hand (if someone so desired) or by any number of
> programs by importing this data into the program. Examples of programs
> that could already do this: excel, openoffice, matlab, mathmatica, or
> even something as simple as the open source unix programs sort or awk.
> Putting the data in this form allows every use to check the data using
> his/her favorite program. This transparency and redundancy guards
> against errors in the tallying code.
> 

You misunderstand. I am trying to say that the whole database of recorded
ballots must be downloaded, not merely the tally. Of course the tally
must be published, but that is not enough to allow verification that a
particular vote has been counted. The voter must also be able to verify
thet the tally was done correctly. I outlined the steps of the verification
in some lines that were not included in your reply. 

As an aside, I have found in working with scientific data that space separated
numerical values are much easier to handle than tab separated values. Space
separation fits more easily with the I/O routines of C/C++ standard libraries.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx