Thursday - October 30, 2008

I told ya so

Here’s the latest, recycled, and utterly expected election season story from CNN: We can’t trust the voting machines! Paper Trails! Hacking! Chads!

Eight years after Florida’s hanging chads exasperated voters and helped usher in sweeping changes in voting technology, many election observers remain concerned about the accuracy of the electronic voting systems most Americans will use November 4.

Touch-screen machines can occasionally fail or register votes for unintended candidates. Optical-scan systems can have trouble reading paper ballots that are too long or marked with the wrong ink. At least one study suggests that electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.

And some 9 million voters, including many in the battleground states of Ohio and Florida, will use equipment that has changed since March, increasing concerns about errors next Tuesday.

“You can be almost certain that there will be irregularities in some places around the country,” said Rep. Rush Holt, D-New Jersey. “The problem now is that roughly a third of voters nationwide will use unverifiable electronic machines. So if there are uncertainties, there will be no way to resolve them.”

And so on, for paragraphs.

“We have to hope that there aren’t problems with the accuracy.”

SSDD. Because destroying faith in the system is one of the basic tenets of a commie/socialist takeover plot.

You want a paper trail? Fine. But how do you keep the ballot secret? Easy. You ask Drew to come up with a solution in 10 seconds or less.

Hmmm ... cogitate ... cogitate ... Ah Ha!

First, you hook up one of those little label printers that you can get everwhere for $50 or less to the voting machine.

Then you write a simple bit of code that outputs several numbers:
1) The number of your state, the number of your polling station, the voting machine at that polling station, and which voter at that machine that you are. Example: 47 1063 15 258
2) How you voted for each of the selections/questions/positions. Number them. 0=NO, 1=YES, 3=candidate 1, 4=candidate 2, etc. Example: 11 20 31 42 52 61
3) Last number is a date and time stamp. When you sign in at your table, the time will also be noted. Example 2008 11 04 16:34:27.25 God help you if your voting timestamp is earlier than your login timestamp.

This is EXACTLY what it will look like:

Ta freakin dah! A paper trail, and your vote is still private. Scale the thing so that it can handle a fairly large number of things to vote on, with a couple dozen choices each. And I bet it still comes out to way less than 250 characters, spaces included. Which means ... hang on ...

The vote tallies would no longer be delivered. The actual votes themselves would. At 250 digital characters per voter, you would be able to store 4 voter’s votes per “K”. Which means 1024 votes per “Meg”. Which means a bit more than a million votes per “Gig”. Which means, in an era when you can buy a PC with more than half a terabyte of hard drive space on it, that you could store the entire nation’s actual votes on what is these days a normal sized hard drive.

And any time anyone wanted to prove the system, all they need to do is show up with their paper with the bar codes on it. There’s a scanner at the polling place. There’s a scanner at the county office. There’s a scanner at the state office. And another one down in DC.

Just for fun, about once every 15 minutes some random voter is asked to scan their paper anyway. You hook the scanner up inside a voting booth to a spare voting machine. They scan their paper, and the machine lights up with their choices. That machine has NO voting button, just for safety. Each polling station takes a handful of slips to county. Each county takes a handful to State. Each State takes a handful to DC, and they all get checked.

Don’t want to waste time actually delivering the hard drives, just to count the votes the first time through? Then send the tallies in by secure encryption. One encrypted data line is the same as the next. You just don’t tell anybody what the phone numbers are. But the HDs get delivered anyway, and run, data copied and tabulated. And those totals would be the formal, official totals at the county, state, and national level. Want to do a recount? You could recount the ENTIRE COUNTRY in about a minute and a half. Under a second if you give the data to one of them big government computers. Worried about naughtiness in the computer? Assign 100 random programmers to review the code and watch the compilation. Because the code is dead simple. It would only be a few hundred lines worth. A geeky 10 year old could write it.

For the cost of what Americans donate to the election campaign, plus maybe a few weeks worth of budget for the war in Iraq, this could be installed all across the country.  And we’d never have to hear this worrisome, degenerate “don’t trust the system, man”, socialist crap from CNN again.

In the meantime, here’s a much simpler system that’s been around for years now. Even the update was free.

Instant Update:
I spent another 10 seconds thinking about this after I posted. The voter would need reassurance that the paper bar code slip has the correct information on it. Ok, ... done. You’d want an extra button on the voting machine that gets labeled “Ready To Cast Vote”. Press it and it generates the bar code slip. Right above the voting machine is another machine. It has a screen and a slot and two buttons. Feed your slip in the slot, it reads it, and the screen lights up with a full size copy of your vote. If you press the “Verified: Screen agrees with voting machine” button it then clears the screen. At that point you press the “Cast Your Vote” button on the voting machine. If what you see does not agree and you press the “NO” button, it reads the slip again. You get 3 tries, at which point it signals a poll worker for help. When you cast your actual vote, the second machine gives you your slip back, possibly now imprinted with “Official Vote”. Ok, this doubles the cost of the system. But hey, what’s a 100% cost overrun when we’re talking about a government project? And besides, I spent an extra 10 seconds thinking about it.

Instant Updated Update:
Forget the secondary system. Forget the bar coding. The slip prints in plain English:

Voter: 358
Date: 11/04/2012 8:34:27 AM
President: Palin / Jindal
Senator: Zimmer
Animal Control Officer: Pearce
Question 1: NO
Question 2: NO

Read the slip, check the machine, cast your vote. It would be your responsibility to keep the bit of paper private and secure. Hey, I just saved the government 10 billion dollars!

Posted by Drew458     on 10/30/2008 at 03:57 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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