[Sosfbay-discuss] Fwd: HR 550--Is this GP interest?

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

My quick read of this bill is that it's a tiny step in the
right direction.  Puts the approved buzzwords into law.
"Voter verified paper trail."

Unfortunately, I am not convinced that "voter verified paper trail"
is an adequate defense against the threat of rigged voting
equipment.  Only paper ballots that are verifiable by both
machine and people can do that, and "paper trail" stops
significantly short of that.

The only time the "voter" gets to "verify" the "paper trail"
is a glance at a paper tape under glass in the seconds after
she or he has just voted.  And [s]he never gets to look
at the whole "trail", only a tiny piece of it.

What we need, to solve the rigged equipment problem, is
a system that is INDEPENDENTLY AUDITABLE FROM ONE END TO THE OTHER,
and routine end to end audits.
I don't believe that can be done with proprietary software owned
by a vendor and kept secret from the public.  Nor is there really
any reason to do it that way.  (All we have is a *tradition*
known as the "non-competition doctrine" that says government will
never build something itself when it can buy it.)  Rigged equipment
with secret software can try to generate a fake "voter verified
paper trail," and can sometimes succeed.  "Voter verified paper trail"
makes cheating through rigged equipment *harder* but doesn't stop it.
(It's really tedious to lead you through an example of how
that might be done.  The OVC folks have done it.)
H.R.550 has "mandatory audits" but they are not end to end
so they can be just part of the show.  Unless I missed it,
H.R.550 doesn't address the problem of rigged tabulators.
It doesn't do any good to "hand recount" the "paper trail"
only to feed the recounted data into the same rigged tabulator.

So the question of whether we should get behind this is really
whether we get behind half-steps.  It's better than nothing,
but will it make it harder to get truly trustworthy voting?

I think it's significant that Diebold and its competitors
are now lobbying *for* "voter verified paper trail" in
California.  They know it's either that or a real solution,
and they don't want the real solution.


Cameron