Donna Wentworth at Copyfight points to the fine print in the recent e-voting edict from California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which says this:

Any electronic verification method must have open source code in order to be certified for use in a voting system in California.

Many computer scientists have argued that e-voting systems should be required to have open source code, because of the special circumstances surrounding voting. Is that what Mr. Shelley is requiring?

I’m not sure. His requirement applies to “electronic verification method[s]” and not explicitly to all e-voting systems. What exactly is an “electronic verification method”? Mr. Shelley’s directive uses this term in reference to the report of a previous task force on e-voting.

So what does the task force’s report say? Surprisingly, the report refers to “electronic verification” methods at several points, but I couldn’t find any specific mention of what those methods might be. This is particularly odd considering that the task force members included computer scientists (including David Dill and David Jefferson) who are more than qualified to understand and write about any “electronic verification” methods, even if only to summarize them or give examples.

It looks as if there might be a hidden layer to this story, but I can’t figure out what it could be. Can anybody help out?

[Correction (1:50 PM): corrected the spelling of Kevin Shelley’s last name.]

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will announce today that as of 2006, all e-voting machines in the state must provide a voter-verifiable paper trail, according to an L.A. Times story by Allison Hoffman and Tim Reiterman.

This is yet another sign that the push for sensible e-voting safeguards is gaining momentum.

[Link credit: Siva Vaidhyanathan at Sivacracy.net.]

Opponents of unauditable e-voting technology often talk about the threat of fraud. They worry that somebody will compromise a voting machine or will corrupt the machines’ software, to steal an election. We should worry about fraud. But just as important, and more likely, is the possibility that software bugs will cause a miscount that gives an election to the wrong candidate.

This may be what happened two weeks ago in a school board race in Fairfax County, Virginia. David Cho at the Washington Post reports :

School Board member Rita S. Thompson (R), who lost a close race to retain her at-large seat, said yesterday that the new computers might have taken votes from her. Voters in three precincts reported that when they attempted to vote for her, the machines initially displayed an “x” next to her name but then, after a few seconds, the “x” disappeared.

In response to Thompson’s complaints, county officials tested one of the machines in question yesterday and discovered that it seemed to subtract a vote for Thompson in about “one out of a hundred tries,” said Margaret K. Luca, secretary of the county Board of Elections.

“It’s hard not to think that I have been robbed,” said Thompson, whose 77,796 recorded votes left her 1,662 shy of reelection. She is considering her next step, and said she was wary of challenging the election results: “I’m not sure the county as a whole is up for that. I’m not sure I’m up for that.”

And how do we know the cause was a bug, rather than fraud? Because the error was visible to voters. If this had been fraud, the “X” on the screen would never have disappeared – but the vote would have been given, silently, to the wrong candidate.

You could hardly construct a better textbook illustration of the importance of having a voter-verifiable paper trail. The paper trail would have helped voters notice the disappearance of their votes, and it would have provided a reliable record to consult in a later recount. As it is, we’ll never know who really won the election.

As expected, an independent study of the Diebold electronic voting machines purchased by the state of Maryland has found that “The system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise.” The study was commissioned by the state and performed by SAIC. A Washington Post story by Brigid Schulte reports that SAIC “found 328 security weaknesses, 26 of them critical”.

The report is available to the public only in heavily redacted form, which in itself does not inspire confidence. What is in the redacted version is bad enough; for example, it reports that the Diebold machines didn’t even bother to encrypt the vote totals before sending them to the Board of Elections.

Diebold, which had previously said we should trust their unspecified security mechanisms, now says that we should trust them to implement unspecified fixes for these problems.

In case you have any remaining confidence in unaudited electronic voting systems, consider this: a Diebold executive told the Washington Post that the fixes will be made to the Maryland machines, but not to the 33,000 Diebold electronic voting machines already in use outside of Maryland.

To a technologist, law and policy debates sometimes seem to be held in a kind of bizarro world, where words and concepts lose their ordinary meanings. Some technologists never get used to the bizarro rules, but some us of do catch on eventually.

One of the bizarro rules is that you should be happy when the other side accuses you of lying or acting in bad faith. In the normal world, such accusations will make you angry; but in bizarro world they indicate that the other side has lost confidence in its ability to win the argument on the merits. And so you learn to swallow your outrage and smile when people call you a scoundrel.

Which brings us to Brigid Schulte’s electronic voting article in this morning’s Washington Post. The article reports that the computer scientists’ campaign for more secure (and less secret) electronic voting technology is getting some real traction, especially in light of the recent Johns Hopkins report detailing severe flaws in a Diebold e-voting product. The computer scientists’ progress is certified, bizarro style, by none other than the head of the Federal Election Commission’s Office of Electrion Adminstration:

“The computer scientists are saying, ‘The machinery you vote on is inaccurate and could be threatened; therefore, don’t go. Your vote doesn’t mean anything,’ ” said Penelope Bonsall, director of the Office of Election Administration at the Federal Election Commission. “That negative perception takes years to turn around.”

You can’t buy that kind of bizarro endorsement!