So, I read today on Daily Kos about the election reform bill that Senators Boxer and Clinton have introduced. (A PDF of the full text of the bill is available.
There are several things in this bill that just make sense, especially in regards the electronic voting machines (as an aside, I should point out that even with our unique challenges of population distribution over an extremely large area, Canada has no trouble running elections with all paper ballots). Some of specific elements of the bill that strike me as good ideas:
- * a voter verified paper ballot for every vote cast in electronic voting machines
- Seems to me like this is the bare minimum requirement for any electronic system: that voters have a receipt of their vote that can be used for verification and recount
- * ensures access to voter verification for all citizens (including language minority voters, illiterate voters and voters with disabilities)
- After both of the most recent elections there were lots of rumblings (and more than rumblings) about racial biases at play in access to voting, etc. Even if you manage to believe there wasn’t any bias, this, like the courts, is one of those cases where even the appearance of bias needs to be avoided. Anything to make the system not just more fair, but visibly more fair, is a good idea.
- * mandates that this paper ballot be the official ballot for purposes of a recount
- This just makes sense, it’s a big part of the rationale for having the receipt in the first place.
- * sets a uniform standard for provisional ballots
- Provisional ballots were also a cause of much concern in the last couple of elections, and having a clear standard in place for them can only be a good thing.
- * requires the Federal Election Assistance Commission to issue standards that ensure uniform access to voting machines and trained election personnel in every community
- * requires the Election Assistance Commission to work with states to reduce wait times for voters at polling places.
- These are also aimed at fixing some of the racial/social class issues we saw in the last election. One way to tilt the election results is to make access to the voting system less convenient in districts where your opponent is expected to have strong results.
- * designates Election Day a federal holiday
- Seems like a good idea to me. Hell, if I were writing the law I’d write it so that employers were required to give the day off to anyone who could produce their paper receipt. I.e., if you don’t actually go vote, you don’t get the day off.
- * requires early voting in each state
- * enacts “no-excuse” absentee balloting
- * enacts fair and uniform voter registration and identification
- * requires states to allow citizens to register to vote on Election Day
- Just sensible parts of ensuring access and opportunity to vote, as far as I can see.
- * restores voting rights for felons who have repaid their debt to society
- I’m comfortable with this, since most felonies seem like things where you should lose your vote while you are serving your time, but not forever. If I were king, I might be tempted to introduce two classes of felonies, though, so I could reserve the lifetime eliminiation of citizen provileges for certain particularly heinous crimes.
- * restricts the ability of chief state election officials as well as owners and senior managers of voting machine manufacturers to engage in certain kinds of political activity
- I.e. the no more “Mr. Diebold promises to deliver the vote”.
- * makes it a federal crime to commit deceptive practices, such as sending flyers into minority neighborhoods telling voters the wrong voting date, and makes these practices a felony punishable by up to a year of imprisonment
- A.K.A. the “don’t fuck with the election Mr. Rove” clause.
I suspect this bill has approximately a zero percent chance of passing, but it should, at least, be a chance to make a lot of political hay–anyone coming out against this should look awfully bad unless their spin machines are working overtime and unopposed.
There are some things in the law that are just silly, or occasionally even drastically wrong, most obviously in the parts of the bill designed to ensure that the software running on electronic voting machines is not tampered with. It’s pretty clear that the people who drafted these sections knew what they wanted to accomplish, but didn’t have any technical savvy at all in order to understand how to accomplish it.
For example, on the 10th page of the bill there are these clauses:
(i) The manufacturer shall conduct background checks on individuals who are programmers and developers before such individuals work on any software used in connection with the voting system.
(ii) The manufacturer shall document the chain of custody for the handling of software used in connection with voting systems.
(iii) The manufacturer shall ensure that any software used in connection with the voting system is not transferred over the Internet.
So, that first clause is pretty obviously intended to ensure that no partisan hacks, or godless Com’nists, work on the election software. This is the drastically wrong part–you don’t want to create some sort of licensure system for coders, as that could a terminally bad precedent, and you don’t want to exclude good coders just because they have political history or strong leanings on either side. The right thing to do is require that the source be open and available for inspection by anyone–that way we don’t have to worry about backdoors being hidden by partisan programers or Cold War moles.
The second clause is likely intended to ensure that the software that ends up installed on the machines is the same software that is developed under the program. Chain-of-custoday is probably not the best way to do this. You should have a completely specified development environment, such that anyone could take the (available) source, follow the specified environment, and create a binary that could be bit-for-bit compared with the binaries on any machine. Additionally, a little bit of digital signature work could also be used to verify the installed binaries on any machine at any time.
The third clause is pretty clearly intended to prevent the nightmare scenario where the Evil Hacker and his man-in-the-middle hack of the binaries while they are being distributed. This scenario would be adequately covered by the solution I recommend for the install verification in the previous paragraph, without needing to set up some alternate distribution scheme for the binaries.
