We should create a network of electronic voting kiosks (EVK), similar to ATMs that are everywhere across the world. However, these EVKs must be owned and maintained by the government, without any influence by private business. The ownership of the vote must be by the people, hence, only our government should be able to administer and maintain our voting system, electronic or paper based.
The most important aspect of the software that runs on these EVKs is that is must be open source (that is the source code can be read and reviewed by anyone. This is so that 'we the people' can review the code that is doing the work powering our democracy) and the software compilation and installment process must be openly reviewable by both Congress and private citizens. The open source caveat must also apply to the operating system of the EVKs, there must be no private business proprietary software in the units. This could be end point verifiable by private citizens being able to use freely downloadable software and a common interface for obtaining information (only! there should be no mechanism for private citizens to upload data to the kiosk, the only data the kiosk should record is voting data via the display) about the software running on the kiosks. The downloadable verification software could then independantly report a verification message to the government with the kiosk id, citizen id and authentication tokens and verification results. Actions could be taken upon the kiosk upon the results of these verifications such as shutting down the unit until government technicitians are able to service the unit, subjecting any votes cast by the unit to manual scrutiny, prompting further citizens attempting to use the unit to perform additional verifications and submit results until the unit is serviced or it is determined that someone submitted a false report (at which point the false report could be investigated as election tampering).
This would provide a high level of faith in the system, in that anyone could run end point verifications. Also anyone could review the source code of these systems and the government records of EVK servicing.
The reason for using a kiosk network instead of making access available to home computers is twofold: first it allows access to anyone, second it provides a high level of voter security.
In terms of access to anyone, it is important that participation in our democracy not be restricted to those affluent / technologically savvy enough to be able to afford / use a computer. An ATM-like kiosk should be simple enough to use that anyone should be able to participate. For those citizens living abroad, we should be able to set up these EVKs in our consulates in foreign countries at the very least. I am certain that there are other places that could be identified to make these places available to citizens abroad. Obviously we should not take United Nations assistance for granted, but it seems likely we would be able to work something out with the UN to expand our democratic participation.
It will be a matter of utmost importance to verify the identity of people logging in to system to record their votes. It is likewise of utmost importance to prevent electronic tampering with the system. The EVKs, being kiosks with very limited input capability and with almost no contact to the internet at large would be very secure and not subject to the vagaries of viruses, worms, keystroke-loggers and such that plague the common home computer. This would provide a high level of reassurance to the public that their voting system is not being tampered with.
The EVKs would be located in post offices, public libraries and possibly government buildings as well.
Obviously, tampering with this system would need to be made a federal crime with stiff penalties.
Comments (2)
As great as this sounds, this is not such a great idea. I'm a very experience software developer, and the potential for things to be abused, let alone just go awry, are much too high. Open source software sounds like it would be a great idea, except that even that is not a fail-safe way to prevent tampering. Take a look at some of the winners of the Underhanded C Contest (http://underhanded.xcott.com/). And these are from the people who are willing to share what they can do!
If you want fair and reasonably efficient elections, consult the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute. The US's voting systems do not have fair elections by their standards. And it doesn't take high tech to get it.
I'm not even going to discuss "verifying the identity of people logging in." This is a tremendously difficult problem which our currently available technology is not prepared to resolve, let alone the costs of implementing a solution. We can't even get Social Security Numbers accurately assigned!
As your arguments seem to be that it is impossible to design the perfect electronic system and therefore that we cannot ever have an electronic system, I will begin by saying that I do not agree with your conclusion. I will grant that a perfect electronic system that will 100% prevent any possibility of tampering with it is impossible. However, I do not think that is cause to not pursue the best that we can do, which given proper controls and design, is pretty darn good.
In regards to malicious code hiding in plain sight: enough eyes on the problem should enable us to find these flaws. Moreover, find people to work on the system who have integrity and a belief in what they are doing and you should eliminate up front the possibility of this occurring.
I will certainly agree with you that US voting is not fair. I am not suggesting that this solution will make the system more fair. I am suggesting that this solution will encourage involvement and, if implemented, will allow broadening of the vote. A well implemented electronic system should allow for more votes to be done in general. There are other suggestions on this board around allowing constituents to vote for what they want their representatives to vote in support of or not. This is a great idea, but it is not feasible to do unless there is an electronic system in my opinion. The cost for everyone's time is too high.
As far as verifying people's identity, what is wrong with a federal user name / password? There could even be a few challenge questions. There could be cameras installed at some / all of the stations and a random sampling with manual verifications of photo id to image at the kiosk (not that I would necessarily lobby for this, but it is a possibility). At that point, it is purely on the individual to keep their authentication information to themselves. I put forth that anyone who cares about their stake in their country and democracy would be likely to treat this information seriously. So, then we get into the scenario of who might try to steal such information. However, with a contained system such as the kiosk, with extremely limited input methods such as touch screen input keypads, it is unlikely that electronic methods of identity theft could be used, unlike with home computers.