Features

Editors, Daily Planet:  

The article “Cal Grad Proposes Touchscreen Alternative,” Daily Planet, May 7-9) is only another attempt to layer more complexity onto a system. It is like a British motor car. When a problem exists, they tend to layer a solution on top of the problem, but not to solve it. As layer upon layer added with each “step further” obfuscates the original architecture, new solutions will cause inconsistencies with other no longer visible aspects of the system. 

I have spent the last 30-plus years designing, developing, implementing, documenting and maintaining information systems and their components. 

I propose a much simpler solution to the problem of vote authentication, storage, tabulation and verification—simpler than the solution proposed by Daniel Silverstein in your May 7 article. Vote tabulation in a repeatedly verifiable fashion is trivial once vote authentication and storage are solved. I solve them with cooperatively developed open source, commodity hardware, write-once media (CD), a reread verification step to allow the voter to correct errors, and digital signatures. No dead trees are required. 

The first problem to be addressed is authenticity of a vote. The statement: “Once a vote is cast on a computer even the most comprehensive checks sometimes can’t ensure the machine won’t make a switch” is inaccurate given currently available verification and authentication capabilities. We can know that a vote is recorded digitally on a non-modifiable medium exactly as the voter requested it be. 

The keys to this are code transparency for the programs that run the voting machines and recording the votes on a write-once medium like CD. 

The big problem with current touchscreen machines is that Diebold will not let anyone see the program listings for each and every piece of object code in their machines. If we can’t see the code, we cannot know what it is doing. 

The solution to this problem is open source. Program listings for systems much more complicated than this simple single user application have been publicly available and cooperatively maintained for decades. The most obvious instance is the Linux operating system. But, there are open source solutions available for each and every layer of program needed to implement a touchscreen voting application. As reference, I would suggest you take a look at projects tracked by sourceforge.net or even the finished packages at freshmeat.net.  

For hardware, I would recommend commodity components. I’d get multiple manufacturers to build them from well known components such as miniCD writers, Intel processors packaged with a touchscreen into a commodity voting machine. Given the open source nature of all code for such a machine, the market would be worldwide and the units would be cheap. 

I would also cooperatively develop a set of quality assurance (QA) acceptance test suites that could be downloaded and run on any new piece of hardware. The manufacturers could use these in their QA. Election folks could use them to vet any new purchases. 

OK, now the process. Because it is open source, the state could read, verify and digitally sign OS CD’s that each county could download and use as boot CD’s for their machines. The county elections personnel could prepare a ballot XML file for each district that would also be burned onto the CD. The CD could then be digitally signed in any of a number of ways that would reveal any subsequent tampering. 

A “voter-verified paper audit trail” would not be provided on paper. It would be provided on the little CDs the machines use. After the voter has finished selecting their choices for each office and measure and verified their choices on a summary screen, the record would be digitally signed and written to the CD. The record of the vote would then be reread from the CD, and the voter presented with a second summary screen. Should the voter not like what they see, a vote nullification record would be written to the CD, and the voting process would begin again. The voter gets two chances to verify their vote. Once before it is written to CD, and a second time when it is reread from that CD. 

In information systems our mantra is “Garbage in, garbage out.” The time to deal with uncertainty is as close to the source as possible. We like to deal with potentially inaccurate data at the acquisition phase. The tricks employed by Mr. Silverstein do not address this. They are back-end compensation. They increase the load on the election management team at the time they are most burdened. Simplifying the system and vetting its components in advance will make things run much more smoothly on election night. 

Henry Mahon 

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