Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Re: Unisys, Microsoft, Dell to Create New Voting System
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 19:47:42 -0500
On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 06:50:01AM -0500, Dave Farber wrote:Reuters Jan 11 2001 12:52PM NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three of the world's top computer companies have teamed up to vaporize the paper chad by developing an electronic voting system that would overcome the kind of ballot confusion that wracked the U.S. presidential election. Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. said on Thursday it will bring together hardware from No. 2 PC maker Dell Computer Corp. and software from Microsoft Corp. in the new voting system.For IP. I think an interesting alternative to this would be to take advantage of the huge resource of used, slow computers out there. The open source movement would be called upon to make an open source voting machine system. The source code, widely available, would be highly scrutinized for fairness and elmination of protential fraud. This software would then be placed on certified hard disks (which may have to be bought new) and placed into any suitable PC. It would assume nothing more than a low-memoried, slow pentium with VGA. The public would then be asked to donate old PCs, and they would get a tax deduction for it. I think there would be a flood of donations. A quick check to assure the donated parts are standard, and you would be able to get all the voting machines at close to zero cost (mostly just the $50 new hard drive, since allowing a donated hard drive provides a slight risk of fraud by very clever people who recode the firmware on the drive.) People would get a thrill out of donating their old PC to help an electoral system in crisis. The machines would not be internet connected. They would just have a screen and printer. They would conduct the voter through their ballot and then both record the ballot and print out a paper ballot which is both human and machine readable -- with the machine reading what the human reads, not some bar code or other non human readable info. When the person confirms their paper ballot is correct, they end the process and take the paper ballot to a ballot box. At close of voting, the machines immediately report a tally of the votes to the returning officers. However, randomly, or in case of a recount, the paper ballots are counted by hand or with a scanner, as they are the true record. An alternative scheme would be to get donated scanners on a 2nd machine. On the 2nd machine, the voter would take their ballot and insert it into the sheetfed scanner. The machine would display their vote as read off the paper ballot, and they would confirm it is correct, then place the paper ballot in the ballot box. The machine with scanner would retain the tally, and could rescan the ballots at any time. Again, the machine would do some form of OCR on a ballot designed to make it reliable, it would not rely on anything a human can't easily read. In this system, voters could, in theory, prepare their ballots ahead of time running the software on their own machines, and just bring them in and present them to the scanner machine, confirm them and put them in the box. If the scanner did not confirm what they want, they could go to a machine at the polling station and re-vote. Such machines would provide a quick accurate count, with confirmation to each voter that their vote is recorded as they wish. They would also allow more "complex" votes, in particular, they would allow the use of the "australian" or "preference" ballot, where you get to list the candidates you like, in order, rather than just picking one, and a mini-runoff is done, eliminating the bottom candidate and transferring the votes of those who had that candidate as first choice to their next choice. Such ballots, used in Australia, Ireland and many private elections in the USA, totally avoide the "nader effect" seen this year, as Nader voters could vote "Nader, Gore" if they wanted, and once Nader was eliminated, their votes would switch to Gore.
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- IP: Re: Unisys, Microsoft, Dell to Create New Voting System Dave Farber (Jan 12)