[ale] Its over. Maybe (monopolies and Nevada)

[aaron]

On Friday 05 November 2004 05:31, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> That same article also identifies a second mfgr of voting systems, this
> clearly disputes those that ignorantly claim that Diebold has a monopoly
> on voting systems.
> 
> -Jim P.

Err... the monopoly comment was made regarding Georgia, whose voting systems 
and vote counting have, in fact, been entirely monopolized by the Diebold 
carpetbaggers.
 
... and you are right in noting that voter verified paper audit trails aren't 
the _only_ possible way to provide integrity and public accountability to 
electronic voting, they just happen to be the easiest, cheapest, simplist, 
most widely proven and reliable solution. ;-)

As to a corrections and clarifications on a couple Nevada comments...

Nevada used 3 different voting system venders when they became the Nation's 
Second State-Wide implementation of electronic voting as of their 2004 
primary and general elections.  The mandate for every DRE system used in 
Nevada was that it had to provide a voter verified paper audit trail, since 
the Nevada Gaming Commission tested every NASED certified paperless DRE 
system available and declared all such un-auditable black boxes to be "a 
threat to the legitimacy of our election process."

The printers on the Nevada DRE's operate under glass, where the voter can see 
and validate their evidence of their choices but not "accidently" walk away 
with the paper record. The only down side of their printer mechanisms is that 
the paper records remained on spools, instead of being cut into individual 
strips. In a small precinct, this can cause concerns about voter anonymity, 
but their SoS claims that they had procedures in place address that issue. A 
statistically significant sample of paper records were manually counted and 
the totals used to audit the electronic tabulations. In the primary, Nevada 
claimed the audit records matched the electronic total 100%.

I would assume that the three different competitive vendors simply had to meet 
a set of specs for their encryption and data formats to make all three 
compatible... say maybe, pgp and an xml form. Kind of like the way SSH and 
HTML work on the internet, you know??

The benefits of DRE's voting with No monopoly, the security of diverse systems 
and publically audited tabulation.  Nevada wins. California has mandated 
VVPAT for all their DRE systems by 2006 as well. Maybe we dumb sotherners can 
learn a few things from those western cowpokes.

peace
(because the only secure nation is a nation at peace)
aaron