“I confess I am annoyed by the vacuous totemism of most of the all-paper folks. For them, as in the above comment, representing voter intention doesn’t actually matter, it’s only the ritualistic act of making a physical mark.” — I think that’s a very unfair and inaccurate characterization of those who support transparent voting systems. I’ve not heard any of them suggest it’s about the “ritualist act of making a phyiscal mark”. But rather, about the transparency of being able to know after an election that you are actually counting the intention of the voter. Also, they correctly argue, in my opinion, that private corporations have no busines counting the publics vote with secret software. While open source seems, on the surface, to solve THAT problem (it doesn’t, but I won’t get into the open source code myth in voting systems for the moment), it doesn’t defeat the transparency/verifiability issue.

“voter errors using pen-and-paper systems are quite common” — the good news is that such errors can be discerned by any citizen after any election. There is no way to discern ANY errors on touchscreen/computer-printed systems like OVCs. Every single vote could be “in error”, but there would be no way for anybody to know. Impossible. The “human error rate” business is also a red-herring in my opinion. If there’s a concern, improve ballot design, instruction, etc. Don’t remove the ability to verify ALL votes in the process. It’s an old e-vote industry red-herring like the one you mentioned in your previous note.

Nobody legitimate is arguing for Florida/2000-style punch-cards, so that is yet another red-herring. With my apologies to you.

“hand-marked long-form ballots are probably the most prone to tabulation errors (probably worse if they are hand counted rather than machine scanned).” — I am unaware of any information to back up your parenthetical claim there. Please share it. The information I am familiar with shows just the opposite, when hand-counting is done at the precinct on the night of the election. (precinct-based versus centralized counting).

“the use of bar codes on the OVC sample designs, reduces tabulation errors greatly ” — That’s a presumption, since there is no way to know if a vote cast during an election is the same as the one counted after an election. The bar code scheme is absolutely insane. Again, pardon me, but absolutely crazy and almost as UN-transparent and verifiable as you can possibly be short of DRE voting machines.

“The other part of the fetish of hand-marked/hand-counted paper advocates is the magical belief that humans cannot make errors during tabulation.” — I am offended by your “fetish” slur, sir. Wher you have delighted comments of mine that you did not care for, obviously I do not have that same ability. But it’s an inappropriate slur, as far as I’m concerned.

With that in mind, I have heard no “magical belief that humans cannot make errors during tabulation” from such hand-marked/hand-count/transparency proponents. But yes, it is difficult to make many substantive “errors” when there are at least four people checking every vote for accuracy, in addition to an entire community watching and or video taping.

Errors could happen, I suppose, but it seems they’d be very easily and quickly caught, and very difficult to actually affect an entire election.

It doesn’t sound like your very familiar with how proper hand-counting actually works. You may wish to educate yourself on that front. I’d suggest looking at New Hampshire’s process where it’s still done for appx. 40% of the votes cast. There are very good booklets available explaining the entire fully-transparent, fully-verifiable (by all!) procedure.

Here’s a helpful link:
“Hands-on Elections: An Informational Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People,” – http://electiondefensealliance.org/HCPB_election_admin_handbook

I confess I am annoyed by the vacuous totemism of most of the all-paper folks. For them, as in the above comment, representing voter intention doesn’t actually matter, it’s only the ritualistic act of making a physical mark. It starts to resemble the ritual meaning of an “X” made on a contract by a non-literate person (i.e. who cannot read the document). In real life, voter errors using pen-and-paper systems are quite common, and that is a huge failing with those systems; though fortunately it’s one that will ultimately be solved by better systems. Obviously, no voting technology is going to make all voter errors impossible; it’s a question of reducing rates of error as low as possible.

The famous “hanging chads” from Florida of 2000 are a particularly well known example of a jurisdiction where voters clearly failed to express intention (in statistically important numbers) via a physical modification of paper. It is true that was the (totemic) physical act of punching a hole rather than of making a mark with a pen, but generally the same failures are dangers in any all-paper system. An EBP (properly built) is simply and greatly less prone to these errors.

It is worth noting as well, that error in tallies come in two parts: (1) errors in representing voter intent; and (2) errors in tabulation. Other than DREs, which potentially have tabulations errors of 100% (either because of tampering or just sloppy programming), hand-marked long-form ballots are probably the most prone to tabulation errors (probably worse if they are hand counted rather than machine scanned). The use of Optiscan cards in many jurisdictions, and the use of bar codes on the OVC sample designs, reduces tabulation errors greatly (with the OVC bar codes being far more reliable than the bubbles of InkaVote+ and other Optiscan-style systems). The other part of the fetish of hand-marked/hand-counted paper advocates is the magical belief that humans cannot make errors during tabulation.

I will also note, as others have pointed out before me, that we do not require City Hall to destroy the stairs for some to use optionally, just because they’ve installed a “separate but equal” wheelchair ramp for similarly optional use.

There is nothing in HAVA or the ADA that requires everyone use voting systems that are specifically made for the disabled. It is, as I said, a very red-herring.

2) Hand marked paper ballots systems are, by their very definition, are “more accurately verified that are ballots printed on Electronic Ballot printers” in that we can know the voter him-herself actually chose the the candidates-initiatives selected on them (presuming proper chain of custody, etc.).

Whether they marked them “accurately” or not, meaning the way they meant to mark them, is their responsibility. We can’t force someone to do anything. But we know they are RESPONSIBLE for the selection marked on the ballot.

There can be no way to know that even a single vote printed out by a computer is actually a vote that was intended by the voter.

Why you continue to push for such a system is beyond me. Do you work with OVC or some other company/group that might benefit from moving to such an unverifiable type of voting system? Not making any allegations here but trying to understand why you are pushing voting systems, with huge long-known failure/flaws in them, on readers here.

The issues we’re discussing have been long understood by evoting experts and computer scientists and computer security experts, and yet you still seem to be pushing for an outmoded and some might say discredited type of technology that most of America has already begun to move away from.

(1) All-paper disenfranchises blind voters and mobility-limited voters who cannot operate pen-and-paper. Computer-assistive devices can enable these voters to vote independently and anonymously. Many of the all-paper advocates feel that it is a reasonable compromise to either let disabled voters vote on “separate but equal” voting systems, or to require them to rely on trusted third parties in casting a ballot. Very few, if any, disability-rights folks find this acceptable; moreover, it is unlikely to be legal under HAVA and the ADA.

(2) There is no actual evidence (nor probability) that all-paper systems are in fact more accurately verified that are ballots printed on Electronic Ballot printers. It is frequent to mark the wrong bubbles/boxes; to mark outside borders; to ambiguously cross-out an incorrect mark; etc. Computer assistive devices (such as touch screens) can watch out for such failures in expression of voter intent better than can pen-and-paper, and prevent overvotes and accidental undervotes. It is quite true that you cannot force voters to accurately check the ballot produced by an EBP, but the overall rate of actual verification is still likely to be higher than with pen-and-paper.

Concerning your strange suggestion that “this is the wrong forum for an open-ended discussion of voting systems”. Huh? The title of this post, is “The Future of Voting Systems in Los Angeles County”, where you kicked it off with a discussion of your preferred voting system.

When problems were pointed out with it, as enlightening discussion and debate ensued, you began deleting notes and then claimed this is not the place for a discussion of voting systems.

If that’s not what this thread is about and why you posted it in the first place then why DID you post it and where IS the forum for such a discussion?

Um, Lulu, why did you remove my post? It wasn’t rude, it wasn’t obsene, it was in response to your note and the discussion concerning the absolutely insane idea of using non-verifiable bar codes to count ballots electronically, while ignoring the verifiable (though not necessarily verified) text.

Is your support for OVC’s system unable to stand up to scrutiny? And what does that say about OVC’s system which, as I described it in the note you removed without explanation, seems to be EPIC FAIL.

What the heck is going on here? (And doesn’t it show how easy it is to remove something without a trace on a computer?? Will this be removed too???)

A number of developers/users (myself included) have expressed concern that the bar code is not directly verifiable. What it encodes is exactly the same information that is verifiable, but knowing that has a worrying “trust us” element to it for average voters. That said, the idea would also be to allow independent companies/voter groups to independently verify the accuracy of the bar code in matching the printed information; and ideally, all elections would have a proof of correlation in a random sample of ballots (if you know statistics, it’s not hard to construct a pretty small sample that makes the odds of tampering negligible… probably less than 1% of ballots needed for this).

That said, there are a number of striking benefits to bar codes over plain OCR of human-readable print. OCR is much faster to scan, the equipment needed for scanning is much cheaper, and 2D bar codes can contain considerable error-correction within them (allowing scans even if part of it is smudged/torn/etc, a feature likely not present in OCR). From an esoteric point-of-view, we can also include cryptographic anti-counterfeiting information in there. I wouldn’t take the bar code as a deep part of the Electronic Ballot Architecture. However, I suspect that that feature will be included in eventual LA voting systems because both cost and ability to scan rapidly are both high on the design wish list.

If the machine counts the barcode, how does the voter verify that the bar-code on the ballot is correct?

Is there a reason OVC couldn’t just create an open source optical scan system that lets voters mark the ballots?

“It sounds like s/he know something in these areas, but I worry a little that s/he comes with a chip on his/her shoulder too, from the tone of these comments. There actually are people who study these things for a living and by doctoral training, and assuming one automatically knows better than the experts isn’t always the right conclusion.” — A chip? What makes you assume I’m not such an expert? Or even that it takes such an “expert” to know what can and can’t be verified after an election as being voter-verified?

Suggesting that an “expert” is needed to determine that, whether I’m an expert or not, sounds like you may have a bit of a chip on your shoulder, from the tone of your comment. Voting systems are for general citizens who they serve. Not for experts. The “experts” are one of the reason we’re in the state we now are.

Lauding any voting system by saying “well it’s better than inkavote”, is not very high praise. Not to mention that at least with inkavote, there is a way to assure with a very high degree of likelihood, that the votes on the card are the ones the voter actually intended to cast. the OVC computer printed ballots offers no such possibility.

Among other studies out there, I might suggest you read the ones from both Rice University and from Caltech/MIT on these matters.

Comparing ANYTHING to L.A.’s inkavote system,