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Crenellations and infarcts in a garlic sauce.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
On the EFF-Austin mailing list, Randy Zagar wrote:
> I just got this from one of our contacts in Maryland.
> Hopefully our local and state election officials will be
> more "transparent" in their treatment of paper ballots...
I am afraid those hopes are ill-founded. I voted this morning at my local polling place and discovered, after a long term absence from this state, that we have switched to electronic voting systems.
I asked the polling examiner for a paper ballot, and he replied, "We have them, but there's a lot of paperwork involved..." I got the impression that he was trying to scare me off. I said, "OK", to his apparent chagrin.
He asked for my government-issue photo ID, again, and went to make a phone call. I overheard him explain that he had a "provisional voter" requesting a paper ballot. After he got off the phone, he told me that I could use the paper "provisional" ballot, but that IT WOULD NOT BE COUNTED. Not, that it may be counted under some circumstance, but that it would categorically NOT be counted. I might as well just throw it in the garbage.
This seemed a nonsensical position to me, so I asked, "Then why do you have them?". He explained that they are for emergency situations, such as a voter who has no registration card and cannot be found in the roles, or that appears at the wrong polling place tool late in the day to be reasonably expect to get to the right place before the polls close. Outside of these extraordinary circumstances, any such ballot would simply be rejected as invalid by a voting judge. Apparently, a healthy sense of distrust for non-transparent technology does not qualify as extraordinary enough, though it seemed to take the polling examiners there by surprise.
Given the option of being discarded out-of-hand, or compromising and using the e-voting system, I opted for the latter.
Then, just to heap insult upon injury, the precinct captain proceeded to take me aside and explain to me just how secure the e-voting system is. He pointed out that the voting terminals were connected to an onsite controller, which recorded votes in a secure digital non-volatile memory card (I'll spare you the hown-home vernacular in which this information was reverentially dispensed), and that "no trace of your vote is retained in the system, except in the card" which is removed and delivered to election headquarters. I did not point out to him that the fact that my vote was subject to a single point of failure in that card did not encourage me.
I think his perception was that I was concerned that someone might penetrate the system security to determine how my vote was cast, and we was oblivious to the idea that I was concerned that my vote be reported and counted as actually cast.
> I just got this from one of our contacts in Maryland.
> Hopefully our local and state election officials will be
> more "transparent" in their treatment of paper ballots...
I am afraid those hopes are ill-founded. I voted this morning at my local polling place and discovered, after a long term absence from this state, that we have switched to electronic voting systems.
I asked the polling examiner for a paper ballot, and he replied, "We have them, but there's a lot of paperwork involved..." I got the impression that he was trying to scare me off. I said, "OK", to his apparent chagrin.
He asked for my government-issue photo ID, again, and went to make a phone call. I overheard him explain that he had a "provisional voter" requesting a paper ballot. After he got off the phone, he told me that I could use the paper "provisional" ballot, but that IT WOULD NOT BE COUNTED. Not, that it may be counted under some circumstance, but that it would categorically NOT be counted. I might as well just throw it in the garbage.
This seemed a nonsensical position to me, so I asked, "Then why do you have them?". He explained that they are for emergency situations, such as a voter who has no registration card and cannot be found in the roles, or that appears at the wrong polling place tool late in the day to be reasonably expect to get to the right place before the polls close. Outside of these extraordinary circumstances, any such ballot would simply be rejected as invalid by a voting judge. Apparently, a healthy sense of distrust for non-transparent technology does not qualify as extraordinary enough, though it seemed to take the polling examiners there by surprise.
Given the option of being discarded out-of-hand, or compromising and using the e-voting system, I opted for the latter.
Then, just to heap insult upon injury, the precinct captain proceeded to take me aside and explain to me just how secure the e-voting system is. He pointed out that the voting terminals were connected to an onsite controller, which recorded votes in a secure digital non-volatile memory card (I'll spare you the hown-home vernacular in which this information was reverentially dispensed), and that "no trace of your vote is retained in the system, except in the card" which is removed and delivered to election headquarters. I did not point out to him that the fact that my vote was subject to a single point of failure in that card did not encourage me.
I think his perception was that I was concerned that someone might penetrate the system security to determine how my vote was cast, and we was oblivious to the idea that I was concerned that my vote be reported and counted as actually cast.
