Captain Oblivious

Read this, from today's Boston Globe, then come back so I can rant about something non-partisan for a while.

Non-partisan? Me?!? I know, I know, it's amazing I haven't written umpteen articles about the SBVFT (no, they will NOT get a link from me) and their disgusting little temper tantrums. Nobody who has ever been to my site can possibly have any doubt what I think of them, though, and I've been unable to come up with a way to write about it that wouldn't involve George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words. If you're curious about my thoughts, Rocky posted a request/demand for President Bush to disavow the ads the other day, spurring a few people who actually believe them to write in and prompting me to respond. I suspect I owe Rock an apology for hijacking his comments, in fact - it wasn't my intent, and I probably should have tracked back with my own post instead. Interestingly, Rock felt the need to disavow any allegiance to either Kerry or Bush during his post, and I almost blogged about what a shame it is that our political discourse has reached the point where everyone assumes anyone with a partisan preference cannot be trusted or believed. I would have thought Rock would have enough credibility in the Domino blogging world for his personal and professional integrity that even people who are 180 degrees opposed to him politically would be interested in, and respectful of, his opinion.

Anyway, back to non-partisan rants, right? Yeah, I can actually still do those, even this year. So you've read the article, right? The topic at hand: electronic voting. Now, we all know I'm a geek. I should be in favor of electronic voting, right? And I am. In general. But there are a few teeny, tiny problems with the way it has been designed and implemented here in the US.

The premise is sound. Computerizing voting should reduce the chances that a person's vote will have to be discarded because the election officials can't tell who the person wanted to vote for, right? No hanging chads, no double or triple voting allowed. These are positive results. So what's the problem?

Oh, nothing major. Just a little detail, really. There's no paper trail being generated by most of these machines. So? It's electronic, right? Who needs paper? Well, as you read in the article (you *did* read it, right? Get with the program already...), we have already had an election where a statistically significant number of votes just disappeared into the ether. As far as the official records are concerned, hundreds of people who voted in New Mexico in 2000 didn't actually, um, well, vote. But that's why we have recounts, right, to make sure we actually count everybody's vote? Er, not so much. No paper trail means no recount. See, there's nothing to actually recount, is there?

How stupid is that? Really. Most of the people reading this are computer geeks. If we were to get together and design a system that had to be 100% accurate and 100% verifiable, would we choose a machine that accepts a response, doesn't verify that it was in fact recorded with the right values or produce any sort of receipt, and moves on to the next request (dropping all evidence of the previous one)? Not a chance. We'd be fired if we did anything that moronic. But that's how the e-voting machines will work in many states across the US this year. Makes you confident about the accuracy of the election, doesn't it?

Brace yourselves for some serious controversy if the election is close (and it will be). If you live in a state where the results are in doubt (not, say, Massachusetts or Texas, but Ohio, Missouri, FLORIDA!) and your voting district has installed new machines since the last election, you may want to vote by absentee ballot. At least that will be on paper, so they can use it in a recount if they need to.

Final word: Lest people misunderstand, I want electronic voting to become a reality. I even want voting over the internet to become a reality. And I have no doubt that it will, eventually. But the system will have to be designed by somebody with an IQ higher than 60! The solution will have multiple and repeated layers of authentication, it will require a national PKI infrastructure both to encrypt the votes and provide additional identity verification, there will be biometrics involved, and there WILL be a receipt generated or stored in multiple locations. In My Not Even Remotely Humble Opinion. If we wanted to design a real system today, it wouldn't be possible to cover 100% of the population because the infrastructure doesn't exist. But the legendary Charlie Kaufman and other security geniuses certainly could design something that would work. These existing systems? I shudder to think of Charlie's reaction to them. Talk about your Encryptable Hulk! (CULT Shirt reference, it's that time of year...)