Media ignores Report statement on need for paper w/ touch screens

[papau]

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/218/metro/Report_suggests_changes_in_voting+.shtml

Report suggests changes in voting - Touch-screens called better technology By Sasha Talcott and Brendan McCarthy

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are recommending major changes in the way Massachusetts runs its elections. The 42-page report released yesterday urges the state to enact same-day voter registration and to certify the use of electronic touch-screen voting machines. It was the second report in two days to recommend use of touch-screen voting machines, which the secretary of state's office currently prohibits in Massachusetts. On Monday, a state-appointed task force also supported use of the newer machines, which voters would use like an ATM. Despite the two recommendations, Secretary of State William F. Galvin expressed reservations about the accuracy of the touch-screen machines. "When the new technology is ready, it will be used," Galvin said. "This is about making sure people's votes get counted. It's not about technologies." A week ago members of the Boston City Council grilled officials from the city's Election Department about their choice of optical scan voting machines, which ask users to fill out paper ballots as if taking an SAT test. The city will replace its 900-pound lever machines, beginning in the Sept. 23 election. Yesterday's report was issued by a voting research project at Caltech and MIT. It was funded by the Boston Foundation, a private philanthropic group. The report marked a reversal of opinion by the research project, which had decided in 2001 that electronic machines have an unacceptably high rate of error and instead endorsed optical scanners. But the study's author said the situation has changed."Massachusetts is going to be forced into the electronic world,'' said Charles Stewart. "Massachusetts needs to plan for it, rather than it just happening." Opponents of the touch-screen machines had frequently made their case by citing that 2001 study. <snip>
Sasha Talcott can be reached at [e-mail]. Brendan McCarthy can be reached at [e-mail].

BELOW IS THE REPORT HIGHLIGHTS - AND THE HEADLINE IS A LIE! :-(

www.vote.caltech.edu http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Reports/VotinginMass.pdf

Voting In Massachusetts- Report by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project

<snip>Voter Registration: Proposals for Reform
Massachusetts should adopt Election Day Registration (EDR), to reduce Election Day registration confusion and to encourage even greater turnout.

Massachusetts should adopt standard “provisional ballot” practices that are consistent with those in virtually all other states in the nation.

Massachusetts should require proper identification of all voters

Massachusetts should adopt administrative remedies to facilitate the use of driver license records to keep voter registration current.

Voter registration information should be broadly, and directly, available to precinct workers on Election Day.

Massachusetts should adopt aggressive voter education measures aimed at steering prospective voters to the right polling places on Election Day.

Massachusetts should adopt new anti-fraud legislation to guard the integrity of Election Day Registration.

Voting Technologies: Proposals for Reform

The Secretary of State should decertify mechanical lever machines and DataVote punch cards for use in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts should change its election laws to make it easier to certify electronic voting machines that otherwise meet Massachusetts voting machine standards.

The interpretation of Massachusetts election laws should be changed to allow voters to be notified if they have over-voted on an optically scanned ballot.

Localities should not lock themselves into stagnant voting technologies in a time of technological flux. Massachusetts should encourage localities to lease, not buy, new voting equipment.

The Secretary of State should expeditiously move to establish a task force to develop a statewide plan for the improvement of voting technologies.

Polling Place Practices: Proposals for Reform

Massachusetts should abolish the requirement that election officials be registered to vote in the town or city where they staff the polls.

Massachusetts should begin experimenting with methods of in-person early voting.

Cities and towns should be encouraged to use municipal clerical employees as polling place workers on Election Day. All levels of government should grant its employees a paid day of leave if they work as an election official on Election Day.

Cities and towns should be allowed to experiment with using students as polling place workers.

Massachusetts should issue voter registration cards to all voters every two years as a way of educating
voters about where they should vote.

Local officials should be more diligent in ensuring accessibility to polling places for disabled voters.


Election Reform Leadership

The Secretary of State should act quickly to appoint a permanent director of the State Elections Division.

V o t i n g i n M a s s a c h u s e t t s
.
Voting equipment refers to the balloting method used for capturing, casting, and counting a voter’s preferences. There are five basic types of voting equipment used in the United States: hand counted paper ballots, optically scanned ballots, punch card ballots, mechanical lever machines, and direct recording electronic devices (“DRE”, “ATM-style” or “touch screen”).15 The first three of these are paper-based technologies that separate the instrument used to capture a voter’s preferences, the paper ballot, from the casting and counting mechanism. Lever machines and DRE’s, on the other hand, are technologies that combine capturing, casting, and counting in a unified machine. All of these types of systems, except DREs, are certified for use in Massachusetts (Table 1). Hand counted paper is used in 77, mostly rural, communities in the Commonwealth. The majority of jurisdictions rely on optical scan voting systems, in which a voter indicates his or her preference on a paper ballot that is fed into an electronic scanner to be read and tabulated. The older mechanical lever machines, which were first introduced in Massachusetts in the mid-twentieth century, require the voter to pull levers that record the vote on gears on the back of the machines. Only 19 municipalities, including Boston, still use lever machines, but they are slowly replacing them with optical scanning. The City of Boston recently tested optical scanners for a final election for district city councilor in Allston-Brighton and plans to transition fully to optical scanning by the 2004 presidential election.

<snip>RECOMMENDATION # 12. Massachusetts should change the election laws that make it virtually impossible to certify direct register electronic voting machines in the state. …we criticize much of the first generation of these Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) designs, for many reasons: they often reflect poor user interfaces, provide no opportunity for independent paper-based audit, and are built on proprietary software. As a whole, the current set of DREs being used across America is no better than the lower-tech optical scanning equipment. Touch screen voting is no panacea for election machine woes. Data from the 2000 election showed that DREs had a rather high residual vote rate nationwide (2.5 percent for president and 5.5 percent for Senate and governor).23 Press reports suggest that DREs showed improved performance in Florida and Georgia during the 2002 midterm elections. However, neither state has yet to release data sufficient to scientifically assess how DREs performed in those states; it is quite likely that much of the improved performance in Georgia and Florida was due to the unsustainably high degree of scrutiny and vendor support associated with the 2002 equipment roll-outs. Nonetheless, social forces are pushing Massachusetts in a direction that will demand the Commonwealth to make DREs available
to its citizens. If nothing else, HAVA explicitly requires that every precinct in the state have at least one DRE, for use by disabled voters, by January 1, 2006. (This will require a one-time expenditure of approximately $6 million, most of which could be borne by the federal government.) In addition, many DREs have added features that are attractive to citizens and election administrators in our increasingly complicated age. DREs can accommodate more ballot styles and more languages than traditional paperbased systems. And DREs save tremendously on printing charges. Up to this point there have been good reasons to exclude DREs from Massachusetts, but the fact is that DREs have been forbidden for the wrong reason— an abstruse provision in Massachusetts election law requires voting machines to allow the address of write-in candidates to be entered on the machine, not just the name. This is hardly a good reason to exclude a technology that holds such promise. Massachusetts may not be able to wait for the perfect electronic voting machine, however. The argument made by the disability community in favor of the adoption of DRE machines—even highly flawed machines—is compelling. Even imperfect DREs currently provide the only way for visually impaired voters, for instance, to cast an independent vote. The trick will be for the Commonwealth to certify current generation DREs in such a way that encourages localities to upgrade their equipment once improvements are made in the next generation. <snip>

Massachusetts has yet to certify the newest type of voting machines, Direct Recording Electronic devises (DRE’s), also called “touch screens”or ATM-like voting machines. Some DRE’s may make verification of selections difficult for voters.

[japcoffee]

1. Book on this subject -- what's holding it up?

Funny you should bring this up.

There's a "forthcoming" book on this subject, "Black Box Voting," by Bev Harris. At least, it's supposed to be forthcoming, and I placed an advance order months ago, but the book still hasn't been published yet. I think it was due in May, then July, now there's no word on when it'll be out.

Has the VRWC buried this, or what? The publisher is Plan 9 Publishing (plan9.org), which I've never heard of. They seem to publish mainly collections of comic strips.