Last chance for EAC comments

[eridani]

We need your help in the next several days to ensure that future voting systems are reliable, accessible, and verifiable. The federal Election Assistance Commission is taking public comments on proposed guidelines for voting technology. The federal guidelines are voluntary, but many states require compliance, and vendors must meet these standards to remain competitive. We need you to express your support for a crucial requirement that is under threat: software independence.

Software Independence (SI) is an important advance toward verifiable voting: it means that voting systems should not rely only on software, because software can contain errors or problems that are impossible to detect without an independent record of voter intent. Of present technologies, only systems that utilize voter-verifiable paper records or voter-marked paper ballots would be software-independent. However, software independence may not make it into the final guidelines; those who still support paperless electronic voting are opposing SI. Your comments are needed to ensure that software independence remains part of the federal guidelines for voting systems.

Monday May 5 is the last day for the current phase of public comment. It will be harder to effect change in the voting system guidelines after May 5, so it is important that citizens comment now.

For a list of other key voting system guidelines provisions that need strengthening (e.g., a standard data reporting format for auditing of elections), suggested comments, and directions for using the EAC website to make comments, please go to this webpage:

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5861
If you have time only to comment on software independence, go to this webpage:

http://www.eac.gov/vvsg/part1/chapter02.php/

There, scroll down to section 2.7A - "Software Independence" and click the "comment" link at the bottom of the section. Below is an example comment. Please keep in mind that your own words are most effective.

Example Comment: "All computer systems are subject to subtle errors. Moreover, computer systems can malfunction or be deliberateley corrupted at any stage of their design, manufacture, and use. The methods used to do this can be extremely difficult to foresee and detect. Therefore, it is crucial to the integrity of elections that voting systems provide a means of recording and recovering voter intent that does not depend on the reliability of software."

Remember, Monday May 5 is the deadline.

Thank you for taking your time to comment on this important issue, and thank you for all you do.

The Team at Verified Voting

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What I wrote--


Computer systems can malfunction or be deliberateley corrupted at any stage of their design, manufacture, and use. The methods used to do this can be extremely difficult to foresee and detect. Therefore, it is crucial to the integrity of elections that voting systems provide a means of recording and recovering voter intent that does not depend on the reliability of software.

Furthermore, paper ballots are the only acceptable solution to this problem because they do not freeze ordinary citizens who do not have software expertise out of the auditing process.

As a scientist, I find it absolutely appalling that we do not require all voting tabulation methods to be audited. You can trust my results in analytical chemistry because our lab constantly audits the performance of every piece of equipment from simple lab scales and refrigerators to the most complex mass spectrometers. You can trust us precisely BECAUSE we don't trust our equipment. Every data set I send out has at least one hand calculation to check that our data manipulation systems have not been corrupted.

If applying common scientific protocol to voting srikes anyone as overkill, they have just said that while it is important to have a reasonable degree of certainty about how much benzo(a)pyrine is in our drinking water, it is pointless to know for sure who really wins elections. As the renowned computer security expert David Dill once said, "It is not enough that elections BE accurate; we havc to KNOW that they are accurate, and we don't"