NPR misses the mark on ITIF “Future of Voting” coverage
March 7th, 2008 by Richard Carback and Aleks Essex in : Voting PolicyAfter the success of the ITIF’s Future of Voting panel, we were surprised by the nature of NPR’s radio coverage. From our perspective the report greatly distorted the tone and focus of the event in an apparent effort to concoct a sense of controversy.
Aspects of the coverage we felt were misleading:
- The title of the report does not reflect the focus. Why would people who oppose paper ballots present a system with…. a paper ballot? The summary of the report is tangential to the event. This event was about new voting research and presented a range of solutions; internet, opscan and DRE based.
- The report begins with a shot directed at the ITIF for AV “technical difficulties.” How is this newsworthy, really? Maybe the reporter could have interviewed the House Administration Committee room’s AV guy and ask him why he didn’t show up to give us access to the equipment. To the ITIF’s credit, they had a backup screen and projector.
- David Dill is interviewed and purported by NPR as providing the “controversy” component, yet was not present at the event. He hasn’t seen the systems nor did he offer any directed criticism about them.
- His comments seemed to be included out of context. Every system presented had a paper ballot capability.1 One focused on overseas voting, and another on usability issues. Our system is an opscan add-on, improving the type of system that David is known to prefer.
- Arguably these technologies are not “on the horizon.” Each group demoed working prototypes at the event and are working with counties to use these systems in public elections.
Stay tuned for more details about the forum. Tomorrow, we will be posting a longer recap with pictures.
1 - Prime III prefers a “video audit trail” that they use in a special way AND have empirical evidence indicating it is faster to audit. Our understanding is that they have a paper trail option built-in already, but if not there’s nothing preventing it and they do not oppose it.
March 21st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I just listened to the NPR coverage you linked to. It wasn’t that bad. I agree with your first two points but disagree with the others.
In particular I do share some of Dill’s concerns that the ‘perfect’ can be an enemy of the ‘good’. And based on the paper that Castro wrote for the ITIF I still have doubts about ITIF’s motivations.
http://allaboutvoting.com/category/itif/
Dill in the Huffington post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dill/election-vaporware_b_65810.html
My view is that e2e should be promoted, research supported, and e2e systems should be deployed on a small scale. But I see this as an investment in the future. In the present we also need to boot out some of the truly awful voting systems that are in widespread use.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:22 am
I respect what you’re saying, but I stand by our point that he wasn’t there. The sole purpose of his inclusion was to make it all seem more controversial than it was.
I (and i’m sure the rest of us) don’t disagree with paper trail bills per se, but we strongly disagree when they exclude the newer, more promising, radically stronger technology. The fact remains that paper ballots alone offer marginal protection against election tampering — what are the security properties of generic paper? It’s not fixing the problem, it’s bringing it back to what it was before the machines, and I can’t put much faith in it.
It is amazing to me how the argument against E2E has shifted over the last few years. First we heard “well, you can’t implement this”, then we heard “you can’t use it in an election”, and now we are hearing “not in a government election”. The truth is, that’s where we are going next, and we are doing it a lot sooner than you might think.
It’s not vaporware when there’s an open source implementation available online. In fact, that’s usually a sign that the idea is coming of age. Most of the research we are doing is the culmination of over 20 years of cryptographic research. I find the insinuation insulting.
I think we (Punchscan/Scantegrity) will be ready to take on a project at the statewide level by 2010, and on a much broader scale by 2012. I don’t really remember what the Holt bill said, but I am pretty sure the mandates were for around those times or possibly even later than that. Implementing our system has been surprisingly simple, and we’re making it even simpler.
I also strongly disagree w/ Dill regarding the ability to change the law after the fact. It is so blindingly, mind-numbingly obvious that it would be a long, protracted process, and that the existing industry will do its best to crush any change in order to keep their oligopoly in place. The harder they can make it for a new competitor to enter the market and the larger the barrier to entry can be, the better for them.
I am also interested to know the credentials of the expert cryptographers Dill tried to get together for a review. I’ve never seen him name names.
I’ve probably already said too much, so i’ll end with a note that there are a lot of new developments that will be coming out this summer.