[lug] FYI: what I'm working on

Paul E Condon pecondon at mesanetworks.net
Thu Nov 25 11:20:19 MST 2004


On Thu, Nov 25, 2004 at 08:27:24AM -0700, David Anselmi wrote:
> Paul E Condon wrote:
> [...]
> >FYI, I'm investigating ways to make the record of voting more Open,
> >capital O intended.  I imagine that it would be socially useful to
> >have the entire record of scanned ballots available for examination at
> >a openly accessable web site.
> 
> I don't think so.  Open might be useful, scanned not.
> 
> >But I am looking for ways to extract the marks made by the voter from
> >the printing on the ballot, in order to reduce data download
> >requirements.
> 
> Why do you want to do this in an image format?  It might make people 
> feel better to see something that looks like a ballot but the fact that 
> it has been turned into bits and processed means there is a trusted 
> computing base that has to be relied on.
> 
> Seems like vanilla machine counting meets the requirement and image 
> processing is overkill.
> 

In Boulder County, the raw data of an election is paper ballots that
have been marked by voters. These raw data are processed into scanned
images that are then further processed into vote tallies. A tap into
the system just after the scan step should show data that is consistent
with the final tallies.

For a DRE voting system, the analogous tap would be a log of interrupt
events from the computer that's running the GUI of DRE. But Boulder
doesn't have DRE (yet?). 

The big issue for which this is a small contribution is verification
of the integrity of an election. Don't ask what I mean by integrity.
Without some data its all wild speculation.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net



More information about the LUG mailing list