Standards to stimulate e-voting?

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In addition to the issue of bad old data, currently, there are no specific standards or guidelines for data exchange. HAVA, the Help America Vote Act" of 2002, did not include specific standardization recommendations.

For this reason, many states are taking a wait-and-see attitude before spending the money on a new system that may not be interoperable with others down the road. Like the high-definition DVD wars or the former VHS vs. Betamax debate, no one is willing to spend money on new technology because they are waiting to see what the winning standard will be, Hall said.

Currently, OASIS (short for Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) recommends something called Election Markup Language, or EML. The IEEE Standards Association, meanwhile, recommends XML (Extensible Markup Language). One of these two standards, if adopted, would enable states to have data exchange.

In Texas' TEAM system, all data is converted to an XML standard called EDX. While 254 Texas counties now favor TEAM's voluntary standard, 27 mostly urban districts have chosen to stick to their own systems and remain offline, McGeehan said.

According to all three of the panel members, getting districts to relinquish control over their current voting system is not just a political struggle for power. Many municipalities are reasonably concerned about spending money to implement a new system now and then having to change it down the road.

"If there were transaction standards, states would know how to handle the fields for names, and when a voter registered, you could transmit data from the state they moved from," Hall said. They could have fields asking, "Where were you last registered?" and then use that data as an affirmative reason for allowing states to legally move people from the old roll. It would allow a voter registration file to be updated in real time," Hall said.

"I am confident that three or four years from now, everyone will come online. Urban districts--they want to retain local control," McGeehan said. "They want to see how the new state system works before they put all their eggs in that basket."

Hall pointed out that this sort of massive undertaking of cooperation and standardization has already been successful in another arena.

"They did it in health care under HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Prior, there were 450 formats," Hall said. "Under federal law, they required one standard. Shockingly, they were able to get all hospitals and doctors and insurance companies on one standard in six years. It lowered administration costs, enabled instantaneous transmission of claims, improved security--since you didn't need third parties (to translate data)--and it improved health care management because it was easier to locate fraud."

[rcrusoe]

We don't need e-voting

We don't need to know who won an election 5 minutes after the
polls close, but we do need to know how the people voted. I'm
not sure we've really known that for the past couple of decades.

Forget e-voting, forget punch cards. Let's go back to paper
ballots that require the voter to write an X next to his choice. If
we do that, the time we spend counting ballots will still be less
than the time and money spent challenging the results in court.

Heck, even people in Broward county Florida should be able to
get it right with paper ballots.

[Sparky672]

I'm with you.

YES - WE NEED E-VOTING. In a world where Windows is
perfectly secure, all hacking has been eliminated, and Javascript
works flawlessly in all browsers. Bring on the e-Voting!

Can you imagine a system where you would never know if the
results had been tampered? Nothing tangible whatsoever to
look at afterwards.... just some numbers on a server someplace.
Geez! Are these people crazy?

At least with online banking, the numbers are tied to account
numbers which are tied to names which are tied to physical
addresses which get a paper statement mailed to them. The
users can see if something is wrong and an audit can be
conducted.

Voting is supposed to be anonymous which really puts a crimp
on these types of transparent audits.

Besides all of that... if you're too lazy to get off your @ss and do
your civic duty then we don't need your vote. (excluding shut-
ins where we already have a working absentee system for people
who are physically unable to get to the polls)

[G.Nuisance]

haha...

Good point But, Florida would probably say they couldn't read the X or that the pen was out of ink... then what? carving it in stones? then it would be, Well, um.. the voter didnt hit the chisel hard enough. - no. i dont think so.

They just need someone with some since overseeing the E-Voting. its a great idea but whoever designed the current machines/technology was an idiot.

[My-Self]

How Diebold delivers for Bush ...

This complete analysis, from the Center for Information Technology Policy of Princeton University shows how easy vote tampering is with Diebold Election Systems voting machine.

See the demonstration video:
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

Those machines are a real joke, and that's how Bush got "elected" in 2004 and how they plan to avoid a debacle in the upcoming midterm election ...

Any proof they ever used it ? Hell no, the system is carefully designed to leave no proof !