We are only one week away from Election Day, and with record turnout expected, there are no doubt still a number of people that have no idea where their polling place is or exactly what will be on their ballot.

Campaigns and PACs pay large sums of money to vendors that sell information on district boundaries, and even the US House of Representatives uses a commercial vendor to provide the data that powers their "Who is my Representative?" service. There is no reason why this information should be this difficult to obtain.

Google recently announced a project to help voters find their polling locations that makes use of data that a group called the Voting Information Project has asked all states to provide.

The Voting Information Project encourages Boards of Elections to standardize and share their voting information including what is on the ballot, where the polling locations are, and the boundaries for all the various jurisdictions. So far only a handful of states (Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Ohio) as well as Los Angeles County have published the requested information.

Voting information is some of the most important information to help the average citizen participate in our democracy, and the Voting Information Project is doing important work to ensure that this information is as open and widespread as possible. The states already participating should be applauded and the remaining states should be sure that by the time the next election season rolls around, they too are participating fully in the Voting Information Project.

For more information on the efforts of the Voting Information Project: visit their website.

"In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in response to the hanging-chad debacle of Florida's 2000 presidential elections. The act's main thrust was to provide money to states to replace outdated punch-card- and lever-based voting systems with optical-scan or touchscreen models. The act largely accomplished that goal, filling the coffers of closed source voting system manufacturers. In doing so, the act may have inadvertently placed the country in a worse situation...."

"Current U.S. policy ensures that e-voting remains in the hands of very few proprietary vendors.... But the key to securing e-voting resides in making its systems open source."

• Open source: How e-voting should be done, by Paul Venezia, IDG News Service, InfoWorld, October 27, 2008.

Last week, at the Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference held at MIT, there was a panel on electronic voting systems in which CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen participated -- along with Moderator Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief, Technology Review; Doug Chapin, Director, electionline.org; Ronald L. Rivest, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT; and Pamela Smith, President, Verified Voting Foundation. You may remember that in 2007, Bowen ordered a complete top-to-bottom review of voting systems in CA. I'm really glad to see a top-level politician sitting on a panel of cutting edge technologists and really, really glad to hear that top-level politician advocate for Open-source software.

Now, I'm not saying the open source is the end all and be all solution to the myriad issues facing e-voting (see Bev harris' Black Box Voting for more on those issues); but it's great to see that Bowen at least gets that open source software is at least part of the solution. We've been saying that for quite some time. For a complete wrapup of the panel see Lucas Mearian's ComputerWorld blog

One method of addressing software issues associated with the vast majority of proprietary e-voting applications out there is to move to using open source, especially for applications residing on optical scanners, which have been particularly troublesom. The concern is that IT administrators can't look at the software to correct errors or tweak it for a particular county's needs. Open source would go a long ways to disclosing problems associated with today's propretary e-voting applications, Bowen said.

[Thanks /.]

Voters prefer e-voting, but tech has limits, By Grant Gross, IDG News Service, March 21, 2008. Researchers found the error rate of the worst-performing machines was 3 percent in a simple task like voting for president and, in "more complex races," the error rate was higher.

• Voting Technology The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot, by Paul S. Herrnson, Richard G. Niemi, Michael J. Hanmer, Benjamin B. Bederson and Frederick C. Conrad, Brookings Institution Press, 2008 c. 215pp.

As you know, we've been tracking e-voting and the CA story for a while. Today's lunchtime listen is from NPR's Talk of the Nation, August 3, 2007. In this 17 minute segment, NPR interviews Matt Bishop, co-director, Computer Security Laboratory; professor, department of computer science at UC Davis, the leader of the hacking effort of e-voting machines certified for use in CA. His red team was able to compromise the security of all the systems tested! Particularly interesting was his description of "social engineering" which is sort of like phishing in which people are manipulated into performing actions or divulging confidential information. In other words, the *technology* can be easily hacked out of human or social weakness!

We've been tracking the continuing saga of electronic voting for a while. You'll remember that last week, we posted about a report from two teams of researchers at the University of CA about the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. The latest news is that, on Friday, August 3, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen de-certified (with a path for conditional recertification) all the electronic voting machines used in California. Brad's blog has the scoop:

Bowen announced that she will be disallowing the use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems made by the Diebold and Sequoia companies on Election Day, allowing only one DRE machine per polling place which may be used for disabled voters. The paper trails from votes cast on DREs manufactured by those two companies must be 100% manually counted after Election Day. DREs made by Hart-Intercivic are used in only one California county and will be allowed for use pending security upgrades.

• Florida voting machines can be hacked, by Marc Caputo, Miami Herald, Jul. 31, 2007.

Reversing an unofficial policy of denial, the Florida Secretary of State's office has conducted an elections study that confirmed Tuesday what a maverick voting chief discovered nearly two years ago: Insider computer hackers can change votes without a trace on Diebold optical-scan machines.

See also
Lunchtime listen: "Hacking democracy"

Most vote machines lose test to hackers (California)

This documentary exposes the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. The film follows investigative journalist Bev Harris as she investigates the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems. It's 1hr 22 minutes so perhaps this will be 2 lunchtime listens.

Now are you worried? On Saturday, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer John Wildermuth, in an article entitled, "Most Vote Machines lost test to hackers", described how teams of computer security experts (aka "hackers") hired by the state were able to crack every model of voting machine that they tested -- including Sequoia, Hart InterCivic and Diebold. The UC's report/document dump is now on the CA Secretary of State's site.

This obviously has national implications. Last week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey advanced H.R. 811, the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007," which amends the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot.

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday. The researchers “were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the “top to bottom review” of every voting system certified by the state.

BlackBoxVoting.org posted an open letter to CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen in which BBV board member Jim March said, "Please consider taking more aggressive action. Decertify everything, citing the obvious failure of Federal oversight as the primary cause." Feel free to contact California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen and let her know what you think of electronic voting machines.