[Talk] Voting in Hendry County

[Nick Simicich]

I voted in the recent election. Unlike many of you, I voted in the
Hendry County system, which is a tiny county to the due west of Palm
Beach county. Hendry shares a border with Palm Beach County at the
bottom of Lake Okeechobee. It does not extend to the west coast. The
county seat is LaBelle, which you might run through if you take Southern
Blvd to Ft. Myers. Don't blink. There is a traffic light. The local high
school football team is called the Cowboys, and a recent game sold about
3000 tickets - at the gate, not to no-shows.  Not much to do in LaBelle
on Friday night, and professional sports is a path out of the small town
if you can play Football or Baseball well. But even if you have no
aptitude for sports, all is not lost. If you graduate from LaBelle High
School and you have gone to LaBelle High for two years, you are
guaranteed two years of education at Edison College - if you can't
qualify for federal money, there is a private foundation that will cover
your tuition. I know of people who have moved to Ft Myers but who still
send their kids to LaBelle High (they have some claim to an in-district
address) because it is worth it to them to get their AA paid for. The
guy who set up the foundation is over 100 and still alive. He has
started asking that you apply for federal money or other assistance if
you are able and eligible - and the foundation will help you make the
application. It is a nice little town. They are supposedly building a
WalMart in a couple years. Right now, other than food, there is no place
to shop for many of the things you might get at WalMart. 

I voted mid afternoon - for the entire process, I was the only voter in
the area - no line, no nothing. No other voters. Plenty of signs outside
identifying the firehouse as the polling place. There was a polling
place in the volunteer firehouse near my home.

The poll had paper  ballots. This was my first vote here. I had
registered when I moved here from Boca so I wondered if I would have
made the rolls or not.  But I was there. They wanted id even though I
was personally known to the fire chief who was a poll worker as well.
This is a small town, small county, it had apparently been a discussion
point how I pronounced my last name. I had to sign the stub of the
ballot, and then the ballot was torn out of the book and handed to me. 
I had a private place to mark my ballot, which was obviously, to my
eyes, a recycled punch card station.

When I was done, I put the ballot in a scanner, face down. It analyzed
my ballot and noted that I had made a mistake (well, I'll never tell)
and that my ballot would have been spoiled had it been counted
later....but, in this case, I had two choices - I could push one button
and tell the machine to take my ballot anyway, that I did not care that
my vote would not have been counted in that race, or I could push
another and tell it to return my ballot.

I did the latter. I explained to the poll workers (who had seen the
indication from the machine and were explaining to me at the same time)
that I blew it and I wanted another ballot - they would have accepted my
spoiled ballot and given me another - but I wanted to keep the spoiled
ballot while I revoted as I had made some decisions on the small races
that I did not want to remake.  That gave them a moment's pause - how
could they be sure they got the ruined one back for the ruined ballot
envelope?  I settled it by putting  a big X across the face of the
ruined ballot so that we could be sure to tell them apart and so that it
was clear that it was ruined - upon pause, I should have written
"ruined, replacement received, do not count" on the ballot's face but
what the heck.

Then I marked the replacement ballot and put it in the machine - it read
it and decided that I had marked it correctly. This read process took
several seconds and might become a blocking point in a major election
and a busy polling place.

Had this system been in place in the last couple presidential elections,
it might have lessened the issues over incorrectly marked ballots,
hanging chad and the like.  Compared to punch  ballots, the check is
immediate, and the voter is allowed to correct their error. There are no
chads. The counties that used mark sense paper ballots in 2000 did not
have 100% unspoiled ballots, but at least the chad issue was moot since
mark sense does not have chad. Extra marks are a problem, but the
immediate check fixes that. I am not sure that, in the past, an
immediate check was done on the ballot. I thought that some of the
places that used mark sense just had people mark ballots and then
collected them.

Compared to touch screens, there is a solid paper trail - the physical
ballots are retained by the machine and in case of a recount it is
probably simpler to determine what the voter meant to mark and didn't,
as compared to chad, although as discovered in 2000, it was not a sure
thing. However, I got no feedback as to which candidate had gotten my
vote, and this I missed from touch screen. If my ballot was totally out
of registration and some other candidate had gotten my vote and the
machine missed it, I would have no way of telling - all that was being
checked for was the right number of squares marked in the right
section.  I almost would have preferred a short list on the LCD screen
(which would then have to be private) as to who it thought I voted for,
and if that was not my intention, hit "return").  If there is a close
race, however, and a recount, the registration issue would likely be
noticed on the sample recount and that would trigger a full recount.

Compared to paper ballots and a physical ballot box, there is the
immediate check that the right number of votes are cast for each office
in the case of a "vote for one" or "vote for two" situation. So my
ballot is very unlikely to be spoiled because I could not follow
instructions.


All in all, I'm happier with the balloting process and the mark sense
reader. I still believe that the process of vote counting should be open
and should be designed to resist the knowledgeable attacker - by
knowledgeable, he should know everything except for "authentication
secrets" and those should be based on an algorithm that is possible to
program into a cheap calculator and they should convert a secret
password (hidden in the calculator) and a second password into an
authentication, but this is security 101 - something you know +
something you have becomes your security entry to the system and that
should be the only secret - you accept the DOS risk because keeping the
dial in numbers secret promotes the wrong attitude. 

As standards like Wi-Fi or SSL have shown us, it is possible to write
open code without being insecure - and when we are insecure, we all know
it.  We have also learned that the best security exists when everyone
has insider knowledge - security should assume that your best technician
got fired yesterday and he is the one you are defending against. So long
as you revoked those now untrusted certs, your best tech has no more
chance of breaking your SSL stream than an outsider - but your fired
tech will ignore the streams and break in to your server using his back
door...so you have to keep everything so open that there are multiple
sets of eyes making sure that no such back door is possible.

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