ElectionAudits talk for OSCON - 2009-07-22 by Neal McBurnett

ElectionAudits: a Django App for Advanced Election Auditing

Boulder County used open source code to audit its 2008 election!
Share the story, share the code, and get you all involved where you live.
Why?
Elections to celebrate: South Africa 1994, paper ballots, hand counted
Obvious disasters: Iran 2009 - clearly fraudulent Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election
US problems with elections: black box voting systems
Not just a problem with touch screen devices (DRE)
Humboldt County 2008: 197 ballots deleted by Diebold/Premier without a trace.
Certified
Discovered only by Humboldt County Election Transparency Project audit
Goal: software independence, via auditable paper records, good audits
Open Source voting systems: Great!
Good audits and chain of custody: Necessary

fascinating algorithms behind modern election auditing, negexp, ssr, Rivest’s Sum of Square Roots method

How - what is an audit anyway?

Audit Election: Compare sample of detailed results with hand counts
Auditing hand-counted election: * Count piles of ballots by hand and write subtotals down * add them up ** check arithmetic and compare to number of ballots
Optical scanners arrived: era of trusting computers too much
Audit DREs without voter verified paper trail? Can't do it.... Pushback.
Audit optical scan systems, e.g.Markey vs Musgrave
Closing loopholes and gaps; Getting more efficient, Improved confidence in election outcomes
Map of how audits vary by state: (from ea web site)
Fixed percentage vs Risk-limiting audits
Selections for Markey vs Musgrave
Principles and Best practices
Results

Web presentation: css, layout
Logo
XML expertise, e.g. for reading and writing (and improving) Election Markup Language
Database design
Django/python insights
Implement features
Windows testing, installation, eggs and Django, etc
Help getting auditing laws passed. c.v. Colorado - Election Reform Commission
Biggest challenge: getting useful data out of election systems
At 1:45: Open Source and Democracy - Creating transparent, trustworthy voting systems
Code is Law - Write our own procedures (after randomness cluelessness)