Q: Chris, in a nutshell, why digital paper for voting? 

A: I think if you have been following voting systems, especially since the passage of HAVA (and frankly that’s where most people entered this discussion) you can see the tremendous pressure exerted against DREs.  Some of the criticism has been politically motivated, but no matter what you think it’s very hard to find someone that is completely satisfied with pure DREs (no paper audit trails, etc.).  Not many people are willing to get up and profess their complete confidence in them.  The law requiring the VVPAT is now in place in something like 27 states and the Holt bill is closing in fast.

Plus, look at Florida; they have 15 counties with DREs (no VVPATs) that now have to get new equipment.  They can’t be very happy but this is the way the industry is moving.  What are their options?  Well, they can get optical scan from ES &S or Diebold, or perhaps Sequoia.  Not much of a choice really.  Keep in mind that some people have been using optical scan (mark sense) equipment for voting for nearly 20 years.  There are even some electronic voting counties that go back about 15 years.  So the move to optical scan seems like a backward move to me. 

When you investigate what’s out there on the market, there isn’t much development.  We hear that Diebold may want out of the business and is quietly shopping their election division.  We know that Sequoia is for sale.  Most of the firms just made their money with the HAVA sales, and now times are tight.  So don’t expect much in the way of development from the big 4.

Many of the smaller firms have DRE devices of their own. Sure they may have a paper trail component, but they are all post-HAVA DRE machines in essence; and that includes firms like TruVote, Avante and so forth.  Most of these firms either have had no sales or very little sales in 5 or more years.  So it would be hard to imagine them starting this all over again with a new product.

I just think the timing is right to start to think about new ways of voting, and with that respecting the general movement away from fancy electronic voting and the return to the primacy of paper.

 Q: Can you tell us more about digital pen voting?  How does it actually work in practice?

 A: This is described pretty well on my web site but I will cover it here again. But before we do that, let’s look at tabulation systems as a whole.  I break it up into three parts: pre-voting, voting process, and post-voting tabulation processes.  Most people that enter the business fail miserably because they focus just on the actual voting process and they ignore the pre and post voting processes.  Those are very complex and simply have to be done right.  In the pre-voting situation you have to build an election management system.  You either have to link to a vendor’s voter registration system, or you have to build it yourself.  But here you have to do all the things necessary to develop ballots.  That means you must understand what it takes to generate ballot STYLES.  To do that you have to know the precincts, precinct splits, district/precinct assignments, candidates, issues, races, etc.  All of that has to be hashed together in an algorithm to make ballot styles.

In addition you have to have ballot design software.  For example, if you are making DRE ballots for Sequoia you use Visio.  Having worked with those I can tell you it isn’t a simple process (it should be but isn’t with their stuff).  It’s extremely time consuming and a bit frustrating to create ballots with their product.  But you have to have that component as well.  And those ballot designs have to conform to state law in multiple states.

Then we have the actual voting process. This is the simple part.  The voter arrives at the polling location, goes in and votes and leaves.  All of this probably takes about 5 minutes.  It’s fairly well explained with DREs and with optical scan.  The only real change with optical scan is that the ballots are now scanned at the precinct before the voter leaves.  This allows the voter to correct any overvotes and potentially undervotes (if they are set to be flagged).  We’ll have to talk a bit more about HAVA to see the need for this.  In the past, the voter could deposit the OpScan ballot in the ballot box and the ballot box was returned to the election office and they were scanned in on election night with a high speed scanner (such as a Sequoia 400c unit).

With Digital Pen Voting (DPV) the voter receives a paper ballot and takes it to a booth.  There is nothing special about the booth.  It could even be the old punch card booths that we all know and love (if we still have them).  You take your paper and put it on the booth table—you can place the paper any way you like.  You grab a digital pen that writes with real ink.  It is a bit bigger than a normal pen but it should fit comfortably in your hand.  The pen is “chained” to the voting booth so voters won’t walk away with it---just like pens at the bank.  You then mark you ballot placing and X in the required boxes, or filling in the circles.  You can even select write in votes if they are permitted.  When you have looked at your ballot and are convinced you are finished, you return the pen to the little pen holder (a cradle with a hole in it).  You wait a few seconds and then a small screen alerts you to any overvotes or undervotes.  You can then request a new ballot in the case of overvotes, or you have the opportunity to take care of undervotes.  In any case, after you are finished you press a button on the screen and your vote is confirmed. You then take your ballot and place it in the ballot box.  That is the process in a nutshell.

When the pen is placed back in the holder the votes for that person are added to a laptop or other device that stores those votes.  Yes, it is possible to even have them sent wirelessly via 802.11 or Bluetooth devices.  However, that might not be legal in many jurisdictions.  Redundant storage can be assured as well.  At the end of the evening the data (could be a thumb drive, or other removable media) are securely stored and returned to the election office—just as it is done with both optical scan and DREs.

When that data arrives back at the office they are gathered together and the total tabulation for the election takes places.  Then you use your standard reports or web exports to display the total reports.

However, unlike OpScan ballots, these ballots can be also displayed on screen.  Therefore it is possible to view the actual ballots with the pen marks from each voter.  This is very useful in cases where you have to make a call about voter intent.  It is possible as well to make very large “blow ups” of the ink marks and see what the voter’s pen was actually doing.

Q: Why haven’t we heard about this technology for voting?

A: The paper itself is a development of the Swedish firm Anoto.  It’s actually be around for several years.  But the most natural markets to pursue would be healthcare.  They use a TON of forms and are really backwards.  I used to think that real estate people were the most technologically backwards until I realized how bad healthcare is. It’s almost a national disgrace. Elections traditionally haven’t been cutting edge, but, in fact, I think our track record is better than many other industries.

There is a test case of this technology now underway for the City of Hamburg Germany (for 2008) and that will be closely watched.  I have a document on my site about their use of this technology.  However, in the US there are so many barriers to entry that many people just haven’t really taken it seriously.  There are a FEW vendors out there that are digital paper experts and are “claiming” they have developed a solution for voting, but I’d be very skeptical about such claims.  One, if they have no special expertise in voting I’d be deeply worried.  Those same firms also tout that they are serving healthcare, homeland security, education, transportation, banking, insurance, and hog farming.  You can’t serve all of those industries if you only have three people in your firm.  So I’d be very skeptical about any firm claiming to have a system of voting on Anoto paper if they aren’t entirely devoted to the election industry.  If you look at the firms that serve the election industry, virtually all of them have one line of business and it is voting.  Diebold, with their ATM business is probably the exception and even they know now that voting is probably less than 10% of their revenue and 99.9% of their negative publicity.  Do the math.

By the way, you can buy this stuff for your own use.  Logitech sells their IO2 pen system (with paper) for less than $150.00.  With that you can take paper notes and when docked with the cradle will convert your handwriting and send it to an MS Word document, or Outlook, etc.  It will also capture your drawings or doodles as a graphics file.  So if you just want to learn more about it, you can get involved fairly inexpensively.

Q: How did you get involved with this technology?

A: Well, I’m always on the lookout for new developments in elections and I have several other projects in the works.  I hope that you’ll hear more about those as they get more fully developed.  Some of them are kind of hush-hush right now.  A good friend of mine, Steve Hilsman, has told this story on his Blog site (see, http://sbclist.blogspot.com/2007/06/pen-and-paper-new-thin-client.html ).  Steve is an expert on thin-client computing and server based computing and has his own uses for this technology.  Since we collaborate on various projects, I thought I’d see what he thought of the paper/pen idea.

It happened, as do many interesting things, as a bit of blind luck.  I bought the paper at a closeout store because I was out of legal pads.  I just thought it was some kind of gimmicky paper, but it worked for taking notes.  Then as I read the cover to it (where you can order more of it) I felt that I was missing something.  This paper was somewhat special.  It was then that I discovered what the paper actually was and that to use it effectively you’d need a digital pen.  Well, I didn’t really need a digital pen, but the use of this kept rattling in my mind until one day I started to wonder if it could be used in voting.

That led then to a series of calls and contacts to digital paper companies.  I found they were quite excited about the possibility of using it for voting, but they lacked the expertise to tackle the market.  Since then we have been discussing ways to move forward with a test case, or a “Proof of Concept” for digital paper voting.  That’s where it stands now.

Q:  How do you envision an end-to-end solution with this technology?

A: First of all, I doubt that anyone can tackle this all without creating some partnerships.  Voting is an extremely complex vertical market with a long history of littered bodies of those that have failed in it.  So no digital paper vendor in their right mind would try to take it on and develop all those pre and post tabulation processes we discussed earlier.  You would want to partner with an established tabulation firm.  Now, as we discussed, many of those firms may not want to get involved with new ventures, but since the digital paper only addresses the actual voting process, the hope is that you could simply drop that in the middle and have a complete A to Z solution. 

Q: How does this product compete with OpScan?

A: It competes very well with optical scan.  To understand the issues surrounding optical scan systems, I would recommend reading all the technical documents from Professor Douglas Jones (Counting Mark Sense Ballots).  This is a great primer to the issues and problems with Mark Sense ballots.    As you will see there are various types of optical scanners each with their own issues and concerns.  However, one of the biggest problems with OpScan is that you have to have an outside firm print your ballots.  We all know the story there.  You send the samples, and they return a proof.  Yet, we constantly hear about printing mistakes.  They are printed on expensive card stock paper and when a mistake is made it can be costly—either to the election office or to the printing firm.  All of that is factored into the cost of OpScan ballots, but they aren’t cheap.

Keep in mind that with optical scan all the ballots either go to one or two scanning stations.  That creates a natural bottleneck.  It doesn’t take long to scan a ballot, but still you may have several booths where people are filling out ballots all coming over to one central scanner.  With digital pen voting, the “casting” of the vote takes place when the pen is returned to its cradle. So if you have 5 booths, for example, then votes are being cast at 5 locations—much as it is done with DREs.

Optical scan readers are prone to LED reader failures.  If you lose one of the LEDs that read the ballots, then (potentially) you have to take that unit out of service.  If that is the only reader in a polling location, then things will really slow down, and a replacement unit has to be put in place or delivered and set up.  With digital pen voting, if the pen dies or malfunctions, a new inexpensive pen can be placed in that voting booth. 

Q: You were recently featured in a major news article in Columbus' Business First.  What has the reaction been from that?

It's been great.  We also created a little Youtube video of the digital pen voting process and put it out on the web site.  It's about 4 minutes long. We've been amazed at the number of hits it has had over the last 4 days its been out.  It's not shot by Spielburg, but it does get the point across.  So the story has generated a lot of interest.  We are also hoping to attract some local VC money so we can continue our efforts to develop this system.

Q. I see that California just decertified their touchscreen (DRE) voting devices.  Talk about good timing.  How does this decision help or hurt you?

Well, it helps tremendously.  What really shocks me the most about the CA decision (Bowen) is that the same vendors that failed to provide adequate security and did not take these concerns seriously are the same vendors that CA counties will have to buy from when they get Optical Scan systems!! Go figure.  I just don't get that.  How in the hell is this punishing Diebold, for example, when they already sold the DREs, now they can come in and sell their op scan systems to the same county?  Don't we deserve better--both as taxpayers, and as election administrators?  If I was running some county and I had to move to a new technology I'd be angry that my choices would once again be the big four.  The same thing has happened in Florida where all 15 DRE counties have to get new equipment.  So Sequoia, for examples, offers to buy back the DREs for $1 each (yes, $1) and then sell them optical scan equipment.  And no one really seems to point this out.  It's more than just getting rid of DREs--this is serious money and what happens is that we continue to keep out the little guys while peddling to the big guys that brought us this mess in the first place.

Q.  It seems like there aren't enough certified vendors.  Is that true?

The certification process is this country is an absolute joke.  It's broken and it doesn't look like it is going to be fixed any time soon.  The big vendors complain about this, but they have been the biggest beneficiaries of it.  After all, it keeps the little vendors out.  What we need, and what I'm calling for, is a new WAY of dealing with these issues such as certification.  We need an end to what I call the Adversarial Model between vendors and SOSs and counties.  That is a situation that should have never been allowed to develop that way, but it did.  And there is plenty of blame to go around on that score.  I'm not just talking about adding new labs or new requirements.  I think we need a new attitude about vendors.  

Q. What about the activist community?  Have they been helpful in this venture? You would think they would be screaming to support a new paper-based voting system that is not connected to the big 4 vendors.  What has their reaction been?

For the most part it is a mixed reaction.  As I just mentioned we have this adversarial model out there. Activists are naturally skeptical about vendors.  Vendors have been in the activists' crosshairs for about 5 years now.  So there's an immediate skepticism on their part.  But when you try to come out with something that is paper based and shows great promise of being a better voting system, they fall into three distinct camps.

Q. Can you elaborate on these 3 types of activists?

Sure.  It's a bit artificial, but we can break them up into 3 camps.  The first camp is truly interested in election reform and they really want to learn about the process and help find ways to improve it.  They do a good job of keeping it non partisan and non-shrill.  We want to work with these people.

The other group is the Luddite group.  They simply hate any technology.  They believe that the only system that should exist in America is hand counted paper ballots.  Now, I respect someone that comes out and says that.  At least that is honest, and you know where they stand.  But a great deal of these people won't lay their cards on the table.  I can always detect these people because they immediately start pooh-poohing anything new.  They are negative from the start and it never ends.  To those people I suggest that they quit hiding and just come out and tell us that they are hand counted paper ballot Luddites and be done with it.  I have no problem with their fight; I just wish they would be clear about what they really think.  The more radical group is now calling for the end of the secret ballot on the pretense that if people announce publicly their choices, then anyone can sit in the voting center and do their own tabulation.  Good luck with that.

The third group is just as bad.  They are the politically motivated activists.  They really don't care about DREs per se they are just angry that Bush won twice.  They believe he stole the elections and they are bitter about that.  They range the gamut from those who truly believe that Diebold controls the outcome of US elections--i.e. somewhere they already have it programmed who will be the next President.  These people are wildly wrong and I try to stay away from them.  These are the people that will mostly go away when their candidates finally win--even if it was by the use of DREs.  When their guys start to win in large numbers they might even become fans of DREs!  But they are out there and there are a million web sites with this emphasis.  But worst of all are those activists that are in this camp that now try to suggest that they are running these objective "think tank" election reform sites.  Some claim to be doing objective 'science' about elections.  But if you look into their backgrounds and their previous work, you can see that they belong to this third camp.  Why they get attention and consulting work is beyond me--but they are out there.

Q. While we are on the subject, what DO you think about hand counted paper ballots?

Interestingly enough, digital paper ballots can be hand counted and done so quite easily.  With our flexible ballot design we can even create some devices that would make the hand counting more accurate.  But save that for a later day.  I guess my position on this is that it doesn't really matter if it's right or wrong, it isn't going to happen anytime soon.  If you want to fight for that, good luck. I think that it would be 10 to 15 years away at the earliest.  Most likely it will never happen.  So I wish them best of luck; just don't stand in the way of everyone else.  It's like fighting to return to horseback riding.  If you want to ride a horse, good for you.  But if you do it on the freeway, expect to get run over.

Q. What has been the reaction from county officials and the people that actually run election?

I think they have been stunned by this technology.  I see people with their jaw down and they say, "I just don't believe it."  Sometimes they tell us that it can't be right--it's too easy.  I love that reaction.  But mostly the reaction has been positive.

There are a few people that are problematic.  I'd like to talk about them a bit.  We noticed that several election officials came by and looked at it and their reaction was more or less, "that's cute."  Cute?  Are you nuts?  

It does amaze me that some election administrators have absolutely no intellectual curiosity.  They aren't leaders in my mind.  How can you lead your profession when you don't follow the trends and know what is happening in your industry?   Many of them feel that this isn't worthy of being seen since they can't buy anything anyway.  I don't get that.  This isn't like not going around to a new car lot because you can't buy a new car.  I understand that.  But this is about being on top of what is happening in your field; and if you can't do that, what does it say about you knowledge of the your profession?  Not much, I'm afraid.  And I noticed there are quite a few administrators that approach this with that mentality and that's a shame.

Q. What about those who see it and ask, "Is it certified?"

Well, again they should know the answer to that question.  By merely asking that question they show they don't know their own business.  No it isn't certified.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't work.  That doesn't mean it won't someday be a force in this industry.  So I don't much care for that question if it is a way to dismiss any further investigation.  It's like looking at an experimental solar or electric car and asking if it has all of its DOT certifications. No, but it might someday if you listen and learn and care about it.

We want state officials and election administrators to HELP US get it certified.  Go tell your state officials you WANT this voting system.   We want to hear from states that want something better.  Look, if you think the voting industry has a great reputation because of Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S, then fine -- you get the voting systems you deserve.  But the truth is that your job is immensely harder because these firms have not done a great job.  I know they are in a tough spot, but in many cases they have been their own worst enemy.

Q. One last question before we go.  You say that this systems allows you to see how the marks were interpreted by the computer.  Does that prove that my vote was counted as I see it?

That's a great question.  It is true that it DOES show you how the machine interpreted your marks.  That is, you can see on the screen how well it did.  If it's perfect, that's the way it should work.  If there is something amiss you can re-vote a new ballot.  But let me address this idea of proving how your vote was counted.  I hear a lot about verification.  The truth is that NO SYSTEM can PROVE to you that your vote was counted accurately in the final tally.  And I mean NO SYSTEM.  Not even the much adored hand counted paper ballots (counted in the precinct) will do this.  You have to think it through a bit, but not even that can provide the assurances you want.  Part of this has to do with the idea that the vote is secret.  That means that after it is cast I am divorced from my vote.  So how can I verify it in the final count?  Now there are all kinds of cryptographic solutions and I even have one of Dr. Chaum's mylar "receipts".  I treasure it since it will never see the light of day, but frankly none of these systems will do what they claim.  If I had time I'd work it up as a mathematical proof (yes, I used to teach mathematical logic), but it would take too much time and I don't have the energy to do that.  But be that as it may, all such attempted systems will fail, and none of them have a snowball's chance of actually being sold to election jurisdictions.  It's a dead end and a waste of effort.

So NO, when you view the screen and you see that what is on the screen matches what you hold in your hand, that is NOT PROOF that your vote will accurately get placed in the final tally.  But, again, and I can't stress this enough, NO SYSTEM DOES.  Many have tried, all will fail.  But it should provide more confidence about the counting than any optical scan system.

Ask yourself a simple question.  Are you happy with the status quo in elections?

If not, then you should at least consider digital pen voting.