Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals 363
An anonymous reader writes "In an new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation they say that paper trails increase costs and can actually reduce the chances a voters' choices are accurately counted. Congress is considering a 'Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2007,' which would mandate 'voter-verified' paper audit trails."
Who are these people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who are these people? (Score:2, Insightful)
CC.
Worthless article (Score:5, Insightful)
As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say, just that they will publish a paper really soon now. News at 11.
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The voter marks the ballot paper with a pencil. The ballots are counted by hand by human beings.
Completely transparent, complete audit trail, safeguards against all the failure modes discovered over the decades, results within hours, recounts within hours if needed.
Oh, and I expect it's cheaper than all this inappropriate mucking around with computers too. Computers aren't the answer to everything. This is one application in which they have no place.
Paper trails have the proven track record (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Not end to end. I can't do cryptography decryption in my head, and the vote verifier at the other end, he can't also do decryptions in his head. So any solution that involved cryptography isn't end to end.
2. One doesn't preclude the other. You can encrypt the electronic vote AND STILL HAVE THE PAPER AUDIT TRAIL to check the machine's cryptographic vote matches the voters intentions.
3. Papertrails, or ballots as we use to call them, have a proven track record of uncovering fraud in voting. To date the fraud in electronic voting is suspect but unproven. It is unlikely that fraud is eliminated in electronic voting, because fraud is *easier* not *harder* to do when votes can be changed so easily and untraceably on mass in a computer. So the lack of uncovering fraud is likely to be a weakness in the auditability of these machines. i.e. we suspect voter fraud because of systematic irregularities in key districts, but nothing can be proved because the lack of paper trail to verify against.
Why does he want unauditable machines? I see from his history that he's a professional technology lobbyists, but I'm curious why the FUD to keep the voting machines unauditable?
Crikey (Score:3, Insightful)
Im shocked. Really.
Up next - 'Republican Party publish report saying the the Republican Party is better than the Democrats'?
The Perfect is the enemy of the Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there is no perfect solution. We only have adequate solutions.
Condorcet voting is mathematically better than simple tallies or "instant runoff" voting. But does anyone except mathematicians comprehend it? Would switching to it increase our confidence in voting or would people be suspicious and trust voting even less?
Paper is adequate. And what's better, it is something that mere mortals understand. And the attack vectors for paper are reasonbly well understood after more than a century of use of the "Australian" ballot style that we all use today.
The proposal by this group opens the door to FUD and infinite delay, and thus infinite retention of flawed DRE voting machines. Diebold would win, democracy would lose.
It is easily solvable (Score:2, Insightful)
It is not hard to make a voter-verifiable paper-trail voting system. Publish a database of election results that includes a unique ID generated by the voting machine for each vote. Also print that ID on a paper receipt that the voter can take home after voting. Then the voter can verify via the internet if the vote was tallied with the right party/candidate. And it will also be possible to verify the totals by downloading the full database and doing the sums yourself.
On the same paper receipt, the candidate/party that was voted on can be printed. But it is better to hash that information together with the unique ID and encrypt it using a private election key and then print the result on the receipt (e.g. as a hex string). This generates a voting receipt that, when decoded with the public key, is verifyably a receipt of a vote that should have been counted for that election.
Vote counting 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
There is just one simple, practical, logical rule for machine assisted voting that anyone need remeber:
A machine that prints your choice is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your choice is at best a waste of money.
Trust in voting systems is very important (Score:4, Insightful)
The likeliness that computers are capable of correctly counting 100,000 perfectly submitted votes more accurately than humans in an ideal world isn't exactly a surprise, but this isn't really the point because the world isn't ideal and it's not realistic.
Even if paper trails are slightly less accurate in the counting (something I'd dispute once factoring in less measurable quantities like corruption of officials and potential hacking), one of the most important advantages of paper trails is that they can be easily understood by virtually everyone who votes. A voter verifies their correct vote is recorded on a slip of paper, places it in a ballot box, and then the votes recorded on the papers in the ballot boxes are counted, with the process being vetted by people who have reasons to make sure it's being done properly. The entire process is completely visible and clear from start to finish.
This is quite different to voting through computer interfaces, where the ability for nearly everyone to understand ends at them pressing a touch-screen. The abstract concepts of what goes on inside the system are very difficult for most people to grasp, unless they have a relatively high education. Furthermore, very few people can verify and confirm that it's working correctly.
Trust of as much of the population as possible is of huge importance in elections, and systems with paper trails are the ones that are easiest for the majority of people to trust.
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I also do not see any reason to abandon paper-based voting, which still is not 100% secure, but much more difficult to 'hack' due to transparency by distribution of control.
CC.
They're full of shit... (Score:2, Insightful)
A proper voter-verified paper ballot system is as good as it gets when it comes to a combination of accuracy, verifiability, and accountability.
It's real simple: the voter makes his selection using, say, a voting machine. Voting machine spits out paper ballot and shows it to voter. Voter examines ballot to make sure ballot is good. If ballot is good, voter tells machine to accept the ballot and machine drops ballot into sealed box. If not, voter tells machine to reject the ballot and machine allows user to re-select candidates.
At the end of the election, the total number of paper ballots are counted and compared with the total number of people who actually came in to vote. They should match, of course. It's also compared with the total number of votes the machines recorded. That, too, should match.
You can have the machines tabulate the voting results. You can then statistically test the results of the machines by pulling a random (but sufficiently large) set of ballots from the box and manually tabulating them. But you also have the option of doing a full manual count, which is of course what you do if the statistical count shows that the machines were off. And the closer any given race is, the larger the sample has to be to get the statistical error below that of the percentage difference between the closest candidates in the race.
No purely machine-based voting system is sufficiently trustworthy to be suitable for an election. Any machine can be compromised, by the manufacturer if nobody else. That's a risk that isn't worth taking when the freedom of the country is potentially at stake.
Why the fuck do you guys need the machines? (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada gets away just fine with using paper ballots. When you vote, you use a pencil to put a check in a circle next to the name of the candidate you're voting for. The circle is large and the text is large, to allow those with poor eyesight to get a better view of what's on the ballot, thus reducing mistakes.
What's more, the results for Canadian elections are near-instantaneous. They actually have legislation in place to prevent the media from reporting about the final results in the eastern and central provinces while polling stations are still open in the west! Why the fuck can't the US manage that?
Yeah, the American population is 10 times larger than the Canadian population. But that's irrelevant! Use 10 times as many ballot counters, and the system will scale just as well.
It's a mixed situation here in Europe. Some of our nations use the sensible Canadian method. Others are stupid, and follow the American scheme with doodad voting machines and all that jibberjabber. But really, we should all just use the Canadian method. It's the best, and safest, there is.
Re:Worthless article (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest concern is not with people making a mistake in recording their votes (though this is a concern, but one which is easily correctable with a good user interface), but with machines which may be tampered with to alter the outcome of the vote.
Even the marbles-in-a-jug thing is easily falsifiable since anyone with two marbles gets two votes, let alone with a hundred marbles.
The idea is that you have to make the "authority" on which vote is which an immutable record. That is to say something which can't be changed after the vote has been cast. There's nothing in the computer world where this is the case. Not even cryptography would suffice since the voting machine does all the cryptography, and it could easily show you one cryptographically signed vote and record a different cryptographically signed vote. If it has everything it needs to do the original signing, it has everything it needs to forge the signing of different data.
This immutable authority is most easily done as a paper trail. The paper can be shown to users through a piece of glass, and once confirmed, be fed into a locked audit box. Unfortunately even this is still vulnerable to a malicious machine continuing on to forge votes between users and feeding those votes into the box. At least the machine couldn't delete existing votes, it would only be able to add to them, and that would show up as more votes registered than votes cast.
So I think the current approach is that each voter would be issued an audit card as they enter the voting booth. The machine doesn't have these, and the user feeds the card into the machine for their vote to be recorded.
Re:It is easily solvable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vote counting 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
How is your vote being printed on a piece of paper that might get lost, ignored, misread, or replaced with another better than a cryptographic receipt that must appear on the final tally or you can prove conclusivley that a validly cast vote was not counted?
Re:Paper Trails Ranked By Value (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vote counting 101 (Score:1, Insightful)
That means we can understand paper ballot rigging, and allow for it. We can't do shit about technical shenanigans (unless we're a techie).
Imagine humans as having inbuilt self-correcting error protocols for things like fiddling paper counts, and you'll understand what I mean!
Wait one minute here ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I think is problematic in the US is that there is this automatic tendency to automate tasks and thus making it difficult for the people to carry out the task. Case in point the ballots with hanging chads. Why on earth is there such a ballot? Oh yeah so that you can save a few bucks on counting the votes. But who cares that the voter has to take a Phd on casting votes.
To put this in context. India in 2004 put in electronic voting machines for 348 million people http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Frontpage/A109B59D2C4BCBA380256E9400373E62?OpenDocument [kablenet.com]
I am sure its not perfect, BUT you have to think twice about this. In a country that is mostly poverty stricken and where people can't really read they have a working democratic system and 348 million people can vote electronically. And what was the population of the US? 300 million...
No, the problem here is quite simple the American voting infrastructure. It's not the fault of the people, nor the political system, but the folks who run the voting infrastructure! They need a good "flogging."
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:3, Insightful)
3) How would that printout prove anything on how your vote is recorded, if you really wanted to mess up the machine you would display the correct results and record the wrong. If I wanted to add votes the old ways are still the best ways; get the dead to vote.
4) The giving of extra papers does nothing, except cause a whole bunch of extra receipts to be floating around. If I was forcing/bribing someone to vote my way I would just use early or mail voting and not worry about it; what states do not provide mail in absentee voting for any reason?
5) If you cannot verify what the vote was for what are you adding? Again if I am changing votes in the software I would print out everything as correct and record the vote the way I want it to be.
6) The problem here is you are giving outside people access to the list of voters, even though it is just a random ID assigned to that person. How would use keep that bar code reader up to date with the latest people who voted, wireless, rotating the readers in/out, have them connected to a network? That is a whole bunch of technology that someone would need to setup and manage. Also the main place you would want to check is after all the votes have been turned into the central location. You would be better off with systems like the blood banks use where you can call number enter a private key and get the results.
As for the encryption and giving that to the user, if I can mess up the software I can get your encryption key, and then make as many receipts as I want.
The whole point of this is that paper reciepts taken outside of the voting place are worthless except to make the voter feel good. They could not be used to verify votes, they cause a huge amount of waste and once it leaves the control of the distributing entity it is worthless for anything requiring accountability.
Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why the foolishness do you guys need the machin (Score:4, Insightful)
You think freedom can be reduced to a popularity contest?
Up until recently, America was about voting issues, not people.
Some people find it incomprehensible that an elected representative of the people would find himself trying to implement the will of the people, rather than simply assuming that the election gave him license to implement his/her own ideas. (You do hear me muttering under my breath here, yes.)
This is entirely the point of having the people vote on so much.
It has something to do with the DIY mindset that also used to be rather typical of people from the USA.
joudanzuki
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not really essential. It's just to protect against a tampered voting machine that basically doesn't record your vote at all. Even paper trails have this same limitation -- if a voter doesn't *look* at the paper, it does no good.
"3) How would that printout prove anything on how your vote is recorded, if you really wanted to mess up the machine you would display the correct results and record the wrong. If I wanted to add votes the old ways are still the best ways; get the dead to vote."
If the machine displays the correct results but records it wrong, it has to do one of two things:
1) Provide correct cryptographic proof, in which case the voting machine will have to turn in two votes for every one that goes in. A paper printer can do this too and it would be just as easy to detect.
2) Provide incorrect cryptographic proof, in which case the first poll monitor to get an invalid receipt would immediately know that this is happening.
There may be better ways to handle this. I don't recall in detail.
"4) The giving of extra papers does nothing, except cause a whole bunch of extra receipts to be floating around. If I was forcing/bribing someone to vote my way I would just use early or mail voting and not worry about it; what states do not provide mail in absentee voting for any reason?"
This doesn't affect the choice of in-person voting methods, so it's not an objection or advantage of either system. I do agree that mail in voting and internet voting present problems that are much harder to solve than these.
"5) If you cannot verify what the vote was for what are you adding? Again if I am changing votes in the software I would print out everything as correct and record the vote the way I want it to be."
Then there would be two votes going out for every one going in. The machine would have to do one of two things:
1) Not pass on the votes it printed receipts for. In which case the first poll monitor to see a receipt not in the pass on list would know this was going on.
2) Pass on both votes, in which case the first poll monitor to check the counts would see this.
"6) The problem here is you are giving outside people access to the list of voters, even though it is just a random ID assigned to that person."
How is giving outside people a list of random numbers harmful?
"How would use keep that bar code reader up to date with the latest people who voted, wireless, rotating the readers in/out, have them connected to a network? That is a whole bunch of technology that someone would need to setup and manage. Also the main place you would want to check is after all the votes have been turned into the central location. You would be better off with systems like the blood banks use where you can call number enter a private key and get the results."
You can certainly output the votes wireless or use other kinds of ways to make the voting information either publically available or available to monitors from various agencies. This is already done in most current voting systems. I agree that the type of voting system I'm discussing is not easy to implement.
Maybe you're missing the point. I'm not saying "here's the best voting system ever, let's use this". I'm saying: Here's a voting system that demonstrates a lot of things that people may not realize. For example, it shows that a cryptographic voting system can provide the same assurances a paper trail does. Here's a system that provides voter receipts so voters can be sure their votes are counted but doesn't make it possible to tell how any particular person voted.
So I am saying, your assumptions about voting are broken. If you want to be able to judge voting systems competently, the first thing you have to do is figure out w
The problem with math games (Score:2, Insightful)
We may know that (if and only if the algorithm is implemented correctly) the method works, but for the rest of the citizenry, this is asking them to put their trust in (yet another) technical priesthood.
The system has to be simple enough for anyone to see, and simple enough that anyone willing to comprehend freedom can comprehend it. It has to be visible.
Thus, the stubbed, anonymous paper ballot, the stub and the ballot going in separate, locked boxes, and each voting station accounting for every ballot received, and more than two voting judges, from different parties, present all during the setup, voting, takedown, and initial count.
It is not perfect, but it is visible, and it works.
Nothing in this world is perfect, and when you start playing cryptic cryptographic math games, it just makes part of the process invisible (opaque) to too many voters.
joudanzuki
Re:Why the foolishness do you guys need the machin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I might be able to prove it's in the final tally. You, too, might be able to prove it's in the final tally. 99% of the voting population, however, have not studied cryptography and would have to rely on an expert to check their vote (and, of course, such a system would have to be designed to make it impossible for the voter to prove to someone else which way they voted).
An election is only democratic if the electorate is able to trust it. If I have a magic wand I wave and then pronounce the results, it doesn't matter if I am 100% accurate, because no one will trust it. And they shouldn't trust it, because there is nothing stopping me from simply making up the result.
In a paper election, anyone who doesn't trust the system can observe the entire procedure. They can watch the ballot box, from the point they enter their vote, watch the counting, and watch the reporting. Verification is not limited to the technorati, it is available to every single voter. This is why paper voting remains superior.
Re:Vote counting 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic protocols of manual counting have been tried and tested for well over 100yrs. They are not perfect and are suscepible to "retail fraud" (eg: box stuffing, stand over tactics, ect), ANYTHING that can tie an individual to a particular vote opens the door to stand-over merchants. What is worse is that ANY counting machine is suceptible to "wholesale fraud" (eg: one person + one point of attack = flip an entire election any way you want).
The old fashion system is fast, efficient, auditable, well understood and extensively tested - most importantly the human counters MISTRUST each other by design. Before you reinvent the wheel try googling for "election observers" or "secret ballot".
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is easily solvable (Score:4, Insightful)
WHY do people keep bringing up this corruption-laden idea of a take-home receipt with your vote printed on it, or some other way of verifying your vote outside the polling place?
As has been stated repeatedly here and elsewhere, taking home a receipt opens the floodgates for corruption. "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, and I'll pay you $10!" "Bring me a vote for Candidate XXX, or you might suffer an 'accident' in the near future."
You verify the paper ballot in the privacy of the voting booth; once verified, the ballot drops into a secure ballot box and serves as the permanent record of your vote. No name, no identifying information is on the ballot, and NO RECEIPT.
Re:Vote counting 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
Paper voting is by and large the most secure form of voting in existence. But if we must have electronic results, then we must have a paper trail.
No matter what level of security you apply to the system, it can and will be defeated. As long as everyone checks their paper ballot before turning it in, it doesn't matter how it gets printed, just that it does.
Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines? (Score:5, Insightful)
Political parties are a big part of the problem here in the states. The framers of our constitution did not anticipate the rise of political parties, and George Washington spoke against them [state.gov] in his farewell address. The two major parties here in the US have consolidated power and intentionally impeded the ability additional parties to have any influence in elections or legislation.
One good example of this is the current rule on filibustering [wikipedia.org] which has made the process to a simple administrative chore requiring a 60% vote to break. No longer can one man halt all other activity against the will of even his own party and stand for what he knows is right. Another good example is the change to eligibility requirements and governance of the presidential debates. Where previously the League of Women Voters [wikipedia.org] maintained a fair and open debate process, now the Commission on Presidential Debates [wikipedia.org], an organization controlled by corporate sponsors [debates.org], has created minimum eligibility requirements [debates.org] that include a 15% share of the popular vote "as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations." This puts the requirements out of the reach [votefraud.org] of third party candidates who need the national exposure that the debates would give them to garner that much popular support.
The last reference above has a great comment from Alan Keyes [renewamerica.us] that I feel deserves inclusions here.
Re:What do you expect ? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's about the SCALE of the fraud and TRUST in sys (Score:3, Insightful)
Any hypothetical electronic system, no matter how secure, is vulnerable to basically _universal_, unauditable fraud by a tiny number of conspirators in the right place - as low as 1. Any kind of cryptographic system can be defeated by the guy who actually controls where the actually-compiled source code - and the COMPILER source code - came from. Even in an OSS system, it's awfully hard to prove that's really the source that's being compiled and that it's being done by a fair compiler.
That's a big difference, and it's an innate, immutable difference. Paper is highly decentralized because much of the population can read. ANY computer system is highly centralized - even if you have perhaps 10 sets of voting machines, that's at best 10 major code trees...
Your worst-case scenario with a paper vote can be a conspiracy on the counting side - which is already done by members of both parties together. So the only way to have this work out is if you also stuff the observers of the OTHER party with conspirators.
The other way requires a pervasive box-stuffing campaign across a wide array of precincts right in the face of bipartisan election judges.
In both cases, you can basically only pull this off in an area where the government is pretty much universally and tightly controlled by one group. A good example is the original Daley's regime in Chicago (Daley per se may not have... ) Note, however, that if THOSE people were elected to the part where they tightly control the government, chances are the voting populace would vote for a similar candidate in that area.
And the risk of those conspirators going to jail is still relatively high.
As theRaven64 said - the important thing about a paper vote is that it's transparent to everyone.
I'll go a step further and say that we as a country are not capable at this time of commissioning a fair electronic voting standard - currently we can't even manage a "not-obviously-retarded" electronic voting standard. Asking election officials to manage cryptographic standards is in practice outsourcing our democracy to a handful of large self serving partisan corporations, because that's how technology tasks are done. The government does not have a good track record of accomplishing either security or transparency in tech projects.
Finally, note that THE reason electronic voting is _theoretically_ used is to provide faster counts. If you treat it like it should be - as a precount - it could easily be used to give a really fast estimate of the votes.
I think this is the key: (Score:3, Insightful)
Paper trail limitations: they require other equipment or groups of people to count them for audits or recounts.
Other technology: you have to rely on the original equipment to report the results correctly the first time. This is cheaper and more accurate, as your results are always the same.
Re:Yet again ... (Score:3, Insightful)
You enter your options on a screen, and it prints your ballot out for you, and a barcode with a checksum. The ballot is read optically (like it often is now), and the checksum is verified. No match, it's counted by hand.
A system like this ensures no hanging chads, etc. It's 100% verifiable by the voter. The paper trail is just as good as the current system, and can be fully counted by hand. It's impossible for the voter to prove which way he voted; if he takes the ballot with him, it wasn't counted. If the system goes down, it can be marked by hand.
A system like this also has the benefit of being able to use slightly cheaper ballots (make them a little smaller, and have a booklet explaining the options in more detail - i.e. The ballot says "Prop 300 - Yes, No", and the screen and booklet have explanations). The use of a computer allows for more detailed explanations of voting options, the ability to use high-contrast/large fonts, candidate pictures, multiple languages, and audio announcing for the visually impaired - providing them a truly secret ballot should they so wish. Yes, they would have to choose between "auditable" and "secret", but that's still one more option than they have now. The checksum could ensure 100% reliable scanning for all automatically scanned ballots, and with the appropriate protocols (set before opening by at least two parties that distrust each other), it can make introduction of foreign ballots near-impossible. The system can be easily audited - if you want to know if your ballot was marked correctly, look.
It doesn't address dead people voting, nor poll workers collusion allowing multiple voting by the same person. Also, if the system is fully "open source", collusion by the poll workers potentially allows for the introduction of additional ballots. Of course, all of this can be said for the current system, too. As such, in a worse case scenario (failed/compromised machine), it's just as [in]secure as our current system.
Cheaper (less printed material, and less time spent [re]counting), faster, more reliable, more accessible, harder to cheat, 100% voter verifiable, and absolutely no less secure than our current system even in a worst-case scenario. It's no wonder politicians (and Diebold) don't want a system like this.
The problem is like this (Score:5, Insightful)
Also remember that it's not enough to hold on for it for 5 minutes. You must hold on to it all the way to the recounts, at least. If you just prove before leaving that the machine still has your vote, then there's not thing to say someone can't flip the votes in the database later.
The problem is this: any proof of how you voted, can be used for electoral fraud by itself. E.g.:
- Someone else can demand that proof that you voted for their candidate, or else. Let's say Don Corleone, the respectable head of the local mafia group, is running for mayor. If you have your ticket that you can check at a terminal, then so can Don Corleone's goons for you. It makes an electoral racket as simple as a protection racket. You know, you only have one kneecap in each leg, it would be a shame if that were to change. Show your ticket proving that you voted for Don Corleone, and you have our "protection" so it doesn't.
- Outright buying votes. Let's say I've won the lottery jackpot and want to be governor. Or just mayor. It's as this: everyone who shows me a ticket proving that they've voted for me, gets 100$, no questions asked. (And I'll store the crypto token on a database of my own, of course, so several people can't come with the same ticket.) In fact, let's turn up peer pressure a notch: if you can also prove that your spouse (if applicable) and at least one parent or child of voting age also voted for me, you get an extra 100$. You know, just to have old retired moms call their sons and do the "you won't even do that for me?" sobbing act.
- Pure social pressure. E.g., if you're a student still living with your parents, whoppee, they can control who you voted for. You know, under the old principle of, "as long as you're in _my_ house, you'll do what _I_ say, young man. Now let's go to a terminal and you'll prove to me that you voted as I told you to." E.g., if you want to keep working at my office, better "voluntarily" prove that you voted for my favourite candidate.
Etc.
Yeah, I'm sure _you_ would bravely stand your ground, stick to your ideals, and never betray the sanctity of the free democratic voting. Maybe. But considering that elections have been won by a 0.1% lead before, the funny thing is: you don't need to get _everyone_ to cooperate.
Some of those aren't even easy to legislate against. E.g., how would you legislate against parents demanding to see their 21 year old son's ticket?
So, no. Please don't do that. The important thing about votes isn't just that they're counted, but also that they're secret and hard to influence. The moment all that remains is that they're counted, but someone can easily influence the voters and/or check what they voted... well, you might as well not bother pretending it's a democracy any more.
Re:It's about the SCALE of the fraud and TRUST in (Score:4, Insightful)
Suddenly your printed receipt is absolutely worthless. Sure, you can rest easy the system correctly registered your vote, but it's the master counting system, and the values it receives, that matters.
Paper ballots require a massive concerted effort with hudreds, or even thousands of conspirators. With Electronic voting, since the code is closed (and even if it was open, we can't ensure that's the code they used in the final machine), it takes one manager with an agenda and a handful of hand-chosen coders to implement it.
There may be a way around this, but I sure as hell don't know what it is.
Re:Yet again ... (Score:2, Insightful)
And an even better one than that: vote by mail. [washingtonpost.com] Anonymous and verifiable. It also has the benefits of allowing you to vote at your leisure in the comfort of your own home, rather than having to travel and wait in line. You can even take you ballot and do some Googling on the races rather than have to look up the candidates and do your research ahead of time.
Vote By Mail People! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody registered to vote, gets checked, then mailed their ballot to their address on file. Signature checks, collected at the DMV, are used to validate votes. Votes are mailed in a double secret envelope that allows verification but does not tie votes to voters.
The counting system is optical scan, is done in one location with security in place there. Audits are performed, and most importantly:
-the voter can verify their own vote
-said vote is human and machine readable
-casting of votes is distributed over time and space.
Re:Paper Trails Ranked By Value (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines? (Score:2, Insightful)
Much like Alice's cat - U.S. political parties have disappeared - leaving behind nothing but the many similar smiles of very individualistic politicians.
Anonymous Coward wrote: ... and obey the dictates of party leaders to get anything done.
This is not the case. Politicians must make alliances
-------------
If are thinking from the politicians perspective you are correct, but from the voters perspective all or most of those decisions and actions happen after the election, or - in private.
Prior to the election politicians are primarily independent or organized by money. It is true that our glorious National Committees, etc. can choose which those politicians - that have gained general election ballot status by being elected in their parties primaries - to fund. However, those conditions are not made public. If you know a source please tell me.
Quote from 1927
Here in the last generation, a development has taken place which finds an analogy nowhere else. American parties have ceased to be voluntary associations like trade unions or the good government clubs or the churches. They have lost the right freely to determine how candidates shall be nominated and platforms framed, even who shall belong to the party and who shall lead it. The state legislatures have regulated their structure and functions in great detail.
Source: American Parties and Elections, by Edward Sait published 1927 (Page 174)
Found in The tyranny of the two-party system / Lisa Jane Disch c2002
Anonymity out the window? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, as with paper or e-voting, what the final tally shows may not reflect the paper/button press you submitted. Electronic or paper, you still need to trust the vote counters OR be able to verify your vote later.
Congress should have power. Congresspeople should not.
Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why the fuck do you guys need the machines? (Score:3, Insightful)