E-Voting Reform In an Out Year? 218
An anonymous reader writes "Most of us know the many problems with electronic voting systems. They are closed source and hackable, some have a default candidate checked, and many are unauditable (doing a recount is equivalent to hitting a browser's refresh button). But these issues only come to our attention around election time. Now is the time to think about open source voting, end-to-end auditable voting systems and open source governance. Not in November of 2012, when it will, once again, be far, far too late to do anything about it." It'll be interesting to see what e-voting oddities start cropping up in the current election cycle; Republican straw polls have already started, and the primaries kick off this winter.
Yes, this works, quite well in fact. (Score:4, Informative)
This is how CT does it. You bubble in the form, feed it to the machine, and if there's a close race, they pull out all of the paper ballots and recount manually.
Additionally, the state picks a few towns and a few offices at random, and has people from other towns come in and hand count the results to make sure no BS has occurred.
Needless to say, we don't get many claims of election fraud in this state.
I helped with both forms of recount, one where some guy lost by 10 votes, and one random audit. On the recount, the difference between the hand and machine counts was a single vote (which is actually amazing considering how many X'ed the bubble, checked it, or otherwise failed to read the directions). On the audit, the difference was 3 votes. Both left a margin of error of 0.1%, which is pretty damn close to perfect. Multiple recounts may be needed if someone wins by 0.1%, but that's pretty damn rare. (The guy who lost by 10 votes lost by 10/1300ish).
It's really not that hard to keep elections honest, the people just need to demand it, everywhere.
Re:Fortunately they are easy to identify, (Score:3, Informative)
If you are required to show ID when you vote then the only valid ID should be a voter card they issue you free of charge when you register to vote.
The reason that Republicans want you to show ID when you vote is to suppress the voting of people who are more likely to vote for Democrats. The level of voter fraud, that is people who are not eligible to vote voting, is so minuscule in this country it's not an issue. In Ohio in 2004 they looked for that and only found 4 out of millions of votes. Yes it could effect an election that comes down to 1 or 2 votes but how often does that happen?
Here in Oregon where all elections are vote-by-mail our "ID" is our signature on the outer envelope of the ballot. The inner envelope is generic and once they verify your signature against the digitized signature they got from your registration they separate the two envelopes. We have very few election problems in this state.