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A few points:

- Florida did not simply use paper ballots; it used mechanical voting machines to punch those ballots.
- Paper-punching machines are needlessly complicated, opening them up to unique kinds of disruption. Their performance in Florida may have been deliberately degraded: there are allegations that substandard paper was sent to that state by a voting-machine company for use in the machines (read more here)
- In voting, the simplest is the best: paper + pencil for the voter; trustworthy citizens for the counting. This is what we use in Canada; a country of 30m people, and we are able to announce election results the night of the election. There is universal trust in the voting process - though not, I am sad to say, in politics in general :)

Ed Felten's comments on the bill can be found Here.

This standard allows 9.2% of all e-voting systems to fail in any 15-hour Election Day, and a much higher failure rate during the extended "Early Voting" periods now being implemented in many states.

stopped criminals from defrauding the 2004 presidential campaign... Given the recent recount-fraud convictions in ohio (see here, here, and here) it doesn't look like he succeeded.

Hear hear!

It's the rush to embrace electronic voting that has led to these catastrophes. In the haste, we allowed the wrong people to be in-charge of how they are used.

How many of the electronic voting systems are actually proven? How many are tamper-resistant? How many use public and openly available source code to operate?

We've already seen the results of "black box" voting. Though the jury may be out, my money is riding on, "not working in the slightest".

If the public is not allowed to understand the voting process, it is NOT a democratic vote!

Learn more here and here.

First of all, I'm from Missouri. Missouri approved a company to create touch screen voting machines to Missourians. According to Voter's Unite, one of those companies is AccuPoll - a company that is now bankrupt. The CEO of that company recently spoke out against voting machines, saying the following: I am not happy about the outcome, or the state of the industry. I think that something needs to be done. I'm not sure what it is, it probably doesn't include AccuPoll at this point, but I do not feel that any of the vendors has a system that voters can trust,"

"I think that vendors outright misrepresent the robustness, stability, and security of their systems. You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances. I also wonder why the other vendors were so adamant in fighting a VVPAT system requirement. They spent much more in fighting it than in implementing it,"

What standards do you think could be put in place that would prevent the problems, and should there be harsh penalties for the above behavior (misrepresenting security, stability, etc)?

In addition, I just read one Missourian's complaints about the voting process and the supposed paper trail. What standards do you think should be in place regarding the people volunteering at the polling stations? I do tech support for a living, and I can tell you that the average joe should not be working at these polling stations without extensive training. Do you think there should be some sort of technical certification process for voting machines? If so, what?

Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as

Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.

Voting machines with WiFi have been produced, and apparently not as a joke. The commodity hardware from Diebold includes an IRDA port.

This is what LA County is using.

Here's warts-and-all analysis.

The InkaVote Precinct Reader can be used to physically count votes. However, LA County will NOT be using them for that purpose. In LA County, the physical ballots, marked with ink dots, are the official vote. Period. End of story. The InkaVote Plus units are being used to "proofread" ballots before they get dropped into the bin.

The Reader will kick a ballot out for two reasons and two reasons only:
1.) Blank ballot. Try again, this time push down HARD on the ink stylus.
2.) Overvote. Turn in your botched ballot and get another try. However, you used up one of your three.

I don't know wtf they have reading the votes in Norwalk, where the LA County Registrar/Recorder's office is. But the vote of record is on PAPER. Not on a chip inside the reader. The version of the reader LA got is DUMB. No memory. If there needs to be a recount, it's done by humans. Reading ballots. And the way the system is set up, there is no ambiguity. A mark in the bubble is a mark in the bubble. And the new system warns about overvotes and blank ballots. You can skip a contest, it's your right. As it should be.

I'm going to be a pollworker November 7th. I went for it because of the 2000 and 2004 "Electoral Dysfunctions." I worked the primary in June and it was a grueling 13+ hour day. I was paid chickenshit for it. But it was worth it. I know that if some RoveDroid came sleazing around our precinct I would DOCUMENT IT and REPORT IT to HQs. Los Angeles, CA is not Ohio. We defend the vote here.

Why can't an electronic voting machine with a paper trail satisfy the private voting/public counting principle?

Leaving aside the Sarcasm, that's exactly what we want. Other states including New Mexico and Washington have gone this route as have many counties. In all cases its because of the demonstrated problems with voting systems. In New Mexico's 2004 election we have a perfect test case. In that year the state employed eight different systems scattered more or less randomly thuought the state. Four of these systems were optical scanners and four were paperless touchscreen or push-button DREs (Direct Recording Electronic systems). In the 2004 Presidential race it was found that votes were missing largely from minority voters. Worse yet the missing votes were in up-ticket races, noteably the U.S. Presidential Race. Typically votes are missing for down-ticket races like local judges. Interestingly enough these patternes appeared on all the paperless systems not just systems made by one company or another. Lost votes were not a problem in precincts using the optical scanners. The excess (overcounted) votes were removed because they had the paper backup.

At the risk of nagging people, this info doesn't belong just on /. It belongs in letters to our state and local elections boards (whoever actually sets the law). It belongs in local newspapers via op-eds. Other people are concerned but most of then simply know nothing about these problems. Changing opinions on this issue won't really happen here, but elsewhere.

Some choice morsels of info can be found Here, here, here, here and here