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I live in Wake County, NC. I pay my county taxes and as a benefit I get the North Wake Multi-Material Drop Off Site.

http://www.wakegov.com/recycling/business/multimaterialdropoff.htm

Why should I be paying another tax when I already have this?

For this election, I started last week doing the deep research on everything from my House representative to the county soil & water conservation board. I went to the county's board of elections page and downloaded the composite ballot - to find out who was running against whom. I searched the net for information on the various candidates, focusing on articles in preference to the candidates' own web sites. I look for endorsements by newspaper editors - because they have been following the issues very closely. They typically document their rationale as well, giving me some more context for making the decision on my own. I look for fair-minded judges, not those who have an agenda plastered over their campaign web sites. I look for candidates aligned with my ideals, and I look for experience relevant to the job. If I'm not sure how to vote, I think of people I know whose opinions I respect (an attorney for a clerk of court recommendation, for example), and ask them. It took me about 3 hours to research 18 contests on the ballot - 10 minutes each, on average - not a bad investment for a quality government, I'd say.

If your county doesn't have the composite ballot on the web site, the daily paper probably publishes a voters' guide on Saturday before the election, oft times including that composite ballot. If you can't plunk down the $0.50 for the paper, the local library will have one and will be able to tell you which issue has the collected information. The librarian will also have a host of other ways to research the issues.

The way I see it, our founding fathers, our ancestors, and our military through today fought hard for us to have the right to vote. We owe them a few hours every other year to do our part for a good government.

Because it makes fraud a lot harder!

Here is a report (big PDF) on threat models against elections, from the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security (includes Bruce Schneier).

They look at what it takes to alter enough votes to swing a statewide election, and rank the difficulty by the number of people who would have to be "in on" the conspiracy.

If you have a machine with no paper trail, or if the paper trail you have is not audited, then only one person is needed to swing the election - to plant a Trojan in the voting machine software.

If you have a paper trail that's randomly audited, and any centralized storage of the voted ballots is secure enough, you need a pretty big conspiracy to swing a statewide election (you'd need at least one person at a whole bunch of precincts).

They go on to describe countermeasures that can be used to thwart or mitigate suck attacks - interesting read. I'm proud to say that my county has most of them implemented.

In NC, each county has been able to choose what voting system to use, as long as it meets certain state requirements. For example, here in Raleigh, since the early '90s, we've used paper ballots that are optically scanned . In Charlotte, they use touch screens. Out of 100 counties, the majority are optical (48) and direct record electronic (DRE - 40). A few counties use punch cards (6) paper ballots (3) and some still use the old lever voting booths (3). There are over 8 different manufacturers used, Diebold being used in 20 counties, most of them small.

In the 2004 election, some of the smaller counties (don't recall which) had lost votes and other discrepencies, so this legislation was passed in August mostly a result of that.

• A shiny, new touch-screen (or whatever technology) machine is used by the voter to pick candidates.
• This machine does NOT count the votes. It prints out a human-readable, machine-scannable ballot.
• The voter looks over this ballot, then runs it through a scanner into a ballot box.
• The scanner counts the votes and reports instant election-night results.

This way, we have the ease of use of touch-screen machines, the audit trail of paper ballots, and insurance that the paper ballot matches voter intent. For extra paranoia, have the touch-screen frontend also count votes, ensure that the optical scanner and the frontend are made by different companies using no common software, and investigate any statistically significant differences in count between the two.

To save money on new scanner development, we could even use existing scanners like the ones my county uses.

Of course, this means that the touch-screen frontend only serves as a disabled-assistive and an ease-of-use device. Perhaps the money would be better spent on education to teach voters to fill in the scannable ballots directly. People with disabilities can use the age-old methods of bringing a trusted assistant along, or of requesting assistance from friendly and helpful precinct officials.

I used the Wake County website to look up Jeremy's million-dollar home. We should send him some mail and see how he likes it : )

What matters is that some voting machines have been deployed with no paper trail, which makes detecting either glitches or outright fraud impossible other than by guessing based on exit polls.

With paper ballots that are scanned by machine (like Wake County, NC's), at least it is possible to conduct a manual recount after the fact, to check up on the machine / software. Some places actually do an automatic manual recount on some small percentage of (randomly selected) precincts for this purpose.

Also, people need to have confidence in the integrity of the elections process (which these efforts help provide), or else our government has no legitimacy.