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E-Voting Done Right - In Australia
tehanu writes "After all the furor over e-voting in America, Wired News has an article about e-voting done right in Australia. An important factor is that all of the software is open-source. The company responsible actually seems to have given consideration to the integrity of the democratic process, too - from the lead engineer: 'Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success? A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.' They also have scathing words for Diebold: 'The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections. It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.' In general they are 'gob-smacked' by the whole situation with electronic voting machines in the US right now."
This petition is the only way to guaruntee that your vote will be counted--it mandates that machine give the voter a human-readable receipt which the voter drops into a lock box in case. In the case of a recount, the paper receipts are counted. It also mandates a manual recount in .5% of districts to verify the accuracy of the machines.
The petititions are linked to at the bottom of the VerifiedVoting site.
Keep the freedom to vote.
Don't panic. It isn't on the company's website, it's on the ACT Electoral commission's website - the tar.gz is here, linked from this page.
The Austrailian ballot is where candidates (for all elections) are listed entirely on one ballot and you get to choose which candidate you want regardless of party.
It may bewilder some people that before the 1920's when you went to vote, a member of the Republican or Democratic party stood outside your polling in place and handed you a "Republican" or "Democratic" ballot. Said ballot would have only the party nominations for President, Senator, House Representatives, State Governor, State Senator, etc. As a result you "voted the party line."
The Austrailian ballot was introduced between the 1920s and 1940s in the US (different municipalities adopted it at different times). It changed US politics because now people could vote for a Democratic President but a Republican Senator. One major result is that since WWII there have been very few times when the party of the president coincided with the majority party of Congress. In fact the Bush administration which has had a Republican Congress for most of the three years it has been in office is an exception not a norm.
Foreign readers might also be interested in checking out the Australian preferential voting system. This is, in my opinion, a much fairer system than the "first past the post" system of the UK or US. In the preferential system, votes for minority candidates are never wasted as the vote cannot be split. This would be especially valid for a presidential system as in the US. For more details, check out: http://www.australianpolitics.com/voting/systems/p referential.shtml
In most elections that I have witnessed in Canada, either municipal, provincial, or federal, there is ALWAYS a paper trail. I mark my ballot with a big fat X in the appropriate spot on a voting card.
Then the magic begins: the cards are each fed, as collected, into a vote counting machine. The ballots are held in the case a recount (automated or manual), and the results are known just as soon as it takes to communicate the results from each of the machines at each polling station.
We usually have the final, _official_ results within an hour or two of the poll closing time, and you can always go back to the paper ballot to verify the count. And who the heck has a hard time with a piece of paper and a pencil?
No hanging or dimpled chads here, and this to me seems the best of both worlds - technology aiding the speed of vote-counting (isn't that what this is all about, anyway?), but with the safeguards (and transparency) of a manual voting system.
The answer to your question is no. The technical legal reasoning for this is below. The practical reasoning for this follows. There is only one federal election: President(*). That election only occurs every 4 years. Creating a federal agency and bureaucracy just for that is pretty ridiculous. Because local elections happen several times per year (at least in my district, school elections are held in April, and general elections in November), the local election boards are much better equipped to run the presidential election.
*(Legal Reason) Because of the way the electoral college operates, the presidential election is technically a state level election. When you vote for president, you are actually voting for your state's electoral college members, who will then vote for their party's choice for president when the electoral college vote formally takes place in January. The constitution mandates that states shall select electoral college members in ways that the respective state legislatures shall establish. Obviously, for all states, this method is popular vote. In most states, the winner of the popular vote takes all the electoral votes, but there are a few states where the electoral votes are proportional to the popular vote (Maine and I think one other that I just cant recall right now). Anyway, because of that clause in the constitution (Amendment.. 12? or 16?), the states are essentially responsible for the presidential election.