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California to Require Paper Voter Receipt
DDumitru writes "Wired reports
that California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will require all electronic
voting systems be equipped with a voter-verifiable paper receipt. This receipt
will not be retained by the voter, but deposited at the polls and may be used
to audit electronic election results.
All new voting system installed after July 1, 2005 must include the new printers.
Existing systems, including the systems already installed in four counties must
be retrofitted by July 2006.
It looks like the public outcry about Diebold and other voting equipment manufacturers
has been heard, at least in a very major market for these machines in the US.
It should be very difficult for other states to not follow suit."
the point isn't that people will get the receipt and double-check it. although that will be a nice side-effect.
the point is that we'll have a complete paper record of who voted for who. the system will be accountable for its results instead of just numbers in an access database that could have been tampered with.
that's what "paper trail" means.
prof.hojo.
my site.
This is pretty much the way San Mateo County voters have been voting for years. We use black markers to connect two dark lines for the candidate we want, and then feed our ballots into an optical scanner which records our votes. It's a simple, elegant solution.
It's surprising that this technology hasn't gotten more media attention. People following the news would think the only three ways to vote are old voting machines, punch cards and DRE!
However, there are some differences between the American and Canadian electoral systems. Please remember, the US Constitution explicitedly puts the responsibility for conducting elections in the hands of the states, for example Section 4, Clause 1 on the election of Senators and Representatives. Furthermore, as witnessed in the last election, we use an Electoral College to pick the President. The selection of the Electoral College members is decided by the individual states. So the Federal government cannot mandate a uniform ballot. (Your statement also ignores the fact that most, if not all, localities use the national elections as opportunities to decide local issues that require some customization of the ballot.)
To do what you propose, while it has merit, would require a Constitutional amendment. One that is not likely to be passed because the states would have to give up some of their power.
"The receipts than allow for a recount to be done later if there is some doubt about the machine's accuracy or if the machine crashes."
Like hell they do. They're receipts, which means the voter leaves the polling place with them in hand. That makes them even less reliable than the machines we're talking about. As soon as the state asks for receipts to come back for a recount, each party will turn in a half a million such receipts they "found" somewhere.
This new law requiring these machines to print receipts is nothing more than feel-good legislation that accomplishes nothing. The machines are still the only word you have on who got how many votes, and they're still using the old, buggy software that local governments aren't even allowed to see, let alone fix. Everybody here who's posting "Hey, they finally fixed it!" is going along with the carrot these politicians are dangling in front of the voters' noses while ignoring the pork-barrel politics that's paying for these machines to begin with.
All the problems of mechanical voting machines, none of the advantages of physical mechanisms, for more money. And somehow spitting out a piece of paper is supposed to fix this?
Yes, exactly.
To elaborate: in the US and in many other countries, republicanism is the mechanism of democracy. We are both (in theory) a republic and a democracy -- a republican democracy, or a democratic republic (that latter term, unfortunately, having been recently hijacked by some very undemocratic republics.) Anyone who says "the US is a republic, not a democracy" and thinks it proves something is an idiot.
Examples of undemocratic republics: USSR, China, Cuba, Iraq (yes, still), Iran, North Korea, etc. The list of unrepublican democracies is shorter, but includes countries such as the UK, Japan, and Sweden. If the grandparent poster and those like him had to give up one -- republicanism or democracy -- I wonder which he would choose?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Ah, the old false dichotomy between a democracy and a representative republic. The US is, of course, both. Check your dictionary.
...
But the electoral failure three years ago was a result of something else that few people other than historians ever mention: The US Electoral College was in fact set up by the Founding Fathers as an explicit check on the power of the masses. They were afraid of a popular demagogue winning an election and overthrowing the established order. Not an irrational fear, as illustrated by several cases in the 20th century where this happened in some other countries. So they devised that peculiar scheme whereby the voters choose "electors", presumably well-to-do members of the established parties, and those electors then decide amongst themselves who should be the president. This system can overturn the wishes of the masses, and that's exactly what it was designed to do.
In this case, it did have some help from a court that ordered a halt to the vote counting, so that one state could "choose" the desired set of electors. This is something that the Founding Fathers apparently didn't anticipate, and has thrown a major monkey wrench into the works. But this isn't the first time; check out the 1876 election for a precedent. ("Rutherford Tilden election" is a good set of keywords for a search site.)
Now we have the have the phenomenon of new voting equipment being widely installed, from a company whose CEO has brazenly promised one party that he can deliver states to them in the next election. Information about this equipment supports his claim fully.
So maybe we can truly remove the US from the list of democracies
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
What do you think democracy is?
Look, there's a bunch of people who insist that "government types" is like something out of Sid Meier's Civilization. You get Despotism, Communism, Republicanism, Democracy, et al, and they're all contradictory.
This is not true. Most of these are measures, or they describe a constitutional arrangement. For example, a monarchy and a republic are opposites (or rather, mutually exclusive), however, a republic can be democratic, communist, or a whole host of other things. Indeed, a monarchy can be democratic.
Confused? The latter sounds impossible?
A Democracy is a regime where the legislature is answerable to the governed. This is currently the case in the United States and a whole host of other countries. The US achieves this by having a directly elected congress and, currently, a directly elected senate. Thus, both are answerable to the people, and as a law cannot be passed without being approved by both houses, it furfills the definition of democratic. "Aha", I pretend to hear you cry, "But the US also has a constitution with a bill of rights in it preventing laws from being passed that the people's representatives might be in favour of!" Well, sure, but it's a constitution that can be changed, again, by the people. There's no office that can veto changes to the constitution, and currently, with constitutional changes requiring the consent of bodies (states, senate, etc) that are all answerable to the governed, it remains democratic.
Does this mean that the US is not a Republic? Far from it. Indeed, even Britain and most of the other European monarchies are democratic, because, for now, those monarchs have agreed to let their elected legislatures be responsible for all lawmaking, and the executives in those countries, however formed, are bound by those laws.
Thus, a "Representative Republic" is not an opposite of a democracy, it is a democracy.
People tend to think that democracy means more than it actually does. I regularly read people who think that democracy means "rule by plebicite" or some other such nonsense. Bollocks.
Further, I also read a lot of too-clever-for-their-own-good types who propose that America isn't democratic because they read the Federalist Papers and, boy howdy, those papers say it's a Republic and not Democratic. Well, sure. And back in the late 1700s, there were no guarantees that individual states would be democratic, and the constitution left the choice of how to appoint Senators up to the states.
The world has moved on since then. Senators are now directly elected. No states are undemocratic. The US is currently a democracy, and thanks to the 14th Amendment, that's going to be difficult to change except by changing the current constitution.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Too labor intensive. Columbus, OH where I live often has problems finding enough poll workers. Ballots can be very large when you have races for municpal, state, and federal offices (judges, county engineer, auditor, dog catcher, council, reps, executives - its a long list) plus ballot isues to deal with.
FreeSpeech.org
If you want to see a really clever electronic voting system, check out VoteHere. They use paper receipts that basically records a hash of your vote, so your receipt cannot prove to anyone who was not looking over your shoulder when you cast the ballot what that vote was, but still allows you to prove that your vote has/has not been changed after the polls close. As VoteHere points out, authoritative paper receipts really just turn the machine into a very expensive pencil, when they offer the potential to do so much more.
By the way, I have no ties to VoteHere, I've just been studying electronic voting a lot lately.
For more info, see http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
Of course, this system has weaknesses, as will any system which enforces both authenticity and anonymity, but even if it cannot be protected against all attacks, it at least lets you know when an attack is happening, which is a huge step up from most paper and even electronic systems.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Anything required by California is almost de facto a national standard. It probably isn't worth it for voting-machine manufacturers to make two different models, one for sale to CA and one for sale to other states.
You see this in lost of industries: low- and zero-emission vehicles are available nationwide primarily because CA required them. And that's why the banking lobby fought so hard against privacy regulations in CA: because if they had to redo their IT systems for CA, then basically it becomes available to their customers in all states. Cheaper to do it for eveyone than just people in one state.
Democracy = government rule by majority vote of the people
republic = government rule by a select group, can be elected by the people or not.
I agree in principle with what you are saying, but most people who make a point of saying the US is not a democracy are basing on that majority rule concept. A lot of people think that if the majority wants it, it should be law... whereas there is no such principle in the country and ample evidence that is what the founding fathers were trying to avoid.
As far as unrepublican democracies, how is the UK a democracy? All legislative power is in the house of commons which is elected by the people. The people have no power on their own. Further, the queen can become a de facto dictator if the need exists.
I don't really know anything about Sweden or Japan. With such a small population, I wouldn't be surprised if Sweden could pull it off. Japan however... I dunno.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
How do you know it says the right thing? Well, uh, you look at it before you drop it in the ballot box. That's why it's called a "voter-verifiable" paper audit trail. If Alice is running against Bob and you want to vote for her, the machine gives you a piece of paper and you make sure it says "I vote for Alice" and not one that says "I vote for Bob".
RTFP/RTFM. You can't do vote-buying with the vote-here scheme, because the receipt doesn't say who you voted for. The receipt just shows a cryptographic hash of your vote that you can use to confirm that the vote didn't change. You can verify that the hash corresponds to the vote you intend in the voting booth, but once you leave the poll, there's no information left to prove who you voted for. The ballot remains anonymous, and your vote is secret.
The vote-buying schemes you describe are *exactly* what VoteHere's system is designed to avoid.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your