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."

Comments

you're missing the point

[professorhojo]

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.

I agree, but the Constitution stops it...

[MyNameIsFred]

I think paper ballots probably are the best. The process is more transparent. Although fraud can be committed with paper ballots.

...Everyone gets a ballot with a standard design, from Victoria to Halifax...

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.

Re:Democracy works?

[squiggleslash]

The United States is not a democracy, it's a Representative Republic. The distinction is important

*sigh*

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.