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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."
This needs to be implemented *before* the elections next November to avoid a mess again.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Yeah right, so his company makes even more money...
But what will be counted?
The electronic votes or the printed votes.
Who says they are the same?
Who says people will even bother reading the piece of paper?
What exactly is wrong with taking a piece of paper with every candidate's name on it, and making an "X" beside your choice? This is the way things are done in Canadian federal elections, no fancy-pants touch screens or butterfly ballots or any other nonsense. Everyone gets a ballot with a standard design, from Victoria to Halifax.
Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest. If technology doesn't simplify life, what use is it?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Why does the bill allow such a long timeline? By requiring a paper trail in 2005 (not in time for the next presidentail election), the legislature is clearly saying there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Why does it not need to be addressed in time for the Presidentail election?
A year is plenty of time short of deliberate sandbagging.
I don't think that electronic voting is really an advantage over traditional methods, especially as it's so open to abuse. But if it is implemented, then at least the possibility of verifying results is now there.
I'm sure some smartass will just claim their voting receipt is different from their vote just to kick up a stink though... enough of these could throw the thing into more doubt.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
True, but at least it would be possible to hold a paper recount, which would show such a deception.
What's so hard about using a sharpie to fill in a (relatively large) bubble next to the canidate you want to vote for? Then use any computer technology you want to count the bubbles. Sounds cheaper to me. The paper trail is there, and only what needs to be automated (counting) is.
Maybe setup a few touchscreen kiosks for those who really need it. For the rest of us, I want my pen and paper.
$cat
I know it would probably create long lines at the polls, but I for one would be more than happy to wait an hour or more if I could know that my vote wasn't being rewritten by some unseen entity.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
You have to give the counties an appropriate amount of time to purchase voting machines that work this way. Not all of them have money falling out of their pockets that they can spend on brand-new voting machines (again), if they happened to recently purchase some machines without these features. Granted, those counties probably should not have purchased such machines, but if you force this on them too soon, you will get a backlash because the counties will have to pull the money from other parts of their budget.. AND that would piss voters off.
What democracy!!! Last time i looked, we lived in a republic. Wow, schools have certainly gone from bad to hopeless, when even the type of govermnent is not know. Just so we all know, the public does not directly elect the president. Its the electorial college that does that. So its possible to have candidates who have more total votes and still loose the election.
Learn the type of govermnent you have and then youll be able to properly complain about it.
later
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
You missed the point. The reason to print the receipt after each person votes rather than printing off a report later is so the voter can see the receipt and verify that the machine has correctly recorded the vote. Even if not every voter bothers to check the receipt, enough will that a malfunctioning machine will be detected. 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.
Voter: Sheriff, I just voted with that machine over there, and it said I voted for Bubba Smith.
Sheriff: Yeah, what's the problem? Don't like my cousin?
Voter: Uh, no everythin's fine. Forget it.
This is about all of the electronic voting machines (even though Diebold is most suspect) and it's about the whole country.
...as goes California, so goes the nation. Smog laws; consumer protection laws, etc. Not always, but usually. Too bad CA can't stop shooting itself in the foot when it comes to business and health care.
A paper trail is just a sanity check, and a completely reasonable way of keeping things in line.
In Iowa to vote you go inside your own booth will nothing but a pencil and a scantron sheet (like the ones you fill out on a standardized test). Fill in the circle and you're done.
Of course, the circle has to be completely filled in. But the again, if you can't fill in a circle then you probably shouldn't be voting.
Counting the votes is relatively fast. We usually know within 2 hours of the polls closing who has won.
Why do we even NEED an electronic system? What is wrong with the paper ballots?
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
That's ridiculous. It'll be easy for other states to not follow suit; what will be difficult will be for the companies who make these machines to avoid producing them with this as an option. This, as a result, will make it easier for states to follow California's example, if they are so inclined. But sticking to the status quo of electonic voting has not become more difficult yet.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The problem with this little scheme is that the printer generates a linear log of votes, and this might be used to figure out who voted for whom. There goes your anonymity. People might be afraid of retribution for voting the wrong way.
I recommend using blinded signature techniques to solve the problem. "Poll watchers" will network their computers to the voting machine, and when someone votes, their machines will sign the voter's choices through a blinding mechanism that will validate the vote. The vote will then be released to the poll watchers' machines mixed with "chaff".
The chaff would be generated prior to the vote; a large number of votes would be created, tabulated and signed blindly. Each vote broadcast on the network would be mixed with ten or so randomly chosen chaff votes. At the end of voting, the unused chaff votes would be tabulated again, the number of chaff votes cast would be calculated and subtracted from the total, giving the true number of votes cast.
California would be a difficult one to rig, even if Diebold wanted to. It would look exceedingly suspicious if it went to GWB (yes, they elected the Republican candidate for Governor, but that's a Republican who is far more liberal than Bush is.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
With one machine for every 150 voters you've got to wonder what the point of machine voting is.
Having a Represenative Republic ensures that the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys.
I might be wrong, but isn't over 50% of the population in 3 states? New York, California, Florida? In such, these 3 states COULD control the presidency, find a candidate that is willing to sell out the other 47 states and give these guys anything they want and there ya have it.
This is a great myth, but it's simply not true. Because of the electoral college and the way they vote (all votes go to one candidate even if the candidate was elected by 51%) the electoral college actually makes things worse. Consider the following (electoral votes data, census data) (assuming everyone can and does vote, doesn't matter, divide all pop numbers by 4 or whatever):
So you'd need all votes of 9 states (assuming a minority who don't are offset by a minority who do in other states).
So you'd need the electoral votes of 11 states to win. The problem here is that each state only needs to be won by 51% of the vote. You could potentially have a situation where a candidate promises half-assed to sell the rest of the country out for these 11 states, and she would win 51% of the votes in these 11 and none in the other 40 (DC). Wonder what that would look like population-wise? 83,968,838. In our current system, an election could potentially be won with 29% of the total vote! So are we assured that "the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys"? No -- not with 51% of a state winning the vote. Make it so the electoral college splits their votes according to the way the state voted, and then you have protection...
I've voted in every election in the last fifteen years and have yet to wait in line at a polling place.
-1 Paranoid or -1 Bad Solution would be more appropriate.
There's already a linear log of votes - votes at the bottom of the ballot box were turned in first. And that doesn't change - THE VOTING MACHINE DOES NOT COUNT VOTES! It just produces paper ballots with greater accuracy than previous methods. That's it. It's the paper ballots that count.
paintball
I wonder if diebold CEO is still promising (and meaning it) to deliver W..
Oh, wait.
The printer was delayed until AFTER the next major election.
Give it a rest.
EVERY elected executive-branch office in California is held by a Democrat except the new gubernator - who is a flaming liberal on all issues except partly on fiscal AND married into the Kennedy clan and advised by them.
That includes the Secretary of State who promulgated this decision.
Yes we'd ALL love to have this done in time for '04. But CA is in debt up to its eyeballs and you KNOW the election machine companies will charge extra for a rush job.
It's going to be tough enough deciding how to handle the inevitable cases where the pissed-off voter comes to the official with the ballot stub and says "HEY! This machine didn't vote it right!" without leaving the barn door open for tampering with the electronic count.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Remember that the receipt is actually a printed ballot, put into a ballot box at the polling place just like the current ballots. If the machine printed out one thing but recorded another, then during the inevitable recount (in CA a recount is automatic if the margin is less than a certain amount) they'll find a discrepancy between the results of the recount and the results reported by the machine. You start seeing that in several recounts, especially if it changes the outcome of the election, and there'll be enough of an outcry that an investigation will have to be started.
Uh, the Buchanan problem was due to a ballot designed by DEMOCRATIC election supervisors. Besides that, the flawed ballot design was not the issue in the big court battle: the counting method (or lack of one) was.
In light of the recent mistakes the bigger issue isn't for people to make sure that their vote was registered to the right candidate but to allow them to trace the behaviour of the system. It is important that the right vote is registered but I would think that systems that can't even count right would be a bigger issue. Also, the post to which I responded mayd the comment that this system wouldn't even matter if they voter didn't check their vote and that is wrong. The very fact that this provides some type of documentation over nothing, which there is now, is an important step in the right direction of holding these companies accountable. I'd much rather see an open source voting system with the source available to all, but I don't know if that will ever happen.
-or so you'd think