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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.
if diebold CEO is still promising (and meaning it) to deliver W..
Oh, wait.
The printer was delayed until AFTER the next major election.
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?
Will Diebold voting machines should now carry warnings that state, "This voting machine contains technology known by the State of California to be harmful to Democracy"?
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.
I see two possible scenarios which make this an unrealistic solution:
(1) The receipt includes a voter ID and the results of their vote. This totally violates the anonymity of the voting process but does allow for counting.
(2) If the receipts include no voter ID but just some form of transaction ID, then why print them off at all? Just run some report at any point during the voting process to see the tally? Why not? If the voting system is compromised, then there is no way to ensure the paper votes with the transaction id, generated from the compromised system can be trusted either.
As I see it, this solution does not add value without removing rights.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
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.
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
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.
...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.
With traditional paper voting, you keep the piece of paper in your hand until it's in the box. The only visual verification is that somebody saw you put a piece of paper in the box. Any piece of paper, it doesn't matter. When the votes are counted later, if your vote is disqualified, then no-one knows you did it.
With this system, the votes are printed and visible to you. If you're going to complain that the machine stuffed up, you have to tell someone. This person will ask you who you voted for, and will want to verify that the printout contains another candidate's name. Once they've verified that your candidate and the the one on paper are different, some action will be taken to fix the machine. But by then, the official will know how you intended to vote. Your vote is no longer anonymous.
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.
Or you could dig a tunnel under the vote station and use a saw to make a hole under the box where all the paper votes are kept. Then when a paper gets fed to the box, you will take it and replace it with another vote of your liking. Don't forgot to wear a tinfoil hat during the operation.
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.
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
I've voted in every election in the last fifteen years and have yet to wait in line at a polling place.
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.