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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.
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.
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.
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.
...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
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.
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.