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The State of Electronic Voting in Georgia
An anonymous reader writes "The AJC is reporting on the current state of electronic voting in Georgia. The article discusses both sides of the debate and mentions Bev Harris and her work at Black Box Voting. Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
here
Some profs doubt the reliability of the proposed voting equipment (!)
I believe there has to be some secure way of implementing touchscreens. Just because we use technology it doesn't mean we have to be stepping into unknown territory. Someone needs to sit down and think up a better way of counting votes but still have it be electronic. Some of you may cringe at the thought of your vote being counted as a bit but I cringe at the thought of a human counting votes in his head.
A touch screen voting booth that lets voters select the canidates they want.
After the voter casts their vote the booth prints out a ballot that's a machine readable.
The voter checks to make sure that the canidates they selected are recorded on the ballot and feeds it into a optical reader. It's this machine that actually records the voter's vote.
The touch screen machines and the optical reader should be produced by two seprate companies and operate on different networks and they should both keep a tally. If the two systems ever get out of synch we will automatically know that a problem has occured. If such cases we can fall back on the paper ballet. Since it was laser printed it will avoid all the problems Florida judges had with hanging chads and strange marks left by stupid voters.
This way not only do we get the benifit of a machine count but a paper trail to boot.
I made a post about this in the SCDC livejournal community, which I'll quote here:
Q: So why do people want electronic voting? What are the perceived benefits?
A: Electronic voting is largely popular because of the perception that it will fix problems like those experienced in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The Help America Vote Act made tons and tons of federal money available for voting technology, and companies like Diebold rushed into production with shoddy products in order to capture marketshare.
Of course, the irony is that with paperless (read: un-auditable) machines, there is both an increased risk of vote-counting problems (as the Diebold e-mail archive demonstrates) and NO MECHANISM to recount the votes. In other words, if another Florida happens, we'll basically just have to flip a coin.
One of the most important arguments in favor of electronic voting machines is that they will enable the disabled to vote unassisted. For instance, DRE's can tell blind people the options through headphones. This is a noble goal, and it is a valid reason to want to have electronic voting machines. The thing is, why is it not sufficient to make an electronic ballot-printing machine, which then could be verified by a blind person using a simple barcode scanner, or which could be printed with raised letters? Why must the voting be completely electronic (i.e. Direct Recording Electronic)? Is it right to say that just because a blind person may not be able to verify a printed paper ballot on their own, that nobody else should be allowed to verify their votes either? There are certainly ways that ballots could be designed that would allow blind people to verify their votes without assistance, but even if this were impossible, that wouldn't be a good reason to eliminate paper ballots, it is merely an argument for machines that aid in filling out and verifying the ballots.
Finally, there are the arguments that electronic voting allows us to tally votes cheaper and quicker. My response is that we should take the time and money to get our elections right. Also, DRE's aren't more efficient at tallying our votes if they don't record our votes at all.
Unless we can build an electronic voting system that can meet these specifications before the 2004 election, I have little confidence in any vote cast using DRE's, and I recommend at least a temporary return to old-fashioned hand-written and hand-counted paper ballots.
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That is the great misconception that the pro voting machine crowd would like the public to think. But who programmed and designed them, GOD? Humans are in the process still. It is just that there efforts are more closely hidden then ever before. Any kind of mechanical counting is BY DESIGN an effort to hide vote counting from the public. It is a deliberate effort to rig the vote(or at least put the mechanism in place to easily rig it.) Even now in most states votes are not counted in public view but at the court house and anybody can tamper with the ballot box(or even outright replace it) before it reaches the court house to be counted.
Most people would be unable to check the accuracy of the programming and thus could be fooled into thinking the vote is safe. I'm not a programmer so I would have to rely on others to check on the vote and there are only so many programmers. Also would they allow me to spot check on demand? How do I know that the machine I'm using is running the same program as what was certified. If sheriff deputies can play musical ballot boxes on election day what is stopping them from playing musical hard drives or ROM chips?
Sorry give me human counters that count paper ballots AT THE POLL. Otherwise why bother to vote?
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The reason voting should always have a paper trail is because no one can make changes to 100,000 pieces of paper in three hundred different locations without some major difficulty. It would require massive manpower and a lot of time. Changing 100,000 lines in a database can be accomplished by one person in less than five minutes.
I don't trust anyone that governs me to sit the right way on a toilet seat, much less control an easily tampered file that keeps them in power.
(Apologies to Rowan Atkinson.)