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Who's Blocking Verified E-Voting?
ClarkEvans writes "The NY Times has a great editorial today calling out the League of Women Voters for their counter-productive lobbying against verified voting. The article states that Diebold voting systems has given lots of dough to these opposition groups." There's an AP story about the issue as well.
It was on the Man Show on Comedy Central. Some of the women who came up to the booth were REALLY outraged too. It was hilarious. Only one of them (that made the edit) actually said "you're trying to end women's rights to vote?!?"
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
The nice thing with a paper ballot or vote record is that the voter can verify that their vote has been recorded correctly and we know how to secure those ballots to prevent tampering so that if there is a need for a recount it can be done.
GA is, you will recall, 100% Diebold voting machines. Which is why the loss of Max Cleland is suspecious. Leading in the immediate pre-election polls, but lost the electronic vote.
I'm a software developer with close to 20
years of experience. I was pointed to your position paper on VVPT.
Please accept my comments on your position paper.
Electronic Voting Machines and Voter-Verified Paper Trails (VVPT)
League of Women Voters
http://www.lwv.org/join/electionshava_dre- vvpt.htm l
The League of Women Voters strongly supports full and equal
voting rights for all eligible Americans, including persons with disabilities. The League also supports voter verification of ballots, including the requirement in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) whereby the voter verifies the ballot before it is cast and counted. However, the League does not support proposals for a new requirement for paper-based voter verification - the voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) system that would require Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines to provide an individual paper confirmation for each ballot for each voter to verify.
A VVPT requirement undermines voting access for people with disabilities or limited English proficiency, raises costs, fails to guarantee security, unnecessarily complicates the voting process, undermines federal certification standards, and slows the replacement of outdated voting machines.
To be clear, VVPT would require DRE equipment to print out a physical paper receipt that the voter could review and then stuff in the ballot box. These printed ballots would then be the official record of the election.
These printed ballots would:
- be printed out when the user has completed selecting all
of their choices via the DRE's touch screen interface
- would only print out the individuals selected, and thus
is very simple to understand and uncluttered
- would be printed in the language used by the DRM machine,
cross-language support on paper is quite easy
- be in large font for reading impaired and could be handed
to an election worker to read for those who are blind
- would have an encoded version of the votes via a bar-code to
make scanning in the votes for semi-automated recounts easy
- would be printed on card stock using your average laser
or inket printer; thermal paper does not last long enough
To be more concrete about this, and to make it absolutely clear what
we are discussing, there is an open source application [1] with an
on-line demo [2] that produces this sort of printed receipt [3]. Be
advised that the user interface for making the selections is not
important to this discussion, the only thing that is salient is the
final receipt printed.
[1] http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
[2] http://gyaku.pair.com/~vote/ballot2.html
[3] http://clarkevans.com/tmp/ballot-receipt.pdf
With this background, let me address your specific concerns. Before
you continue with this statements, I ask you to download the
referenced PDF file above and print this so that you can see exactly
what is being requested by the VVPT community.
* The voter-verified paper trail requirement undermines voting access. DREs make it possible, for the first time, for persons with visual disabilities or limited manual dexterity to cast secret and independent ballots.
The VVPT does not replace DREs. People would still use touch screens
to make their choices. The printed 'receipt' would be in the
individual's language and printed in a large enough font so that it is
absolutely clear.
Because DREs can be programmed in multiple languages, voters with limited English proficiency can participate fully and equally. The millions of Americans who face literacy challenges also can take advantage of the audio features of DREs to cast independent votes without embarrassment.
There is no reason why the printed receipt cannot print out results in
the voter's choice of language. During an official manual recount, it
wou
You're misuderstanding what the verifiedvoting people seem to advocate. They advocate a piece of paper that the voter verifies BEFORE putting it in the ballot box. The idea is that we have decades of experience securing paper ballots in ballot boxes, so if the voter can verify that their paper ballot is correct, they've verified that their vote is correct.
This is not the same as advocating a receipt that the voter takes home with them and later uses to verify their vote was counted correctly. As you correctly realized, this makes vote coersion possible, and was already realized to be a BAD IDEA. That doesn't keep some people from advocating it anyway.