Florida Ruling May Lead To E-voting Paper Trail

dorkus123 points out this Palm Beach Post story which begins "An administrative law judge over-ruled an administrative decision Friday that the 15 counties that use touch-screen voting systems must be able to perform manual recounts in extremely close elections." Prior to this, counties using touch-screen voting were exempt from a requirement requiring that certified voting machines be amenable to manual recounts. wierzpio adds a link to the AP's similar story.

Comments

Paper receipt?

[mOoZik]

Why would it be so damn hard for the e-voting machines to print out a receipt after a person votes - a receipt that is retained by the states? The whole point of e-voting is ease of use - maybe even cheaper deployment. But why would it be so hard to implement such a system...or is it all politics & big business?

Re:Stupid

[josecanuc]

The paper trail is not best implemented as a "Receipt" for voting, as that denies anonymity and allows coercion.

The right way for paper-backed electronic voting to take place is to have the electronic system present an easy-to-use interface, which can be adapted on-the-fly for various limitations in voters (deaf, blind, unable to grasp objects, etc.). Have that interface be the way to vote. Then print the ballot out on a strip of paper and give that paper to the voter. The voter then walks to the ballot box and places the ballot in, just like we do now.

This eliminates ambiguity in deciding whether a particular ballot is valid or invalid, since the ballot would have a clear indication of the voters' intents.

Sure you can also get a quick, accurate count from the aper-ballot-printing machines, but if you want to do a "Recount", then there aren't any ballots for corrupt or inept voting officials to declare as invalid.

Florida's lotto machines..

[itomato]

Florida has had nearly the same machines spitting out the same paper lottery ticket, keeping the same journal, uploading each set of digits scanned from the same "blacken in the circle" forms for nearly * 15 FUCKING YEARS *

Change the firmware, repurpose some hardware, and give us a goddamned voting system with some EQUALLY STRINGENT ACCOUNTING

This process has been carried out billions of times by now, and you'd think that they'd try to utilize some of the expertise accumulated through so many, many, many, many, many drawings (like mini-elections themselves.)

This is important: -------------------

Q. Who audits the Lottery?

A. Florida law requires a variety of strict audits and controls, and the Florida Lottery enjoys the distinction of being the most audited agency in Florida state government. The Lottery, unlike any other state agency, must submit detailed monthly financial statements to the Governor, Treasurer and the Legislature disclosing all Lottery revenues and expenses. In addition to the Lottery Inspector General's internal auditing procedures:

* The Legislative Auditing Committee contracts with an independent accounting firm to conduct an annual financial audit.
* The State Auditor General may at any time audit any phase of Lottery operations.
* A comprehensive security audit must be conducted at least every two years.
* An independent certified public accounting firm witnesses each Lottery drawing to certify the official winning numbers for the drawing.

Re:bull

[vsprintf]

If the correct count is close (i.e. a human would be likely to get it wrong), then we bring in the humans to add error. So yeah, stealing the election...but not by the machines.

During the 2000 election, the Diebold machines in Florida's Volusia County returned negative 16,022 votes for one candidate. Obviously those infallible machines were right, and we wouldn't want to introduce human error by having a recount.