No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes

In the Washington state gubernatorial election, the hand recount has begun, and Snohomish County -- which had nearly 100K votes cast on Sequoia electronic voting machines -- won't have to print up and count them all by hand, as had been previously thought by county officials. Instead, they will print up the totals from each of the 937 machines, and compare those to the grand total. (The statewide hand recount is expected to complete before Christmas, modulo court challenges.)

Comments

You're not being dense

[roystgnr]

Because they've made recounting the votes impossible (the "vote" is whatever the voter got to look at, which for most electronic voting machines is an ephemeral pattern of lights on a screen), they're recounting electronic copies of the votes instead - the honest people are just hoping the copies match the originals and the dishonest ones are hoping nobody calls them on the distinction.

Re:What!?

[Shakrai]

Actually, this is exactly the process of recounting votes in the old pull the lever machines

The difference between then and now is that our parents trusted those machines, and we here on /. don't trust the electronic versions.

Except it's a lot harder for somebody to tamper with a mechanical machine that relies on mechanical rollers then it is for somebody to tamper with two lousy lines of code (out of a needlessly bloated program that probably has hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines) to tamper with the election results.

The setup on those lever machines are triple-checked by members of both major parties in a transparent process that is open to members of the public before they are used on election day. They are then sealed against tampering through a combination of locks, protective counters, one-time seals and other means before being transported to the polling places. Once there they can only be unlocked by elections inspectors -- at the end of the day these inspectors (two from each major party at each polling place) reseal the machines against tampering -- again with a wide open process that can be witnessed by anybody from the public, media or any major/minor political party who wishes to observe.

Compare that to an electronic voting machine where we are essentially trusting a private company who probably has an interest in the outcome of the election -- or in a less sinister motive (yet ultimately still as bad for our Republic) underpaid/undereducated programmers with deadlines to meet who probably cut corners all over the place.

I know of what I speak -- I am a certified Elections Inspector with the State of New York. I'll take the lever machines over electronic voting any day of the week. If we can't have pen and paper they are the next best solution as far as integrity goes.