WI Bill Would Require E-Voting Paper Trail, Source

AdamBLang writes "Three Wisconsin legislators announced today that they began circulating a memo for cosponsors to a bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper ballot. Additionally, the new bill includes a provision that the source code must be publicly accessible. After the November 2004 elections, there were numerous reports of problems with the new paperless touch voting screens. Problems include machines subtracting or adding votes, freezing up, shutting down and skipping past races."

Comments

EFF: verified vote bill introduced in US Congress

[Savantissimo]

From the EFF:

Best E-voting Bill Reintroduced - Lend Your Support!
Verify the Vote In 2004, thousands of EFF activists helped Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (VCIAA, HB 550) garner immense support before the session ended. The bill contains several critically important election reforms, including the requirement of a paper audit trail for all electronic voting machines, random audits, and public availability of all code used in elections. HB 550 was reintroduced in February, and it currently has over 130 bipartisan cosponsors.

The momentum is on our side, and it's more important than ever to ask your representative to support this bill since many counties across the country are choosing voting equipment now. Tell Congress to stand up for election reform!

There is a link on the EFF page so you can send a canned or customized letter of support for this bill to your Senators and representative.

Re:Why isn't this already a requirement?

[Anonymous Custard]

"Quick question: Why isn't this already a national requirement? What reasonable explanation is there for such a glaring lack of security in the most fundamental of governmental institutions?"

They'll tell you it's too expensive to have printers on all the voting machines. (Even though Diebold is the same company that somehow figured out a way to give you a receipt for every transaction you make at an ATM.)

The real reason is that paper receipts make it too hard to rig the election.

e-voting

[falconwolf]

a bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper ballot.

Good, they should. If atm machines can print a receipt so should e-voting machines. I seem to recall some years back about how Deibolt, one of the companies that makes them, said having these machines print receipts wasn't practical. Funny because Deibolt also makes atms.

Falcon

Help support Black Box Voting, they guard your right to have your vote counted.

they need to count both then

[zogger]

the more immediate pure electronic vote can go forward with the machine, but the voters could verify their vote on the paper,then drop them in another tally box if they look good, then those paper votes get manually counted elsewhere and compared against the electronic result within a few days.

That's one way to do it. Of course I am in favor of no e-voting at all. I've voted for decades, and it's only the last three I have been required to be dieboldized. My vote has disappeared, you can't see it, it's gone, poofed away to some closed source machine only used by a few people with an agenda. We have no vote now, we have an illusion of a vote, we traded magic beans voodoo "new shiny" voting for anything resembling a vote. Paper pencil and wooden box are quite sufficient. worked for centuries. I like tech, but I like simple too. The only *need* for diebold is to hack elections, that's it. all the stuff that has leaked out about diebold screams "hacked elections on mass scales for fun and profit". Obvious as all get out. I don't think it was a coincidence that the first state wide all e-voting (georgia) also resulted in major poll busting differences in the vote, all *conveniently* in favor of the party currently enjoying power. Now I am not a D,nor an R, none of my guys every hardly gets elected, but... but this was fairly easy to see happen. It just sucks. pre and post polling for years was always pretty accurate,not perfect, but usually nailed it well. Then all of a sudden these polls "failed" the same time we started using diebold machines.

uh huh

I just don't believe in coincidences with power politics, not with the stakes as high as controlling large states and the federal government. It is beyond even putting a numerical value in dollars to estimate what control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government are 'worth", and if that continues for some time, then control of the judiciary, then that's it, you got it wrapped up. Only two parties is dismal enough, but just one party would be a disaster, and with the vote controlled, it would stay a disaster.