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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."
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin and up till now that's been Diebold.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
It's hard to overstate the importance of this--no matter what your stance on any of the multitude of wedge issues, you should be behind this. Only people who somehow expect to gain from rigged elections could rationally oppose it.
So let's keep a list of who objects, shall we?
--MarkusQ
Certainly corruption and misreporting on a massive scale can be avoided entirely by "backing up" an electronic process with a paper trail - because paper based voting systems are infallible!
Just ask anyone from Florida.
At least paper ballots never return a negative number.
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.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"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.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Well - I think that if the election binaries were regulated as closely as the slot machine binaries in Vegas, I would trust it...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
In this time of automated exploration of the solar system, robotic probes wandering around on Mars, computer systems decoding the human genome and whatnot, we find that addition in a simple tally of votes is just too damned hard to get right.
Am I being cynical?
Why is it that the American people sit idly by and allow the gutting of America? This Diebold voting scam was about the most obvious and malicious corruption (or coup) of the democratic process in the history of the world. But nobody even bothered to pay attention.
What the hell is wrong with all of us? We should be marching on Washington with pitchforks, torches and hangman nooses!! I'm serious!!
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
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.Should there be a Law?
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.
The issue is that nothing is being done to prevent the fraud NOW. Every possibly means of avoiding identification and eligibility to vote is the norm. Look how many times in the news we see people opposing reform? Right now the big issue is electronic voting mainly because of the fact that Diebold's high muckety-mucks visibly support Bush and too many people want to make it appear Ohio was won by Bush only through Fraud.
Hell we still have the Voting Rights Act nearly 40 years after it was supposedly not needed. Its not being done to protect voters but instead to protect politicians by allowing for current methods of fraud to remain unimpeded. Vote fraud is very real and combining positive voter ID and a paper trail are both required, not one, BOTH.
Here in Georgia we had a major problem with voting fraud. The problem with current computer voting systems is that they could not trace the vote to who cast it. Normally I would be all for that type of privacy but this is a big avenue for fraud.
Now in Fulton county we got 45,907 new registrations to vote. When precinct cards were mailed nearly 3100 were undeliverable. Of those 3100 undeliverable 921 of them voted!
Now of 8100 plus registrations that were missing information on the form they mailed to each and only 55 responded!
Under the old paper ballot system with little to no voter verification there was a slight chance to correct fraundulent elections. The paperless solution we have no provides no means.
What happened in my Grandparents area of Ohio was that a few of them were bussed to multiple voting areas and told to vote in each. They were also told whom to vote for.
This isn't a crybaby ploy and attempts to dismiss the argument as such only contribute to the fraud, after all it is far easier to dismiss the person bringing the claim than to refute the claim.
Actually the Washington case is a good one for why picture Id and instant verification are needed. What was done in Washington is similar to what is done nationwide but usually only for smaller local elections - keep counting until you get the results you want. Extrapolating from my examples of attempted voter fraud in Georgia may explain how vote tallies can change so much. Found votes, lost votes, and miscounts are all part of dirty politics.
What you propose by ignoring the problem is that we keep the politics as usual. This of course walks right into the hands of the politicians in power. They don't want to lose their jobs and will therefor encourage anything which allows them and their cronies to protect those jobs.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I worked as a local election judge in November 2004. I saw hundreds upon hundreds of people show up at the polls, and I can't remember how many times we cleared the memory of those microship-implanted cards. All told, I think we did a pretty good job at making sure that people at least provided an ID before we let them vote. Could that checkpoint have been invalidated? Sure, but you'd have to do the following:
1) Change the computer printout of our list of names to allow voting at our facility.
2) Pose as someone else, and either hope or ensure the identity theft victim didn't show up first.
When all was said and done, we took each computer voting terminal and got a printout of votes for Bush/Kerry/other. We also had identification sheets of who was registered to vote. This sheet included their listed party affiliation. As a CYA measure, we compared the voting results with the list of people who voted and their party prefreence. The ratios in both cases leaned slightly towards Bush. Could that have been invalidated? Sure, but you'd have to tamper with the list of registered voters as well as the voting machines.
Now I'm still young (23) and don't really know how things worked back in the one-armed bandit days or with simple paper ballots. I'll agree that our voting machines aren't perfect. They're still subject to people in high places with an agenda. I'm convinced there always will be that possibility as long as Americans have the right to vote. At least now I don't have to worry about corrupt local election judges fixing the results to fit their personal prejudices.
A man, a plan, a canal: went overbudget and held back by red tape.