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

Yes!

[MarkusQ]

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

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.