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Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
smooth wombat writes "Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said Wednesday that he has lost confidence in the state's ability to hold fair and secure elections this fall, and called for paper receipts for Maryland's electronic voting machines,and the delay of early-voting procedures approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature." From the article: "'In light of these recent national decertifications and the Maryland General Assembly's decision to override my vetoes ... I no longer have confidence in the State Board of Elections' ability to conduct fair and accurate elections in 2006,' said Ehrlich, a Republican, in his letter to Board of Elections Chairman Gilles W. Burger. Democrats criticized Ehrlich's apparent shift on the paper-receipt issue, noting that he vetoed a bill last year that would have studied the option. Advocates of reforming the state's voting system cheered Ehrlich's remarks, which he made a day before a Senate committee is to hold hearings on a bill that would require a paper trail. "
What, a guy can't make a mistake, change his mind, and try and fix things?
Work with him, Democrats! Work with him! It's better for everyone that the system is fair, because eventually it will be you that gets screwed over.
GPL Deconstructed
Democrats criticized Ehrlich's apparent shift on the paper-receipt issue, noting that he vetoed a bill last year that would have studied the option.
Yes, but chances are, the bill didn't do just that. Chances are, there were a billion and one unrelated things attached to it, any one of which could have been collosally stupid. Until politicians stop playing anti-democratic games like that, I'm not willing to assume that just because he vetoed a "paper-trail" bill that he is against paper trails.
I'm starting to consider the opinon that voting should be an essay question as of late.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
Congratulations, so do your constituents.
Developers: We can use your help.
As I say a few posts above (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177649&ci d=14734757) what the Democrats actually said and what was reported by the media and by slashdot are probably very different.
That said, Republicans don't have a good track record for forgiving people who grow and evolve their opinions.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Because if one has a verifiable paper trail it makes it that much harder to rig an election.
Don't get me wrong, I use ATMs all the time, and trust it with my money, so I don't see why it should be so hard to come up with a secure and easy way to use voting machines.
This is the same thing I keep harping on. The usual response from Diebold (and others) is that because it is electronic there is no need for a paper ballot.
So is adding/withdrawing money from an ATM. You shouldn't need a receipt to verify that the correct amount of money was withdrawn from your account because it's all electronic.
The same thing goes for grocery shopping. Since it's all electronic there shouldn't be a need to have a paper receipt of all your purposes. You should be able to trust the system didn't overbill you for a product or add in products you didn't buy.
But hey, who am I to use logic when talking about a verifiable paper trail. After all, I should just accept that the government is always right in these matters because the companies making these products have told them there is nothing to worry about.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I keep hearing that this will make elections "more secure". If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Let me guess... thru the use of open source software for voting machines?
The point with paper trails is that they're permanent. Let me remind you that with the 1988 elections in Mexico, a "system crash" elliminated all evidence, and all of a sudden, the officialist party won the presidential elections. Many people wanted a recount of the PAPER BALLOTS, but they were burned.
I agree, use of electronic voting machines does make voting risky - but it's much more risky WITHOUT paper trails.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
You don't take the paper ballot home with you. You put it in a locked box, where unlike electronic ballots it cannot be invisibly changed later.
How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind?
By destroying the original paper ballot and printing out another; in the polling booth; while you're voting; until you've put your ballot in the box. Note that you can still have computers print out the ballots if you want - and you may want to, so they can prevent voters from accidentally choosing two candidates in the same race, help read to blind voters, warn voters who may have unintentionally missed casting a vote, and make long ballots easy to read. What is important is that the final official ballot is in an immutable human-readable form that gets checked by the voter before it is cast.
If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Because hacking into a computer that your opponents are watching requires you to be smart, but hacking into large numbers of ballot boxes that your opponents are watching requires magic.
Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
No, remember the voting machines while also focusing on absentee ballots and voter registration. Security is hard and tedious - if you want the voting system to be secure, you have to secure every weak element of the process, not just the weakest.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. It violates the whole concept of the secret ballot not to mention adding layers of potential abuse to the vote counting process. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
That would be stupid, except that's not what's being discussed. The "paper trail" in question is a ballot, which gets dropped into the ballot box. The voter can't show the receipt to anyone because it's an anonymous slip mixed in with hundreds of others inside of a locked metal box.
The idea is that the pieces of paper are the *real* ballots, any purely electronic tallies can be challenged and overruled by recourse to the paper.
The way I'd like to see such a system work is to have the paper ballots printed with both human and machine-readable content. If OCR-able fonts could make this one and the same, fine, you can omit a verification step, but it's not a problem either way. That way, the voter would be able to see who they voted for before leaving the booth and dropping the paper in the box. The purely electronic tallies could be reported as soon as all the polls closed, so we'd get our instant gratification, and then all the paper ballots could be machine-counted over the course of the next few days to produce the official results. In addition, a random sample of the ballots should be verified by hand to ensure that the human-readable and machine-readable portions match.
Electronic voting machines, if well-designed, can make the voting process easier and more accessible, and can provide faster results, but without the paper ballots, the system is too easy to rig. With a system of unofficial electronic tallies backed by counted pieces of paper, you get the best of both (plus a big bill for voting machine hardware).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Actually, there are a few really good reasons to use electronic voting even if it prints out a full ballot.
1) It can also store ballot information in the system, so you can have an accurate vote count within minutes of the election closing.
2) The system can ensure that all votes are valid (not voting for too many people for a single position, etc.)
3) Electronic voting becomes essential if we ever move to a better voting system (condorcet, etc.)
Well, what 24-year old woman wouldn't want a classy, sexy comment from such a studly, hunky 84 year-old like him?
I think it's sad she had to bring him tea. You see, they have these things called pitchers that really work well for things like beverages.
You don't know the what's stored in the computer ever -- that's the problem! But having the paper ballot stored securely at the voting site ensures that, in the event of a contested election, officials can return to the voter-verified paper ballots which we're certain are correct, verified by each voter independently, and furthermore, unquestionably legible (and thus superior to handwritten or punch-card ballots), as the thing is printed in plain English. In so doing, we can ensure that IFF there is a contested election, the paper receipt, which the voter is certain is accurate, can be used to augment the uncertain, unverifiable digital trail. No "random" audits are truly needed, though perhaps a random sample to be determined afterwards could be used, if only to assuage concerns about the legitimacy of this new system.
While it's ostensibly possible to rig an election using any one sort of ballot, I would submit that it is perhaps a bit more difficult to rig an election using two different media to document a ballot. Through verification and recounting as outlined above, the potential to truly rig an election goes back, at least, to the good old days of having dead people vote, double-registration, etc.
I don't know what you're talking about, but that's OK: I fixed the world in responding to your two earlier paragraphs