Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
Congratulations, so do your constituents.
Developers: We can use your help.
How many districts have we heard about, where their have been problems with electronig voting machines? 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. Diebold, the same company in trouble in several counties, is trusted for making great ATMs, but their voting machines are notoriously bad and their behaviour not to be trusted http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00 .html. Voting machines's source code should be open to election officials, so that they can take a look at them and make sure that they don't count backwards...
Let's hope this yields a chance to fix them. Our report is here. For a funnier take on it, see my boss in this Daily Show clip.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
Well then this bill was the outlier (the exception to prove the rule?). The complete text of the bill is only 3 pages long. It does one thing:
"The State Administrator of Elections shall study, review, and evaluate independent verification systems, including at least one system that includes a voter-verified paper audit trail, for the voting system currently used in the State."
The bill then goes on to describe how the systems will be evaluated and by whom. The complete text is here.
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 whole issue of verified voting has been mired in stupid partisan squabbling for over 4 years. The entire Demoblican duopoly deserves large shares of scorn, blame, and (in a much better universe than this one) defeat at the polls.