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From the Trenches of Electronic Voting
Avi Rubin, an expert on electronic voting systems, worked as a judge in two elections in 2004, and he worked the chaotic Maryland primary election yesterday. His blog article about a day spent with Diebold voting machines gives impressions from the trenches of electronic voting. From the article: "The least pleasant part of the day was a nagging concern that something would go terribly wrong, and that we would have no way to recover. I believe that fully electronic systems, such as the precinct we had today, are too fragile. The smallest thing can lead to a disaster... I can't imagine basing the success of an election on something so fragile as these terrible, buggy machines... As far as I'm concerned, the 'tamper tape' does very little in the way of actual security... I hope that we got it right in my precinct, but I know that there is no way to know for sure. We cannot do recounts."
There is a very simple, much more inexpensive and reliable method of providing secret ballots with anonymous voting. It's called using a printed ballot. Most precincts have a few hundred people voting, it can't take that long to count X's on a page. And having been a polling officer at a local election - twice - I know of what I speak. And yeah, we use electronic machines at our polling place. I'm not sure if they are accurate or not, but we do.
The simplest answer would be for the machine to issue a slip with each ballot that is dropped into a hopper after the vote. The slip would only display the vote, not who did. And to make sure it was anonymous, the hopper could be rotated regularly to mix the slips.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Supposedly, No. The design is such that it is supposed to prevent mapping precisely who voted for whom. This is a basic part of voting in the US (if not the world over). If it is easy for the powers to be to figure out precisely who each and every one of us votes for, it plays into the hands of a horrible form of corruption. It enables retaliation, even the threat of which is sufficient cause for some people to change their vote. That type of vote manipulation is not supposed to be possible.
Still, I may be wrong on this...but I would think any voting system that makes it impossible to do recounts would be unconstitutional.
Problem Exists Between Touch-Screen and User
:D
I was one of those 'disinfranchized' in the Maryland primary last night. Being a junior, I share the same name as my father except for the title. I heard some of the horror stories from my parents when they voted at their polling place, located just inside Baltimore City. After I got up to the judges to get my card to vote, I learned that I was 'Cancelled'. They let me do a provisional, however.
Chatting with my father, talking with a third election judge that was assisting everyone, and my own observations revealed a startling fact. Basically, the two judges manning the touch screens and the voter rosters are F-in' idiots. They had no idea how the touch screens worked. They didn't know you could scroll to see more names, so how many people were turned away, with them saying a voter wasn't in the system? My father had to point out and explain how to use the system. And he is NOT a judge, nor affiliated with the voting system other than by being a normal citizen voter. And that other judge 'politely' informed me of the other judges general intelligence as he was helping to set me up at another booth with the provisinal.
Most likely, the two geniuses knocked my name out when they were dicking around earlier, leading to my provisional ballot. Thankfully, as a Republican (in a heavily-Democratic Balt. City), this was only a primary. Having my ballot lost here wouldn't be as bad as in the general election. I'm definately worried about the general election, however.
I'm also curious as the the density of these 'voting irregularities', including the political makeup of the regions they are located. I'm not saying it's politically motivated; I'm just curious if the old addage about "Republicans have no heart, and Democrats have no brains" has any truth to it.
After you sign in and are verified as someone is registered in the precinct (in California you can still vote a Provisional ballot even if you aren't registered, but it's a paper ballot), you are given an access card that has been activated by one of the polling place workers that allows you to use the voting machine. This card activates the machine and tells it, depending on the election, which ballot to display. It can also tell the system to display large text or to read the ballot to the voter, but that's incidental. Once the vote is cast, the card is deactivated and cannot be used to activate the voting system again until it is reset by one of the clerks.
The encoder is very limited. Basically, all you can do with them is choose the ballot (if multiple ballots), choose special options for visibility and sound and then activate/deactivate the card. That's about it. Adding personal information on the voter really isn't possible.
Now, I don't have full access to the internals of the system, but the only information that I can guess that the card passes to the ballot is the precinct number so someone can't bring in an encoder and vote more than once.
So, unless you type your own name in as a write-in vote, you're safe from someone finding out how you voted.
Besides the fact that voters could be disenfranchised due to a power outage, you also have the problem of hardware failure due to power outages or brownouts or spikes, which could result in the loss of the voting tallys that had been accumulated to that point.
Paper and pencil are power-failure tolerant.
For that reason alone, all voting should be paper and pencil based.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.