Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals

An anonymous reader writes "In an new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation they say that paper trails increase costs and can actually reduce the chances a voters' choices are accurately counted. Congress is considering a 'Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2007,' which would mandate 'voter-verified' paper audit trails."

Comments

Re:Worthless article

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say

That's textbook FUD for ya. Make a claim, let the news sink in, then follow up later with easily debunked reasoning far after everyone's stopped paying attention.

I've been interested in the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project for awhile now, and they have quite a few papers on voting issues, including discrepancies, statistics, technologies, reliability. One paper in particular (PDF warning) speaks of a study done on different methods of verifying user voting. For the mock election, they randomly inserted incorrect vote records, and thus tested different methods of auditing, to see how often voters noticed the discrepancy. With the paper trail, only 8% acknowledged any problem (i.e., realized that the machine voted wrong). For an auditing system, that's not at all counterproductive as the topical article would have you believe, but it's still pathetically ineffective.

A different kind of auditing system is advocated in the paper: one using audio via headphones to play back the recorded votes to the voter. 77% of voters caught the errors. Of course with every added system, there is inherent risk -- listening devices, accessibility, etc. -- and, of course, audio auditing is relatively untested, but this seems promising. This, however, assumes that the problem is with voters or the machines making an honest mistake and not with the machines maliciously changing votes. Thus, the best course of action would be to have both paper and audio: one to help the voter, the other to verify recounts and prove unreliability.

Of course, no auditing system, no matter the sophistication or rate of helpfulness, will matter if the machines themselves are designed to be corrupted and the vote counts manipulated. Ultimately, it will be far more beneficial to the American people if, rather than trying to force accountability and regulations on corrupted producing companies bought and paid for by corrupt political crooks, the machines are written and produced, or at least heavily tested, by independent committees.... May I suggest academic committees, such as this Caltech/MIT VTP, or similar groups? Their ultimate goal is to certify reliability, and since academics is far less motivated by money, they're far less likely to be corrupted. Or so goes my theory, anyway.