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All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
according to an announcement made by activist Bernie Ellis at the premier of David Earnhardt's film "Uncounted [The Movie]" all fifty states could be receiving subpoenas in the National Clean Election lawsuit. The documentary film, like the lawsuit, takes a look at the issue of voting machine failure and the need for a solid paper trail. "The lawsuit is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public. The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting machines to record and count the votes at each polling station, and allow tallying of votes by election officials outside the view of the general public."
Let's face it. WHO can verify the voting of open voting machines? We can. We, computers savvy people who understand computers and who can test, probe and verify the mechanisms behind the machines. Joe Average cannot.
Joe Average can look at a vote, see the cross and verify that yes, whoever casted this vote voted for the person or party where the X is. That's the difference.
Yes, of course we trust us. But can we be trusted? Hey, of course we can, I know that, you know that but essentially, it's the same situation we have with closed source voting machines: An outsider does not know whether we, computer people, are to be trusted. Like we, as outsiders, stand in front of the makers of voting machines and question their trustworthyness, so will non-tech people stand in front of us and question ours.
The only way to have elections that cannot be questioned by anyone is to create a system that everyone can verify if they want to. And the only system is simply one that everyone can "read". So it's paper or nothing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or the paper and pen method... why introduce unnecessary mechanization? Occam's razor applies very well to voting. Simplicity is best.
I got a catholic block.
The sick fascination with immediate results is what is causing this issue to begin with. Election results do not need to be available immediately. Taking a day or a week for counting is perfectly fine. For some reason though we need to have live coverage as the polls close to find out who wins. It really doesn't matter all that much.
I used to think this as well, but then I saw a talk by a Ben Adida, a cryptographic voting researcher. It turns out there are electronic and hybrid voting systems that allow every step of the process to be independently audited. Individual voters can log into a website and ensure that their vote was recorded correctly (and yes, this is done in such a way that nobody can prove to another party which way they voted). Anyone can get a list of the people who actually voted, so they can check that nobody voted twice and that every voter was valid. Each of the candidates can independently and programatically verify that the tallying was done correctly (again, without exposing any one specific ballot). This is far superior to traditional paper ballots, and there's no technical reason we can't have it today.
Here's a paper that gives some more information. I believe Dr. Adida mentioned that this particular system has a few problems that would prevent it from being used in practice, but it still gives a pretty good example of how a cryptographic voting system could work.