[ale] Is there any way to stop this travesty? -- NO, of course not!

[mainwizard at vei.net]

----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph A. Knapka
Sent: 8/23/2002 2:49:06 PM
To: tis3 at cdc.gov
Cc: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Is there any way to stop this travesty? -- NO, of  course not!

> "SanMillan, Todd" wrote:
> > 
> > The deeper problem with electronic voting is the lack of an audit trail.
> > See RISKS LIST http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.12.html#subj1.1 for an
> > intro.  These are all closed source systems that are "self-auditing".
> > Meaning that once the election results are reported, there is no possibility
> > of a recount to verify results.  If there are systemic problems, how can you
> > rely on the system to find and report errors?
> 
> Gosh, I hope I'm misundertanding what you're saying here.
> 
> Why would anyone, even a politician, ever -consider- the use
> of a voting system that didn't permit external
> auditing of election results? Not only can't you rely on the
> system to find and report errors, you can't rely on it not to
> -intentionally introduce- errors in order to push an agenda.
> Any electronic voting system would have to, at minimum, allow
> a voter to verify that their vote was recorded properly (without,
> of course, allowing anyone else to do so), at any time after
> the vote was cast, IMO.
> 
> There would still be room for the processing firm to manipulate
> the results, however, since nothing short of a complete manual
> count could verify the electronic results, unless further
> measures were taken to ensure the integrity of the data. I'm
> not sure what those measures would be, though. The very fact
> that no one other than the voter should be permitted to
> find out the mapping between votes and voters places pretty
> strong limits on how much verification can be done. (Of course,
> this sort of game can be played with paper ballots as well,
> but it would be a great deal more effort, and therefore harder
> to conceal.)
> 
> -- Joe
> 

You could combat this by having two machines. The first machine uses a computer to print a paper ballot with the choices selected and then use the standard reader machine to count the ballots. In the case of a dispute, you have a paper ballot to hand count, while ensuring that the choices were properly selected. (circles filled in vice name being circled).

Ed.


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