WI Bill Would Require E-Voting Paper Trail, Source 87
AdamBLang writes "Three Wisconsin legislators announced today that they began circulating a memo for cosponsors to a bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper ballot. Additionally, the new bill includes a provision that the source code must be publicly accessible. After the November 2004 elections, there were numerous reports of problems with the new paperless touch voting screens. Problems include machines subtracting or adding votes, freezing up, shutting down and skipping past races."
Paper, we don't need no stinking (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin and up till now that's been Diebold.
Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to overstate the importance of this--no matter what your stance on any of the multitude of wedge issues, you should be behind this. Only people who somehow expect to gain from rigged elections could rationally oppose it.
So let's keep a list of who objects, shall we?
--MarkusQ
Re:How does this change anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not a strawman argument... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell we still have the Voting Rights Act nearly 40 years after it was supposedly not needed. Its not being done to protect voters but instead to protect politicians by allowing for current methods of fraud to remain unimpeded. Vote fraud is very real and combining positive voter ID and a paper trail are both required, not one, BOTH.
Here in Georgia we had a major problem with voting fraud. The problem with current computer voting systems is that they could not trace the vote to who cast it. Normally I would be all for that type of privacy but this is a big avenue for fraud.
Now in Fulton county we got 45,907 new registrations to vote. When precinct cards were mailed nearly 3100 were undeliverable. Of those 3100 undeliverable 921 of them voted!
Now of 8100 plus registrations that were missing information on the form they mailed to each and only 55 responded!
Under the old paper ballot system with little to no voter verification there was a slight chance to correct fraundulent elections. The paperless solution we have no provides no means.
What happened in my Grandparents area of Ohio was that a few of them were bussed to multiple voting areas and told to vote in each. They were also told whom to vote for.
This isn't a crybaby ploy and attempts to dismiss the argument as such only contribute to the fraud, after all it is far easier to dismiss the person bringing the claim than to refute the claim.
Actually the Washington case is a good one for why picture Id and instant verification are needed. What was done in Washington is similar to what is done nationwide but usually only for smaller local elections - keep counting until you get the results you want. Extrapolating from my examples of attempted voter fraud in Georgia may explain how vote tallies can change so much. Found votes, lost votes, and miscounts are all part of dirty politics.
What you propose by ignoring the problem is that we keep the politics as usual. This of course walks right into the hands of the politicians in power. They don't want to lose their jobs and will therefor encourage anything which allows them and their cronies to protect those jobs.