WI Bill Would Require E-Voting Paper Trail, Source

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."

Re:oh yes, this will solve all our problems...

[2old2rockNroll]

Certainly corruption and misreporting on a massive scale can be avoided entirely by "backing up" an electronic process with a paper trail - because paper based voting systems are infallible!

Just ask anyone from Florida.

At least paper ballots never return a negative number [bbvforums.org].

Voting System Rocket Science

[iendedi]

In this time of automated exploration of the solar system, robotic probes wandering around on Mars, computer systems decoding the human genome and whatnot, we find that addition in a simple tally of votes is just too damned hard to get right.

Am I being cynical?

Why is it that the American people sit idly by and allow the gutting of America? This Diebold voting scam was about the most obvious and malicious corruption (or coup) of the democratic process in the history of the world. But nobody even bothered to pay attention.

What the hell is wrong with all of us? We should be marching on Washington with pitchforks, torches and hangman nooses!! I'm serious!!

It couldn't hurt, could it?

[gimmickless]

I worked as a local election judge in November 2004. I saw hundreds upon hundreds of people show up at the polls, and I can't remember how many times we cleared the memory of those microship-implanted cards. All told, I think we did a pretty good job at making sure that people at least provided an ID before we let them vote. Could that checkpoint have been invalidated? Sure, but you'd have to do the following:

1) Change the computer printout of our list of names to allow voting at our facility.

2) Pose as someone else, and either hope or ensure the identity theft victim didn't show up first.

When all was said and done, we took each computer voting terminal and got a printout of votes for Bush/Kerry/other. We also had identification sheets of who was registered to vote. This sheet included their listed party affiliation. As a CYA measure, we compared the voting results with the list of people who voted and their party prefreence. The ratios in both cases leaned slightly towards Bush. Could that have been invalidated? Sure, but you'd have to tamper with the list of registered voters as well as the voting machines.

Now I'm still young (23) and don't really know how things worked back in the one-armed bandit days or with simple paper ballots. I'll agree that our voting machines aren't perfect. They're still subject to people in high places with an agenda. I'm convinced there always will be that possibility as long as Americans have the right to vote. At least now I don't have to worry about corrupt local election judges fixing the results to fit their personal prejudices.

Re:e-voting

[jesterzog]

Having a "receipt" is pointless, except for extortion uses; it isn't a reliable indicator of the machine tabulation and can't be used for manual recounting.

Well, it's only pointless if it's returned to the voter. I think what was meant by the parent (which wasn't very clear) was to simply allow the voter to confirm that their correct vote is also recorded on paper. The receipt can then be automatically dropped into a paper ballot box. (Or alternatively if it wasn't correctly recorded on paper, the voter indicates this, the receipt and electronic vote are ignored, and the voter votes again.) If there's any significant controversy over the electronic counting, the collected paper receipts can be counted manually as a final authority.

People simply can't confirm that their vote has been correctly recorded inside a computer. I have a computer science degree, and that only makes me even more wary that it might not have been, perhaps because I'm aware of all the ways that it might be abused. There are too many levels of abstraction between the real world and computers, and it takes a lot of training and expertise to properly understand it. Most people will never be able to confidently understand it, either because they don't have the time, or they simply can't think in that way. But they can check that it's correct on paper, and then watch the paper be dropped into the ballot box.

It's pretty similar in many ways to the system you've described for Wisconsin, I think. What really matters is that both of these systems allow for manual recounts of voting papers that have been verified by the voters. Doing this returns the voting system back to a level where all voters can see and understand how it works on at least the most fundamental level where things will be decided in the case of any controversy. Understanding of the system by as many people as possible is where trust comes from, and trust in the election system is one of the big things that's ultimately needed for a fair and respectable democracy.