Cannot be audited.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Bob_Robertson Mar 15, 2011 11:08 AM EDT |
Let's face the fact that electronic voting, unless it is in real time, cannot be confirmed as honest. There is no paper trail. There is nothing that can be counted by someone ELSE. If I push the button and am told that my vote for X was counted, but it actually incremented Y's number, not only cannot I ever know, but there is no way to know that I did in fact push X's button and not Y's. That is why in every country that finally gets voting out of a corrupt system, they go for 100% paper ballots and independent verification. |
| smallboxadmin Mar 15, 2011 1:47 PM EDT |
The one E-voting system (actually just the software running on a PC) that I've seen gives you a printout of your vote. California and other states have mandated paper printouts, verified by the voter, that get stored. So you can have a hard copy for auditing. |
| jdixon Mar 15, 2011 6:53 PM EDT |
Verifiable electronic voting requires three things: Open, audited software; open, audited hardware; and a full paper trail. There's nothing about this people haven't know for years. |
| tracyanne Mar 15, 2011 8:10 PM EDT |
In other words Electronic voting offers nothing that standard paper voting doesn't, other than extra work and expense. |
| jezuch Mar 16, 2011 3:19 AM EDT |
Quoting:Let's face the fact that electronic voting, unless it is in real time, cannot be confirmed as honest. The broken version proposed by the so-called "voting machine" manufacturers - yes, absolutely. But cryptographers have created algorithms that allow secure voting and secure verification. I don't think they've been definitely proved safe and fraud-proof yet (or if they'll ever be; it's a chicken and egg scenario), but they're nothing like that crap we have now. I think Debian uses something like this. No paper trail, just cryptographic hashes. |
| jdixon Mar 16, 2011 6:06 AM EDT |
> In other words Electronic voting offers nothing that standard paper voting doesn't, other than extra work and expense. Except for the speed of the initial count, pretty much, yes. Any proper recount is going to involve an audit of the paper trail and is going to take as long as paper ballots. |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 16, 2011 9:02 AM EDT |
When votes are tallied where I live, I fill out a paper ballot and then it gets run through a machine which scans it and adds the numbers. The ballot is then stored for the paper trail. This provides both the paper ballots for verification and the "instant" vote totals at the end of the voting period. A purely electronic system does nothing to improve on this, in my opinion, and only opens another mode of fraud. |
| JaseP Mar 16, 2011 9:44 AM EDT |
I love tech, but voting machines are one example where less is more. I echo many of the sentiments here against computerized voting machines. |
| mrider Mar 16, 2011 12:32 PM EDT |
What I don't get is why don't "they" go the other way 'round. Have a nice touchscreen accessible interface that outputs a nice clean document that can be scanned easily. This will satisfy the ADHD crowd since getting an unofficial tally would be a simple matter of bringing the device back to the registrar's office and connecting up. This would also help make sure the ballot isn't filled in using crayon or with some other inane problems - please select one candidate (all selected), etc. Plus it would be trivial to make it truly accessible. Have sight issues, or otherwise can't read the screen? Use these earphones. Need extra large text - press this button. And yet at the same time, the tinfoil hat brigade (I'm one when it comes to voting) can be satisfied because it's an actual sheet of paper. Should a recount be required, there's a nice audit trail that can be easily verified. |
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