Kerry and Clinton promoting new way of voting

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[Harmless Teddy Bear]

She is nothing but a self-serving, opportunistic, snake oil selling skank who will stop at NOTHING to get into position of ultimate power. I loathe her.

I'll put you down as undecided. ~ Zogby pollster

[Miss Behave]

"I'll put you down as undecided. ~ Zogby pollster"

Natch. LOL.

[SirTaurus]

I have not read the bill, but I would have to believe the the source code would not be published in the public domain. But would only be availble for recount auditing purposes.

[cricket]

There is no improvement that these people will be satisfied with until our Constitution is changed. . .our voting laws. . .et al. . .period. No improvement sufficient enough; until they can steal Elections without impugnitiy. . .

The only way to stop Liberal, Left-wing ambitions and the madness they represent; is to stop voting for Democrats.

There can be no reason; no excuse, good enough to do so.

[infidel29]

How many people in FLA couldn't even read the ballot in 2000?

[Seattle Conservative]

Amen!

[HangThemHigh]

For the first and probably the last time in my life, I agree with both of these clowns. I think it speaks volumes to the desperation of the Dims. They are so afraid of being beaten by the Republicans at their own game that they are proposing changes that they would never consider if they were in power.

I think a paper audit trail is an excellent idea, but then so is requiring voter ID's. The open source code idea probably doesn't mean much unless it includes every bit of code loaded on the voting machines and every computer used in the transmission and tabulation of votes, but hey, in case of questions, just count the paper ballots.

I say take them up on their offer before they come to their senses (fat chance).

[oolatec]

WTF... just use purple ink. Receipts can be forged/doctored.

[Varmint Al]

Requiring the Purple Finger would go a long ways in stopping people from voting more than once!

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

[holyscroller]

The "Count Every Vote" mantra is what the Dims in Washington State were chanting, just before they packed in 2000 more ballots than there were voters, and before they had over a thousand felons vote. They are very good are materializing phantom votes, and they want every one counted.

[Raffus]

You are NOT alone! Loath is a very accurate description. The sabbatical WILL BE on the books for 2008.

[Buwan]

The states are responsible for determining voting methods and eligibility...NOT the federal government. This is a transparent means of federalizing the voting process, a right the constitution does not provide for the feds.

[supercat]

Elections should be carried out so that a person needs to have faith in a minimum number of things in order to believe the election results to be legitimate.

If votes are recorded in any sort of alterable medium, then one must have faith that the medium was not altered surreptitiously.

If votes are recorded in a manner that is not directly observable, then one must have faith that the votes are in fact being recorded as cast.

I think my favorite idea for recording votes would be to have a machine, largely transparent to the voter, with a reels of colored paper tapes, one per candidate plus a few for "checksumming". Each tape would feed from an opaque magazine, through a punching mechanism visible to the voter, and into another opaque magazine. Before the election, the start of each tape would be signed by members of all parties and each tape would be prepunched with a set number of holes sufficient to reach from the puncher to the edge of the takeup magazine. Then, after each voter selects candidates and pulls the big "I'm done" lever, the tape of each selected candidate would get a hole punched in it and be advanced 1/4". Additionally, the "checksum" tapes would get holes punched in them according to some suitable method(*).

At the end of the election, the tapes would be removed from the machine and signed at the other end by members of all parties. Counting the number of votes for a candidate would be a simple matter of counting the number of holes and subtracting the number that were prepunched.

(*)If there are 63 candidates for office, there should be six "checksum" tapes, labeled "1", "2", "4", "8", "16", and "32". After each voter marks his selection, counting each candidate as "1" and the checksum tapes as indicated, the total value of all punches must equal 63. In this way, the total value of all punches on all tapes must equal 63 times the number of voters, plus the number of initial punches.

Anyone else like the idea of such a machine? It would seem immune to any type of fraud other than fictitious or double voters, and any voter using it would be able to see that their vote was in fact counted correctly.

[GeronL]

first off, the secret ballot is going to stay that way

[Just Lori]

Baynative:

You are a great and brilliant AMERICAN!

[Fenris6]

Transparency is fine. But Congress should load up the bill with riders to correct Voter Fraud.

[Splatter]

Open Source code for ballot machines is right behind Vote-By-Mail for retarded reform of the year. Beside the potential for partisan hacks cracking the database, imagine how many Islamofacist scumbags would love to create a worm that screws with our elections. "This just in.. Saddam Hussein has just won Ohio with 99.9% of the vote."

I wonder if the Government will issue patches for holes from Microsoft? Just make sure your voting machine has Automatic Update turned on or your vote may not be counted!

Anyone who doesn't want to see election fraud need look no further than Oregon's Vote-By-Mail-Fraud system. That's right, you can't SEE the fraud. VBM has essentially hidden "irregularities" and fraud from public.

[supercat]

Open Source code for ballot machines is right behind Vote-By-Mail for retarded reform of the year. Beside the potential for partisan hacks cracking the database, imagine how many Islamofacist scumbags would love to create a worm that screws with our elections. "This just in.. Saddam Hussein has just won Ohio with 99.9% of the vote."

There's nothing wrong with open-source solutions for voting. The question is whether any system which does not record votes indelibly on a medium that a ordinary person can examine should be trusted.

If a system has voters select entries on a touch-screen system which prints their choices on an optically-scannable ballot, I see nothing wrong with using open-source software on such a machine though the possibility of 'cheating' would be pretty minimal since anyone could examine the ballot printed by the machine and ensure it was accurate.

Likewise, the tabulation system could be open-source since its inputs and outputs would be entirely testable. If each ballot were tagged with a unique machine-readable identifier sometime after it was cast, the ballots could be run through two machines, using different hardware and software, and the results compared. Any ballots whose interpretation didn't match on the two counts could be mechanically separated for examination.

The key requirements for a good voting system should be (1) votes should be recorded on an indelible medium. Punched tape is fine. Printed cards are fine. Flash memory is not; (2) an ordinary person should be able to examine the system and confirm that votes are indeed recorded as indicated; (3) ballots should be designed so that (a) any alteration to a validly cast ballot will render it invalid; and (b) there is no way an invalid ballot can legitimately enter the ballot stream.

Unfortunately, even though these requirements seem obvious to me, many voting-system designers don't seem to care about them.