State Tells Counties to Establish Paper Trail on Electronic Voting

Los Angeles Times ^ | November 21, 2003 | Allison Hoffman and Tim Reiterman

[dpwiener]

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is expected to announce today that as of 2006, all electronic voting machines in California must be able to produce a paper printout that voters can check to make sure their votes are properly recorded.

Late Thursday evening, Shelley placed calls to county elections officials around the state to tell them that any voting system that is currently in use or that is purchased before Jan. 1, 2006, must be modified or replaced to produce a paper trail. After that date, no county will be allowed to buy machines that can't make printouts.

Click here for rest of article (requires free registration).

[dpwiener]

This is excellent news! Kevin Shelley (a Democrat) is doing a pretty good job as California Secretary of State.

This comes less than a month after the 9th Circuit Court threw out Susan Marie Weber's lawsuit. Auditless electronic voting is an invitation to massive voter fraud, but Shelley's directive may do what Weber's unsuccessful lawsuit was unable to do.

[concerned about politics]

That shouldn't be too hard. When I use the charge card to fill my gas tank, I always get the receipt. Grocery stores right you up, and you get the receipt.
Oh my, Democrats will be totally lost without those multiable votes from the butterfly ballots. No hanging chads and dimples from trying to punch through 6-7 ballots = lost elections.

[ItsMyVoteDammit]

This is good news but the machine manufacturers are crying about how much the paper will cost but they do not provide the numbers. The voting fraud sites have done the research and said it would cost each state on average about $500. That is five hundred dollars with no milion or billion behind the number.

How dumb do the voting machine companies think we are?

[MainFrame65]

I actually have a serious concern about providing each voter with an official printout of his vote. Suppose that I am supporting a particular candidate by any means I can. Why can't I then offer a cash bounty for your printed ticket showing that you voted according to my instructions? Or even worse, why can't I carry out the threats I made if you fail to produce such a ticket? This could destroy the secret ballot if not done right.

One possibility would be to allow each voter to print for himself an additional ticket after the original, showing whatever the voter chooses, but sending a copy of only the original ticket into a secure receptacle for audit.

Another would be to allow the ticket with the votes to be examined but not removed, and only allow the ticket header without the votes to be removed from the machine.

One existing problem is that absentee ballots can be collected by an organization and either filled in or examined for compliance by the organization before submission.

I don't want to create an opportunity for coercion. Any suggestions? Am I just paranoid? Because if I am, please remember that somebody could still be after me....

[Let's Roll]

Excellent start! Now when they tighten up registration and kill auto fraudo, maybe we can be pretty sure of the integrity of CA elections.

[concerned about politics]

Am I just paranoid?

Yeh.

[ItsMyVoteDammit]

The machines are set up not to actually hand over the paper vote receipt to you. How they are set up is that after you vote, a paper verification is printed and shown to you behind a glass screen. If you agree, you touch yes and the paper drops down into a secured box inside the machine only to be counted if a recount is requested.

So you are right, they did think of voter fraud by selling votes and the machines are set up to prevent it. However the sellers of the machines are not in favor of turning on this feature. Go figure.

[So Cal Rocket]

Until they require proof of identity at the polls, voter fraud will never be successfully eliminated in California.

Poll workers are STRICTLY forbidden from asking for any identification whatsoever when someone shows up to vote.

[Let's Roll]

What you said.

[longtermmemmory]

I believe the paper would be in the form of an ogoing reciept tape. Each machine should have its own running tape.

[dpwiener]

Until they require proof of identity at the polls, voter fraud will never be successfully eliminated in California. Poll workers are STRICTLY forbidden from asking for any identification whatsoever when someone shows up to vote.

That's a whole 'nuther problem, which must be dealt with separately. But at least this decision by Shelley will make it much more difficult to fix elections simply by hacking the computers. It also makes it possible to have recounts. Without a paper trail, a recount would consist of little more than punching up the computer display and saying, "Yeah, the computer is correctly displaying the count it previously gave us." And of course if a computer crashed there'd be no way to recover the original votes in the absence of back-up paper receipts.

[jsbankston]

First they arrest Jacko, then they stop modern voter fraud. All within days of the inauguration. Coincidence?

Don't forget about raising taxes as Arnold has already proposed after only a few days in office!

[Political Junkie Too]

Why can't they design a machine that prints out a machine-readable optical ballot which you then have to run through a scanner to count? Then you tear off the receipt at the bottom and the ballot goes into a ballot box.

The point of the machines should be to prevent voter error, not necessarily be the one-stop-shop for vote counting.

-PJ

[MainFrame65]

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it. Using such a process would increase my level of confidence in the outcome, and I agree that reluctance to do so is puzzling.

[dpwiener]

The point of the machines should be to prevent voter error, not necessarily be the one-stop-shop for vote counting.

Your absolutely right. Some of the quotes in the article from County Registrars were appalling:

Voter registrars around the state reacted with surprise and anger to the news.

"I am shocked," said Mischelle Townsend, Riverside County's registrar and a member of the task force Shelley convened last summer to discuss electronic voting. "You're talking about millions of dollars of added expense at a time when we have a fiscal crisis."

Townsend said that to "impose all of that extra expense for these machines means that there won't be any justification for going to electronic voting."

Why spend millions of dollars for voting machines in the first place, when one computer programmer can just insert a few numbers in a database? Just think how much money we could save if we did away with elections altogether. At the very least we should postpone all future elections until California is past its fiscal crisis...

[Political Junkie Too]

Townsend said that to "impose all of that extra expense for these machines means that there won't be any justification for going to electronic voting."

Have they forgotten already the ACLU argument from October that punch-cards were too complicated for some minority voters?

Why spend millions of dollars for voting machines in the first place, when one computer programmer can just insert a few numbers in a database?

Better yet, why spend millions of dollars for voting machines when we simultaneously spend millions of dollars encouraging voters to stay home and vote absentee?

-PJ