Interestily since the old padlocked ballot box has gone to the dustbin of Society, Fraud and corruption has increased. Maybe this illegal activity should be raised to Felony status?
Electronic voting machines are little more than voting fraud machines. Period.
Anyone (ANYONE) that attempts to tell you that an electronic system is secure is lying to your face (of an ignorant fool). Voter fraud will increase until we get back to a physical paper trail.
Physical systems can be backed up by data systems (in fact, duplicating the data between a physical item like a log book and an electronic system like a database will make fraud harder), but an all electronic system is a playground for people that want to commit fraud.
Well that depressed me.
Exactly. Electronic voting should never, ever, occur. If your vote matters, demand paper.
This is why I always vote early. I can ensure use of a paper ballot.
I have been an election judge here in Champaign County Illinois for 4 years or so. The system we use is a scanner. The voter is issued a paper ballot with an election judge’s initials on it, fills in ovals, verifies with another election judge that the ballot indeed has the first judge’s initials on it and feeds it into the scanner. The scanned ballot is routed into a locked box. The scanner produces a results tape at the end of the day with the election results. Write-ins need to be manually counted since the scanner does not have the smarts to recognize anything other than the existence of a filled in oval.
The county clerk estimates number of voters who will show up at each each precinct. That is all the ballots that get printed. They come in packages of 100. Most of the time, the ballot for each precinct is unique due to candidates and issues on the ballot. Each voter application is numbered in sequence, thus keeping track of the number of voters. If the number of voters is more than a certain number at 3 different times in the day, the judges are instructed to order more ballots. The clerk then prints group. We had a higher turnout than expected at about 4 in the afternoon and decided to order more ballots. It turned out that we didn’t need them, but all the judges had to sign give a reason for ordering the additional ballots. Each had to be accounted for.
At the end of the day the ballots are removed from the locked box (didn’t see any Social Security in there) and sealed with numbered plastic ties in the box in which the ballots came in the morning. The ballots, election results tape and scanner memory card are transported to county building by two of the election judges, one Dem & one Pub.
This system seems to be less subject to fraud than many others, although I have reason to suspect the accuracy of the filled oval recognition system.