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Well that depressed me.

Sorry, but the electronic voting machines in my state don’t even attempt to have a verification against fraud. The electronic machine has a paper roll inside that holds a printed copy of the electronic ballot. Woo hoo! If you’ve managed to hack into the machine and changed it so it records the wrong electronic votes, changing the routine that prints on the verificiation paper roll is child’s play.

What would work?

() When voters sign in to vote, their voter id should be entered into a physical log book, and a computer system.

() Attach a printer to each electronic voting machine.

() Allow the electronic voting machine to record the vote electronicly.

() When the voter elecronicly casts his ballot, the attached printer prints a paper copy of the votes cast by the voter—with both english text and scannable bar codes to indicate the vote. Plus an id identifying the specific voting machine and vote number on that machine.

() The voter visually scans the print out to verify his votes were recorded properly.

() The voter places th print out into a scanner that reads the barcodes and records the votes again. The data from the barcode votes is displayed to the voter, who verifies it was read correctly or not. The barcode data can be electronicly transmitted to a central database.

() Besides reading the barcodes, the scanner does a complete page scan of the print out and creates a single image file (probably a tiff format) of the print out. The image file can be transmitted to a central database.

() The print out itself is then deposited into a lock box just like traditional paper ballots.

You now have 4 copies of the vote produced by two different systems. Two electronic (voting machine & scanner) and two “physical” (a paper copy & an image file).

The total number of voters that signed in to the precient should match the total number of ballots cast by the voting machines, scanner, and electronic tiffs (these numbers can be validated quickly by computer), and if they don’t match it will raise a red flag.

The total number of ballots for each machine will match the number of scanned ballots with that machine’s id (again, a non-match will raise a red flag).

If there is a question about a machine’s ballots, the tiff files for that voting machine can be pulled up in a matter of seconds to verify the machine’s accuracy.

In the case of a recount, the physical paper print out (which was approved by the voter) can be read to determine the will of the voter.