California to Require Paper Voter Receipt 348
DDumitru writes "Wired reports
that California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will require all electronic
voting systems be equipped with a voter-verifiable paper receipt. This receipt
will not be retained by the voter, but deposited at the polls and may be used
to audit electronic election results.
All new voting system installed after July 1, 2005 must include the new printers.
Existing systems, including the systems already installed in four counties must
be retrofitted by July 2006.
It looks like the public outcry about Diebold and other voting equipment manufacturers
has been heard, at least in a very major market for these machines in the US.
It should be very difficult for other states to not follow suit."
It's too late (Score:5, Insightful)
replace the printer (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah right, so his company makes even more money...
What to count (Score:3, Insightful)
The electronic votes or the printed votes.
Who says they are the same?
Who says people will even bother reading the piece of paper?
Hey... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest. If technology doesn't simplify life, what use is it?
Why So Long? (Score:4, Insightful)
A year is plenty of time short of deliberate sandbagging.
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that electronic voting is really an advantage over traditional methods, especially as it's so open to abuse. But if it is implemented, then at least the possibility of verifying results is now there.
I'm sure some smartass will just claim their voting receipt is different from their vote just to kick up a stink though... enough of these could throw the thing into more doubt.
Re:how? (Score:2, Insightful)
True, but at least it would be possible to hold a paper recount, which would show such a deception.
paper receipt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe setup a few touchscreen kiosks for those who really need it. For the rest of us, I want my pen and paper.
Couldn't voters insist on using the old machines? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:2005? 2006? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Democracy works? (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn the type of govermnent you have and then youll be able to properly complain about it.
later
Re:um...useless? (Score:5, Insightful)
how is this better than paper voting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Voter: Sheriff, I just voted with that machine over there, and it said I voted for Bubba Smith.
Sheriff: Yeah, what's the problem? Don't like my cousin?
Voter: Uh, no everythin's fine. Forget it.
And it needs to be ... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about all of the electronic voting machines (even though Diebold is most suspect) and it's about the whole country.
Amen (Score:5, Insightful)
A paper trail is just a sanity check, and a completely reasonable way of keeping things in line.
Iowa has the best voting system. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the circle has to be completely filled in. But the again, if you can't fill in a circle then you probably shouldn't be voting.
Counting the votes is relatively fast. We usually know within 2 hours of the polls closing who has won.
Why do we even NEED an electronic system? What is wrong with the paper ballots?
-Nick
Difficult for other states to not follow suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:how is this better than paper voting? (Score:5, Insightful)
With traditional paper voting, you keep the piece of paper in your hand until it's in the box. The only visual verification is that somebody saw you put a piece of paper in the box. Any piece of paper, it doesn't matter. When the votes are counted later, if your vote is disqualified, then no-one knows you did it.
With this system, the votes are printed and visible to you. If you're going to complain that the machine stuffed up, you have to tell someone. This person will ask you who you voted for, and will want to verify that the printout contains another candidate's name. Once they've verified that your candidate and the the one on paper are different, some action will be taken to fix the machine. But by then, the official will know how you intended to vote. Your vote is no longer anonymous.
there goes anonymity (Score:3, Insightful)
I recommend using blinded signature techniques to solve the problem. "Poll watchers" will network their computers to the voting machine, and when someone votes, their machines will sign the voter's choices through a blinding mechanism that will validate the vote. The vote will then be released to the poll watchers' machines mixed with "chaff".
The chaff would be generated prior to the vote; a large number of votes would be created, tabulated and signed blindly. Each vote broadcast on the network would be mixed with ten or so randomly chosen chaff votes. At the end of voting, the unused chaff votes would be tabulated again, the number of chaff votes cast would be calculated and subtracted from the total, giving the true number of votes cast.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
1 to 150? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Democracy works? (Score:1, Insightful)
Having a Represenative Republic ensures that the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys.
I might be wrong, but isn't over 50% of the population in 3 states? New York, California, Florida? In such, these 3 states COULD control the presidency, find a candidate that is willing to sell out the other 47 states and give these guys anything they want and there ya have it.
This is a great myth, but it's simply not true. Because of the electoral college and the way they vote (all votes go to one candidate even if the candidate was elected by 51%) the electoral college actually makes things worse. Consider the following (electoral votes data [fec.gov], census data) (assuming everyone can and does vote, doesn't matter, divide all pop numbers by 4 or whatever):
So you'd need all votes of 9 states (assuming a minority who don't are offset by a minority who do in other states).
So you'd need the electoral votes of 11 states to win. The problem here is that each state only needs to be won by 51% of the vote. You could potentially have a situation where a candidate promises half-assed to sell the rest of the country out for these 11 states, and she would win 51% of the votes in these 11 and none in the other 40 (DC). Wonder what that would look like population-wise? 83,968,838. In our current system, an election could potentially be won with 29% of the total vote! So are we assured that "the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys"? No -- not with 51% of a state winning the vote. Make it so the electoral college splits their votes according to the way the state voted, and then you have protection...
Re:replace the printer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why So Long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And it needs to be ... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is much better, if more expensive, to allow counties to implement the voting system they see fit.
Re:Couldn't voters insist on using the old machine (Score:4, Insightful)
I've voted in every election in the last fifteen years and have yet to wait in line at a polling place.
Why is this market insightful? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's already a linear log of votes - votes at the bottom of the ballot box were turned in first. And that doesn't change - THE VOTING MACHINE DOES NOT COUNT VOTES! It just produces paper ballots with greater accuracy than previous methods. That's it. It's the paper ballots that count.
Give it a rest. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, wait.
The printer was delayed until AFTER the next major election.
Give it a rest.
EVERY elected executive-branch office in California is held by a Democrat except the new gubernator - who is a flaming liberal on all issues except partly on fiscal AND married into the Kennedy clan and advised by them.
That includes the Secretary of State who promulgated this decision.
Yes we'd ALL love to have this done in time for '04. But CA is in debt up to its eyeballs and you KNOW the election machine companies will charge extra for a rush job.
It's going to be tough enough deciding how to handle the inevitable cases where the pissed-off voter comes to the official with the ballot stub and says "HEY! This machine didn't vote it right!" without leaving the barn door open for tampering with the electronic count.
Re:Hey... (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the standard solution, but throwing away someone's vote is undemocratic and undesirable, so if there is now a better solution available (e.g. a touchscreen that makes the voter's vote is valid before it gets submitted), why not use it?
Re:No guarantee (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember that the receipt is actually a printed ballot, put into a ballot box at the polling place just like the current ballots. If the machine printed out one thing but recorded another, then during the inevitable recount (in CA a recount is automatic if the margin is less than a certain amount) they'll find a discrepancy between the results of the recount and the results reported by the machine. You start seeing that in several recounts, especially if it changes the outcome of the election, and there'll be enough of an outcry that an investigation will have to be started.
Re:Iowa has the best voting system. (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus paper is expensive. Plus counting is only fast if you have the people (or the machines, which are dangerous) to do it.
Plus scantrons are ambiguous. There's a recognition issue there, and while they're pretty good, the margin of error is nonzero (as it is with all counting systems, but here it's measurably non-zero). And then you'd get into "pregnant chad" lands again, just with, I dunno, "pregnant bubbles".
Look, the paper trail isn't the important part. The important part is that a hardcoded audit trail is available, and that it can be easily spot checked to ensure that the machines are working as they are supposed to be working.
Electronic voting is the right way to go, in the future. As you scale the number of people, the logistics get insane, and wasting money on elections is not what I want a government to be doing. We're talking about *counting* here, something that's been done since the first person looked at his fingers.
What you need, though, is a foolproof system. A system without friggin' software, a system running on bare metal, just logic gates, writing to a verifiably safe write-once-read-many storage medium.
Unfortunately, in order to develop that, you need to have some technical expertise, which Diebold and co definitely don't have. Come on. Commercial off-the-shelf crap? Jeez. Take out a damned electronics CAD package and design something that doesn't suck.
Re:What mess? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:1, Insightful)