Letters to the Editor
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Republicans aren't the only culprits
I think it would be interesting for you to check out the voting machine glitches that happened in Chicago this last election.
Especially concentrate on the Cook County Board President election. Not as important, but damn interesting.
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Who says there is a culprit ?
The article doesn't claim that Republicans are the culprits. It specifically claims that the problems were non-partisan, but due to the voting patterns of the county it adversely affected the Democratic vote.
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Double receipt
I don't like electronic voting machines. I have no doubt that these machines can be hacked, and that pole workers can be social engineered. One day we will long for the days of partisan party manipulation of the vote. Someday, a corporation or a foreign government will put its efforts into hacking the American vote and the results will be disastrous.
If we need to use computers to vote, why can't there be a double receipt system? One receipt goes into the ballot box, voter gets to keep the other as a record of his vote. If anyone purports to have a reason why this can't be done, my reply would be that I get a receipt when I buy even the lowliest of chewing gum. The store keeps a copy, and I walk with a copy. Not too complex for almost every commercial transaction in America, not too complex for democracy.
The double receipt is an improvement in that this situation in Florida is addressed. Each voter would check to see that the receipts match. They then put one in a ballot box and keep the other. While they are walking away they notice that the vote for congress is blank. The problem is spotted a lot earlier.
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Cheating? Disenfranchised voters? Hacked macines? You bet. Don't doubt it for a minute.
I live in Orlando, FL. I've volunteered in the polls for years. I saw people disenfranchised in 2000. I saw Gov. Bush try to purge tens of thousands of voters in 2000 & 2004. In 2000 he succeeded.
Gov, Bush has deliberately worked to make voting hackable in Florida. There is NO excuse for passing a law making a verifiable paper trail illegal, but that is what Bush tried to do. His rationale against people who wanted proof that their votes counted was that it should be illegal to question the integrity of the vote process in his state. He is just like his brother.
It makes no sense to blame 18,000 undervotes on a ballot or confused voters when the undervotes occur in one county but not the adjacent counties.
As for the partisan nature of these voting irregularities - please! - every voting problem in Florida under Bush has benefited the Republicans. The statistical probablility of non-partisan errors only affecting one side negatively falls in the slim to none category. Get real. There are Republicans across the country going to jail for the voter fraud committed in 2002 & 2004 - its stupid to pretend that this isn't a massive problem caused by the Republicans to benefit Republicans.
Now we have an all Republican panel - led by Jeb - declaring a Republican the winner before the votes can be verified in a highly questionable election. Jeb declaring an election in favor of a Republican - what a joke that is. Too bad the joke's on all of us.
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"double receipts" won't improve elections.
The problem with paper is vote buying.
If you give a receipt that the voter can carry out the door it will be used as proof for liquor, drugs or money.
After many years in the computer business I advocate paper ballots. Count them by hand or OCR them but give every voter a piece of paper on which to cast their vote. Simple, cheap and verifiable.
The tricky part is to be sure each voter turns in the ballot they were given by a poll worker so no pre-marked ballots find their way into the system.
The old liquor, drugs or money method was to send in a voter with a pre-marked ballot and give them their goods in exchange for the blank ballot they were given inside. Not a good way to run an fair election...
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Why we don't have receipts
The problem with a receipt for your vote isn't a technical one. A receipt allows the possibility of vote-buying. Right now you can take money to vote for somebody then vote any way you please, and they have no idea beyond your promise.
I leave it up to you to say if vote-buying is a worse danger than not knowing if your vote was counted at all. I will say that vote-buying is potentially very dangerous. Not only would elections literally go to the highest bidder, but people could be pressured by their bosses to vote their way at the cost of their jobs.
There are various clever technical means to provide you an encrypted receipt so that you can confirm that your vote was counted (say, by checking for your receipt on the web site) but can't actually verify who you voted for. A manual recount could decrypt your vote, but the decryption key would be secret to prevent vote-selling. Ultimately, however, it's not nearly as satisfying or clear-cut as a receipt that says "I voted for X, Y, and Z".
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Paper is better, but . . .
It is not completely safe either. Search for "Harri Hursti" and read about his hack. The dangerous thing about the vulnerabilities that he exposed is that vote totals and other initial checks wouldn't show that anything was wrong. The results wouldn't match exit polls, of course, but there wouldn't be anything definite.
The main check against this kind of attack is to always hand count a random sample of the ballots as a part of the certification process. This wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a lot better than anything that we have now.
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The butterfly ballot
goes digital.
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Receipts
The reason you don't get a receipt when you vote is simple. Party operative comes to someone and says "I'll give you $10 to go in there and vote for Joe. Just show me the receipt and I'll give you the $10." Or in a slightly less kind location "Get in there and vote for Joe. If you don't show me the receipt, I'll kill you."
In our system now you can (illegally) pay someone to vote, but except with an absentee ballot, you can't know HOW they voted.
This running tape that the writer advocates is not without problems either. Generally you know (through accounting or otherwise) what order people voted on in a machine or you can figure it out. If you also have a running receipt, a persons vote is no longer secret.