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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 04:01 AM

  Nothing is Perfect

  Let us state a simple fact - no voting system that provides anonymity to the voter can ever be secure, because the requirement for a casting a secret ballot will always provide a opening for fraud. That does not cover the possibilities for ballot stuffing (at the election site or later in recounts in "secured areas") for tampering with mechanical voting equipment or in this story - the hacking of electronic voting machines to change ballots. And don't even start on other ways to rig an election such as vote buying, vote identity theft (with variations for dead or alive) or simple intimidation.

  So you want a system that can be counted quickly and accurately, can be audited with a physical record, is easy to use (physically and multi-language), is tamper proof, can be set up easily and does not cost a fortune to purchase or maintain. And, again cannot be used to tell how you voted as an individual.

  And on top of all that – a system that is standardized so that there is no difference in voting anywhere in the administrative district.

  So - do you revert to individual paper ballots (the simplest method)? These are great for 2 or 3 races, but what is the chance for mistakes or error if you have to make 100+ pages if you have loads of choices on a ballot? (assuming individual ballots for each election). Plus the language issue and the possibility for fraud is really huge on these. And color codes are hard when there are over 10 items.

  Voting machines - mechanical - are too easy to "fix" and are also prone to breaking. And they are hard to use.

  Chad type ballots - have been discredited and are too susceptible to human interface problems

  Electronic machines - great potential, but are expensive, can be hacked and have a lot of possibilities for abuse.

  So there is no clear answer here - just which is the least objectionable to the most people. I went to the verifiedvoting.org site and read their proposals and laughed a lot. Electronic voting machines that spit out paper ballots that you put in a box. Great idea, until the printer breaks, and also the fact that it will take twice as long to vote because you will have to vote on the machine and then reverify your paper ballot.

  And will the paper have machine code to read the ballots quickly? Or are we back to the problems with reading paper again?

  As a modest suggestion - I would like to see the most simple and robust electronic systems developed with a simple rom core - that could be standardized throughout the US and then read and verified before the machines are put into use. Maybe the Treasury Department could do it? - they print money and seem to handle revenue items reasonably well. Then let Diebolt or whoever build them - but not touch the internal design. Nothing is perfect and in the end, it is all about getting a system with the least potential for error or abuse. But whatever is built - I can assure you that someone will find fault with it (or figure a way to abuse it).

  —Ironclad Read Ironclad's other letters
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