[EM] Re: touch screen voting machines

[Forest Simmons]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Rob Speer wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 04:45:36AM -0800, Ken Johnson wrote:
> > I agree that it is not acceptable for the voter to be given a voting
> > receipt if they don't want one. The voting machine can ask "Do you want
> > an auditable voting receipt?"; if not you just click "No". But I feel
> > strongly that I should have the OPTION of being able to verify that my
> > particular ballot was counted the way I voted, and no one but me should
> > have access to the information identifying me with my vote.
>
> But they will, and making it optional doesn't help.
>
> If you have the option of verifying your ballot, then someone has the
> option of paying you $20 for your verifiable vote receipt. Or
> threatening you if you don't get a receipt and give it to them.
>
> As far as I can tell, there are two reasonable ways to handle
> verification:
>
> * Give everyone a number to verify their vote; post all the votes along
>   with the voter numbers. Then anyone can hypothetically check that the
>   votes have been counted correctly. You must realize that if you do
>   this in a large election, you are creating an open (or black) market
>   for votes.
> * Don't do it. This is the only option for public elections.
> --

Here in Oregon almost all voters vote by mail, just like voting absentee,
except from home.

This is for all elections, including the presidential election.

The hardest part about this is the ease of losing your ballot before
getting around to filling it out.

So far nobody has come over and tried to bribe me or coerce me into voting
one way or another.

There is a statement about the penalty for election fraud on the envelope
that you sign (the outside envelope).

The inside envelope is called the "ballot secrecy envelope."

I believe that the systems proposed by Dave Ketchum and Eron Lloyd are
much more fool proof than this Oregon system, but the e systems currently
used in some parts of this country are vastly inferior, so it appears that
we are moving backwards rather than forwards in this area.

I hope this isn't part of the democracy education that Bush is so
graciously scattering abroad to all of the backward countries that don't
seem to understand who's really supposed to be in charge of resource
distribution, etc.

Forest