Threading the Needle: Florida Plan Gives Citizens Real Paper Ballots

[kster]

Bill Faulkner’s Answer to
Fear and Loathing in the Voting Booth

Michael Collins
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington, DC

Thursday, 8 March 2007, 4:15 pm
Opinion: Michael Collins

SNIP... This approach has a number of significant advantages. Combined, these changes return power to the people.


Citizens control the process: The counting of paper ballots would be conducted by citizens, in full public view, on election night. The volunteers would live in the locality where the race took place and represent a cross section of the population. This was done for over a hundred years with far fewer questions about elections than we have now. It’s feasible and a proven success as our history shows.

Citizens regain confidence in the process: Instead of a crew of experts from private corporations (the voting machine companies or other vendors) or public officials who disdain inquiries, this approach involves citizens conducting the count that determines the winner.

Cross checking between hand and machine count: The complaint about hand counts, complaints from those who sell e-voting machines, is that human error occurs when humans count votes. They forget that there is both human error plus a capability for human avarice at play in the handling and programming of voting machines. Our democracy was built on human hand counts and tabulation of voting results. By putting citizens in charge, errors will be caught and corrected on the spot.

Reduced post election controversy: Close elections or elections with nonsensical outcomes are difficult to recount due to state laws that make recounts difficult and often expensive. When recounts take place, the recounts often lack common sense like Virginia’s refusal to allow examination of optical scan forms in 2005. The simultaneous hand counting and machine checking creates a situation where the necessity of recounts is greatly reduced.

Winners and losers

The big winners with this plan are the people, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, Greens, etc. Anyone involved in the political process who wants to fight for their cause on a level playing field would come out ahead with citizen counting of paper ballots in public view.

Voting machine companies like Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia would soon leave the field. They’d be denied the ever expanding market for increasingly expensive and complex voting machines.



http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0703/S00150.htm

[MercutioATC]

1. ...because Florida did such a good job with paper ballots in 2000...

The emphasis shouldn't be on paper or touchscreen, it should be on security and reliability...and a lot of that is legislative, not physical (as we learned in 2000).

[boobooday]

2. I think we need paper

Nothing else archives "voter intent" in a trustworthy way.

[MercutioATC]

3. Agreed, but you also need to fix your laws.

Paper didn't help you in 2000 and it's not going to help you now without clearer legislation.

[boobooday]

6. Believe me, I know

But like I said, I just got here.

However, at least paper ballot leave open the possibility of a recount.

[kster]

4. Simultaneous a) optical scan counting and hand counting of optical scan ballot with

b) the hand counted paper ballots serving as the ballot o record.
Each process checks the other and the entire process serves as both a tabulation of votes and a simultaneous audit, conducted in the open by citizen’s not private concerns

:)

[Peace Patriot]

5. You need to see Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens"--the part about

the electronic voting corporations providing soggy punchcard ballots designed to fail (produce "hanging chads," etc.) in FLA '00. One employee whistleblower says it was to artificially create a market for electronic voting machines. Another believes it was to steal the election. These motives are not mutually exclusive. Steal one election, and set things up (e-voting boondoggle fast-tracked all over the country) to steal elections forevermore.

It wasn't the paper that was the problem. It was WHO was providing it, and their devious or diabolical intentions.

In any case, punchcards were never a good form of paper ballot. As has been proven in Ohio '04, punchcards can easily be miscounted by slipping the card, with the voter choices represented only by holes in the card, into a wrongly callibrated hole counter. What's needed is a VOTER MARK **NEXT TO A NAME**. The vote must be easily recognizable to the human eye. Anything that interferes in that human relationship--one person's anonymous vote being easily recognizable and countable (and recountable) by other human beings--especially high speed machines run on 'TRADE SECRET' code (jeez)--creates too much opportunity to INTERPRET the results. A voter mark handwritten NEXT TO A NAME is the least ambiguous form of voting. And if those votes are then counted IN PUBLIC VIEW in close proximity to that voter (his/her precinct) BEFORE being transported elsewhere, that is the most security you can have--HUMAN BEINGS, of all political stripes, free to WATCH, and the locally and publicly counted results posted locally for all to see. Every step you take away from a visible mark made by a human, and counted by humans in public view--and, in particular, every machine or private corporations you interpose, and every bit of secrecy created by officialdom--decreases security.

ANY system can be fiddled. With electronic voting, insecurity is huge, and includes the SPEED of the count, the number of votes that can be switched with one simple action (a line of code), the very secrecy of the "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, easy insider access to the 'TRADE SECRET' code, the complete lack of a paper trail (in many states--still) or miserably inadequate audits (even the states that have ballots don't do enough of a hand-count to catch fraud, and some don't ANY automatic audit), and the inherent insecurity of BILLIONS of dollars being at issue, both as to voting machine contracts and who gains power over government coffers (by means of fiddling the vote). The COST of e-voting has corrupted our whole system, and it has introduced a corporate "culture of secrecy" that has infected election officials with HOSTILITY TO THE VOTERS AND CITIZENS whom they are supposed to serve. It is stark-raving madness to give "trade secret" control of election outcomes to PRIVATE corporations, let alone to private corporations with close ties to the Republican Party and rightwing causes (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia).

Punchcards and other mechanical systems also introduce elements--the punchcards, the holes, the callibration--that increase insecurity because you can't SEE the vote, and because--as Dan Rather showed--each element is corruptible. If a private corporation controls production of the punchcards, and government officials do not provide oversight, or look the other way, an opportunity is created to misuse that power.

A marked paper ballot, hand-counted in public, is the MOST secure. Its very slowness is an asset. Its clunkiness and awkwardness INCREASES security because the very existence of a marked paper ballot is a preventative to large-scale vote switching. You have to have duplicate ballots; you have to mark them; you have to get rid of the real ones. And...HUMAN BEINGS ARE WATCHING, every step of the way. You might be able to get away with large-scale fraud, with enough conspirators involved, but every person involved, and every physical ballot you have to get rid or, or falsify, increases the chances that you will be caught.

With e-voting, ONE INSIDER HACKER can switch a million votes, instantly, without detection. The potential exists to EASILY and UNDETECTABLY change the outcome of state and national elections. With zero auditing, or only 1% auditing, how would anybody know? There is only inferential evidence (pre-election polls; exit polls--the very pickle we were in, in 2004). And even with paper ballots that are electronically tabulated (optiscans), if you don't COUNT the ballots, you have only created the POSSIBILITY of a reliable result, not the reliable result itself. Optiscans heighten insecurity partly because they create the ILLUSION of security. ('oh, we have a paper ballot--we don't have to worry.') In most states, those ballots go into a box and are never seen again--and the ELECTRONIC TABULATION of what the ballots supposedly said determines the outcome. Your vote becomes merely a bunch of manipulable electrons!