...in an official way!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15976613/from/ET/

I'm quite pleased with the two essential statements:

-electronic voting cannot be made secure

,and

-paper trails are a must.

Electronic voting records are not human readable and are mallable, in that they can be changed with no enduring record of the change. Electrons do this by their nature and it's what makes computing possible.

The primary issue with the security of electronic voting records is the need to not have our votes be personally identifiable. That one requirement, and it is a must, really inhibits our ability to make secure electronic recordings of the votes.

Of course, paper does not exhibit this quality. A physical change to physical media leaves a record and is difficult to do.

That leaves counting and auditing said count to determine when and if the paper must be consulted.

A much nicer problem to address.

I'm a strong advocate for optical scan. It's got issues, but it does feature a physical record of the vote cast that endures and is both human and machine readable. It also powers VBM, so that's a good thing.

After knowing what I know, having researched this thing to death, I still would actually love to see VBM implemented with human counters. We have them in a room, televise it if we want to, each counter supervised by at least two other watchers.

Make the counting of the vote something that people do. We've got lots of people. Students, retired people, homeless! Would be a great contribution and civics lesson for anyone participating. This scales such that we could still have definifive results the evening of the election, in a majority of the races.

Waiting for a full and complete democracy is well worth it, IMHO.

I'll easily take what I can get though. Optical scan is solid enough. Hope this sees traction.

I don't care who wins. Well, I do, but it's secondry. I need to know who won --actually did win. Ambiguity in this regard is very unsettling in that it puts the other elements of democracy into chaos. Is the issue one of advocacy, education, other?? These are things that are what we are supposed to debate and engage in to affect the will of the people.

If the results are ambigious, one always wonders if the issue isn't corruption, etc... This harms the process in that advocates don't have the information they need to engage in the proper advocacy.

Harmful.

I watched a documentary about some folks who put the electronic voting machines to various tests and stuff and it showed how they could be hacked and blah blah blah. I caught it after it had already begun and I don't know the title. I'm pretty sure " hacked " was in the title.

Anyway, some of the content was good to see and know and stuff. But they style was SOOOOO over the top and dramatic and women crying and crap that it was embarrasing to watch. I don't know if the " testers " were Liberal or Conservative or anything or both. But it was STOOPID.

It completely undermined their credibility to see some of those scenes.

Look, I have never made a movie ( well, at least I have never made a movie that will get released on anything but youtube ) so I doubt I could do better. But that was a terrible film about something that could have made a difference. They blew it.

What is the objection to paper trails? That's what I just don't understand.

I don't get that either.

Our top computer scientists have confirmed what activists and concerned citizens have been saying all along: electronic records are too mallable to be trustworthy.

Paper is dead simple, it's cheap and it's known to work.

IMHO, there are people who like the ambiguity and that's the resistance. There is also a lot of uninformed credence assigned to computer technology getting in the way.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has proposed abandoning touch screen voting machines in favor of optical-scan paper ballots.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070131/tc_nm/florida_ballots_dc

Well hey, electronic machines gave Diebold a few years of healthy profits, and probably provided the opportunity for a few local, state, maybe even federal elections to be stolen. A win/win for corporate America. Glad to see people are finally waking up to common sense, along with realizing that when it comes to technology, more is not necessarily better.

If they are going to optical scan, then that paves the way for Vote By Mail.

Of all the current choices, optical scan is probably the best overall solution. The voting record is kept and is made by the voters hand, thus keeping the chain of trust solid between voter and vote cast.

They really should follow up with some intent standards now, before they have another hanging chad repeat.

A simple table of examples and intent would suffice. Bubble filled, two bubbles filled, one more than the other, mark through one bubble, part of a bubble filled, any sort of mark in the bubble, etc...

Hope they also have audits of the counting machines as well.

There are still issues with optical scan, but not anywhere near the issues found in all electronic voting records.