Paper trail needed [LWN.net]

Paper trail needed

Posted Aug 14, 2003 20:20 UTC (Thu) by frumious (subscriber, #3892)
Parent article: Bringing free software to voting booths

Voter-verifiable paper trails are needed. You can look at them when the power is off, and you can verify that what you voted is what's on the paper.

See http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/2003/february5/dillsr-25.html

In my county (Washington County, Oregon), we're finally switching from punch-cards (with hanging chad) to paper ballots that are optically scanned, like nearby Multnomah County (downtown Portland) has been doing for ages.

http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/105999813873341.xml?oregonian?lcpl

The touch-screen machines look cool and seem modern, but I personally think they're just too risky to use, period, unless you add printers so that voters can compare the printed vote with their desired vote.

Using paper to start with is a lot easier.

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Paper trail needed

Posted Aug 19, 2003 1:11 UTC (Tue) by jmason (guest, #13586) [Link]

Having worked with touchscreens -- and their attendant calibration issues -- I can only agree. I would never trust a touchscreen system, unless it verified afterwards the candidate *it* thought I voted for ;)

The best suggestion I've heard, is for paper ballots that are more easily OCR'd. The system for voting, and counting those votes, using paper ballots has been worked out over the years and is pretty foolproof and attack-proof, compared to the computer-based systems. But where computers *could* be used to speed up and simplify the voting process, is as automated counting machines -- which can be double-checked afterwards by humans, as in present recounts.