Even More Voting Machine Woes
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, TechnologyThe Tarrant County Democratic Party and four local voters have filed a federal lawsuit against the Texas secretary of state declaring that the electronic voting machines used in Tarrant County are unconstitutional and in violation of federal law.The suit calls for the county’s election system to install a verifiable paper trail in time for Tuesday’s general election, a process that the top local election official said would be impossible.
Art Brender, chairman of the Tarrant County Democratic Party, filed the suit in Austin on Monday charging that without a backup paper trail that voters can use to double-check their vote when casting their ballot electronically, the voting system in Tarrant County violates the Texas Election Code, the Help America Vote Act, and the first and fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
No paper trail? Come on…we need a Federal standard for voting. None of this state-by-state shit anymore. Local and state officials have shown that they’re incapable of providing adequate voting systems, so let’s federalize this process and call it a day.
What say you?
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November 1st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
The touch-screen voting machine technology simply isn’t ready for prime time. And anybody who actually works with computers (and is feeling honest) has to be horrified at any even vaguely important system which has no audit trail — which for voting machines means a paper trail. There are just too many ways that things can go wrong (accidently or deliberately), and no way to find out, let alone prove it.
That said, I’m not convinced that a federal solution is the answer. What is the basis for believing that, if one set of politicians can’t deal with the problem, another set of politicians will be able to do any better? At least with state-by-state control it may be possible to sort out, eventually, what works and what doesn’t. Once the Feds get into it, we’re stuck with one “solution” — even if, as seems likely, it doesn’t work either.
November 1st, 2006 at 7:16 pm
Boy, if it’s true that no paper trail violates Texas law, I wonder what that will mean for my vote. I voted today and it was an electronic ballot with no paper trail (at least not one that I could see). But the lack of a paper trail obviously doesn’t violate the constitution. We’ve always had to go on faith that our vote will actually be counted and counted accurately. The problem with electronic voting without a paper trail is that, if something goes wrong, there’s no way to double-check the system. But whether no paper trail is illegal is a whole other matter.
This should be simple. All e-vote machines should have a paper trail. I was irritated that the one I used didn’t and I’m more irritated that this whole thing may end up in court because politicians didn’t think this through before authorizing the machines.
November 1st, 2006 at 8:22 pm
If you’re just looking for a paper trail, you’re looking at the wrong solution. Have you seen the machines with the paper trail? The paper is behind glass. So if it does have an error, you have no recourse, and no proof that it screwed up. If it runs out of ink (which happens all the time at the gas station, and occasionally at ATMs), you have no record. What if the machines die part way through? You’re screwed again.
The most secure, reliable system is paper ballots. Those ballots can be machine readable and human readable, and we can have machines that produce them.
Imagine this: You go to a machine and pick your candidates on a touch screen. You confirm who you want, and it prints your choices on a preprinted ballot. You look at it, and confirm that it’s correct. You then take it to the official, who puts it in a reader, right in front of you. It reads it, and tells you how it’s reading it on a private screen that only you see. You verify by pressing a YES or a NO button. If yes, it records the result, and puts it in a box. If no, it spits it back to you and you can fix it. If the power goes out, or theres a problem with the machine, you can still fill the thing in by hand. If someone suspects fraud, you recount the ballots that the machine counted. Since the ballots were all machine printed, you have zero ambiguity. (Only if the machines fail AND there’s a recount do you have a problem)
November 1st, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Well, I have no experience with voting, seeing that I am only sixteen. Although I must say that, mainly in response to WJ, a federal solution could possibly be the answer. They have managed to have the US Mint is such an organized and protected manner, then why can’t they with something that is no where near as complex. Electronic voting in every state that prints out a receipt-like-paper into a giant steel box which is welded and locked for security and behind a wall not accessible by the community.
BAM. Paper trail, e-voting — you have what you need.
Or in fact, take the voting systems that are working (obviously not Florida’s… or Texas in this case), and have the federal gov. do tests with them and surely incorporate it into a national tradition. As Justin says, “federalize this process and call it a day.”