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.”

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)

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.

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.