Why Can't Voting Machines Be Like ATM Machines

and give you a receipt telling you who you voted for?

I actually noticed that Diebold makes the ATM machines in my area.

.... There is a fear that if our actual vote is recorded, someone
will use it against you sometime. Like at your job.

immediately.....

And the paper trail just says the vote was cast not who cast it....

Doesn't an absentee ballot have your name on it? Just asking, because I've never used one. However, I will use one in 2004 if my district goes touch-screen.

I will give up my paper ballot when they pry it out of my cold dead hands.

At least the way vote by mail works in Oregon, you put your marked ballot into an unmarked "secrecy envelope," then put that envelope into the slightly larger return envelope. After sealing it, you sign your name across the flap.

When the ballots arrive, they take them out of their return envelopes and dump them into whatever receptacle while they're still in their secrecy envelopes. When the ballots are opened to be counted, there is nothing to connect them to the voter.

eom

goes in a lock box and is treated just like any other ballot.

Help yourselves by dropping the term receipt. That stops half the arguments about taking them out of the polling place.

Voter-verified paper ballots- because with voting, unlike ATM's, you cannot walk away with that proof. That ballot stays in a ballot box to be used in recounts and audits and as the official proof of voter intent.

Receipts and audit trail do not have the weight or implications that ballot does. Always use the term ballot.

Voter-verified ballots stay in the polling place in the ballot box. If someone yells about vote buying, ask them how they would prevent it with absentee or internet voting? Double standard. Junk argument.

With an absentee ballot, the ballot goes inside a blank envelope. That goes into another envelope that the voter signs as proof it is their vote. The signature is checked against the records and the outer ballot discarded. The blank envelope (relatively speaking, it does not have your name on it) is collected with others and at some point in the process, then removed and counted.

If you use an absentee ballot, make sure it counts as per normal. Some are treated as provisional, even if you are a registered voter, and may not be counted unless the race is close. Check your state to see the status of these ballots. In states like Washington state, in which voters can request permanent mail-in voting, that ballot is treated like a ballot cast at the polls. That may not be true in all states.

If your ballot is counted just like any other, then by all means vote that way. I happen to like the idea of county auditors receiving a flood of requests for absentee, especially if they are thinking of purchasing all DRE's. That's a lot of expense that won't make sense if they also have to purchase optical scan for the mail in ballots.

I think there is one new system out there that can produce the optical scan ballots, count them, and is also a DRE. Kind of an all in one package- but it produces a voter-verified paper ballot and as we know, some areas don't seem friendly to the idea of protecting the vote.

And what garbage arguments by the 9th circuit court. Sounds like the rational you get from the vendors of paperless DRE's. Hmm.....

The vote selling argument never occurred to me....

I learned something today....


I now want a system that provides an i-n-t-e-r-n-a-l trail....

Argument: "No need for a paper trail, the machines keep three copies of the vote internally"
Answer: How are we to know that any of these three internal copies are our actual vote without a voter verified paper trail? Internal copies may guard against accidental erasure - they do nothing against intentional cheating.

Argument: "You can't give people receipts - it will encourage vote selling"
Answer: No one walks away with a receipt - the audit ballot is put in a lockbox and only used to audit the election.

Argument: "Counting all the votes by hand only moves us back to the bad old days of paper ballots - and we know that people cheated with paper ballots"
Answer: This one deserves several responses:
1.) Glad to see you agree that cheating has occurred in the past.
2.) Our suggestion was to use spot checks - not to count ALL the ballots by hand.
3.) Prior methods of cheating are labor intensive and require a large number of coconspirators. Computerized cheating would only require a small group of insiders who could then throw elections all over the country – our worst nightmare.

Argument: “Printing paper ballots is completely unworkable. Printers will jam, ink will run out, and malicious voters will tie-up the system with fake spoiled votes.”
Answer: Almost every process that involves monetary transactions in the country (ATM cash withdrawals, retail purchases, bank deposits, etc.) is accompanied by paper audit trails. Don’t our votes deserve as much care? As for malicious slowdowns, unless an organized campaign is launched, I truly doubt this will come to much of a problem.

you could get money out of them!

"We're sorry, there are insufficient funds in your account to cast this ballot."

Instead let us stay with the good old paper ballot. It has proven time and again to be the least subseptible to tampering, and for those who say that it takes too long to count, well Canada runs it's elections on paper ballot and usually has the results in 4-6 hours.

But, as you may know, the "handicapped accessible" argument is one of the chief arguments for the touch screen machines. I say, fine, if the disabled are better served by DREs, buy enough for them - everyone else gets paper.

How many people vote in each precinct? A few hundred?

Just have everyone mark their ballot with a pencil or pen provided at the polling place, have a bipartisan committee count the results, and send them up to the municipal level, then up to the county level, then up to the state level.

This is a perfect example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Before you cast the vote the computer tells you who you voted for and asks "Are you sure?"

Happens all the time on my computer.

:eyes:

n/t

What we want is a Voter Verified Paper Ballot.