Texas Supreme Court: no e-voting paper trail required

By Timothy B. Lee | Published a day ago

A group of Texas voters seeking to stop the use of paperless electronic voting machines reached a dead end on Friday; the Texas Supreme Court ruled that their suits could not proceed without evidence that they have been personally harmed.

Texas has been using direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines for more than a decade. In 2006, a coalition of voters led by the Austin NAACP sued to stop Travis County from using the eSlate, a DRE machine made by Austin-based Hart InterCivic. (Hart does offer a printer as an optional component of its system.) The voters claimed the machines were insecure and did not allow meaningful recounts.

Travis County disagreed. In a FAQ on the county's voting website, officials answered questions about paper trails and security.



In other words, the county has foregone a real paper trail, but it can simply print all the vote records in the machine's memory on slips of paper at a later date. Since the concern in most such cases would be about whether the recorded votes are accurate—not, say, whether the computer was adding them up properly—this feature is largely meaningless. (A real paper trail prints a "receipt" under glass that voters can see before leaving the voting station.)

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/texas-supreme-court-nixes-e-voting-lawsuit-before-trial.ars

"(A real paper trail prints a "receipt" under glass that voters can see before leaving the voting station.)"

All that needs to be done is to print another tape that shows the votes they way they want the votes to be and destroy the first tape. What is to stop them? How would you know? You can't know.

There needs to be real ballets that the voters fill in, that can be hand counted. If other countries can hand count hundreds of millions in a few days or less, why can't we?

After all, suppressing the vote might not be enough, so votes actually registered may need to be rigged.

Gotta make sure their votes aren't counted. I suspect we will be seeing lots of "why aren't hispanics voting in Texas?" or "Hispanics surprise by voting overwhelmingly Republican" articles in the future.