E-Voting & Paper Trails
via: Wired News
A “Blue-Ribbon” panel, led by former President Jimmy Carter, has recommended that a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) be required for all e-voting machines by the time the next Presidential elections roll around. The goal of the VVPAT is to create an audit trail that is independant of the electronic vote count. Of course this all sounds like a great idea right? Why not have a VVPAT? With a VVPAT, if there ever was a question regarding who actually won the election it would be easy to go back and verify the electronic votes with the VVPAT, wouldn’t it?
The answer to the above question is… NO! How would you use a printed piece of paper to to verify that the votes had been tallied correctly? Would the registrars ask everyone to photocopy their VVPAT tickets and mail them in to be counted? What would the mechanism be? How would this work? What happens if I misplaced my VVPAT ticket? Would I get to fill out a form, under penalty of purjury, that states for whom I cast my vote?
Voting in this great democracy of ours has always been an anonymous affair, and is, by design, non-auditable. There is no way to hop in the “way back machine” and make sure that everyone’s votes were tallied properly. I think that we, as a nation built upon the fundamental principal of democracy, should focus on a voting mechanism that is secure, open to scrutiny, accountable, free from fraud and yet maintains our anonymity. Printing out pieces of paper that 78% of voters will discard or misplace within 24 hours of voting does not accomplish those goals. To the credit of the “blue ribbon panel”, they have stated that a VVPAT may not be the ideal solution and that further research needs to be done on e-voting machines.
