Who Would Protest E-Voting Paper Trails? Election Officials
from the didn't-see-that-coming dept
Last week California made the right call in mandating a voter verifiable paper receipt in all electronic voting machines. This makes sense in any number of ways and it's hard to think of a reason why you wouldn't want that. However, a group of election officials are so angry about it that they're threatening to fight the state over the mandate. So, what are their problems with a system designed to make sure our elections are fair and accurate? They claim that the paper receipt isn't fair to the blind. No, seriously. Because the blind can't read the receipt, they claim, we should all be barred from using such systems. Of course, none of the election officials bothered to look at the one company that already offers machines with paper receipts - who says they offer a system that will read aloud the vote from the paper receipt using some text-to-speech technology so the voter confirms his or her vote. There goes that complaint. Second complaint? It will slow down voting. Does it really take that long to check the name on the receipt? Besides, where in the law does it say voting needs to be quick. You have as much time as you want when you go to vote, and we should encourage people to feel they've made the right choice - not ask them to speed up. Finally, they complain because some custom-made carts for transporting voting machines won't work any more. At this point, they're clearly just stretching for reasons. Since when does democracy take a back seat to our ability to transport voting machines? The complaints appear to just be politics from people who want to protest any change, even when it makes things better, just because they don't want to bother to change.
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Blind Voters
This reminds me of the drive-up ATM machines that have braille characters on the buttons, probably to satisfy some equal-access regulations.
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It's not that they don't like change
The real risk of a paper audit trail is that it now makes it possible to buy votes...you pay when presented with the voter's receipt. Still, that risk is lower than the other risks.
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Re: It's not that they don't like change
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Re: It's not that they don't like change
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Re: It's not that they don't like change
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Re: It's not that they don't like change
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Re: It's not that they don't like change
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Re: It's not that they don't like change
It isn't that the voting officials are afraid of change, since they're changing to these fancy machines anyway. They're afraid of it changing the "right" way...
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No Subject Given
BooHoo. Happens every day in a real work environment.
I agree with the previous poster - they really want to minimize the chances of a papertrail and manual recounts. Since most election officials are elected anyway (and most belong to either the Dems or Reps anyway) this helps the officials "keep control" over the process. I suspect their main motivation is ensuring their party retains control of the political process, rather than having a true and fair election.
As for vote-buying - who cares. A vast percentage of the voting public are mindless sheep who cast party line votes irregardless of the candidates merits. Having competing bids for their vote might actually induce some of the sheep to think for a change!
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