Congress Won't Fund Paper Backups For E-Voting Machines
from the we-broke-it...-but-don't-expect-us-to-pay-you-to-fix-it dept
It was Congress that first mandated that polling places needed to start using e-voting machines a few years back, which has led to the ridiculously long trail of stories concerning buggy machines with questionable results and no way to go back and check to see how accurate the results are. It appears that politicians have finally been realizing that the lack of a paper trail (even if just to confirm the results) is problematic. So they're pushing states to make sure they use e-voting machines that also include a paper trail. But, when it comes to paying to make those changes, the states are apparently on their own. Congress has rejected a plan to fund the states in making sure a paper backup was available. Why? Well, as Rep. Vernon Ehlers says: "I think there are other methods of achieving redundancy" though he conveniently leaves those out. He then notes: "hand counting is not as accurate as almost any machine counting that I have seen." It's true that hand counting has its problems too. No one denies that. But the point isn't that hand counting is perfect, but that there's a way to go back and compare the results to make sure they're correct and accurate. Without that in place, we're simply relying on the machines to work perfectly, and we know that doesn't work.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: congress, e-voting, paper trail
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Hand counting isn't that bad
Maybe America needs to look at other countries to see how they manage the counting of their vote, instead of trying to over-engineer the solution, introducing several new layers that can result in errors/corruption.
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Re: Hand counting isn't that bad
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Reelect noone
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More to the Story?
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I'd rather the Feds didn't "fund" anything
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Did I get to vote for politicians in all other states ?
I should be "responsible" for those I voted for, not others.
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Re:
The national congress made the dumbass decision that the nation's polling stations should be moving to e-voting machines. Some states had already been making the move, but the national Congress passed the idea.
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Voting could have been stacked in the past, still hackable now.
You would think that they'd be able to design a hack-proof system of something so important such as voting... I guess to them, our vote isnt that important anyway, or they would have put more care in the design of the voting machines.
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Re:
Oh no, your vote is very important to them. That's why they're so keen on finding ways to change it (such as these non-verifiable electronic voting systems).
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Oh no, your vote is very important to them. That's why they're so keen on finding ways to change it (such as these non-verifiable electronic voting systems).
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How would a paper trail work?
An easier suggestion would be to create summaries of votes cast every hour or half hour as the case may be. This can be then checked against the number of votors during that period to avoid over-voting, or vote changing at a later stage.
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Re: How would a paper trail work?
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