Voting System

The new crop of voting systems coming out are wrought with outright fraud. Diebold machines have no paper trail, no one can look at the results or how the software works. Those of us living in a "democratic" society are forced to blindly trust a company that sent out letters urging elected officials to support the Bush re-election campaign. We have only their word that they're telling us the truth about the results. I've got an idea for a system that will work. It will work because the information is transparent, everyone can see the results. 1) Each registered voter is sent a ballot. The ballot is on carbonless paper and has one or two copies. On each ballot is printed a unique number. That number is assigned at random (say, using a GUID) for each election. 2) The voter fills out the ballot. They keep the yellow copy, their receipt of their vote. They then can either mail the ballot back, or drop it off at a collection point on election day. 3) The votes are counted using optical scanners at centralized locations. The results are sent to a centralized database. The paper copies are retained in case a paper-recount is needed. 4) The results are put on to the web. Information shown is the unique number, the votes, record of which machines each vote went through, and any changes to the information; the audit trail. This list is available to everyone, anywhere. People without internet access could get the list at their local polling place or county office. Privacy is maintained because the correlation between vote and name/address is not known. 5) In the case where someone notices that their votes are not the same as what's shown on the site, people may go to their local voting place, show their receipt, and have the vote corrected. This change shows up in the audit trail. The key is the openness of information. If everyone is able to check their own vote then that's millions of free workers verifying the accuracy of the totals. A potential problem is having extra people added to the list, or having people who didn't actually vote, vote. These would be harder to detect because those people wouldn't be checking the website to make sure their non-vote wasn't counted. This is a problem now, anyway, though. The existing methods to prevent that kind of vote fraud will still work. Links Voting Fraud in Georgia - independent.co.uk Fears of more US electoral chaos after flaws are discovered in ballot computers - independent.co.uk Diebold Audit Released; BlackBoxVoting.Org Shut Down - slashdot Touch Screen Voting Industry Circling Wagons - slashdot Electronic Voting: Your Worst Nightmares are True - slashdot Diebold Voting Systems Grossly Insecure - slashdot Inside Electronic Voting Machines - slashdot

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