How to have a democracy

Voter verified paper audit trails (VVPAT) are a big issue in this era of electronic voting with untrusted proprietary machines made by partisan contributors like Diebold. Does VVPAT make any beneficial difference at all? No, as arete writes on Slashdot,

I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine – and it’s NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.

They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.

The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.

So 1) there’s no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.

2) There’s absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there’s plenty of precedent for voiding votes.

3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it’s on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.

If you want democracy with electronic voting, you have to have open voting. It’s that simple. No more secret ballots. But what is worse, is telling people that they have secret elections while they actually don’t.

You don’t. With electronic voting machines, they can find out how you voted anyhow.

The problem is that the public doesn’t know, and there is no way for the public to be sure that the elections were fairly conducted and the votes fairly counted. So open the whole thing up, put it online, let everyone see everything so that we will all know what the result was.

If you want secret ballots, only paper ballots work. And elections conducted with paper ballots are not immune to tampering either, so if people prefer to vote by paper then the results of each ballot box should be counted in the open and posted immediately to the net.