Punch cards are a voting problem (see hanging chads, butterfly ballots, et al), but the proposed solution - electronic voting machines - is unauditable.
Record votes in electronic voting machines the way they are, but print a paper receipt to confirm votes and write an entry on a physically marking WORM-type device to provide an audit trail to prevent cheating on electronic voting machines.
Audit the machines randomly to confirm paper matches WORM matches hard disk randomly. Otherwise, how do you know your vote was recorded the way you punched it in?
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I like it. Why is this so hard to conceive of? Two receipts. One stays in the machine, one goes with me. No cheating.
This is a very important issue!
Read about the scandal occuring now at http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
We are already being cheated at the polls.
The reason there aren't receipts to take away from voting machines is that it makes selling your vote easier.
With today's systems you could offer someone money to vote a certain way but you'd never know if they did it or not. A receipt would make verification a snap.
This is a very serious problem though. All electronic voting machines should have a printed receipt that's the voter verifies is correct and is kept at the polling place so that meaningful recounts can occur.Check www.verfiedvoting.com for more info on this issue.
theclar is right that we can't have people walking out on the streets with receipts. The common suggestion is that an internal receipt be taken that can be counted, but this seems to be susceptible to the same type of fraud because you can't see it. Maybe we should get a printed receipt that we can look at and then you put it in a box on your way out and the election worker watches to make sure it is deposited. Then the election commision can do a random sample later and make sure its working.
aschmidt thank you for your vote of support. I think you are dead on about printing a reciept that the voter can see and check against the their choices which should still be visible on the screen. If everything is kosher then the voter presses a button to say yes that's my final answer. If not then there needs to be an option to redo.
Simpler would be to have the results of the voting bootprinted in a machine/human readable form, of which that paper is the only voting data that leaves the booth. The paper is optically scanned, or if need be, human read.
classicsat has the right idea. As a politically concerned software quality engineer, I have been very disturbed by what I've seen about electronic voting. A person should go into a voting booth, same as always, and come out with a ballot that goes into a ballot box and is counted there. Same as always (except here in Connecticut where we use mechanical machines). In the booth, touch-screen voting produces a perfect ballot - punched, darkened circles, OCR, bar codes, details unimportant - and the ballot also lists the names of the people voted for. The present system for voter verification, ballot counting and recounting, etc. can be used without change. Easy to set up and test, no networking or vote files, no smart cards,... VERY IMPORTANT!
As an election judge, I feel that the optical scan method of counting votes is the most reliable and efficient method. I greatly prefer this idea to black-box touchscreens, but optical scan combines the paper trail of actual ballots with the efficiency of automated counting.