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A paper trail **is** possible

A paper trail is a must. The last two elections I voted using this system. There was no tangible record of my vote. Only that I had "participated" via the log of who in my precinct voted that day. Your proposed system would be a vast improvement over what is currently the case. Hopefully we won't conveniently "vote away" many rights before a verifiable system is in place.

I don't know the Diebold people at all, so no comment on them or their product, but if their system is as easy to disrupt and/or corrupt as has been indicated many times in many pubs, they've got a major problem. I've designed data systems for close on to thirty yrs, and the principal rules of all of them are: 1) you can't possibly have too many copies of your data, because the worst case WILL occur, 2) if you can't track the history of your data back to the first keystroke, you can not rationally assert the validity of the data.

This is NOT nuclear physics -- hell's bells, any bright college freshman could design a lot of assorted systems very well, postulating only that he or she had some amount of experience in/with such systems. From a data standpoint (and from a systems standpoint, too), the struc and proc of a competently designed balloting system is absolutely child's play compared to, say, six-sigma production quality control or multivariant real-time sims or any number of other apps.

Why in the world the ''problem'' (sic) of effectively tamper-proof e-balloting has not been quite thoroughly solved is a complete mystery to me. Now, I understand perfectly well why, once solved, such a solution might not be implemented; that's easy. Some politicians have a strong vested interest in NOT having a tamper-proof system...but why (apparently) IS there no implementable solution yet? Baffling.

FReegards, and Happy Hols!