Posted on 05/26/2005 11:05:31 AM PDT by Former Dodger
FEC Section 3.2.4.3.2, DRE System Vote Recording --
To ensure vote recording accuracy, all DRE systems shall:
a. Contain all mechanical, electromechanical, and electronic components; software; and controls required to detect and record the activation of candidate, contest, and write-in vote selections, made by the voter in the process of casting a ballot;
b. Incorporate multiple memories, both in the voting machine and in its programmable memory device, to detect any discrepancy in the content of individual memories;
c. Provide at least two processes that record the voter’s selections that:
1)Use neither common software nor common storage devices for these processes;
2)Designated one process and associated storage location as the main vote detection, interpretation, processing and reporting path;
3)Use a different process to store ballot images, for which the method of recording may include any appropriate encoding or data compression procedure consistent with the regeneration of an unequivocal record of the ballot as cast by the voter; and
4)Provide a capability to retrieve ballot images in a form readable by humans; and
d. Ensure that all processing and storage protects the integrity of the data and the anonymity of the voter.
3.2.4.3.3, Recording Accuracy
DRE systems shall meet the following requirements for recording accurately each vote and ballot cast:
a. Detect every selection made by the voter;
b. Correctly add permissible selections to the memory components of the device;
c. Verify the correctness of the detection of the voter selections and the addition of the selections to memory;
d. Achieve an error rate not to exceed the requirement indicated in Section 3.2.1;
e. Preserve the integrity of voting data and ballot images (for DRE machines) stored in memory for the official vote count and audit trail purposes against corruption by stray electromagnetic emissions, and internally generated spurious electrical signals; and
f. Maintain a log of corrected data.
3.2.4.3.4, Recording Reliability
Recording reliability refers to the ability of the DRE system to record votes accurately at its maximum rated processing volume for a specified period of time. The DRE system shall record votes reliably in accordance with the requirements of Section 3.4.3.
But on-line voting ... Not enough security.
*snicker* Little Lord Poopypants...
In Harris County, Texas (Houston) I served as a Poll Watcher and Alternate Election Judge in Democrat precincts last election. The new machines record each vote 3 times in separate, sealed memories. The only attempt that I saw at fraud was one lady from out of state. Most multiple registrations were caught and stopped dead. Fraud is still possible, but our county officials made it much more difficult. Bravo!
Chads, no chads. Touch-screen, no touch-screen. What the commie rats really want is to end all this nonsense about voting.
The RATS do not like this method since it is clear that is discourages a high cemetery vote turnout.
These are not in order for the most part, but some stupid and great replies.
Yeah, I keep hearing this from my demonRAT acquaintenances. They want a paper trail. Just why? I don't get one now. They say, Well you can't do a recount. Of course not, there is no need for a recount when the computer counts the same everytime.
I think this petition is a bunch of sour grapes. Electronic vote counting would be the most accurate method - no chads, no recounts, no butterfly ballots. If their complaints and allegations had any merit, they would have been brought into court and sustained by a judge or jury by now. By the way, I've been looking at the DUmp trying to find the correlating thread to this one and I can't.
I remember why I never go over there... those people are disgusting.
I'm admadantly opposed to any electronic voting machine that does not provide an auditable paper trail. Anything less is just asking for even more fraud than we already have.
That's because, though at first glance, there seem to be strong similarities between online banking and online voting, there are some rather large differences that make implementing online voting difficult.
I've written about it extensively in the past, and really don't have the time now, but you'll find a really good analysis HERE.
Please decribe to me the paper trail you now get when you vote. Also, tell me how this paper trail cannot be duplicated or dummied up. What is the purpose of your paper trail? Do we make a duplicate copy for the polling place and hand count them?
I believe that if you want to eliminate fraud and human intervention, the only way to go is with computer voting. It cannot be changed after the fact by some political hack.
I think you misunderstand what is meant by "paper trail". The idea is definitely not to give the voter a paper copy of his vote, as this would greatly facilitate fraud. For instance, if Fred the Democrat Fraudster tells Alice he'll pay her $5 if she'll vote a straight democrat ticket, such a reciept indicating exactly what vote was cast would enable the Fred to verify who Alice voted for. Today, Fred can pay Alice $5 to vote straight democrat, but he has no way to know that Alice didn't take Fred's money and vote straight republican anyway.
What has been proposed in most cases, is a machine-printed ticket that would be printed by the computerized voting system. This ticket is placed in a sealed container much as other paper ballots are today. The computer itself keeps a running tally of the votes, and the paper ballots are only counted in case of machine failure or a mandated recount. A computer-generated paper ballot like this is much superior to a punch card, or scantron ballot because the votes printed are unambiguous. There are no hanging chads, or double voting. You don't have to worry about a voter not completely filling in an oval, or accidently marking the wrong one.
As far as duplicating the ballots generated in this manner, it would be much more difficult for Bob the Ballot Stuffer to duplicate a ballot, especially if there were some machine-generated information on it like a barcode checksum of the vote as marked.
I believe that if you want to eliminate fraud and human intervention, the only way to go is with computer voting. It cannot be changed after the fact by some political hack.
I don't believe we'll ever completely eliminate fraud no matter what voting system is in place. I think we can greatly eliminate the chances for fraud by using a combination of computers and paper auditing. I'm not pushing to eliminate computers from the mix, but think a more intelligent way of using them is to use computers in conjunction with paper.
I'm a professional nerd, and as such I just absolutely do not trust the reliability of these devices for something as important as elections. In my experience, there are two types of computers, ones that have failed, and ones that haven't failed yet. You can build computer that aren't nearly as suceptable to failures as the average PC is, but it isn't cheap at all to do so, and that type of expendature isn't necessary if you are smart about dealing with failure modes up front.
If you would like to discuss this further, I can assure you, that I've put a lot of thought into this stuff, and I'm open to any criticism or suggestions you might have.
One other thing that would help to eliminate a lot of fraud IMO, is to have good identification of voters. Positive ID of voters is pretty crucial to prevent double voting and ghost voting (i.e., the emptying of graveyards in democrat precincts).
Well I have been a computer professional for over 25 years. Believe me, businesses today run totally on computers. There are fail safe systems and redundancy that protect you from losing computer data. You just have to use them. Home computers do not generally have this protection and thus you can lose data when they crash. I firmly believe that any computer counting electronic ballots is going to be more accurate and less prone to tampering than any other method. Your idea of printing out a piece of paper just opens up the area of fraud. How hard is it to lose a few or duplicate them. Not hard at all.
As regards the paper side of things, we're probably just going to have to agree to disagree on that. I've seen several designs that would be hard to forge, duplicate, or tamper with. Like anything else paper, they could be destroyed, but with the they'd be a heck of a lot better than having nothing at all if you had a catastrophic disk failure on one of your voting machines.
Any system can be gamed, but if you're smart, you don't let any one mode of failure be something that can significantly alter the results.
Exactly, that is why you don't rely on paper. Of course, the election authorities need to be serious about collecting and maintaining the data, as every business I have worked for is. I have never seen a major loss of data. At the most, you should only lose the transaction being performed at the time of the problem and of course the problem would be known. I actually believe that in the future multiple state voting and dead people voting can and will be prevented by computer voting.
But again, if one wishes to cheat, then a computer is not the way to go.
I'm offended... Mine didn't get an honorable mention.
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