I'm all for paper ballots, but what good are they if you don't actually use them to verify the electronic tally? Following is a message relating to this topic that I posted recently at http://verifiedvoting.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=198 . (Note: Netscape is unable to access this site, but IE works.)Message: 1 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Ernest Prabhakar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 13:26:22 -0800
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In the consortium's system, a voter approaches a touchscreen and fills out a form, which is promptly printed out as an official legal ballot. The voter can cast his vote or review choices before the ballot is printed out with the voter's choices checked off. The voter then places the ballot in a private envelope and places it in a ballot box.
That approach is in sharp contrast to most of the electronic voting machines now in use. Most of today's voting machines use proprietary source code and machines--and leave no paper trail, making it difficult to audit counted votes. ...
Paper ballots present a conundrum: You may never know whether the machine count is valid unless the paper ballots are manually counted, but you can't justify a full recount unless there is sufficient cause to doubt the machine count. The solution to this problem is to mandate a "statistical recount" as part of routine election certification processes. Each paper ballot would have a piece of information associating it with its associated computer database record from which the machine count is generated. A small, random sampling of paper ballots is manually inspected and compared to the corresponding data records to confirm that the ballots are correctly represented in the database. Similarly, a small, random sampling of data records is selected and compared to the corresponding paper ballots to ensure that no "virtual ballot stuffing" has occurred. A very small sampling, e.g. 1000 out of a total of 10,000,000 ballots, would typically be sufficient to validate the machine count with 99.99% confidence. (A conventional full, manual recount may actually be LESS certain than this sample-based recount because of counting errors.) This process would make it possible to routinely validate election results beyond reasonable doubt without doing a full recount and without having to validate all of the detailed mechanisms and processes (e.g. software) by which the information on the paper ballots is transferred to the database.
Ken Johnson
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