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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (128454)	11/13/2000 9:26:42 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570363

Combjelly, The whole idea of an acceptable error in balloting is a weird one. In engineering, everything is done within tolerances, i.e. acceptable errors. Scumbria

To: combjelly who wrote (128454)	11/14/2000 11:11:27 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1570363

Dear Combjelly: The problem with most electronic systems is that voters and outsiders see that a fully electronic system is far easier to corrupt. By using paper ballots as the votes to be counted, there exists a paper audit trail to verify the correctness of the count. Someone could corrupt an electronic count by various means (like changing the CPU or DSP with a slightly modified one to bias the count to say a democrat by 0.1% after x votes are tabulated (prevents easy detection of cheat)) without anyone the wiser (without large time to diagnose which would preclude most election workers who do not have the spare time). The optically scanned paper ballots can easily be checked and recounted with any number of methods to check accuracy and repeatability and still give that absolutely necessary feeling of trust. There are ways to give this trust to an electronic system, but that is what increases the cost. ONe good way is to give each voter a copy of the recorded vote on paper with a transaction id and a "carbon" paper copy is retained just like a checkout machine. That way, any voter who wishes to give up their anonomity, can verify that the vote recorded was correct. The paper copies, which can not be traced back to an individual, can be counted to verify the machines accuracy and repeatability in case of a protest or certification. If the paper copy is printed with an OCR font or barcode, then an optical scan of the paper copy is easy and capable of being quickly (or slowly by humans) verified by machines that can be trusted. Our government was set up with checks and balances, so any system should have five goals, ease of use, speed, accuracy, repeatability, and auditable by humans. Without the last which gives voters the ability to trust the result, the first four are hard to use. The optically scanned paper ballots are the best system so far that satisfies these goals. Pete