A while ago, I posted a video by Princeton researchers that showed how electronic voting machines could be hacked. Dave Johnson has a solution:
Here is the solution: The machine is used as a data-input device ONLY. This solves all the problems from earlier ways of voting, including "hanging chads" etc. It then prints out a paper ballot, filling in the voter's choices from the touch-screen. The voter looks over the ballot and, if it has the right information, puts it into a separate ballot box. Then there is a way to PROVE how the voters voted. AND it doesn't MATTER what software is on the machines.
I think this is exactly what should be done. And if one were clever, there would be a way the paper ballots could be optically scanned to speed the counting process.
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Sorry, but 10 counties in FL in 2004 had Dieboldt optical scan machines, and had the exit polls just flopped from the alleged tallies. Optical scan machines can be hacked -- the only virtue is that there is paper to hand count against the machine's totals. Not ONE of those counties was recounted, leading me to believe that 2004 was also stolen... there needs to be a law that if the exit polls deviate from the machine tally there will be a hand count of the paper ballots, or there is no use in scanning results at all.
"And if one were clever, there would be a way the paper ballots could be optically scanned to speed the counting process."
Sure. Just have the voting machine fill out a Scantron form.
There seem to be about ten million easier and safer ways to handle electronic voting than the Diebold method. One wonders why it's the dominant e-vote solution.
Somehow, this reminds me of an April Fool's story in one of the electronics trade journals back in the 70's/early 80's. A new product, the WOM (write-only memory) was introduced. It would have been a clever way to sell dead memory ICs. Nowadays, we would call it a black hole. Therefore, I applaud the idea of printing out the ballot before it's flushed down the oubliette.
That's exactly how it worked last week here in Hawaii. We had a choice of optical scan ballots or a machine. The machine printed out a slip of paper with my choices on it and gave me the opportunity to confirm or reject it.
There were some complaints about how long it took to merge the results from the two systems and there was at least one mishandled ballot box, but altogether it seemed reasonable. I'm not particularly troubled that final results weren't known until well after midnight.