| In my home state, your registration is printed in a poll book. It has a line number. As you come in to vote, you sign a log and the poll worker marks that you voted. The way they used to mark that you voted was by writing the sequential sign-in line number you signed in on. So, signature 73 would match up to James Smith. We then implemented electronic voting machines with voter-verifiable paper tapes that allow to you see your votes and could, if absolutely necessary, be used to do a manual recount using paper records. These tapes were on the same type of paper used for other receipts, but were fed from one reel to another and stored in a locked box on the machine. During the first election these machines were used, I went with another poll watcher to the precinct where a politician who was so set on how secure and wonderful the machines were and kept my own log - which of the five machines people used as they signed in. So, at the end, I had my log (line 73 to machine 5, line 74 to machine 1, etc), the nice sequential sign-in sheet that matched easily to the easy-to-read printed poll book, and the paper tapes (required to be open to inspection). We were able to match votes to people for all but seven of the votes (the last seven, actually, and we had a good idea who matched with which). The politician flipped his shit when I was able to demonstrably prove he voted for someone other than his party's candidate for governor. The poll procedures were changed the next election cycle. The paper tapes were not allowed to be produced and the poll workers used a tick mark instead of a number in the poll books. The machines remain in use. |
So you are the person that killed democracy? Given that voting is a "trade secret" and the code will never be inspected do you think the abolishment of a paper trail is a good idea?