Comments on: Electronic voting and partial audits

E-voting is not secure now and will never be in the foreseeable future, says guest blogger and security specialist Rebecca Mercuri.

[joker.ny]

Dr. Mercuri hits the nail dead center when she advises that the self-proclaimed experts are continuing "to promote palliative shortcuts that run considerable risk of providing false validations of unjustified victories."
I wonder if this is naivete on the part of the mavens or a conscious effort to build in a method to steal elections. We must not forget that Walden "Wally" O'Dell, the chairman of the board and chief executive of Diebold wrote a letter pledging his commitment "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President" in September 2003. Others have the same goal.
The old-fashioned paper ballots are said to be inefficient... and the counting of them can be inaccurate... electronic voting is said to be inaccurate ... so what is the answer?
Dr. Mercuri?

[kathydopp]

This article makes several incorrect statements about ballot-level auditing that is being proposed by Ed Felten.

First, to do any ballot-level auditing, the voting system must publicly publish a report of all the vote counts on each ballot, along with a humanly readable unique ballot identifier for each ballot, and the tallies for all ballots, matching the unofficial reported vote counts.

Therefore the following statements in the above article are incorrect.

"Problem is, you don't know which ballots were counted as "undervotes" by the computer, where actually a legitimate vote had been recorded, without pulling all of the undervoted ballots out and seeing if their hand-counted total precisely matches the number of undervotes that the machines reported."

"Basically, the likelihood of detecting 10 easily-dismissed, instances of vote tabulation fraud by counting only 1,000 of the winner's votes may be nil (especially if the thieved votes are mostly buried in the third party and undervote counts)."

--

Ed Felten's paper on ballot-level auditing discusses the need to run ballots through an optical scanner/printer after the election that would print a humanly-readable identifier (this is required for making random selections of individual ballots) and creating the publicly reportable list of each ballot's counts in a format that anyone from the public could verify.

There is no need to fear that this type of vote count audit will be adopted any time soon because there are no ballot-level auditable voting systems on the market today.

[tenc21]

I think everyone is missing the point...if there is one to be missed. How can the average Joe /Jane have his/her vote ever count for anything if some malicious voter can't corrupt the voting process to balance the odds now heavily weighted in favor of two party smoky back rooms, super-delegates, electoral colleges, etc. etc. ? If a genius hacker could defeat computerized voting systems in the future, we'd not have Gore/Bush 2000 where the voice of America was clearly drowned out. If the system is broke, fix it--don't break the fix for God's sake!