Hand counting ballots

[Ralph Shnelvar <ralphs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear group:

I promised Evan Ravitz that I would do this so here it is.

A couple of weeks ago Evan proposed that all ballots be hand counted.  The
group rejected this.  I was one of the people rejecting this.




But I gave it some thought and the long-and-short of it is that Evan is
right.

What changed my mind? My experience being a poll watcher for a Boulder City
Council candidate.

I watched as ballots were being counted by the scanners and the information
was pumped into a pc.

Basically, as a person with almost 40 years computer programming experience,
I know how easy it is to subvert a system.  With a scanner and a pc there
are now two points of vulnerability.  Folks, it would not be hard to change
a scanner so that a scanner sends the wrong information to a pc doing the
counting.  Thus, one could have "proprietary, copyrighted, open source" and
one still could have the election be rigged by "rigged hardware" (the
scanner, among other things).

As an example of how hard people work to defraud other people I offer the
following example.

Most of the participants on this list are too young to remember _mechanical_
cash registers.  But I remember them and I remember a time when these
mechanical monstrosities were manipulated so that when, say, your grocery
bill was more than $23.45 that the _mechanical_ cash register would add an
extra $0.25 to your bill.  We're talking gears and nuts and bolts here; not
the infinitely easier to manipulate computer program.

(By the way, that extra $0.25 raised the grocer's profit margin by a
whopping 30%.)



My proposal:

The election process proceeds as follows.

1) "Touch-screen" computers generate printed ballots.  In addition, a direct
count of the vote is kept by the computer (a so-called DRE computer).
2) Those printed ballots are inspected by the voter for correctness.
3) The ballot is deposited into a ballot box by the voter.
4) The ballots are scanned electronically by a scanner whose vendor is
different from the vendor providing the computer printing the ballot.

5) On election day, the results of the count generated by the computer(s) in
(1) and (4) are reported.  THESE RESULTS ARE PROVISIONAL and have no force
of law.  The results merely serve to provide a quick - and provisional! -
result of the election.

6) After election day the votes are counted by hand using age-old
techniques.  This may take several weeks. It is this hand-count which is the
legal basis for all elections.  If the election is close, then the votes are
hand-counted again.

7) The result of the election count is now done in three different ways,
First, the DRE computers generate a result.  Second, scanners generate a
result.  Third, the hand-count generates a result.

The purpose of this entire procedure is to increase the reliability of the
voting systems and the confidence that voters have in the election results.



The voters will get the desired quick election results (assuming that the
machines are not rigged).  With three - we hope, independent - sources of
vote counts, the voters will also get a sense that the machines are
reliable.  In fact, with this procedure, the chances of two manufacturers as
well as County Clerks colluding to defraud the electorate drops to the
vanishing point.


The only down side is that the voters will get a sense that the machines are
reliable and will later insist that the necessary hand counting is
unnecessary.

Of course, it is the hand counting that will help guarantee that the
machines are kept honest.

The preservation of freedom requires eternal vigilance.


Ralph Shnelvar