Re: Dual DRE/paper system

[Nicholas Bernstein <bernsten@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Neal McBurnett wrote:

> It would be a foolish person who accepted a video or photocopy as
> proof of how you voted.  It would be easy to change your real vote
> after recording this sort of evidence, or to doctor the evidence.  But
> your scheme provides posession of a "Unique Ballot ID" number and a
> way to verify how that vote was officially cast after leaving the
> polls.
1. Do you agree that absentee voting already provides a loop hole by 
which votes /could/ be bought?

2. Do you think the number of votes that would be bought under such a 
system would be greater than the number of errors (typically in the 3-5% 
range) that that go undetected in paper systems.

3. If you really don't like the concept of having voters validate their 
receipt, you could have a system where the public lists and the voter 
receipts just have the ballot ID. This way, voters could check that at 
least their vote has been counted. The validation would be left up to 
the voting officials.  All the same benefits exist as far as validating 
ballots to a higher accuracy (because the ballot id can still link the 
recount receipt to the electronic ballot), the drawback is that the onus 
to validate these checks is on voting officals rather than the voters. I 
suppose it's not a big deal to validate the 700 ballots to ensure 1% 
accuracy (better than checking 10000, for sure), but in close elections 
this would mean slightly more work than a voter-checked system.

Do you have any problems with this revised method?

N


>