Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Time off from work to vote

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

>There's a lot of argument about this.  When my wife and I did our election research, we watched for people who wanted electronic voting systems that generated a voter-verifiable paper ballot.  There were several Democrats and Libertarians who were in favor of - essentially - making the system use open source as well (woo hoo!).
>
>The lack of a write-in is still a problem, IMHO.  Then again, I am not aware of a write-in candidate EVER winning an election anywhere, or even coming close.  Anyone have any data to the contrary?
>
>But the open source, voter verification, and paper trail issues are a big deal IMnsHO when it comes to electronic voting systems.  Personally, I'm pretty happy with the Sharpie method, really.  It's sophisticated enough to do the job quickly and well, but not so sophisticated that even third-graders could tally the ballots in the event of, say, a massive power outage (no scantron counters!).
>
>Dry Sharpie's without caps notwithstanding... ;-)
>
>The parking lot was packed when I went this morning at ~6:30am, but there's a lot of room at the fire station.  Only had to wait on two people, and the second one was my wife.  :-D
>  
>
I'd definately use opensource and I'd probably base a lot of the logic 
on my designs I've done for OSS powered casino machines. It seems that 
you have a lot of the same issues as to security and having multiple 
copies of the data held in different secure locations in case you need 
to do an audit. I'd probably print out a receipt of the results in such 
a way that it'd be easy to recount by machine or by hand if need be. 
Probably a barcode for each canidate followed by their name in human 
readable form.

Really the point of writing in a canidate isn't so that they'll win so 
much as so your vote is heard. Also I do know that some write-in 
canidates have won local elections before.

Voter verification is harder since people don't want to be required to 
enter their SSN or some such key to enable the machine. Obviously doing 
so would be harmless as long as the machine recorded who had voted 
sepperatly from who they voted for but people are paranoid.

The Sharpie method isn't horrible but it really isn't very scalable. It 
takes a lot of work collecting and counting votes in that way. It leaves 
room for someone to "accidently" lose boxes of votes. Using a digital 
method should be easier and more secure against tampering if done right.

-- 
Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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