We need a law that mandates all elections be conducted by paper ballot, optical scan counting, and random verification, exactly as you suggest. Electronic voting machines can't be trusted, since there is no backup, no way to confirm the accuracy of the electronic tally, and no way to know the machines were not programmed to change votes as they were being cast.

funny how many nations and some states manage paper just fine,
and have notoriously clean elections.

In Oregon, we have paper vote-by-mail. very blue state.

Think they are compromised also. I remember some years back a guy was going to prove the Louisiana machines could be tampered with, after weeks of trying he proved one thing, he did not have the ability to compromise them. It ended his claim and wasted several weeks of his life.

why do you insist that every election is fraudulent and it's impossible to have clean elections?

Tamper proof. Voting by mail can easily be tampered and stuffed. I have worked in elections, there are lots of checking and cross checking the voters at probably not aware, in the precinct where I worked was checked and cross checked by the ones working there.

The tampering with the vote takes place in the "programming" of the machines. This is "inside" the machine, accessible only to the manufacturer of the machines and the people who maintain or do the specific programming for each election.

As one expert has pointed out (and a Republican too), it takes a lot of time and trouble to alter 100,000 paper ballots. It takes three seconds for one person to change 100,000 votes. Plus, since the mistake would be inside the machine, a result of malicious programming either at the factory or at some point later on by some "insider," probably not some lone hacker (though that's possible), it would be impossible to discover the crime unless the guy who did it confessed, which isn't very likely.

The best method is the opti-scan machine which merely "counts" the vote and leaves the actual paper ballot so that it can be audited and recounted as needed. If you have the paper, you can always "audit" the results by counting the paper in a few randomly chosen precincts and if needed, recount the whole election by counting the actual paper vote.

BTW, do you have a link to an article about this Louisiana guy who tried vainly to prove that the machine could be compromised and failed to do so? It would be interesting to see who he is. There are perhaps a hundred articles about studies at many universities showing how easy it is to "compromise" the machines. I'm sure if you google "voting machine hacks university studies" or something like that you can get a huge number of articles. Bev Harris in the documentary HACKING AMERICA which showed on HBO in about 2006 takes part in an experiment in which a Finnish computer whiz uses a memory card to alter the results on an opti-scan experiment. It comes at the end of the documentary. But there are many many other ways to alter the results of an election with almost zero possibility of being detected.

anonymously over the internet.

I have no problem with touch screens as long as they are strictly limited to being interfaces, which generate a checkable paper ballot.

Innocent mistakes by volunteer poll workers would amount to nothing. But computer based manipulation of entire columns of voter could easily add up to decades. The masterminds behind these schemes would probably have enough clout to avoid prosecution. But if you were an IT guy, a technician, or a software engineer you probably would steer clear of any involvement in vote manipulation.

is to record identifying information of every vote. This could assure validity via self auditing. This is how congressional voting works.


If we want a secure anonymous vote then paper is the only thing that makes sense. It's substantially more difficult to manipulate on a any scale, and much harder to hide.

I want the punishment to be so severe no-one would dare risk it.