What's Wrong With Paper Ballots Anyway?

Fifty-eight days remain until the presidential election. If you're like me, then your mind is made up already, but you have a lingering anxiety about the many problems of our voting system.

A few weeks ago Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc.) admitted to major security flaws in their electronic voting machines (if video doesn't show, click here):



Let me just make this perfectly clear: Premier Election Solutions has admitted that their software used in at least 34 states does not count votes correctly. I will never trust electronic voting. I've written about the threat of electronic voting before, but it can't be repeated often enough. Casting your vote on a computer is like walking up to a window where a little man opens a curtain and asks "who do you want to vote for?" You answer him, he closes the curtain, and you never know what that little man does with your reply. It's a black box.

And these boxes can be easily hacked as proven in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. And these boxes are also proprietary meaning Premier made the inner workings secret so that citizens have no way to scrutinize the hardware or software. There is also no way to authenticate election results which can of course be done if paper ballots were used.

So what was wrong with paper ballots anyway? After all, they've been used since 139 B.C.

Well, the same company, Premier, makes optical-scan machines which tabulate paper ballots, and these machines can also be hacked!

But the biggest complaint with paper ballots has been poor design. For example, the infamous butterfly ballot used in Florida for the 2000 presidential election was blamed for many mis-marked ballots.

Punch card systems have also lost favor due to the high rate of inaccuracy related to the incomplete removal of the perforated chad and the inaccessibility to voters with disabilities.

Sometimes it seems that the MSM is trying to perpetuate the idea of paper ballot "voter fraud" like in the case of Dixville Notch, NH where 17 ballots were cast even though there were only 16 registered voters. Well, those reports were irresponsible and inaccurate as exposed on the Brad Blog.

The simple fact remains that any system that leaves a paper trail can at least be recounted by hand in a location where the process can be viewed by the public. You can't get that transparency with any electronic voting machine!

Therefore I have to conclude that paper ballots aren't perfect, but they are by far the best system available.

Finally, if you're wondering which candidates votes will go missing this year, remember in 2003 Walden O'Dell -- then the chief executive of Diebold Inc. -- told Republicans in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." I don't for one second believe that their machine "glitches" are accidental.

Some other links of interest:

• Standing For Voters
• Black Box Voting
• Velvet Revolution

The Threat of Electronic Voting

Velvet Revolution Interviews Stephen Spoonamore: segment 1, segment 2, segment 3, segment 4, segment 5, segment 6, segment 7, segment 8.

The problems with electronic voting are complex, and if you're even a tiny bit computer-phobic (like John McCain), you might be intimidated by discussions about computer memory, IP addresses, and encryption. But in segment 2, Stephen Spoonamore, one of the world's leading experts in cyber crime, gives us this metaphor:

Here's my finger, and if I were to write on a ballot, that ballot is now a permanent document. What is happening now is when you touch that screen, that screen has circuitry inside it and the circuitry inside talks to a datafield. That datafield below it is basically like you walking up and opening a curtain and there's a little man who says, "hello, what's your vote?" And you say "well I'd like to vote for this person," and he says "thank you," and then he closes the screen and goes to a different screen and tells someone else. That next layer is the operating system. Now you don't really know what the screen is telling the operating system because you can't see it, so unlike a vote that you marked, the screen now takes that information and passes it to a fieldset of the operating system. Who knows who wrote the operating system? Diebold won't tell us.

In another interesting segment, Spoonamore says that he believes that Kerry won in 2004, not Bush... and Spoonamore is a Republican. If you care about the election, if you care about democracy, you'll watch those 8 video segments.

On a related note, do you realize that in the U.S. there is no Constitutional guarantee to the right to vote? I think it's time for an amendment. But what a radical idea that is. Amending our Constitution to affirm basic rights? Our current government only passes legislation to take away rights and freedoms.