DREs can produce three different versions of the vote. That trail, or "voter-verified paper audit record," may be different from what is on the screen, and the vote recorded. This is due to error, tampering or fraud. The voter is not verifying the actual vote, and, legally, the paper record does not even have to match the recorded vote.
The simplest, least expensive and most reliable technology is what we need. That's PBOS.
PBOS
The system consists of LEGAL paper ballots marked by hand (or by ballot-marking devices for voters with disabilities or minority languages, like Automark), and optical scanner machines in each polling place. The optical scanner lets the voter check each ballot for correctness before it is cast and counted, and prints a tally report at the end of the Election Day. After scanning, the votes are stored, locked and guarded in a ballot box.
More than one half of the counties in New York State, and all five boroughs, currently use the 30-year old PBOS system. Paper ballots and optical scanners are used in more jurisdictions in our country than any other voting technology.
Minnesota has moved to PBOS to satisfy HAVA, and just this week, New Mexico is one step closer through its Senate. There was targeted disenfranchisement to the Native-American and Hispanic of New Mexico in the '04 election, by vendor technicians under oath, resulting in more votes lost than won by Bush. Phantom votes of 100,000 in Alaska, casting some doubt on that popular vote won by Bush.
We already have a bipartisan staff trained to handle the PBOS technology and prevent fraud. This simple system can be easily learned, has the fewest problems, lowest rate of invalid ballots, and highest level of confidence, of any system currently used.
DRE
By contrast, the legal ballot is whatever is recorded directly inside the computer--which can be different from what is on the computer screen and the printout. New York's new election law calls the printout a "voter verified paper audit record" and it is not the legal ballot. Unless there is a costly, difficult and unlikely 100% recount.
We would unnecessarily privatize our elections. The DRE machines do the recording and counting of the votes in secret, and voters can't see if their votes are correctly cast inside the computer. Election observers can't witness the storage, handling, and counting of votes. The bipartisan, election structure of New York State would be replaced by costly vendor technicians, who program the secret software and administer the machines. In Miami, that is $1,100 an hour for technicians with sole control.
To this day, we have not been able to get lawsuit discovery or a recount on the proprietary systems used in the '04 Ohio election, or anywhere else.
We should benefit from others states' mistakes. Miami-Dade just threatened to throw out their $24.5 million touch-screen e-voting system because of lost votes in six elections due to (1) flawed vote counts due to hardware and software failures and (2) operational cost overruns exceeding predicted costs. They estimate that in five years they would make back the purchase price of PBOS from future savings.
California had refused Diebold its foothold, because of the stunning 30% failure of its tests, and a Democrat in charge. Arnold switched the power to a GOP, who gave conditional certification, despite all. Another blue state at risk.
The Maryland governor just wrote a letter this week that cost overruns were 1,000% greater than estimated.
Computer security is impossible to achieve-40 million MasterCards were compromised in 2005. The FBI reports that 87% of businesses admit to being hacked, with 44% as an inside job. Communications capability in e-voting systems allows tampering by anyone in the world. There is a reason why computer experts are the biggest critics of electronic voting!
Urgency
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