Accurate and Fraud-Free Elections Now: Florida's Solution

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By William Faulkner (about the author) Page 1 of 4 page(s)

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William Faulkner, MBA
Retired Naval Officer
Florida Verified Voting

Shortly after taking office, Governor Charlie Crist realized that Florida had significant problems with the election process. The lost votes in Florida's 13th district and the obvious problems with touch screen machines caught the governor's attention. He endorsed paper trails almost immediately and then supported the replacement of touch screens (DRE's) with optical scan machines.

In addition, Crist called for more citizen involvement and input, an abrupt change from the previous eight years of dictates issued form Tallahassee.

I take Governor Crist at his word and as a result, I provided the following plan for future elections in Florida accurate and fraud free.

That's a large claim but the solution provide within the following involves simultaneous a) optical scan counting and hand counting of optical scan ballot with b) the hand counted paper ballots serving as the ballot of record. Each process checks the other and the entire process serves as both a tabulation of votes and a simultaneous audit, conducted in the open by citizen's not private concerns.

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To; The Honorable Charlie Crist, Governor of Florida
Secretary of State Kurt Browning
Both the House and Senate Committees, Ethics and Elections

This Document represents the collective thoughts of the Voter Verified Paper Ballot Movement and my own personal opinions as a founding member.

The problems in Florida elections all come down to interpreting the intent of the citizen voters. When equipment is not cleaned, ballots are not on the proper format, or machines simply stop taking votes, the fundamental question is: what was the intent of the voter. We know that they intended to vote, we have an idea how this or that precinct might vote, and, from partially marked ballots, we can make a good guess at how they would vote.

However, one truth above all remains: computerized voting alone cannot prove voter intent. When you have an unverifiable method of deterring the intent of voters, the line between Human Error and or Fraud has been blurred to the point that the two are indistinguishable. The only Justification for the cost of purchase and maintenance of Touchscreen DRE Technology is the elimination of Human Error/Fraud. That goal has not been achieved and in fact Human Error/Fraud has been multiplied exponentially many times over by the complexity of the Vendor's product. Therefore, "Touchscreen DREs are a failed experiment which needs to be totally phased out of this States Election Process."

The Paper Ballot does prove voter intent and the criticisms concerning manual counting from Election Officials are not justified.

There are two things that must always remain clear in the minds of All Election Officials and the public:

The difference between a paper receipt and a paper ballot: one prints your vote out as represented by the machine, and the other is the manually created ballot that I refer to as Voter Verified Paper Ballot (VVPB). Many people mistakenly think of the former as a VVPB and it is not.
The difference between retail fraud and wholesale fraud: the effects of retail fraud are created by fooling with the paper ballots themselves and wholesale fraud which machines have the potential to employ. The difference is in the impact. Never before have we had the ability to change votes and vote totals. But now, thousands of votes can be changed in a hidden way by a single, or very few individuals. The focus seems to be on the former, when the latter is the real danger here.

Discussion

The difference between a "paper receipt" and a "paper ballot" is simple. A paper receipt is only an alleged facsimile of the way a voter's ballot was actually cast. But this provides only the illusion of validation. It is a trivial matter, from a programming point of view, to provide a receipt that may show which candidates whose buttons the voter pushed, even while the machine internally tabulates the electronically or mechanically cast votes differently. A paper receipt is not only useless, it is worse than useless because it provides a false sense of ballot integrity, and such receipts can be used as the basis for remuneration of those whose votes were bought by political machines.

A paper ballot, on the other hand, whether printed by machine or marked by hand, is the official document by which an individual casts his or her vote. These may or be marked by hand or cast by a mechanical or electronic device and then printed by machine, and they may or may not be countable by machines, but they can be counted manually and provide an official and reliable record of the vote. Paper ballots, however, can have a rather wide variation in effectiveness as honest voting devices. The infamous Votamatic punch cards were paper ballots. The old mechanical lever-type voting machines punched holes in a paper journal tape that served as an unusual form of paper ballot. On the other end of the reliability scale you have Canada's ballot booklets, clearly laid out and designed in a manner that minimizes human clerical errors. It is Canada's system, or at least their ballot design, that we should emulate to a point (that point being having the ballots tabulated not by a private firm like it is done in Canada but by government officials in front of a bipartisan team of observers).

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I learned at a very young age in the 60's that the press never really understood the War or The anger against the War. The Press paid more attention to the Political Battles, not the people that were actually dying or watching their sons and (more...)

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