Voting in America
Electronic Voting in America has not resolved all the questions over election results as it should have done.
The "hanging chad" issues of the Florida election in 2000 made it difficult to determine "voter intent." Electronic Voting has not made it any easier to determine voter intent either. In fact, it's quite the opposite, Electronic Voting removes the evidence of "voter intent."
The 2002 HAVA (Help America Vote Act) mandated and funded the purchase of Electronic Voting equipment -- DREs (Direct
HAVA transferred the important role of citizen oversight of elections to Election Administrators and their suppliers. It changed the relationship between the citizen and the government. It privatized elections.
Elections are the moment when the current administration is being held to account. There is an obvious conflict of interest if the administration exclusively oversees the election process.
The transition from manual or mechanical systems to an
Electronic Elections can achieve this goal whereas Electronic Voting on its own is a setback.
When
Normally,
The touch screen features of DREs (Direct
Electronic Voting, as implemented, lacks the necessary feedback to show that the vote was also counted correctly and that the result was based on similar treatment of all the other votes.
Publication of the result backed up by a list of the votes could provide the necessary high quality evidence as feedback. That would require a whole different concept of Electronic Voting. In fact, that would be an Electronic Election.
Only an end to end
The current system does neither.
The key to achieving verifiable voting is preserving evidence of each vote's identity. Lest anyone is alarmed that this compromises the secret ballot, it is the vote's identity not the voter's identity which can be published. The voter needs some confidential token which allows the vote to be recognized by the owner of the vote but by no third party.
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