Marc Baber first introduced me to this idea in 2005, and here it is resurfacing in an opinion piece.
The idea is to place numbered ballot images online for easy public access. Anyone who wanted to check the count in a given precinct could count them. Individuals or candidates or watchdog organizations--anyone could write software that would read the images and extract vote counts automatically. Most counties in most states already have the hardware in place to do this, and adding scanning in other places would not be expensive or difficult.
As Lopez says in this article: Best practice is hand counting of all ballots on election night, in full public view. Much of the civilized world already does this. But it may be a long-term goal in America, and in the meantime, public repositories of scanned ballot images will at least make election theft more difficult and more risky.
At hubpages.com
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