Bob,

Good response. But you did hit on the elephant in the room with your comments about security.

Even the simple solution you mentioned last time would probably be hackable somehow.

But you mention that perfection is something you can't shoot for. The problem with that is that in todays superpartisan political climate, its what's being demanded by electronic voting critics. People have written theses on electronic voting vulnerabilities.

Your comments on a paper audit trail are very well founded and go out as an answer to a oft stated criticism of a particular brand of voting machines.

Now why this feature doesn't exist anyone could guess, but let me posit two possible scenarios.

1) A developer at the electronic voting machine company, who lets say for the sake of argument is very keen on environmental issues, decides that a long paper receipt trail is equivalent to your argument about chopping down a lot of trees. So he decides, "no paper trail" and you have the situation we have today. 20-20 hindsight show the error of this thinking, but many of us have seen this kind of issue occur in IT projects, right?

2) A developer at the electronic voting machine company, who lets say for the sake of argument is a rabid partisan for one particular party, decides that he could include code to "fix" certain votes when they come into the system. The problem is that an paper audit trail feature would highlight the fraudulent vote. So the developer decides to eliminate the paper trail feature. I'm not sure how many of your readers would actually have seen this occur in an IT project, but many have probably seen features take on a political nature (like being useless but demanded by the CEO).

Anyway looking at these scenarios, I would like to say that we should "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" would definitely apply. Of course this would lead you to choose option 1. But if you are making an emotional political decision, in some cases option 2 becomes some people's overwhelming choice.

So thats where the complexity lies, in the poltics of an IT project, on a national scale this time, instead of just a company wide scale. You've talked about _that_ issue before. Just like a lot of other things, the technical solution is simple, the political issues revolving around getting it done are what's complex.

Oh and as far as that goes, give me a pencil and paper to vote with any day. Whats the cost to the trees compared to the price of liberty? (oh and like you said a couple of times Bob, please no responses to that ;-)

I live in Massachusetts and this is what I did at the polling station on Tuesday morning:

1) I gave my street name, number and last name to the nice elderly volunteer.
2) Got a ballot
3) Walked across the room to a table
4) Filled in the ovals next to my choices
5) Walked back across the room
5) Fed the ballot into an optical card reader
6) Walked out

Elapsed time: 5 minutes. Most of that was waiting to get the ballot since I'd already made up my mind on all of the questions.

It was quick and easy with a nice paper trail.

ATM style voting machines are an expensive and risky solution to a simple problem.

Security is not the problem. Trust is the problem. If you try to solve a problem called security, you'll get a solution satisfactory to IT managers. Voting systems need to be trusted by ordinary folks who (wisely) don't trust machines that have mysterious invisible stuff going on inside them. Whether it's paper ballots or paper trails, paper is the only solution that solves the trust problem.

I'm like Rick: in Kentucky, I walked up to a table, the volunteer looked me up in the book, I signed the book after showing ID, got a ballot, filled in the circles (from my prepared research sample ballot which I had done over the weekend) and fed the ballot into the optical scanner. Elapsed time 10 minutes because we had like 30 judicial races to fill in the circles for...
No one except me touched the ballot until AFTER it fed through the scanner, and it still existed as a paper trail. Kentucky reported results pretty quickly Tuesday night, including the Yarmuth-Northup race! Which is right in my district. soo.....cheap, easy, auditable...Why add WINDOWS to this mix, for heaven's sake????

Even better, then Rick and TechGrrl...at my polling place, I did not have to show ID. I walked up, told them my last name, they looked me up, said my address, and asked if that's correct. How's that for security? But I'm sure people in my town would yell and scream if we had electronic voting machines.

Our rural polling place had the new-fangled, federally-mandated touch-screen just fixed in the hour before the polls opened voting machine and paper ballots. As I walked into the polling place, one of the volunteers called out my name (we're rural, remember) and verified my registration. As an IT professional, I avoided the line of confused people at the machine, took a paper ballot, filled in the X's and fed the ballot into the wooden ballot box. Elapsed time: Our rural polling place had the new-fangled, federally-mandated touch-screen just fixed in the hour before the polls opened voting machine and paper ballots. As I walked into the polling place, one of the volunteers called out my name (we're rural, remember) and verified my registration. As an IT professional, I avoided the line of confused people at the machine, took a paper ballot, filled in the X's and fed the ballot into the wooden ballot box. Elapsed time:

Like Rick and TechGrrl, we filled out mark sense forms in Michigan. Quick, easy, and no question about an audit trail. Like Jason, I think that the cost of trees is warranted by the reliability and auditability of the system.

I hadn't read the original rant until after I read this post rant. What I can't believe is the ignorance of the majority of the posters. Almost every complaint they posted against the evoting systems are, and have always been, just as, or even more, problematic with traditional voting systems. If you want a list, just go read the rant, then apply the arguments against evoting to all the traditional methods. For instance, what if the server or disk gets destroyed or lost. Have you not listened to the news where whole boxes of votes got lost or misplaced? What about the readers for the punch cards or the blackened circle readers, you don't think they can get our of calibration? You don't think they can be tampered with? You would rather trust the people at the polls? Okay, how about this, you hand over all your banking transactions to some volunteers who only do the job once or twice a year. Send your votes in by mail. You know that all mail gets delivered to the correct people 100% of the time. Almost every time I go to the mailbox I've got mail addressed to someone else. Does anyone know anyone who's mail has NOT gotten lost? The ironic thing is, there are even more things that could go wrong with traditional voting systems. Unbelievable!