electronic ballots

The whole electronic ballots/voting thing has been a mess. Most technology professionals are generally in favor of it but we're also wary of it. Doing it securely is hard to do.

I strongly feel that the machine specifications, schematics, and source code should all be publicly available for independent auditing and that there should be a paper audit trail. Some might argue that since we have our entire financial system built around electronic-only transactions how is it not possible to do an electronic vote. It is different. Financial transactions are all logged and traceable. Funds transfers have sources and destinations. Anonymous voting without a paper audit trail is too easy to tamper with.

Because they generally lack the needed audit trails, I and many others are not confident in the security of the existing electronic balloting systems. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) was working a bill through Congress "that would encourage states to conduct verifiable elections by converting to a paper ballot voting system, offering emergency paper ballots, and conducting hand-counted audits".

This might sound backwards, going from electronic voting to paper voting, and it sorta is. But it is necessary because electronic voting has been approached wrongly and been implemented in an unsafe manner. Sadly this bill died on the floor. You can read more about it in Rep. Holt's press release and you can see how the votes came out on the Office of the Clerk's site. I was pleased to see that my Representative, Lousie Slaughter voted in favor of the bill.