WI Assembly OKs Voting Paper Trail

WI Assembly OKs Voting Paper Trail

"Wisconsin cannot go down the path of states like Florida and Ohio in having elections that the public simply doesn't trust ... By requiring a paper record on every electronic voting machine, we will ensure that not only does your vote matter in Wisconsin, but it also counts."

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=61186&ntpid=9

Well good for wisconsin!

I've always chalked it up to consulting firms taking state executives out for lots of steak dinners that they could sell those voting systems blindly to people. Treating a computer like a magical black box with no understanding of the data going in, how it's processed and stored and no way to validate what is coming out is a remarkably stupid thing to do. Especially in something like an election where the output can be orders of magnitude wrong and not really look wrong.

We used to joke that IBM had the best prostitutes or something. We'd see our execs in suits going out with their consultants and it didn't matter what they were selling, we'd buy it.

Hear, hear. I always thought electronic voting was the stupidest thing. The old punch card voting was cheap, efficient, and provided a hard-to-tamper-with paper record. Either teach people to clean off their own chads or put an automatic motorized "ballot brusher" device out there to clean off each ballot before the voter drops it into the box.

Geez, what were they thinking?

in tulsa, OK we use a low tech optical reader.

everyone is handed a paper ballot, which requires voter to black out space between two stripes. pretty much same as many standardize tests.

then voter feeds ballot into optical reader and leaves. results are tallied instantly with a paper trail.

"people do what you inspect, not what you expect" quote by John Zink

One step in the right direction....

Now, If we could just require positive ID checking at every polling place across the nation.

This still has to get past our governer yet. He has opposed all voting reforms in the past.

I have wished for years that Wisconsin would require valid ID to vote, but this will never happen anytime soon that I see. It's pathetically easy to walk into a polling place, identify yourself as some pre-registered voter, and go vote - again and again in different polling places. The registered voter rolls are public information that anybody can request. I automatically assume any university student is voting twice - once at their campus area polling place and again in their hometown. If the campus and hometown are in different counties, nobody really cross-references the voter rolls.

I think I have a hanging e-chad...

I agree with the need for verification, although even with a paper receipt, there's the possibility that the vote that gets tabulated may or may not be the same as the vote that shows on the receipt. Unfortunately the only way to verify this for real is with third-party oversight of the process, including access to the code that the machines are running. Since this is not likely to happen in most cases, there's always going to be a certain amount of blind faith in the process.

BF Hammer said:

I have wished for years that Wisconsin would require valid ID to vote, but this will never happen anytime soon that I see. It's pathetically easy to walk into a polling place, identify yourself as some pre-registered voter, and go vote - again and again in different polling places.

Click to expand...

proceedures in Tulsa, OK are:

one can only vote at closest polling station nearest location of listed adress in voter registration form, which is usually your residence.

Polling station has a computer printout of all registered voters with a required signiture before receiving a ballot. not much chance of someone repeatedly voting.

Now, if only more voters had a clue. The state senator and US representative from my area of Wisco have been returned to their offices since 1979, yet "everyone" complains about the policies these guys support.

cy said:

proceedures in Tulsa, OK are:

one can only vote at closest polling station nearest location of listed adress in voter registration form, which is usually your residence.

Polling station has a computer printout of all registered voters with a required signiture before receiving a ballot. not much chance of someone repeatedly voting.

Click to expand...

Similar to WI, each resident has an assigned polling station, computer printout also. Difference here is that no signature is required, or no proof of identification. You walk to the table, say your name, get your ballot. Honor system all the way. Under this system there is no possible way to stop anybody (like political party hacks) from getting a list of registered voters, drive from city to city, or polling place to polling place, falsely identifying yourself as somebody registered locally, and vote in their place. If the legitimate voter shows up later, he's the one that has to straighten it all out, likely both votes get counted based the decision of the old people administering the ballots that day.

I know this practice is widespread, in Milwaukee during the last presidential election certain districts had more votes cast than registered voters. The governing political party here still says that isn't a problem! (I'm not naming names today)

Also Wisconsin residents, when "get out the vote" political organizations are canvassing a neighborhood, they always ask if you will be voting in the upcoming election. Very important to answer "yes" because they record these answers and find fraud opportunity this way. People answering "no" may be voting without their knowledge.

Yikes...

just discovered optical scanners can be hacked.

"Three memory card hacks

1. An altered memory card (electronic ballot box) was substituted for a real one. The optical scan machine performed seamlessly, issuing a report that looked like the real thing. No checksum captured the change in the executable program Diebold designed into the memory card.

2. A second altered memory card was demonstrated, using a program that was shorter than the original. It still worked, showing that there is also no check for the number of bytes in the program.

3. A third altered memory card was demonstrated with the votes themselves changed, showing that the data block (votes) can be altered without triggering any error message."

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/5921.html?1122737304

It's nice that WI is trying to pass the requirement that all voting systems have a paper record backup requirement. The massive security holes in e-voting machines have been legendary. Even worse is the companies promoting their products trying to use lawsuits and copyright laws to block these holes from becoming public knowledge.

I personally think this may pass as the governor may be willing to throw this out there as crumbs as he and his party to try to stave off the one truly meaningful reform that we've been trying to pass here in WI.

What WI really needs is a photo ID requirement at the polls. It seems simple enough. You need one for most everything else these days. You can't rent a video, or write a check for your groceries without one, but you can vote? There is of course the inevitable cries that Voter ID = racism, classisim, voter disenfranchisement of the sick, disabled, elderly.. etc. etc. etc.

Of course, the poor, disabled, and the elderly often managed to navigate all sorts of government lines and forms for welfare, SSI, Medicare, Medicaid etc. and if anything, deal with the govt. bureaucracy much more than the average middle class working voter ever does. So how is having a photo ID requirment a hardship? The drafters of the legislation have even made provisions for free ID for anyone too poor to pay the ten dollars or so the state would charge.

I don't know how things are in the rest of the country. However, it's been well known for years that around here, and especially our neighbor to the south, Chicago, that one party predominantly is the beneficiary of vote fraud while the other is not. And our current governor is of that party. Go figure.

WI also has, "same day" registration BTW. Essentially you can register and immediately vote on election day. All you need to do is fill out and sign a registration card and show any piece of mail at that address such as a utility bill, and I'm not certain they even need that. Your vote isn't tied to the registration either, so a bad (i.e. fake) registrant doesn't get their vote kicked out if the registration is found to be invalid. So when others who have pre-registration for voting, and an ID requirement to at least register, they don't really understand how laughably fraud prone WI's system is. If we at least had a pre-registration requirment, I wouldn't be so concerned about the lack of ID, but having nether is electoral suicide IMO.

Besides the one party being afraid of losing their margins from their dead, felon and fraud, constituencies, they're afraid how obvious it will be when the results from an election cycle pre-ID and an election post-ID will be.

Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws

here's an old articles that will scare ya..

"Harris said it's possible to alter the vote summaries while leaving the raw data alone. In doing so, the election results that go to state officials would be manipulated, while the canvas spot check performed on the raw data would show that the GEMS results were accurate. Officials would only know that the summary votes didn't match precinct results if they went back and manually counted results from each individual polling place and compared them to the vote summaries in GEMS."

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65031-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1