No receipts for electronic voters
Martha Foley has been talking with election officials and it appears that I was mistaken reporting this morning that voters could request a physical receipt after voting electronically.
Elections officials tell us, you can double check your vote, but no receipts are available.
We'll ad more information about this as it becomes available.
Labels: election09
posted by Brian Mann @ 11/03/2009 11:18:00 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Most voters can't get a "receipt" or paper evidence of their vote because elections officials worry about some people selling their vote. Coercion is also a concern.
While it's possible in some places to get a piece of paper saying you did in fact vote, I haven't heard of any machine that prints out anything saying how or for whom you voted.
The concern, of course, is that someone was paid or forced to vote a certain way and a receipt showing how the vote was cast would become proof.
Jim Adler is a cryptographer who founded VoteHere, which audits and verifies elections that use voting machines.
This is an excerpt of his 2004 testimony before a House committee on government reform:
"The voter-verified paper ballot ... goes into a ballot box as opposed to a receipt that the voter can take with them. Now, this receipt must be a private receipt. You cannot have a receipt that can prove to anyone how you voted."
The "paper trail" so often mentioned in connection with these new voting machines is a printed receipt of each voter's selection. But that's only for use by elections officials (the name of the voter does not appear on these records). And this paper trail is there in case something goes wrong with the machines or electronic counting. Should this happen, elections officials use the printed ballots to count the votes.
In the event of a problem with the electronic voting machines, the "paper trail", at least in St. Lawrence County, is the actual paper ballot filled in by the voter that is scanned into the reader.
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