one for the voter to take with them showing where their votes went. Then they should do a sampling of votes to make sure the machines and cards are equal in number. Then have the cards or paper ballots locked and stored for a future recount. The republicans would never agree to this of course.

1) When computers print out results, it is impossible to verify those results as accurate after an election. Computers make mistakes, they can be gamed, people don't check their printouts, and computers can be gamed in such a way that it's even more difficult to notice when the computers have been gamed. Either way, after an election, we can't know if the printouts actually reflect the voter intent.

2) Taking a copy of how you voted out of the precinct makes buying and selling votes really easy.

3) Taking a copy of how you voted out of the precinct makes voter intimidation really easy. (Eg: Husband to wife: "Prove to me you voted the right way or I beat you!" Employer to employee: "Prove to me you voted the right way or you're fired!&quot

4) Having two different copies of the same votes makes gaming an election much easier. All I need to do is fake one copy or another and I can put the entire election into question. Not good.

I could go one, but I'll leave it at that for now.

The simpler way: Hand-marked paper ballots, counted publicly at the precinct with all parties (and video cameras) watching and with results posted decentrally at the precinct right then and there before ballots are moved anywhere. "Problem" solved.

it requires a fill in the circle, was the circle completely filled in? and so on. I agree now that two printouts of votes is a bad idea. I think the computer should tally the total but a printout of the vote to be verified by the voter and then dropped into a box right there. The claim to gaming the electronic system is either that the individual can't verify how they voted or that the totals are miscalculated. With a backup printout that the voter verifies as accurate you solve those two problems.

Just one example: Out of more than 6 million hand-marked paper ballots cast in the 2008 Coleman/Franken U.S. Senate race in MN, there were, as I recall, just about 12 ballots about which a unanimous decision could not be made by the judges.

So, if by legendary, you mean mythical, I agree with you. Otherwise, the claim that determining the intent of the voter is just too hard for us humans, is largely complete and utter bullshit.

As to your continued suggestion that we should have computer printed and computer tallied votes, I've spent the better part of ten years explaining why computer tallies are a bad idea. But as to the computer-printed ballots, I'll just ask you: How can you know, after an election, that ANY ballot printed by a computer actually reflects the intent of ANY voter?

(P.S. You may wish to review what happened to ME while voting on a computer system that printed my ballot here in L.A. back in 2008, when four out of 12 of my votes were printed incorrectly by the system: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6043 -- Please stop trying to solve problems that don't exist. That's why we have the ridiculous, often unverifiable system we use now in the first place!)

The system we have with computers is so damn easy to hack...and I am convinced it is done all the time.
Back to paper ballots counted by people...so much harder to cheat and cost so much less than computers that cost thousands of dollars.

However, I disagree with your final comment:

Please stop trying to solve problems that don't exist. That's why we have the ridiculous, often unverifiable system we use now in the first place!

People in the House and Senate spend most of their time and effort trying to make sure they get re-elected, especially, obviously, members of the House. The system is as it is, not because they and their staffs and their respective National Committees cannot understand it or because they are trying to solve problems that don't exist.

The system is the way that it is because, for whatever reasons, that is the way lawmakers of both of the largest political parties want the system to be.

Of course, your assertion is largely disprovable and so is my reply to it.

The system that we have is, largely, because we all pretended that votes could not be counted in FL in 2000. That, despite the fact that the largest "error" that occurred on Election Night was the Volusia County computer tabulator which recorded -16,022 (that's NEGATIVE 16,022) votes for Al Gore for some odd reason. That was an op-scan system made by Global Election Systems, Inc.

Thereafter, Congress passed a bill, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which invested about $4 billion to "upgrade" all of America's voting systems to ones like the one which produced the egregious "error" on Election Night 2000 in Volusia County, FL.

That "error", by the way, has never been explained. And Global Election Systems, Inc. was purchased by Diebold, Inc. and became Diebold Election Systems, Inc.

If you're implying that "the system is the way that it is" because there is something more nefarious going on, well, that's a different matter all together.

Every few years I go work a polling place because I feel it's my civic duty. I show up at six, doors open at seven. I take a half hour break twice, assuming things aren't terribly busy, in reality it's usually once. Polls close at eight, assuming everything goes right we get everything counted up and are out the door at ten. Somebody (hopefully not me) rides along with the site supervisor, everything gets dropped off to county elections by eleven, if everything goes right. If something goes wrong, count on a little more time. If everything goes perfectly it's a fourteen hour day, and rarely does everything go perfectly.

There is no way I'm working hours more to count every item on one of our multi-page umpteen proposition California ballots. And there's certainly no way doing so by hand after working such a long day would be more reliable than a well-designed electronic counting method.

fresh groups could be brought in for the counting

please read the following article and think about how reliable the results are....i will give ya a hint,they move!!!!

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7875

There's a reason we all work one long day instead of splitting it into two shifts.

A total of 1,465 votes seem to have suddenly showed up in the Dem Senate race! And then there are the disappearing votes in the Republican race...

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the reason i show this article is to prove brad's point that touchscreen voting is totally faith based...he asked all the election officials what happened and none of them could give an explanation.....so which set of reported numbers were real? no one knows and i would think as an election worker that spends long days you would want to know that the results announced at end of count were ACCURATE

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as far as using a fresh team for the actual count,of course it should all be open and transparent preferably video taped and live streamed so any interested citizen can oversee their own elections instead of private companies doing the counting and reporting with no oversight

See my reply to your previous note.

Poll workers do not do the counting (though, I suppose, if they wanted to volunteer they could). But, in general, a new, fresh crew comes in to do the counting. The ballots are transparently handed from the poll working crew to the counting crew and counted right then and there.

See about 40% of the towns in NH for a good example of how it works. There, most of the hand-count downs are completely done with their counting before the Diebold op-scan towns have finished with their tallies.

I thank you as well for working the polls, btw! It's a ridiculously long day (though could be made less long in many places with smaller polls) and poll workers should receive more money for those ridiculously long days. If we weren't wasting so much money on computers that fail democratic principles, we'd be able to give it to poll workers instead!

Comparing a count there to one in California makes absolutely no sense.

Thanks for posting, Brad.

more, at least as to federal elections?

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress from January 2007 to January 2011, after claiming that two Presidential elections in a row had been stolen. Why did they not at least attempt to make stealing elections harder?

If the excuse is that Republicans are going to vote against that, at least make them go on record as having voted against cleaner elections. If you don't do at least that much......why?

How much moronicity can be believed?

Paper ballots, all the way. I don't care if it takes a month to count them. I don't have to have an instant result before my head hits the pillow on election night. I rue the day this country chose to privatize it's elections.