but if a RW-leaning PRIVATE corporation is in charge of source codes, etc.
how can it really be more secure than plain paper ballots? Perhaps the
machines are owned and operated by the gov't? Even then, it leaves me
with some questions & doubts, because who knows what all goes on in
those machines once you vote?

I love Jimmy Carter and do solidly trust him to know, so I'm weighing
that too.

the article states further down that it has a very transparent system, without specifying exactly what that means. I imagine President Carter took that into consideration.

We have no transparency due to source code corporate ownership, or whatever the hell that proprietary excuse is for keeping it from the "prying eyes" of the American voter.

Sorry, but Carter, whom I admire, is wrong about this one.

Sequoia- Smartmatic...even in Chicago. Pretty much everywhere.

I used to be an adamant "hand-count" person. Maybe I still am. I do know that the Election Reform Forum exhausted me after four years or so.

are the only transparent system. Computers, if used at all for counting, should be at most a double check of the hand count. Similarly, if used for tabulation, they should be just a tool to add up a public list of figures that anyone can add for themselves.

In other words, computers should not be trusted at any point in the process. Because otherwise the system will never be transparent to an ordinary citizen. I would not even consider a computer count transparent to someone like myself, a software architect with several decades of development experience, because in the end you would always have to trust what some person says (since you can't examine each machine yourself, at the time the count is being done).

And, yes, I think many of us sort of burned out of the discussions on ER. Not that we don't still care and hold the same opinions, we eventually just didn't want to argue the same points day after day.

Although I do hope we some day see the proof that the red shift from exit polls to vote counts is due to cheating in the counts rather than shyness of Republicans.

McCoy: It is the most comprehensive that, electronically speaking, I’ve seen in the world, because all steps are automated. In the US, where I vote, it [the voting system] is only automated from the moment I touch the screen. Over here it is very interesting. This new identification system is new to the world and we understand that it’s a measure that prevents the possibility of double voting and identity theft. We have heard rumours that in the past it was possible that local election officials could add a lot of votes just by tapping the button, but which now is not possible because you have to identify your fingerprint to activate the system. We saw people trying it and when the voter puts their fingerprint and if there is a match then the machine authorizes [the person] to vote.

Panorama: Based on your experience, how is the Venezuelan electoral system compared with those of other countries?

McCoy: [In Venezuela] There are many mechanisms of control, of system security, but the most important one is that you can verify and audit. The National Electoral Council [CNE in its Spanish acronym] works with the [existing] political parties so that they participate in all the audits; its transparency is what gives it confidence. Any system has advantages and disadvantages and none is 100% infallible, for example in the Electoral Register there are still some errors. Each society must determine which system is best for them and when they choose one what is important is that there are systems of verification and that political parties send their observers and that citizens verify. With this system the possibility of error is removed because it is all automated, as long as you do the audits to verify that the software is not tampered with.

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7177

Democracy should be open source.

about WHO owns & operates these touch-screen voting machines.

I've heard computer geeks talk about "open source" systems that ARE transparent,
and pretty much fool-proof; and I certainly hope that's what Venezuela has, for Jimmy's
reputation sake. But other peeps here insist that "transparency" include "to the
ordinary citizen" so I'm not sure how that could ever work with computer voting.

It cannot be audited. Carter is a good guy, but he needs to get a clue here.

in Palm Beach County. When you're done it prints out your ballot, which you then check for accuracy. If the voter makes certain to check it - it is no different from a paper ballot. It IS counted by machine, but it is always there for an audit.

--in the CPU. That is not auditable, period.

could read the ballots incorrectly on purpose, but the hack would probably be discovered because there are random audits. I trust Susan Bucher to make sure.

DREs are inherently insecure, and that can't be fixed even in principle. Now if the touchscreen were to be used to print paper ballots to be scanned in a separate process, and those ballots were the real, legal ballots, that would be another matter entirely.

The machine prints out a paper ballot which IS scanned in a separate operation. The print out of the ballot is inspected by the voter for errors and irregularities, then you take it to another area and it gets drawn into the counting machine (of course it could malfunction, but the machine is self contained - no phone line connections). The counter puts the results on a cartridge and the cartridges are taken to another location and the results on the cartridge are combined with other cartridges to compute the results. A small percentage of the paper ballots are hand counted to make sure there are no irregularities. Granted, the percentage is very small by state law and the hand counting does not take place until after the election. If the percentage counted was larger and done in time to catch problems before elections are decided, it would be a very secure system. The entire state of Florida now uses paper ballots.

That's much better. The separate tallying does indeed insert a check point that allows for true auditing. All states need much tougher protocols for auditing.

It seems pretty tight unless I am missing something. Much better then our inexplicable receipt-less system.

The "paper ballot" was just printed on cash register tape, and where all counties with real paper ballots got hand counted in the disputed governor's race, Snohomish was allowed to just submit its machine totals. BTW, the DREs were for poll voters only, and the results were badly out of synch with the mail-in paper ballot results, which were recounted.

at various locations like a library, the way they do tax forms.

I was going to make an attempt at humor and say something like we can't be like Oregon because they're a left leaning state etc., but hell, I'm gonna' start bugging the crap out of my teabagger state rep and ask him why we don't make voting easier. We all should be hounding our states to make it easier for ALL Americans to vote, and Oregon is a perfect example of how to do it.

Andy Stephenson would roll over in his grave to think that there would be cheerleading for touchscreens on DU.