E-voting critic calls on hackers to expose flaws

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paper ballot voting, e-voting, internet voting . . .: It doesn't matter how the we record the votes! As long as the secret ballot exists there will never be fraud-free elections. Following almost every election there were numerous anecdotal reports of small groups of voters with lists of polling places going from polling place to polling place and voting at each one. Since no ID is required to register to vote and it is actually illegal to request ID at the polling place there is no way to prevent a group, particularly in larger cities where polling places are not far apart and most people don?t know the people in there precinct anyway, from casting dozens of votes each.

A hard core group of a hundred voters (which is less than 1/100 of 1% of the population of a larger city) each casting twenty ballots is 2000 votes; how many elections are decided by less that 2000 votes? The fact is, there is almost no way to prevent this, I have heard of various groups which claim they are planning to station monitors at polling places to ?challenge the votes? of suspicious voters. But every honest person knows that all the hard core repeat voters have to do is make sure there are a few minority voters in each of their groups, no unpaid polling worker is going to put his head on the block by accepting a challenge to a minority person's vote. Not with the NAACP waiting in the wings, ready to cry racism at the first hint of a minority person claiming that ?whitey kept them from voting?.

The answer is the elimination of the secret ballot. Votes should be signed, either physically or digitally, by the person that cast them. Then it would be almost impossible to tamper with the vote. Anyone who was interested could check the records and see exactly how their vote was recorded and know that if their vote and the votes of all their friends, where properly record that the results of the election were in fact most likely legitimate. Public interest groups could review the lists of persons who voted and contact these people to see if they in fact exist and live in the district in which they voted. No more double and triple voting, no more dead people voting, no more proxy voting for your minor child or your cat. If fraud was alleged and someone thought it was worth the effort, it would be possible to contact every voter and have them verify that their vote was recorded accurately.

I will sum up by saying if you are so embarrassed by your choice of candidate that you need to hide behind a curtain and vote in secret, perhaps you need to review your choice of candidates. Let?s come out of the closet and vote like Americans who are proud of our system of government and the candidates we choose to vote for.; Posted by: bjornafreeman@... Posted on: 07/30/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use