more THROW YOUR VOTE AWAY, REDUX.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

No, Dave, you are absolutely right.  After the Gore-Bush  fiasco in
Florida in 2000, I suggested paper receipts as a solution to a friend
who is one of the leading election consultants in Michigan.  He
rebuked me for being so foolish. Giving receipts to the voters is an
invitation to fraud.

The optical scan system offers efficient electronic tallying and a
paper record that can be secured should a recount become necessary.
The paper records must go into locked and sealed boxes kept by the
elections agency.

The Gore-Bush debacle has never been understood properly.  The
Presidential race in Florida in 2000 was a TIE.  The difference in
votes between Bush and Gore was simply smaller than the precision of
the tallying mechanism.

The nation rushed to dispose of punch card voting because of the
images of election referees staring at hanging chads.  But punch card
voting is efficient and it, too, provides a paper record.  The
famously flawed butterfly ballot and the reprehensibly sloppy process
that flagged innocents as felons were much more important issues than
the use of punch card voting.

The only problem is that election law doesn't embrace the notion of a
statistical tie, so we rushed to replace punch cards with purely
electronic machines whose risks are FAR more ominous.

/rich

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