"Paper ballots, counted by hand!"

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

Friday, October 03, 2003

The boring Canadian province of Ontario had an election yesterday, and the
voters finally managed to kick out the right-wing American-influenced tax
cutters, replacing them with a party whose main promise was that it would
not cut taxes so that it would have enough money to pay for things
considered inessential by the previous government, such as health care,
education, public security and safety, and the electricity supply. A little
sanity in an insane world. The interesting thing is the mechanics of the
voting procedure. The election used paper ballots which were counted by
hand at each polling station, with the results telephoned in to the
Returning Officers, who communicated the results to the media. Ontario is a
huge place, with over 11 million people on 415,000 square miles or over one
million square kilometers (at the longest points, 1,000 miles high and
1,000 miles wide), and yet this old-fashioned system produced election
results in about an hour, with the winner giving his victory speech less
than two hours after the polls closed. Since paper ballots were used, and
absolutely no computers were involved in the balloting process, the ballots
can be recounted at any time should there be any dispute, and the ballots
themselves serve as decisive evidence of the validity of the results. When
I look at computer voting, I see a system which is in every possible way
inferior to the paper ballot system:

Computers are significantly more expensive, and require constant
maintenance and updating.

Computers can break down at any time, while paper ballots never break down.

Regardless of what the computer lover will tell you, I defy any computer
voting system to produce results as fast as produced in the Ontario election.

Computers are essentially impossible to secure from cheating. They all use
proprietary code, and it is impossible for anyone to be certain that there
isn't some fixed result in the machine itself. Once hooked up to the
internet, the problems associated with insecurity multiply enormously. It
is simply impossible to be sure of the results if a 'black box' is used. It
doesn't help that the actual machines produced by companies like Diebold
have even more obvious flaws, making them essentially useless unless the
desired result is to produce a cheating machine.

One of the most important principles of voting is the secrecy of the
ballot. Many voting machines that simply print out a hard-copy ballot for
use in the traditional voting procedure leave open the possibility that
information associated with the voter can be connected to the choice of the
voter. I can see such machines in limited circumstances being used to
assist disabled voters (on the theory that the possible loss of privacy is
outweighed by the help provided by the machine, with other methods of
voting assistance removing privacy anyway), but see the privacy issue as
being a possible problem if they are widely used. The use of voting
machines to assist disabled voters seems to be a large part of the
marketing campaign for these machines (and there are a number of options,
including such things as ballots printed in braille, which can be used with
paper ballots).

I don't want to sound too sentimental, but there is something essentially
democratic about the process of filling out a paper ballot and physically
depositing it in a ballot box. That feeling is lost if you stand in front
of a machine pushing buttons, completely unsure of whether your vote is
going to count the way you intended it to count. Voting must not only be
fair, it must be seen to be fair.

In spite of this, there is a huge push in the United States to introduce
computer voting machines all over the country. Why is this?:

The computer voting industry reminds me of the pharmaceutical-industrial
complex. The drug companies grab drugs developed with government money for
nominal payments, and then spend billions of dollars promoting these drugs.
A large part of the promotion is, as bizarre as it might seem, finding a
disease for which they can purport to use the drug. In other words, they
often have the drug first, and go looking for the marketable disease later.
In fact, it is often not the drug that is marketed, but the disease itself.
The computer voting machine makers have nice new computers hooked up to the
nice new internet, and had to create the market for these unneeded
machines. Since the old system worked spectacularly well, and was much,
much cheaper, you would think they would have a difficult job foisting
these useless machines on the public. Never underestimate the combination
of heavy lobbying, bribing vile politicians and bureaucrats, and our almost
monkey-like fascination with bright, shiny, new machines.

Let's face facts. The voting machine companies are all owned by doctrinaire
extreme-right-wing Republicans. If the United States holds fair elections
in the next round, the Republicans will lose. The Republicans need these
machines. Their main purpose, after making money for their creators, is to
cheat.

People should go after these awful voting machines like the Luddites went
after automated weaving machines: with sledgehammers. Paper ballots have
worked well and have formed the basis for the whole history of
Anglo-American democracies (with marked shards in urns going back to
ancient Athens), and there is no good reason for voting machines. Paper
ballots, counted by hand!
posted 3:32 AM