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As I
mentioned in a message to the people I met at my first meeting Tuesday
evening, there is a conflict between requiring discrete ballots (which I
understand to mean "a physically separate piece of paper for each voter" and I
don't understand why we don't use such unambiguous language), and wanting
random post-election audits of a few machines at a few precincts to verify
consistency of the machine counts with the paper ballots they produced. In order
to do the audits for just a few machines in a voting site, the individual
ballots would have to be collected in separate ballot boxes for each machine.
That seems impractical, and the validity of any audit could be easily destroyed
by a very small number of voters putting their ballots in the wrong boxes.
Without the separate boxes, the audits would have to be done for entire polling
places. It happens that tapes actually avoid this conflict, as I will describe
below.
People are understandably concerned about counts being
done from barcodes (which vendors could put on separate ballots just as easily
as on tapes) that do not necessarily match the text that the voter verified; but
it should be possible to deal with that by requiring that all audits and
recounts be based on manual counts of the voter verifiable content on the
paper record, i.e. not any content that is only machine
readable.
With
this objection (which up to now I have only heard associated with tape) out of
the way, then problem of valid tapes being replaced
with fraudulent ones is in the same category as replacing ballot boxes and
shouldn't be what this fight is about.
AND, voter verified votes on tapes are inherently
associated with a single machine, eliminating the auditing complications
described above for discrete ballots.
I
have heard the concerns that tapes can jam, but so can paper sheets. Cash
registers and gasoline pumps and ATM machines (some built by these same
vendors) print millions of receipts every day, and we are not inundated
with horror stories about them not working. I don't see that
being a serious enough concern to jeopardize support for legislation that
potentially is a big step forward.
Joe
Callahan
-----Original Message-----
From: Margitjo@xxxxxxx [mailto:Margitjo@xxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 11:17 AM To: meliom@xxxxxxxxxxx; neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: warren@xxxxxxxxx; atoso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; bjbarkey@xxxxxxxxx; bthack@xxxxxxxxxxx; carolyn@xxxxxxxxx; courtenay.white@xxxxxxxxxxx; WthrngHite@xxxxxxx; debsueadams@xxxxxxxxxxx; deenalarsen@xxxxxxxxx; dthiel714@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; donnamp@xxxxxxxxxxxx; wildgrass@xxxxxxxxxx; inkcat42@xxxxxxxxx; ivan.meek@xxxxxxxxx; taichiproj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; j.c.callahan@xxxxxxxx; jleventhal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; j_erhardt@xxxxxxxxx; MagandKen@xxxxxxx; laurieannb@xxxxxxx; lseaborn@xxxxxxxxx; Mary.Daugherty@xxxxxxxxxxx; mlambie@xxxxxxxxxxx; jwarner2000@xxxxxxxxxxx; ross12410@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; randyg2001@xxxxxxxxxxx; mcgrath_mcnally@xxxxxxx; svlocke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; stan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; vrprods@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; vincencollins@xxxxxxxxxx; cvv-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: VVPB and VVPAT under attack in Mitchell/Madden bill - call Friday
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