An electronic voting system does not have to be bad or a risk to our democracy. If a system is put in place with enough checks and balances then it would work and be as safe as what we have now.
Being the techie that I am I have been pondering a way to do this. I have come up with a possible solution that would be practical and cost effective. The amount of money required would be no more than is spent now on the electronic voting systems.
Ok let me explain how my system would work:
First each time a voter cast their ballots on the system a ticket would print out with all the information that will be needed to keep the politicians and their cohorts honest. This ticket might look something like this:
Now on this ticket we have (4) elements to our checks and balances system.
1) We have the Voter Confirmation ID
2) We have the printed voter selections
3) We have the Voter Confirmation on the Side
4) We have the Voter Confirmation in bar code at bottom
Ok here is how we check and then double check our information to insure that the ballot was cast as we wanted. First we will have a secondary system separate from the voting machine to verify our ballot for us. This system would be a dumb terminal which would only know how many races or issues there were in the election and would log the results as they are scanned in. There are 2 ways we could do this scanning of the barcode for verification. A) we could have a barcode scanner made into the printer so that as the ticket came out it was scanned and then the information displayed on a separate monitor above the voting machine. Or B) the voter could scan the barcode on the ticket themselves to see the results of their vote. Either way here we could be sure that our vote was cast accurately.
Now the second system I speak of would have no network connection and would not need memory cards inserted for any reason therefore removing that possibility of tampering. It could use the barcode scanner to read printed tickets to add candidates and issues to the system. These could be printed right from the voting machines own configuration. This eliminates the need for repetitive entering of the information by hand and possible errors. The system could then print out a ticket at the end of the election to compare to the ones from the voting machine. If they do not match then a flag is sent up and the search would begin.
We could also take this a step further and have the voter drop the printed ticket into a box so that we have the two machine printout plus each paper copy of each vote. We could even have it print 2 tickets one to drop and one for the voter to keep which could be scanned by yet another system upon exiting the polls to have really accurate exit polls. This would also add a 4th check to our system and leave less room for manipulation of the system.
Here is what a Voter Confirmation ID might look like and an explanation of it.
note that it has several checks built into the number itself. This would make it harder to steal votes or add ghost votes. As you will know how many votes were cast on the system and you will have a log of who voted and if the numbers do not add up you know something is wrong.
Also this information will be easy for both the voting machine and the verification system to store millions of votes with very little memory or space required. This enables the voting machine and verification machine to be built with a small embedded micro computer lowering cost. This also reduces heat and size as well as tripling if not more the rigidity of the device as there will be no moving parts such as hard drives to damage.
Many more safe guards could be built into the voting machine to ensure that the voting process is fair and honest I have simply named a few plausible ones.
As with any electronic or computerized system there is always an inherent risk that it could be compromised but at least with a system like this you could have several security features to keep people honest or at least make it hard for them to be dishonest.
What do you all think?
Matt
