and this is based on American history. A "receipt" could be used in vote buying to prove to someone how you voted.
In NC there are only two counties with TS systems, and they are by law required to have a printer on the machine which records all choices as they are made. When you click summary, it prints out a summary of your votes chosen to compare to what's on the screen. If you are satisfied with the choices, you "cast" you vote and it is recorded electronically.
During random audits, the paper tape summary is compared to the recorded digital count and discrepancies trigger a recount of the entire precinct until the deviation is explained. In these situations, paper beats digital since it is the tangible record of the vote.
The problems with Diebold machines when I and other activists were investigating them were :
1) Hard coded supervisor passwords.
2) Identical access keys (any key would open any machine, and they could be bought on the net).
3) All source code and documentation was "in the wild"
4) Database was running on Access
5) Hardware was WAY out of date (386 CPUs)
6) USB/Serial ports were not locked, meaning access could be granted to the machine even without the key.
That was just the small stuff. There were tones of other documented problems, and we caught Diebold in lie after lie about the problems.
My experience with election officials was that the "lack of paper" was sold to them as a cost savings issue, and I think all of the people I spoke with believed it. After the dangers were explained, most wanted nothing to do with the paperless systems. The major issue was one of ignorance, not malice. On the part of the voting machine companies the overriding issue was greed.
My major worry about these machines was not treachery of an individual or group, but of the simple fact that the machines were highly unreliable with almost zero redundancy. I was on a local talk show in April 2004 with the NC Director of Elections and I explained that when these machines failed, and I said WHEN, not IF, the votes would irretrievable. If the votes lost was within the margin of victory for a race, they would be looking at lawsuits and public humiliation. I didn't have to wait long, as this is precisely what happened in the November election in Currituck Co. over 4,000 votes were lost and the margin of victory in the Ag Commissioner race was 3800 votes.
= new reply since forum marked as read
