Verified Voting

I just endorsed the resolution on electronic voting at verifiedvoting.org. I also looked at my home state of Nevada's statements on electronic voting machines. They don't make it clear that the voter should have a chance to manually verify a permanent, auditable record of their vote.

I've sent an e-mail to the State Elections Division to ask them to clarify this matter. Since the e-mail address was on the state's web site, I'm not hopeful of getting a timely answer. We'll see.

(As a side note on my endorsement -- I endorsed the statement as an individual, not as a representative of eBay or the Omidyar Foundation. I made that clear in the comments field, and used a personal e-mail address. Should directors and officers of public companies be allowed to make public statements on issues of public policy without implicating their organizations?)

Comments

[Jamie Gilcig]

While intellectually I can understand the premise of Electronic voting; I think it is opening Pandora's box.

I really do think it will create new and modern ways to rig voting, and make it much more difficult to regulate and validate.

There are reasons why votes are counted with reps from both major party's present.

Yes, the last US Presdential Election was the biggest sham since Germany in 1933, but at least most people understand the circumstances of it regardless of which side of the fence that they are on. There were ballots to PHYSICALLY count and while one sided may have been up to petty chicanery it was open and evidenced petty chicanery.

With Electronic voting there will not be any hanging chads.

Things will happen and I fear that society may never be the same....

Happy Holidays All!

Jamie Gilcig

[Ami Dar]

Hi Pierre,

I'd like to meet with you, and I can't resist the opportunity of posting here. I run http://www.idealist.org which I started in 1995. It would be great to talk.

Thanks!

Ami

[Doug Kenline]

Thank you very much Pierre. This is an important issue.

[Jeffry R. Fisher]

If we are going to modernize our voting systems, then why don't we do more than just updating the machinery? Plurality/first-past-the-post voting is horrible in contests with more than two candidates. What do you think of approval voting? If we go electronic, we could even calculate Condorcet ranked pairs.
See: http://www.electionmethods.org/