Re: Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results

From: robert j. kolker (nowhere_at_nowhere.net)
Date: 11/18/04 

Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 12:11:54 -0500

David Kastrup wrote:

> Well, then it is without purpose. The problem is that with something
> like a "cryptographic trail", you again have to trust the machine
> manufacturers. With paper (of course, visible to the voter!), you can
> always verify the votes afterwards.

Only if paper ballot are guarded and there is assurance that no genuine
ballot has been stolen or destroyed, or invalid ballots have been
stuffed into the ballot box.

  At least if you take a headcount
> of the voters manually (to guarantee that the machine is not passing
> more votes into the ballot box than actually taken).

This is done when the voters check in. They present i.d. and the i.d. is
checked off against the registration list. So it is known modulu error
how many voters voted. The total number of ballots equal (modulo small
error) the number of voters checked off against registration. This does
not preculude ballot tampering which maintains the total count.

Bob Kolker

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