You've got votes.In Phil Keisling's review of Aviel Rubin's Brave New Ballot ("Election Fraud, American Style," December 2006), Keisling accuses Rubin of feeding "a hyperactive hy·per·ac·tive adj. 1. Highly or excessively active, as a gland. 2. Having behavior characterized by constant overactivity. 3. Afflicted with attention deficit disorder. (and bipartisan) obsession with the perfect election system ... [T]he idealist in him seeks a totally secure voting machine voting machine, instrument for recording and counting votes. The voting machine itself is generally positioned in a booth, often closed off by a curtain to assure secrecy for the voter. , a totally fraud-proof electoral process." Keisling is setting up a straw man. Rubin and many others who are studying this problem have no illusions that perfection is achievable. What they are trying to head off is the threat of an entirely new kind of fraud--wholesale fraud--in which a single individual could sabotage thousands or millions of ballots. Having foreclosed that threat, we'll still have to deal with the many kinds of retail election fraud that we've been managing more or less successfully since the first U.S. election. The process of counting votes can be immunized against the kind of unprecedented wholesale fraud of which paperless DREs (direct recording electronic voting Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is a term encompassing several different types of voting, embracing both electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of counting votes. stations) are capable. We can achieve this immunity by taking DREs out of the business of counting votes altogether. We would transform the DREs into EBPs--electronic ballot printers. After making her selections on an EBP EBP Evidence Based Practice EBP Enterprise Buyer Professional EBP Education Business Partnership EBP European Business Programme EBP Efficiency Bandwidth Product EBP Electronic Billing and Payment EBP Extended Base Pointer EBP Error Back Propagation screen, the voter would get an 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper ballot summarizing her choices. After checking her ballot for accuracy, she would deposit it in a ballot box, just like an old-fashioned paper ballot marked by hand. After the polls closed, these machine-printed ballots could be counted by hand, by optical scanner See scanner. , or both. Since Keisling presided over the establishment of Oregon's vote-by-mail system (VBM VBM Value Based Management (shareholder based approach to managing companies) VBM Valence Band Maximum VBM Virtual Beit Midrash VBM Visual Backward-Masking VBM Vietnamese Baptist Mission ), his umbrage at Rubin's "casually dismissive half-sentence" characterizing VBM as a "terribly insecure system" is understandable, but his defense of VBM is hardly unbiased. VBM suffers from the disadvantages of all hand-marked ballots: voters are not prevented from overvoting, nor warned about undervoting. Ballots can be invalidated by stray marks or failure to follow directions, and VBM offers new opportunities for election sabotage. Incoming filled-in ballots can be intercepted, outgoing blank ballots can be misdirected by filing false postal forwarding notices, voters' signatures can be forged, votes can be bought, voters can be coerced or intimidated, and blind, senile senile /se·nile/ (se´nil) pertaining to old age; manifesting senility. se·nile adj. 1. Relating to, characteristic of, or resulting from old age. 2. , or intellectually disabled voters can be "assisted." HAMILTON RICHARDS, PHD Senior Lecturer (retired) Department of Computer Sciences University of Texas at Austin “University of Texas” redirects here. For other system schools, see University of Texas System. The University of Texas at Austin (often referred to as The University of Texas, UT Austin, UT, or Texas |
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