EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Warren Smith
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
Section : | 6.8
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Comment : | PAPER TRAILS: First of all, these guidelines do not mandate a "voter-verified paper trail" i.e. a record of all the votes cast, readable by an unaided human. (I do not think there is any reason to demand that this record actually literally be on "paper" - "Babylonian clay tablets" would be even better as far as I am concerned.) That non-mandate is an outrage. I believe that all voting machines containing an electronic computer should be required to be accompanied by such a paper trail. There have already been instances of voting machine failure leading to uncorrectable errors due to the lack of such trails - and this includes cases where that data loss prevented determining the winner. There have already been instances where voting machines have been used and later proven on videotape to vote for candidates other than the one the voter selected, with no way to correct the error in the election result.