April 3, 2007
Alligator op-ed: Ditch touch-screen voting machines
Anuradha Pandey, “Touch-screen voting machines must go,” op-ed, Independent Florida Alligator, April 3, 2007.
Those counties in Florida and around the country acquired touch-screen voting machines despite public outrage about the lack of accountability and the fact that they leave no paper trail. These election officials displayed a profound disregard for democracy. It should have been obvious to election supervisors that spending millions on machines that don’t leave a paper trail wouldn’t solve the problems from the 2000 elections.
Hi, I´m from Brazil, where we´ve been using voting machines for quite a long time (10+ years) and I don´t see a problem in them not leaving a paper trail, provided that you can audit their functioning at any given time - and that you do so. There must be some sort of public control of the software employed - so that you don´t fall in the hands of the owner and are cut short of voting - and the records in the machine´s disk should be verifiable - and verified randomly. Anyway, voting machines could not wipe out the traditional scams in elections, which include buying votes (with public money or not)and the “rental” of elector registration documents, to be used by scammers. The struggle to keep corruption out relies heavily on opennes of the process, voters´ participation and surveillance.
G´luck!