The Political Inquirer

Recently, a few cases of potential vote fraud have been circulating the Internet. One story concerns Ron Paul in an Iowa district where 0 votes were tallied yet individuals have come forward claiming they voted for Ron Paul. One other instance is the questionable difference in the results for Senators Obama and Clinton between voting districts that used paper ballots and those that used the electronic voting machines. An additional story, the cover story in this Sunday’s The New York Times, posed the overall threat of electronic voting machines to the 2008 presidential election. MoveOn.org has taken some traction from this story and a mass email has been floating around which asks “Can you sign this urgent petition asking local, state, and federal officials to require paper ballots for our votes?” The question I am posing is “Will paper ballots improve the voting process as recently suggested by this MoveOn.org email?”

The simple answer is no. It will not improve the voting process. In the case of the 31 votes missing from Ron Paul in Sutton County Iowa, voting was done in a very public manner and it appears the mistake was made when submitting the results, not tabulating the results. This could happen whether the process was electronic, paper ballot, or a group “show of hands” approach. What is most important about this example is that the error was realized because the final submitted results were available to be seen, and were glaringly obvious which is what leads me to believe it was in fact an honest mistake. Had 10 votes been shaved off the results though, I highly doubt the error would have been discovered.

What is needed is auditable results for every single voter. This is quite easy to accomplish and can be done a variety of different ways whether electronic or paper ballot is the voting method used. Discussions with my brother came up with the following process.

1) A person votes for their candidate of choice

2) 2 paper trails are created with a unique voter id; one for your to keep and one for the election commission. This would be done in addition to the memory card tabulation for electronic voting machines since they have been known to fail.

3) The final results are tallied with the complete details (voter id, location, candidate selection) available as substantiating backup on-line and in hard copy format at disclosed locations.

4) Every voter has the ability to review and correct the final results after comparing to their paper copy to make sure their vote was counted and was counted correctly.

I say that paper ballots are not necessary, but a paper trail is.

My brother had the following comment:

I don’t understand what’s so difficult about this. Schools have been doing this for years. They post grades on-line according to student id#, and they post test results hours after you’ve taken the test. In many cases you can write your answers on the test booklet and take it home with you so that you can verify that the scan-tron didn’t make any errors.