![]() Since any of the political-party-designated pollwatchers can see (and write down) what order people vote on the machine, and know the names of all the voters who announce themselves when signing in, they can (during a recount) correlate voters to ballots. “Continuous-roll” VVPATs, which don’t cut the tape into individual ballots, compromise the secrecy of the ballot.They can remember who they selected for president, but do they really remember the name of their selection for county commissioner? And yet, historically in American elections, it’s as often the local and legislative offices where ballot-box-counting (insider) fraud has occurred. Voters are not very good at correlating their VVPAT-in-tiny-type-under-glass to the selections they made on the touch screen.You might think, if the wrong candidate is printed on the VVPAT then this is strong evidence that the machine is hacked, alarm bells should ring– but what if the voter misremembers what he entered in the touch screen? There’s no way to know whose fault it is. If the voter does notice, then the DRE is caught red-handed, except that nothing happens other than the voter tries again (and the DRE doesn’t cheat this time). If the voter doesn’t notice, then the DRE has successfully stolen a vote, and this theft will survive the recount. ![]() But think about the “threat model.” Suppose the hacked/cheating DRE changes a vote, and prints the changed vote in the VVPAT. Yes, the voter can alert the pollworker, the ballot will be voided, and the voter can start afresh. It’s not clear to the voter, or to the pollworker, what to do if the VVPAT shows the wrong selections. ![]() (For example, in 2016 an instructional video from Buncombe County, NC showed how to use the machine the VVPAT-under-glass was clearly visible at times, but the narrator didn’t even mention that it was there, let alone explain what it’s for and why it’s important for the voter to look at it.) The voter is not well informed about the purpose of the VVPAT.The VVPAT is printed in small type on a narrow cash-register tape under glass, difficult for the voter to read.The problem is, no one has any confidence that the VVPAT is actually “voter verified,” for many reasons: If the DRE had been hacked to cheat, it could report fraudulent vote totals for the candidates, but a recount of the paper VVPAT ballots in the ballot box would detect (and correct) the fraud.īy the year 2009, this idea was already considered obsolete. The voter would select candidates on a touchscreen, the DRE would print those choices on a cash-register tape under glass, the voter would inspect the paper to make sure the machine wasn’t cheating, the printed ballot would drop into a sealed ballot box, and the DRE would count the vote electronically. Those opscan computers can be hacked too, of course, but we can recount or random-sample (“risk-limiting audit”) the paper ballots, by human inspection of the paper that the voter marked, to make sure.įifteen years ago in the early 2000s, we computer scientists proposed another solution: equip the touchscreen DREs with a “voter verified paper audit trail” (VVPAT). The best solution is to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, counted by optical scanners. Touchscreen voting machines (direct-recording electronic, DRE) cannot be trusted to count votes, because (like any voting computer) a hacker may have installed fraudulent software that steals votes from one candidate and gives them to another. ![]() Erie is one of ten counties that use ES&S DS-200 to scan their ballots.States and counties should not adopt DRE+VVPAT voting machines such as the Dominion ImageCast X and the ES&S ExpressVote. "I am perplexed by your email because Erie County does not use Dominion equipment. Consequently, the machine would be useless in the field." They indicated that the Erie Board of Elections programmed their Dominion machine to produce multiple ballot faces, but when it was tested as if at a polling site (after the seals were broken), it took 18 hours to boot up. The example they cited was the test experience of Erie County. " The objection is this: because the machine takes so long to boot up on site, it is impractical to use. To: NY State Co-Chair Douglas Kellner, describing information she had received from Westchester County Election Commissioners: Election Commissioners seem to be misrepresenting this information.īelow is correspondence from an attorney from Indivisible Scarsdale, Myra Saul, to the NY State Board of Elections.
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