Voter Verification In Touch-Screen Machines

Below is a quote from Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, on the issue of voter verification in touch-screen machines.

It would seem that computer scientists aren’t quite as unanimous on the issue as “paper trail” supporters would have us believe... thanks to Jim Dickson for forwarding this.

"So-called voter-verifiable ballot systems are nothing of the kind. They simply replace electronic voting, which has a perfect security record, with a paper medium, which is easy to tamper with. The voter is given the false impression that he knows how his vote will be counted, which is simply untrue."

"The call for supposedly ‘voter-verifiable’ ballots is based on paranoia run amuck. We are asked to fear the possibility of an all-powerful programmer who is so clever that he can cause anyone in the U.S. to be elected yet no one else could ever be smart enough to catch him or even detect his crime. It's a scenario much better suited to a summer novel than a state legislature."

"To achieve the false claim of ‘voter-verifiability’ we are asked to discard all the advances in computers and computer security of the 20th century -- advances so reliable that we regularly trust our lives and fortunes to them -- and return to the same paper voting methods that people have been using to fix elections for a hundred years."

"I have nothing against voter-verifiable ballots except that they aren't voter-verifiable, have no greater security than any other physical ballot (including punched cards), are slow and inconvenient to use, maintain and count, disenfranchise blind and disabled voters and I possibly forgot to mention that no such ballots have actually been used or tested in any jurisdiction of significant size."

"If you can trust your life to the computers in an airplane, the Powerball can trust $240 million to a computer in a convenience store and banks can conduct their entire business with computers, then the same technology can work just fine for voting."

Michael Shamos PhD, JD
Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Co-Director, Institute for eCommerce
Twenty years experience in testing and certifying voting systems Rob Randhava, Policy Analyst Leadership Conference on Civil Rights & LCCR Education Fund 1629 K St. NW, Suite 1000 Washington, DC 20006 202-466-6058 (direct dial) 202-466-3435 (fax)

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