Cheap Democracy

Link: Commission recommends voting safeguards.

The 21-member Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by former president Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, has concluded that electronic voting machines should generate voter-verifiable trails and all voters should be required to present photo identification.

The Commission on Federal Election Reform has made the full text of their final report available in pdf format.

Electronic voting machines are usually highly appreciated by voters, but few are aware of how difficult it is to make those machines tamper-proof. The only way to make electronic voting machines at least as auditable as standard paper ballots is to make sure that they generate a paper trail. In other words, the computer prints a ballot with your vote, you inspect it and cast it in the ballot box if it is correct. Although votes are counted as soon as they are generated, the ballots are still available for manual audits or recounts, and always take precedence over the digitally recorded vote.

Unfortunately, most implementations of electronic voting eschew paper trails, using higher costs as a smokescreen to hide the utter insanity of making the democratic process essentially unauditable and thus undemocratic. How cheap do you want your democracy to be?