Saturday, January 15, 2005
Ohio bans touch-screen voting machines
Via TechDirt, I find out that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has ordered standardizing on optical-scan machines (Story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer).
It's partly a financial move rather than a security move. The Legislature passed a law requiring paper trails from voting machines. Adding printers to the touch-screen machines would have cost money.
I agree with the legislators, by the way. A paper record doesn't prove the machine counted your vote correctly but it is the only way you can ever audit the results. And you have to audit the results, at least a sample of them, to deter cheats. Like businesspeople have always said, "you can expect what you inspect".
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It's partly a financial move rather than a security move. The Legislature passed a law requiring paper trails from voting machines. Adding printers to the touch-screen machines would have cost money.
I agree with the legislators, by the way. A paper record doesn't prove the machine counted your vote correctly but it is the only way you can ever audit the results. And you have to audit the results, at least a sample of them, to deter cheats. Like businesspeople have always said, "you can expect what you inspect".
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