Recently, Larry Dighera posted:

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 11:35:36 GMT, "Neil Gould"
wrote in
::

What method would you employ to assure that the receipts are not
forgeries?

The same method that assures that paper ballots aren't forgeries. If
you go back a few messages, I suggested that *two* receipts would be
printed & verified by the voter; one would be given to the polling
official, just as paper ballots are handled now. Then, at least one
machine selected at random from each precinct would have its
electronic tally audited against the receipt. In the case of a
discrepancy, a 100% audit would be performed at that precinct.


That's a reasoned solution. Why do you feel it necessary to *add* a
receipt to be given to the voter? What would be the advantage of
electronic voting over the current *one* ballot system?

After thinking about it, there probably is no advantage to two printed
receipts. I know I wouldn't care to have one.

Personally, I think it's going to be nearly impossible to insure an
accurate electronic vote tally much as it was in the
paper-vote/voting-machine era. But here's an idea:

All voting methods have "issues", but I was only trying to suggest a
solution to a system that introduces a lot of new issues, and could be
very easily "rigged". The fact is, I'm not being paid to figure this out,
but many people are. What are *their* solutions to this problem?

Provide a real-time running total of each ballot choice on the
voter's display screen, so that s/he can confirm their vote
incremented accurately. The real-time vote tally could be
continuously monitored by representatives of each party/candidate?
If a dispute should arise, the sealed camera that monitored the
running tally could be consulted. Under no circumstances should
anyone other than the voter be able to modify the running tally;
their must be no way for administrator intervention to modify the
running tally.

I don't see much value in knowing how my vote tallied with previous votes,
and as others pointed out, that tally is likely to be changing so rapidly
it would be unreadable anyway.

Everything occurs in real-time. The voter confirms his own vote.
There is no necessity to print anything.

The idea of the printed receipt is to verify the accuracy of the machine.
If all you have is an on-screen display, there is no way to insure that
the data passed to the board of elections is a valid representation of the
actual votes, which I find to be an intolerable scenario. Why others
aren't bothered by it does puzzle me.

Neil