Iowa’s Jones Persuades LWV To Back Paper
One of the obstacles in our campaign for verifiable voting systems has been–sad to say–the League of Women Voters. That changed last weekend at their national convention in Minnesota.
The League is now on record supporting voter-verified paper and audits, to boot!
Here is a shortened version of the resolution:
Whereas:
Paperless electronic voting systems are not inherently secure, can malfunction, and do not provide a recountable audit trail,
Therefore be it resolved that:
The position on the Citizen’s Right to Vote be interpreted to affirm that LWVUS supports only voting systems that are designed so that:
a) they employ a voter-verifiable paper ballot or other paper record, said paper being the official record of the voter’s intent; and
…..d) the paper ballot/record is used for audits and recounts; and
e) the vote totals can be verified by an independent hand count of the paper ballot/record; and
f) routine audits of the paper ballot/record in randomly selected precincts can be conducted in every election, and the results published by the jurisdiction.
The final push for this change of position was applied by Iowa’s own Professor Doug Jones along with Teresa Hommell ( Where’s the Paper) and Barb Simmons of the Association of Computing Machinery. Jones and Hommell are both linked in the sidebar of this blog every day.
Jones told the League that state and local election officials are in CYA mode (my term, not his), having spent public funds on defective voting equipment and fearing a loss of public confidence if they admit their folly. Besides that, the local officials can’t actually run their equipment without constant help from the vendor and they don’t want to offend the vendor by noting flaws in the system.
He says our only hope is to lean even harder on the government to reform. He suggested one way to do that: computer experts like him should go beyond mere criticism of the equipment and begin actually demonstrating the details of how to exploit the known security holes.
To which I say, “Bring it on.”