Google® "Dr Rebecca Mercuri" and you'll get tons of references to her writings against electronic voting. Most of them make it look like there's a snowball's chance that electronic voting will ever be accurate or accepted in the United States.

When critiqued, she barrages the author of the letter with unsubstantiated claims that he's all wrong, ignoring many ways that any or all of her complaints are either invalid or could be handled to everyone's satisfaction but hers. She just comes across as a fanatic to whom no solution is acceptable.

Sure, and unfortunately, any and all voting systems I have ever used, or even conceived of, all have inherent ways that fraud can be injected into the system. Even Dr Rebecca Mercuri's paper printed ballot method has flaws, not the least of which is the extremely labor-intensive vote-voiding system.

In addition the possibility of a small percentage of votes may be electronically manipulated, but not ever cross-checked against the paper ballots unless all election results are always contested and recounted!

That, by the way, extremely stupid, since it would mean always using the paper printout as the accurate, actual count, so why have the electronic part in the first place?! [except maybe as a data input device to help print a paper record with no dimpled chads? Hey, maybe that's a solution! Read on....]

Here in California, the idea of printers at each voting station to provide a hardcopy verification for the voter or for recounts has been floated, completely ignoring the extreme cost of engineering and installing printers into every voting machine, when that's not at all necessary.

If that's the Mercuri Method, may i suggest the Falk Method:

Using the equipment that we used in local elections recently, the vote is collected electronically in the individual "booths" and recorded on a small smart-card with electronic memory.

After voting, the cards are collected and may be used for recounts.

The missing ingredient here is that no matter what votes i cast, the electronics and the chip could have fraudulent data in them, but one printer per booth is not needed: just one printer per polling place! Here's how:

• after voting using the electronic unit, the smart card is spit out and the voter takes it to the one reader/printer [and one spare for backup?] at the polling place.
• inserting the card automatically makes the reader/printer read the recorded votes off the card and print them out.
• there is no way, other than clairvoyance or telepathy, that the reader/printer can not print the voter's actual data, is there?
• the voter can see, feel, and smell their votes on the printout, which will let them verify that the votes were accurately recorded.
• if they dispute the information or decide they made a mistake, the printout is immediately shredded and the voter goes back to the voting booth, the voting machine erases all of the votes and the voter goes through the process again.
• when the voter is satisfied that the correct votes have been registered by verifying them on the printout, the electronic card is dropped into one box and the paper ballot into another.
• in this way, the electronicl tally can be uploaded for quick initial results, and in the event of a recount, the chip cards and the paper ballots had better match pretty darned closely! Triple-redundancy, anyone?
• if they don't, foul play or incompetence is indicated, and follow-up actions by the appropriate authorities start.

Think about it.

I'm really tired of stupid claims being made about electronic voting. Cut it out, Dr Rebecca Mercuri.

First Rev: 10.24.2004 © Copyright 2004-2008 by plusaf. All rights reserved.

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