Voting on Election Day
The vast majority of States now use electronic voting machines, a voting system that has proven notoriously vulnerable to mysterious technological snafus and vote theft. Computer scientists have shown many times over how easy it is to tamper with voting machines in ways that are nearly impossible to detect.
What’s a voter to do?
Thankfully, many states have now passed laws that require paper records of all votes. Of course, that means you have to be diligent about checking to make sure the paper record matches the vote you cast.
The following 6 simple steps will take you a long way toward safeguarding your vote:
Step 1 The Verifier Map will tell you if a voter verified paper record is required in your state.
Step 2 Make sure you fully understand how the voting method at your polling place works.
Step 3 Take your time while voting to make sure you check the boxes you intend to mark.
Step 4 Immediately inform a poll worker of any voting machine malfunctions.
Step 5 Ask for assistance receiving and verifying the paper record of your vote.
Step 6 Report any irregularities to: 866-687-8683 or www.866ourvote.com
It’s not enough to merely collect paper records. Vigilant, random auditing of all elections is required in order to ensure that dishonest and malfunctioning machines can be detected.
To reduce the risk of incorrect election results, the Verified Voting Foundation strongly recommends: “paper-ballot based systems over systems which merely produce a voter verifiable paper record along with mandatory random manual audits of every election.”
While some states do have audit laws, many of them have no teeth and don’t require an audit of votes for president. Some, like Florida, only allow for audits AFTER a vote is certified, which makes it difficult to change the “certified” votes if mistakes are found.
Elections with independent paper records of the votes can be recounted, unlike paperless elections. And some recovery from most election malfunctions is also possible with paper records. In the best of all possible worlds, to safeguard honest elections where you can rely on your vote being counted:
“All states should require audits of all major races before election results are certified. They should require that a sufficiently large percentage of the ballots be checked to be statistically meaningful. States also need clear guidelines for what they will do—to investigate, and if necessary set aside flawed results—when a significant level of error is detected.
Supporters of honest elections won an important victory when a majority of states enacted paper-trail requirements for electronic voting. But those paper trails will have little value unless they are backed up with audits that are able to detect errors and fraud—and to ensure that the candidate who gets the most votes wins.” ~New York Times, July 16, 2008
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