IP: Difficulties With Paper Ballot Systems Pointed Out Six Months Ago

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 15:47:38 -0800
>From: Ed Gerck <egerck@safevote.com>
>To: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>Subject: Difficulties With Paper Ballot Systems Pointed Out Six Months Ago
>
>
>[Dave:  This may interest IP'ers -- things did not go wrong
>all of a sudden.]
>
>When looking at the current scenario in public elections, it is
>useful to consider the lessons gained here.  One of them is IMO
>to fight lenient attitudes toward problems.
>
>The overview of an extensive year 2000 market study that Safevote
>conducted in the U.S. regarding public elections and the perspective
>of Internet voting was made available to the public and published in
>the newsletter The Bell [http:/www.thebell.net] in May, June and July
>[http://www.thebell.net/archives/]. Florida was one of the five
>states researched. Six months ago, The Bell declared:
>
>"The study revealed the tension in having the  power to identify a
>problem while lacking the means to solve it.  For example, for vote
>recounting the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do
>not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than
>once, which means that election officials lack the means to
>objectively distinguish between fraud and error under these
>circumstances.  Thus, the timeliness and usefulness of this study to
>the election community, vendors and interest groups cannot be
>overstated, as well as its relevance toward future benchmarks to rate
>Internet voting systems. The study shows that the performance of
>currentsystems is not the "golden benchmark" to which Internet voting
>systems should be compared.  There are many faults with the current
>systems, as the report will describe, so we should in fact be looking
>to Internet voting systems in order to try to reduce those faults and
>thus provide for more security than what is available today ­ not
>less security."
>
>Cheers,
>
>Ed Gerck