Reply #133: And if I were writing a vote switching program, I'd keep that in mind [View All]

[jwmealy]

I just have to say that I think the only reasonable system is 100% paper ballots. I don't care if it costs $10 per voter per year.

Let's say I am a designer of DREs with under-glass receipts, and I have this little compulsion to write programs that switch votes. What will I do?

I think I'll maybe write a bit of code that records how rapid, and how close to the center of the choice indication targets on the touch screen, each of the voters' choice indications are. I'll use that information to make a surmise as to the 10% of the voters on this machine that are most likely (1) to be in a great hurry, (2) to have poor eyesight and/or to have forgotten their glasses, and/or (3) not to be in an attentive frame of mind.

Among those 10%, I'll then swap the votes of all those who vote for the "wrong" candidate to the "right" candidate. That way, the great majority of them won't even notice that their vote has been swapped, either because they're in too much of a hurry to check their work, or because they literaly can't read the receipt. Those few who do catch the "error" will tend to assume that it was their sloppiness and haste, or their poor eyesight, that created the "error", and they will fix it without ever suspecting that the "error" is not an error on their part at all. The best part is that the receipt has the vote I want. Any receipt recount supports the electronic version with the swapped votes.

I totally agree with the theme on this thread that convenience and inexpensiveness are grifter's wares when it comes to democracy. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Strike that--it obviously is. If it seems puzzling that no uproar is happening on a large scale in America about this, I recommend reading Chomsky's institutional analysis of the media democracy in America. It's upsetting, it's distressing, but, when all's said and done, what's going on here is not really surprising.

Webb Mealy