Chuck and VotersUnite "Mythbreakers" can tell you much more about it. Essentially, a VVPAT is just a paper record of what the machine outputs. Even if you have a paper receipt in front of you that you can check and drop into the ballot box, there is STILL no guarantee that the counters are recording the votes accurately. Also, these receipts, since they are not identified in any way and therefore you cannot verify whether the trail in the box is actually yours or not, your "trail" can be easily "substituted" for others with different results that would match the machine-counted tally. It would be much, MUCH more difficult to substitute BALLOTS that voters have to laboriously mark themselves--filling in lots of ovals with a pen--and therefore much, MUCH more difficult to cheat with them.
If machines are forced on us to do the counting, then we need to ensure they are secure. A paper receipt will only tell us how we voted before we drop it into the box. How do we know that the votes on that receipt are in fact what the counter will count? How do we prove that the counter is lying? Another receipt can be substituted for our receipt and we won't even know. Additional receipts can be printed out and dropped in the box for voters who never even actually voted.
How can we prevent that? We have to AT LEAST make sure we have paper ballots that we can count manually. We have to be sure those paper ballots are hand-marked by people in such a way that in order to substitute them or to create fake ones it would be much harder. We have to have better accounting practices so that the number of voters who sign in or mail in their ballots count the actual number of ballots/receipts that are counted. We have to make sure the machine counts match the number of ballots/signatures at the polls and in the registration books.
A paper trail is just a printout of what a machine says happened. How do you prove that what the machine says happened is what actually occurred?
http://www.chuckherrin.com/paperballots.htm<snip>
Before we started using computers, it was unthinkable that you wouldn't have a piece of paper that could be used in the event of a recount- now, when there's a request for a recount, all we hear about is bitching because somebody has to hook a printer up to the machine! And do you know what you get when you recount inaccurate results? A paper copy of inaccurate results.
Have we lost our frickin' minds? We don't even have paper receipts, much less ballots! And it's not just the touchscreens - that's something else that a lot of people are missing. You have to take a step one level back in the tabulation process to the computers that actually do the tallying. That's where votes from touchscreens, as well as optically scanned AND absentee ballots come together to be counted.
<snip>
http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/handcounted.aspThe "central finding" of a 2001 CalTech/MIT study was that, of all voting systems used in the United States, hand counted paper ballots have the lowest average incidence of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots.
- Errors in the software, firmware, and election-specific ballot programming of both paperless electronic voting machines (DREs) and optical scan tabulation machines have caused hundreds of election problems in recent years, including high levels of uncounted and unmarked ballots. It is unreasonable to believe that all such errors have been detected.
- Manual recounts of optical-scan ballots have overturned initial, inaccurate machine results in many such cases. It is only reasonable to believe that the outcomes of many other elections (both DRE and optical scan) have been inaccurate, and the inaccuracies were not detected.
- Computer-counting errors have a much greater potential impact than hand-counting errors.
- The electronic voting systems used in the United States, both optical scan and DRE, have severe and unresolved security and accuracy flaws that are not being remedied by election procedures.
- While we advocate the use of computers to assist people in marking their ballots, computers cannot count those ballots reliably.
Therefore, in order to protect the accuracy of our election outcomes, we demand the following:
- All ballots shall be paper ballots and hand counted.
- Every voting system using automated or electronic means of recording and/or counting votes shall provide a paper ballot whose accuracy can be verified by the voter, and that paper ballot shall be the legal ballot used for the official canvass, audit, recount, and final record.
- Ballot counts shall be done by precinct with public oversight.
- Ballot-count results shall be made public immediately at each precinct.
- Media outlets shall wait until all polling places close before reporting any election results or outcome predictions.
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