Re: No E-Voting cannot be democratic
> You cast your vote on an electronic device, and it prints out a paper ballot appropriately marked, PROPERLY marked, and YOU take it and put it in a box after verifying it says what you want.
This is the way to go. The machine totals up everything in the box of how many votes were cast for each candidate. No possible errors on who was voted for as you get a final confirmation before a valid vote ticket gets printed. Votes are then tallied automatically and if there is a discrepancy with the numbers of votes in the box, then the paper votes are law.
Problem here is that if you do that, you can have a vote validated, but not cast it in the box itself. Or drop in a blank enveloppe, or you can make an invalid vote by adding some other paper into the enveloppe before voting, so you now have 2 different numbers: What was entered and valid on the machine, and what the machine users *actually* put in the box. Not to mention the people that vote, print out their slip, realise they screwed up and print another without cancelling the previous. you cannot know from there what data is the real one, especially with places with a large proportion of luddides within the ranks of the great unwashed... .and if you are going to recount anyway, then why spend several thousand quid on each Diebold machine in the first place...
The way to go would just to be to use the machine as a dumb printer terminal. Press the name of the candidate on the list, and it will print out a slip with that name. You can print out how ever many you want. The machine does not count or keep track. It's a plain point of sale printer. Voting slips are now all in a standard format, you save paper, and even small parties who cannot afford to print thousands of slips (like I saw in France for the European elections) are not left out, and there cannot be screwups with voting "blank" when people added a white blank slip for no candidate but the vote was rejected as invalid as the paper was not a standard size (and no-one was told about this). Keep the counters, keep the ballot box, keep the paper trail, just install a touch screen printer that prints out what ever valid candidate, or blank, or invalid as the voter wishes. It may not change much for the election itself, but it would make voting procedures easier, and save a couple of forests at the same time!