Internet and Networked Voting

I am suspicious of these online voting mechanisms. Voter fraud would be nearly impossible to prove and certainly will cause questions about the veracity of the results.

Voting should be done via optically read cards and the cards retained for at least a year after election day. If a card cannot be read by the machine, the card is set aside. This would be a mechanical and impartial arbiter of voter intent.

Any moron who cannot properly fill in an oval next to a name deserves to be mute on election day. Think of it as Darwinian theory applied to voting.

Just as importantly, voting rules should be set before election day, where votes not marked or submitted properly set aside and not counted. This BS of trying to count half punched or unpunched cards as votes does nothing to insure the integrity of the system.

Palm Beach County Florida was a problem again in the primaries of 2002, when democrats were duking it out. This is symptomatic of an incompetent Supervisor of elections (also a democrat).

The issue of stealth software is tough. Who do you trust to validate it? How big a pool of checkers is needed to prevent a conspiracy risk?

If we agree on the national database to insure 1 person 1 vote and prevent ineligible voters, that is a big hurdle in itself.

Now, what if the vote tabulation occurs at a state, or even precent, level and is then bounced against the count of valid voters? This makes the manipulation effort increase by at least 50 locations. As a double blind, the counts are also sent to at least two audit agencies from each of the 50 states. Now we have to have a tally agree across 3 independent groups, only one of which is a government agency.

The software from any given state could be from any number of sources, so to steal an election would again reguire a larger conspiracy.