Is the end of the secret ballot at hand?

Hat tip Albert Kao via Josie Kao

Wired News has a LONG story about how E-voting is a threat to democracy. The threat is because of computer problems or because of hackers could mean people who vote for person A have their votes deleted or changed to person B.

The story is not only critical of the new touch screen voting machines but also the optical sheets that have been around for a long time and all students know and love as Scantrons.

The story and Bev Harris, the person who the story is about, spends a lot of time saying the companies that make the voting machine's are linked to mostly Republican candidates and because the owners have political views and express them, there is a likely chance they will rig the vote to their party's favor.

While the threat is not remote, after all the 2002 election showed there were glitches with the E-voting machines, this also is not a new threat.

There is a story that one governor of Louisiana won election after election. After he retired the voting machines were sold to a country in Africa that was having its first election. The candidates were put into the machine and the votes tallied and the former governor of Louisiana won again. The machines had been rigged all the time he was in office. The story suppositively takes place in the 1950's so we are not talking about touch screen voting machines.

There are several problems with any voting system:
1. The people who are voting will not bother to follow directions (such as make sure chads are off and the card is seated correctly so the correct person is voted for).
2. Voting systems can be rigged and tampered with. Even if the touch screen machines prints a paper record, who is to say the paper record will be the same as the machine tallies. If the voter gets a paper receipt saying they voted for candidate A but the machine has been set to change the vote to candidate B and the internal paper record is also set to record a vote to candidate B how will anyone find out?
3. Voters who are too lazy or afraid to ask for help and muck up their ballots are the first to complain their votes were not counted. Voting is not that hard and if people can't understand how the voting machinery works and will not ask the poll workers for help, why is that anyone's problem but their own and their own fault.

So any secret ballot is open to abuse, I don't care what type of machinery is used. The only way to insure the vote is not tampered with is to have an open vote, you have to register your name and who you voted for. Of course that is also subject to abuse as family or bosses or neighbors can find out who you voted for and if you didn't vote the correct way can take revenge. That happened in the US in the 19th century and was one of the reasons given for the secret ballot.

I think we ought to go back to paper ballots, we take a piece of paper and mark on it who we want to vote for an the votes are counted by hand. There is still room for cheating, ballots can be lost or stolen or not counted but we won't have to worry about the machines stealing the election.