Thanks for the follow-up comments and rebuttal. I apologize for the rather lengthy response…

1. I do not call for an

Buzz,
Summary,
Detailed point-by-point review

In brief:
I am basic agreement with the thesis of the report which is that the debate about eVoting should move beyond voter-verified paper audit trails to include systems that can prove to a voter that their vote was counted as cast. However, I found the tone and focus of the report disagreeable and I disagreed with much of the material in the report advocating for eVoting and against voter-verified paper audit trails.

For those who are interested, Please stay tuned at my site as soon I will also be posting comments from an email exchange by Castro and my responses.

-AllAboutVoting

The issue that I find most contentious is the supporters of e-only voting arguing that it is “transparent” when all support of transparency has been wholly resisted. I cannot, rationally, believe that any of these supporters would bank online, buy from Amazon, and so forth if told “Thanks for your order. To provide you with the greatest degree of security we no longer provide transaction numbers, order status, or shipping information. Your package will arrive at an undisclosed date to ensure no one sees that you have ordered anything. Additionally, we have added a random dollar amount to your order, masked the merchant name that will appear, and will choose a random date in the future to post this transaction to your account. We have also partnered with a number of other organizations to combine charges so that, should anyone gain access to your credit card statements, your purchase habits will be less readil identifiable.”

Security is a concern – yes. However, it is more realistic that the one most concerned with security is the voter; specifically related to ensuring their vote cannot be re-cast, miscounted, or otherwise tampered with. Encryption, user salted hashing, etc provide a layer of security towards this end, but still don’t cover the possibility of displaying Vote A and casting Vote B. Only the seperation of vote collection, vost casting, and auditing supply the level of disconnection to reduce the capacity to automate fraud – reduce; not prevent. The paper trail mechanism is not capable of preventing this either – however, it provides yet another layer of de-coupled record keeping that significantly raises the bar to subvert the process.

My final issue: He who records the transactions should not and cannot be the same “He” who performs the audit of the system or the data. Additionally, with the critical importance of voting, he who wrote the system should never, ever, ever be the “he” who tests it – and especially not the “he” who verifies it.

Am I a technophobe? Not in the least – I design enterprise systems for a living. In all cases, I’ve never met a user who demanded the system be transparent through obfuscation or opaqueness. Guess I’ve had the wrong user base. I’ve also never gotten away with saying “Just trust me – the numbers add up because the system says they do. I wrote it – I should know. But, I can’t show you how – you just don’t trust computers, Grandma…” Again, wrong user base, I suppose.

Me – I want the audit trail not because I don’t trust the computer(s) to do simple addition. I want it because I don’t trust the people behind the machines.

Cory

I am training to work on ’508′ friendly web projects – making sites accessible to people with disabilities, especially visual disabilities. It’s an eye opener (excuse the pun) to find out how many people are ALREADY shut out from the high tech world because there are limited alternatives for them to receive electronic media.

Because voting is so critical, any and every technology (including old school paper) should be modified to accommodate people with disabilities.

“these systems work because of multiple avenues of verification. ” This point sums up your whole argument. Paper and electronic auditing systems should both be used for elections – a check and balance system, kinda like how our government works

Many people are and don’t feel comfortable switching to electronic voting technology, or any other electronic technology. Many people are very intelligent but can’t handle the cognitive stress of learning new technology. Why should they have to? People don’t have to switch to online banking. They don’t even have to have internet access (as we all know, many people wan’t it and can’t get it!)

So what if there are technophobes? They have the right to vote too!

“Then, on September 22 of this year, a groundbreaking treatise on voter ignorance appeared. Perhaps out of deference to the urgent need to register voters–any voter–progressives failed to respond to Ilya Somin’s policy analysis for the libertarian Cato Institute, “When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy.” Lacking even the most basic political information, most voters, Professor Somin maintains, are in no position to communicate their will to the candidates.

The ignorant voter, he continues, lacks the knowledge to assign credit and blame for policy outcomes to the correct office holders (like the informed voter can?). Worse, unless spoonfed a program by a force as well organized as the Far Right, he’s unable to understand how issues are connected. Each issue, in other words, exists in a vacuum.

One can hear the collective exclamation: “I knew it, I knew it.” Basically, as Christopher Shea, who cites an earlier piece by Professor Somin, states, the ignorant voter bases his vote on vague feelings about how life is treating him–yet another suspicion whose confirmation one dreads. Essentially conceding governance to the elite, the ignorant voter thus dilutes democracy.