There are new voting machines being currently used that satisfy some of my requirements but still have massive loopholes ripe for exploitation. The new machines do, in fact, print out a paper version of the voter's selections. However, they suffer from the following, likely deliberate, shortcomings:
- A manual review of the printed ballot is not mandatory. The voter can make his/her selections and choose AutoCast where the ballot is automatically scanned and tallied.
- Whether AutoCast is selected or not, as part of the scan/tally process, the ballot passes under the print head again.
So we have two obvious ways of exploiting the machines.
- If AutoCast is selected, the machine could easily be rigged to change the actual selections to rigged ones.
- Even if AutoCast is not selected, any seats for which the voter had selected no candidate could be automatically selected by the machine.
By restricting the number of voting machines in specific districts, a state government could create artifically long wait times at the polls leading more voters to select AutoCast.
As if these flaws were not bad enough, most machines will encode the selections into a barcode, and the barcode is what is actually tallied by the machine. Voters cannot read barcodes so there is no guarantee that the barcode will in fact match the actual selections.
The ExpressVote hybrid by Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S), the ExpressVote XL hybrid by ES&S, and the Image Cast Evolution hybrid by Dominion Voting all include the same defects. ES&S has donated $30,000 to the GOP.
