Ask Conyers to add paper ballots/hand counted to survey

[mirrera]

He seems interested in finding out what we think. I emailed him this link to Chuck Herrin's comments on paper ballots, hand counted. http://www.chuckherrin.com/sinceyouasked.htm Most of you know that Chuck Herrin is a professional "white hat" hacker, who is also a Republican. He is worth listening to.
I emailed John Conyers at [e-mail]

If anyone knows of a better contact, please post it.

(snip)
"Optical Scanners are feasible - paper ballots aren't"

That, to me, is unnecessary compromise.  We are selling out our main priority, integrity, because our elections staff would rather not count by hand.  Some think optical scanning is an easier 'sale' to voters and legislators.  I guarantee if the voters of ANY state demanded hand-counted paper, they would get it.  To say that "the voters won't understand it" is to sell the voters short - do you understand it?  Are you a voter?  Are paper ballots more difficult to understand than, say, driving?

People will understand it if it's presented logically.  That's the beauty of paper ballots - not that complex.  It doesn't take a Norman Einstein to figure that out ;-)

Compromising when you don't have to only ensures that your opponents will get their way.  They aren't worried about being 'nice guys'.  By allowing a little whining to influence your decision, you are allowing people with other agendas to change your priorities.  Why don't others see that?

One brief point I have is about the priorities reflected by the different solutions. It all comes back to priorities for me and my constant attempts to keep things simple. I believe that the voters of NC will understand hand-counted paper when the basis for the decision is made clear. My priorities:

Integrity
Accuracy
Speed

in that order have led me to favor hand counted paper ballots based on their strengths and limitations. Add to that the fact that there is no tech support or expensive equipment involved, and we have what appears to me to be a superior solution.

Optically scanned ballots offer a solution that goes with the following priority set:

Speed
Accuracy
Integrity

Since hand-counting offers more integrity and resistance to fraud than optical scanning, the question then becomes "How much hand-counting do we need to boost the integrity to an acceptable level so we can still get most of the speed benefits of optical scanning?" 1%, 5%, 10%, etc? Since we intuitively
understand that:

1) hand counting is more trustworthy, and is always treated as 'the final word', and
2) optically scanned ballots are subject to tampering and error more efficiently than paper,

we then have to wrap compensating controls (some percentage manual recount or 'spot check') around the process to compensate for the weaknesses introduced by scanning.

Accuracy is pretty much a wash between the two methods. 

I don't have a strong objection to supporting optical scanning, since it does provide a paper trail that we are sorely lacking. Better is better, after all.

But I do want all of us to go into this with a full awareness of the trade-offs we're making if the voters settle for less than hand-counted paper. I still feel that integrity is not 'A' factor, it is 'THE' factor, but it appears that not everyone feels that way. I'm not saying that they're wrong - No judging - I'm just saying I disagree.

We are necessarily choosing speed over integrity and fraud resistance, and then trying to mix integrity back in at 5% to get the best of both worlds.
This may be the easiest method to sell, but that doesn't make it the best. Not with my priorities. But your mileage may vary, we all have our own set of priorities, and this IS a democracy, right ;-)

[Carolab]

1. Sent this.

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