Carter & Baker Panel recommends paper trail for electronic voting

[Bernardo de La Paz]

Panel recommends paper trail for electronic voting

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-09-19-improving-elections_x.htm

Former President Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, the panel's co-leaders, cited the loss of confidence in a report they were to deliver Monday to President Bush and Congress. Among the commission's recommendations:

• Congress should pass a law requiring voter-verifiable paper audit trails on all electronic voting machines.

• The presidential primary system should be reorganized into four regional primaries, held after the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. A regional primary would take place each month from March to June.

• All "legitimate domestic and international election observers" should be granted unrestricted access to the election process, within the rules of the election.

[McCamy Taylor]

1. Like Congress is gonna do that....

[AzDar]

2. I say we POUND them until they DO!!! n/t

[Ruby Romaine]

3. you left out the part about ID required

• States should require voters to present photo IDs and offer free photo IDs to those who don't have drivers' licenses.

see Congressman Conyers's post at
http://www.johnconyers.com/

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. He's setting up a straw man argument, and it's bad strategy

Conyers is being foolish here I think, by attacking a good report with a strawman argument. The panel recommends that Photo IDs for voting are to be made freely available. Conyers says that this will not be free and will require a fee. That is the strawman. Nobody has proposed a fee.

If he succeeds in shooting down this panel, he will have helped defeat paper trails for voting systems. Not a good strategy.

Only four paragraphs allowed when quoting articles, so I had to cut something.

[faithnotgreed]

5. kicking for any post about verified voting + jimmy carter

i dont like the baker aspect though
he is too entrenched to be on the good side of any proposal

[Chemical Bill]

6. I read the summary

And it's pretty bad. Before much else they want the states to control voter registration (Blackwell and Harris thank them for that). Then they want uniform registration procedures among all the states, and a voter database (we know how safe those are). Then comes "Real ID". Finally, after that, comes verifiable paper ballots. Plus they recommend that source code for machines be put up for review by "qualified experts" (hand picked?). I lose interest about there, too bad, they have a section on "improving ballot integrity" that I may read eventually.

Bill

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. Dont give up so easily. Each item can be worked and improved. Its a start.