What Would It Take to Fix the Voting System and Why Isn’t Anybody Doing It?

The post What Would It Take to Fix the Voting System and Why Isn’t Anybody Doing It? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

A manual recount of paper ballots is the gold standard of election audits. However, even that procedure, which roughly three-quarters of Wisconsin counties will use, may not discover every way in which an election has been tampered with. The US system is clearly more vulnerable than those of other democracies throughout the world … and that seems to be by design.

What is truly baffling is that the vulnerabilities of the US system are entirely self-inflicted. In theory, instead of being one of the few western democracies that seems to have voting problems every time, the US could run an election with greater participation, shorter lines and much less controversy. The fact that this isn’t happening is the result of deliberate policy decisions. It is a choice by those in power.

So WhoWhatWhy asked leading election integrity specialists and advocates why the US can’t get it’s act together and what could be done to avoid stumbling from one election mess into the next.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether the US, if it wanted to, could have a relatively reliable and tamper-proof voting system. We also asked what it would take to implement such a system and finally, and perhaps most importantly, why this has not happened yet.

Most of our experts believe that it would be possible to come up with a system that is relatively reliable and tamper-proof. Among them is Philip Stark, the associate dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and director of the Statistical Computing Facility at the University of California, Berkeley.

“If the US wanted to, it could have cheap, accurate, verifiable, tamper-evident voting systems,” Stark told WhoWhatWhy. “No system is tamper-proof, but by combining paper ballots, optical-scan counting, rigorous accounting for the physical ballots to ensure their security, and audits of the electronic results against the paper ballots at the level of individual ballots, we could offer very strong protection against hacking and errors, and the ability to recover from most kinds of problems. A paper record and routine auditing have to be part of it.”

Jonathan Simon, author of CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century, agrees.

Read more http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/12/01/take-fix-voting-system-isnt-anybody/