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from the I-know-what-you-did-last-summer^W-election dept.
According to a paywalled (register for three free articles per month) article on Law.com, it is impossible to cast a secret vote using Georgia's electronic voting machines.
In a new motion for a preliminary injunction, attorneys for the Coalition for Good Governance and several plaintiff voters have asked a federal judge in Atlanta to sideline use of the state’s obsolete electronic voting machines after Oct. 1.
The plaintiffs claim that evidence obtained from state and county election officials revealed that a “unique identifier” is attached to each electronic vote cast on the 17-year-old machines. Those unique identifiers could enable “election insiders or malicious intruders” to connect each ballot to the voter who cast it, the motion contends.
The motion contends that state and county election officials have admitted that ballot image reports maintained in their electronic databases and memory cards—when combined with other election records—contain enough information to identify who cast every electronic vote in Georgia. If proven, the practice would violate state and federal constitutional provisions requiring that all voter ballots be secret.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:38PM (1 child)
Does the machine itself somehow "know" who is casting the ballot on it ("Lawn is assigned to machine #3 and we had to clear Lawn / We set up Lawn to use machine #3 now"), or is it the election staff who assure that a given machine is only accessed by a screened voter and that this voter only uses one machine once? In my experience it is the latter and the entire system takes pains to *not* know who a given ballot belonged to. There are certainly records that I voted at my station on election day, which is how my registration is maintained from election to election and how my county selects me for jury duty.
As long as there are enough volunteers and the system is designed to be transparent and allow both parties to monitor for fraud, electronic voting systems still seem like solutions in search of a problem.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:30PM
In my case, a voter comes in and authenticates himself. Two tokens are separated from his file entry. One is a receipt that the elector has been at the polls. The other is an admission ticket to the voting machine. This prevents people from voting multiple times.
The voter is brought to an open machine, the token is deposited into a slot on the side. That way you can identify which voter used which machine, but not at what time. The polling location staff know when, but they can't read the logs. The counting staff know when someone voted for whom, but don't know who did so. This information is generally not published, so no interested observer (we are free and open to be observed) can watch for his employee and then later read the log to find out whom he voted for.