Not-So-Secret-Voting in Ohio
Reason contributor and CNET News columnist Declan McCullagh has a stunning story about how
Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's results–including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.
Here's how it works:
Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio….
Moyer and fellow activist Jim Cropcho tested this by dropping by the election office of Delaware County, about 20 miles north of Columbus, and reviewing the results for a May 2006 vote to extend a property tax to fund mental retardation services (PDF). Their results indicate who voted "yes" and who voted "no"–and show that local couples (the Bennets, for instance) didn't always see eye-to-eye on the tax.
The same machines are used in more than three dozen states and four other states have similar disclosure rules to Ohio's.
Hat tip: Yury Tsukerman