Voting by electronic methods does not have to lead to the abuses that are going on right now.  I have a relatively simple idea for making electronic voting verifiable and more transparent than the traditional paper ballot or any other voting machine method.

In my proposal, every electronic voting machine will print a receipt for the voter to take home. The receipt will have a ballot number and the vote for that ballot. In the voting booth the voter can verify that the receipt matches how the voter intended to vote.

The results of all ballots will be put online in a way that matches the receipts. What is online is what will be counted. Each person with a receipt will be able to go online to verify that his or her ballot was recorded correctly.  There should be no way for anybody other than the receipt holder to know which ballot number corresponds to which voter.

That will prevent the machines from incorrectly recording what the voter intended.  It will also prevent the machine from dropping votes. It will also maintain the secrecy of the ballot.

We still need a mechanism for preventing the machines from inventing votes that were not there. The number of votes cast can be compared to the records of voter sign-in and sign-out counts.

What’s left are issues of challenged voters and mail-in votes.

However, at this point the electronic vote is already better than the pure paper ballot vote.

With the principles of quality control applied to the checking of votes, it is not necessary for all voters to check that their vote is properly recorded. If enough voters do check, and the failures are below the AQL (acceptable quality limits), then the vote can be considered “correct”. If the errors are above AQL, steps can be taken to remedy the “few” precincts where the error rate is above acceptable limits.

If making electronic voting this verifiable is not so difficult, then why are there voting machine companies out there making electronic voting machines that use secret software and that can be easily hacked?  Why are there election commissioners buying such machines? Instead election boards and commissioners should be specifying what kind of machine they want to buy in requests for proposals (RFP).  The usual way government purchasing is done is with an RFP with all the specifications of the product to be purchased and an open bidding process among suppliers to provide the requested product or service.

Certainly a retired software engineer such as me cannot be the only person who has figured this out.

June 8, 2016

See subsequent post Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (Full Length). In the video, there is a demonstration of some electronic voting hardware that is exactly what is needed for my idea to be implemented.

November 27, 2020

See subsequent post How To Cheat On My Electronic Voting Proposal.

This describes a system to defraud my idea, but mentions that experts looking at the open source for the electronic voting system could be looking for such schemes in the software. If there are any fraudulent schemes in the software, they would be detected and the software would be banned from use in government elections.

William Black has written the article The Great Betrayal – and the Cynicism of Calling it a Grand Bargain .

Kuttner wrote to warn that Obama intends to seek a “grand bargain” causing the U.S. to adopt the type of austerity program that threw the Eurozone back into a gratuitous recession.

Worse, Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain.  Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net.  The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.

I had been hoping to keep this controversy among Progressives under wraps until after the election, but I can see that it is difficult to keep this hidden.

Electing Mitt Romney is not the solution to preventing the Great Plague (aka Grand Bargain). What is the solution is for the Progressive Community to be able to turn on the proverbial dime after the election. As soon as we know that Obama has been re-elected and that the Democrats are in firm control of Congress, we must start applying immediate pressure to prevent the Great Plague from coming to fruition.

November 7 cannot be the time to take it easy and think our problems have been solved.

Another gem posted on The Real News Network.

It is so sad when the Republicans want to focus on spending cuts now and the Democrats concentrate on spending cuts later, but none of the mainstream politicians are focusing on what to do now.

When are we going to, as a nation, focus on the trillions of dollars of infrastructure work that we know must be done in the next decade? Do we do it now when there are lots of people unemployed, resources going unused, and interest rates at historic lows? Or do we do it later if and when we get full employment, the economy is running at full capacity, the interest rates are high, and any extra government spending will only fuel inflation?

Where is the sanity in refusing to do now what is the most appropriate thing to do now, and formulating a policy where we will do necessary work at exactly the wrong time in the economic cycle?

Many of the posts on this blog are inspired by what I read and and see on The Real News Network.  Because this source is so important, I am posting this explanation of what The Real News Network is, what it can become, and the support that it needs.

“The Promise” represents The Real News Network as we hope it will be when fully funded. What you have been seeing so far on our web site is just a taste of what’s to come.  We need your support to make this vision a reality.

The following video was re-emphasized in today’s email from The Real News Network, but it was originally posted in 2009.

The Huffington Post has the article Mitt Romney Massachusetts Budget Targeted Programs For Poor, Disabled . I don’t usually post items from this source, but JackH suggested it.  The information in the article is important to understand.

A detailed Huffington Post review of Romney’s budget proposals from his first year in office, however, reveals that he advocated deep cuts to programs serving the state’s most vulnerable — even when those cuts had little effect on the state’s fiscal position. Romney’s aggressive reductions to social programs did not earn support across the aisle. The state legislature ended up overriding more than 115 Romney vetoes in his first year as governor.

“There was no magic in the Romney approach,” recalled former Democratic state Rep. Dan Bosley. It was “cut as many social programs as you can.” Bosley added: “If we didn’t override every one of his vetoes, we overrode most of his vetoes. … There wasn’t a bipartisan effort to run government.”

Romney targeted many programs that had been historically supported by both parties. He pushed to eliminate or gut more than 20 state programs serving veterans, disadvantaged children, and adults with severe physical disabilities. He also sought to cut money for breast cancer screenings, suicide prevention and programs that assisted the blind and the deaf.

These cuts would have totaled $26.8 million — 2.2 percent of the $1.2 billion state budget deficit that Romney inherited upon taking office. None of these cuts were necessary for balancing the state’s budget. All were overridden by the Democratic state legislature, and the state still closed its budget gap with room to spare.

One point you can take away from this is that the nation might survive a Romney administration if the Congress had 85% Democrats to override Romney.  Unfortunately, there is unlikely to be such a lopsided number in Congress.  If there were such a lopsided majority in Congress, President Obama could get the country moving again without the interference of Romney.

RichardH has suggested that I need to provide these important tips from Mitt Romney on how to survive the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Received an email from Selectman Thomas Creamer which read in part.

In light of the challenges many have faced with respect to Hurricane Sandy, I thought it worthwhile to provide an advance notification I have received from the National Weather Service. Clearly this notification is preliminary as weather patterns can rapidly change, but considering this past week, it may be useful to residents to consider the potential for a Nor’easter next week. The actual notification from the National Weather Service is as follows, with the most relevant text in bold print and underlined for quick review:

Looking at Google News, I noticed that the only news source that they mentioned reporting this information was Fox News, Round 2? Forecasters predict nor’easter may hit East Coast election day

I looked up  the Weather Channel forecast for Sturbridge.

The Weather Channel was forecasting sunny and 44^o on Tuesday with a 0% chance of rain.

For Wednesday, it did predict 44^o and a 60% chance of rain.  Winds of 12 mph.  Doesn’t sound like a Nor’easter to me.

I wrote back to Selectman Creamer:

If I didn’t know you as a person of very high integrity, it might even sound like an attempt to manipulate the election.

Thomas Creamer responded that the link to the forecast that he sent was directly to the National Weather Service. He is absolutely right.

Also, note that the Weather Channel was predicting overnight lows that could result in snow if the “rain” they were predicting fell at night.

Reuters has the story CIA officials in Libya made key decisions during Benghazi attacks. In case you haven’t got the time to follow the link to the story, I’ll provide a sizable quote from the article.

About 25 minutes after the initial report came into the CIA base, a team of about six agency security officers left their base for the public diplomatic mission compound.

Over the succeeding 25 minutes, the CIA team approached the compound, and tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to get local Libyan allies to bring them a supply of heavier weapons, and eventually moved into the burning diplomatic compound, the intelligence official said.

At around 11:10 p.m., a Defense Department drone, which had been on an unrelated mission some distance away, arrived in Benghazi to help officials on the ground gather information. By 11:30, U.S. personnel who had been working or staying at the mission had been rounded up except for Ambassador Stevens, who was missing, the intelligence official said.

When they tried to drive out of the diplomatic compound to return to the CIA base, however, the convoy carrying U.S. evacuees came under fire.

Once they got back to the CIA base, that installation itself came under fire from what the intelligence official described as small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. These patchy attacks went on for roughly 90 minutes, the intelligence official said.

CIA SENT TEAM FROM TRIPOLI

Around the same time, a CIA security team based in Tripoli, which included two U.S. military officers, landed at Benghazi airport. Upon its arrival, however, the team spent some time trying both to arrange local transport and to locate the missing Ambassador Stevens.

After some time trying to solve these problems, the security team that had flown in from Tripoli eventually arranged for an armed local escort and extra transportation, but decided not to go the hospital where they believed Stevens had been taken. In part this was because they had reason to believe Stevens was likely dead, and because security at the hospital was believed, at best, to be “uncertain,” the intelligence official said.

Not long before dawn, the reinforcements from Tripoli managed to take themselves and a convoy of vehicles to the CIA base to prepare for an anticipated evacuation.

However, just after they arrived at the CIA base, the official said, a new round of attacks on that facility was launched, this time with mortars. Although the mortar attacks lasted only 11 minutes, two U.S. security officers were killed by a direct hit from one of the shells, the intelligence official said.

Finally, a bit less than an hour later, a heavily armed Libyan military unit arrived at the CIA base to help evacuate the compound of U.S. personnel to the Benghazi airport, the official added.

Over the next few hours, roughly 30 Americans, as well as the bodies of Stevens and the other three Americans killed during the attacks, were loaded on planes and flown out of the city, several U.S. officials said.

This is only one report from the CIA.  I am not saying anyone should believe any report as conveying the complete truth.  However, it does indicate that there may be another side to this story than the one Mitt Romney has been shooting his mouth off about.

The Nation Of Change has the article UAW Files Charges Against Romney on His Auto Bail-out Profiteering by Greg Palast.

For Mitt Romney, it’s one scary Halloween. The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon he will charged with violating the federal Ethics in Government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bail-out.

When I posted Romney Made Multi-Millions in Detroit Bailout, I heard the comment that if it were true, why isn’t there a bigger deal being made of it.  Perhaps this post provides the answer to that question.

Of course, now the claim will be that this is dirty politics because the suit will never be adjudicated before the election.  If this were true, the investigative journalists who tracked this down should have done it longer ago, before the election.

For some people there are just not enough red flags that indicate that Mitt Romney may not be the honest truth teller that some people would like to believe that he is.  I’ve certainly posted enough red flags on this blog to satisfy me.

Can we list all of the taxes and fees Mitt Romney increased on small businesses and the middle class while Governor of Massachusetts?
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For the full list go to barackobama.com/romney-fees

I cannot attest to these personally as we were living in Oregon during the Romney years in Massachusetts.