Computer scientist Dan Wallach News8 Austin TV: “Texas Supreme Court to weigh in on e-voting”…..Computer Scientists, Election Integrity Advocates Question Feasibility of “Digital Democracy”:”If I’m going to steal an election, I probably won’t mess with these little pilots…”I’m going to wait until there’s this groundswell for Internet voting.” ~ Dr. Barbara Simons….Court permits release of…
Post-election audits of electronic vote tallies are inexpensive. The process is simple: a sample of precincts (or batches of ballots that have been tallied electronically) is chosen randomly, counted by hand, and compared to the corresponding computer tally. To mention just two examples, North Carolina conducted an audit of the Presidential election in 275 precincts (almost 10% of the total precincts in the state) for a statewide total of $31,000, and Connecticut’s November 2008 audit costed 11 cents per audited race on each ballot.
Still, in these straightened times, States and counties with auditable voting systems might be concerned about the costs of manually counting ballots. In May, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission gave such jurisdictions excellent but little-noticed news: the Commission ruled that States may use Federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funds to pay for the cost of post-election audits. The EAC concluded that funds allocated under either Section 101 or Section 251 of HAVA may be used to fund audits.