On 4/30/12 7:30 PM, Paul Kislanko wrote:
Whatever handcounting is it isn’t “secure.”
Seriously, you think hand-counting whatever you get from the “official
ballot boxes” is a “verification” of the vote-counting?
It’s not, as we repeatedly point out.
You argue over and over that the only “verifiable” counts have to be
based upon INSECURE notions of paper ballots in boxes.
as "insecure" as microscopic bits living in a magnetic or semiconductor
medium packaged in an opaque container?
that's what having the *option* of a paper-ballot recount is for. so we
can see and read precisely the same ballot the voter saw and marked and
not some electronic representation of it.
Suppose we change every ballot-collection-method in existence to paper
ballots suitable for hand-counting.
Show how you can PROVE to me that the paper ballots you hand-counted
included mine.
one thing, Paul, is that if you are the final arbiter of what is
"proved" or not (it has to be PROVEd to you), that is a standard where
the goalposts are only known to you. the other party might legitimately
think they kicked the ball so high and so far that it had to have gone
over *any* goalpost and you come back and say "nope, didn't make it"
when none of us can see where your goalpost is, let alone if you're
moving it or not.
i have participated in helping in elections (but not as an elections
inspector nor the ward clerk) and have participated in manual recounts
of two different elections. unless we believe in a Star Trek
transporter, we can be reasonably secure in the verifiability property
of a manual recount of paper ballots.
with paper ballots, we can see that the ballot box is empty before the
polling place is opened to voters. we can keep our eye on it and know
that only ballots issued to and held by voters go into the box. and we
can see your ballot go into the box. at the end of the day, we can take
the lid offa the top (usually there is an optical scanner in the lid)
and dump the ballots into a bag that was previously inspected to be
empty. we can close and seal the bag with serialized tag that must be
broken when the bag is reopened. and we can see that the ballot box is
now empty (your ballot is not left behind because no ballot is left behind).
we can see the tags broken, verify the tag serial numbers agree with the
record of what was closed up in the bag on election night, dump out the
ballots, and verify that the bag is empty.
in the manual recount procedure, it is called and counted by multiple
persons from more than one party. ballots are removed from the bags and
divided into piles of 50 that are each called and counted separately. we
have to do it two different times in slightly different ways and get
equivalent results twice before we say we counted that pile correctly.
for a precinct-summable method, we can sum up the results from each pile
and double-check that summation.
i cannot promise that this will prove to you that your ballot was
included, but if i'm watching the whole thing, it's proven to me.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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