Posted 8:16 AM

ACM is all thumbs

The venerable old Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) may be passing into organizational senility, at least when you view their entry into the world of electronic voting. According to a Network World story, "Paperless e-voting gets thumbs down from ACM," the organization polled it's membership and the results are reported as indicating that "Voting systems should enable each voter to inspect a physical (e.g. paper) record to verify that his or her vote has been accurately cast."

But, how many different ways, how many different times can I say this? A paper receipt tells us absolutely nothing about how the vote was recorded!

The only way to insure accurate vote tallies is to validate and certify the machine. With validation, the vote count is accurate and no recount is needed. Without validation, the vote count is worthless, no matter how many paper receipts are issued.