Policy Documents: Making the Voting Process More Transparent
Introduction: There seem to be three major potentials for vote mis-counts or fraud: votes being improperly recorded or tallied, vote buying or voter coercion, and ballot box stuffing or ballot shredding. Unless every voter watch every other voter and every public official at every step, it’s impossible to be truly certain that some form of mis-count or fraud did not occur, no matter what the system. Right now, voters have two primary concerns: Were my votes accurately recorded? Were everyone’s votes totaled up accurately? Current “trust me” systems, whether paper or machine based, do not allow ordinary citizens to allay these concerns. But both these concerns can be simply addressed by allowing voters to independently check the County Clerk’s records of the votes in a way that still preserves the anonymity of the voting process. Summary of Proposal: Every individual citizen’s votes would be anonymously recorded as a single record...