Reply #33: Please "corrupt the vote total" on this spreadsheet:

[tiptoe]

http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/HandCountedSecureExcel.xls

For the presumably numerous parties who might be privileged participation in an Election Day hand count of Paper Ballots -- i.e. forget Levers (virtues and drawbacks), DREs, and optical scanners...the OP deals only with voting systems based on auditable, individual Paper Records of voters' intent.

These ballots have neither 1) been recorded in secret (open to deliberate vote-switching) nor 2) are to be counted in secret by any non-transparent, intermediary electro-mechanical device (open to deliberate mis-counting). The unavailability of line-itemized printed output would be a missed opportunity for not only verification of the vote, but also protection against vote-switching and non-counting that can occur at the precinct level and beyond.

The fact that physical ballots in Ohio have been transported between precinct counting machines and have eventually been "destroyed or lost" altogether, attests to the extent that election fraudsters have gone to systematically undermine democracy in America and to the vulnerability of paper records.

The inclusion of a simple precinct spreadsheet procedure need not be an exclusive proposition: It can be done in parallel with whatever other HCPB methods of counting might be utilized and would be non-obtrusive. The benefits in preserving a verified "backup" of the paper records themselves should be considered.

Vote Secrecy can be protected with proper procedure and method. It is presumptuous to assert voter-privacy need be compromised.