Senate Rules Committee Testimony of David Dillsnip
I am grateful for this opportunity to address the crucial issue of electronic voting in American elections. The debate about electronic voting should not be about whether election fraud has occurred, is occurring, or even will occur; it should be about the transparency of our elections. By “transparency,” I mean the ability to do independent checks on the conduct and results of the election. Ultimately, this debate is about public confidence in our democratic system.
The real purpose of an election is not to convince the winners that they won, but to convince the losers that they lost. So, it is not sufficient that election results be accurate; the public must know that the results are accurate. That can only be achieved by making election processes as transparent as possible.
Unfortunately, paperless e-voting technology is almost totally opaque. No one can scrutinize critical processes of the election, such as the collection of ballots and counting of votes, because those processes occur invisibly in electronic circuits. Voters have no means to confirm that the machines have recorded their votes correctly, nor do they have any assurance that their votes won't be changed later. Paperless e-voting, in its current form, is a threat to democracy.
The basic problem of e-voting can be understood without an in-depth knowledge of computer technology. Here is a helpful analogy: Suppose voters dictated their votes, privately and anonymously, to human scribes, and that the voters were prevented from inspecting the work of the scribes. Few would accept such a system, on simple common-sense grounds. Obviously, the scribes could accidentally or intentionally mis-record the votes with no consequences. Without accountability, a system is simply not trustworthy, whether or not computers are involved.
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