Verified Voting Paper Trails

[ethereal]

From The American Prospect, May 7 2004:

I'm sitting here looking at a WalMart Receipt that has about 100 grocery items listed on it by name, barcode number, price and quantity. It also has a time stamp, my credit card number with the first digits x'd out and the clerk's name and register number. It's about 15" long by 2.5 inches wide.

The cash register that produced this receipt is operated 24 hours/day for 365 days/year and there is usually a line of people waiting at the checkout line. It takes a minimum wage grocery clerk about 4 seconds to pop in a new roll of paper when it runs out. The information on this receipt exceeds that which would be required for any election that I have ever heard of. And the volume of receipts printed out by any store far exceeds the volume produced by any voting machine. Think about it. The average clerk probably scans grocery items 100-times faster than the average person votes, and people pass through the cashier line a lot faster than any voting booth. In fact the new self-service checkout lines at the grocery store produce receipts that are already pre-cut and ready for you to grab. So industry can obviously design a recipt printing machine that is self-service and user-friendly.

Don't let anyone tell you that it is too costly, complicated or difficult to print out voting receipts. The printer technology is used in every store in the developed world. As far as the 37 page nonsense. They don't need to print the entire voter's guide on the reciept, or even the entire ballot with all the candidates that you DIDN'T vote for. All that is necessary is a short abbreviation of the ballot line (Pres, Sen, Bal. Meas. 15, etc) and your actual vote (candidates name or yes/no in the case of ballot measures). That information can easily be fit onto a cash register recipt.

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/

Contact your Senators and Congresspersons. There is NO valid reason not to a paper receipt of our votes. Period.