Electoral transparency and accountability are possible, but the political will to achieve such desirable outcomes is absent. Voters mark paper ballots. The paper ballots are fed through machines that photocopy both sides of every ballot. These computer-generated ballot images are then used by the machine to count votes. After the vote tallies are recorded, the ballot images that produced the election outcomes are destroyed. We, the people, never get to examine how the machine determined which marks count (and which marks don't) inside the computer's "black box." Posting .pdf files of all the ballot images online would allow everyone to check how accurately a machine interpreted the voter's intent. Computer hacking threats undermine electoral integrity; opening the vote-count process to the sunshine of public inspection from any and all political stripes is a cheap and easy fix that could rebuild our crumbling trust in elections.
Mary DeCamp
Downtown
Disclaimer: As submitted to the Arizona Daily Star.
