Crispin Cowan wrote: > you can call the elections office and they can tell you if you were > sent a ballot and if they received a ballot back from you - they > cannot tell you how you voted only if they got a ballot from you > (there is an assumption that it was counted correctly if you did NOT > hear from teh elections office that your ballot was NOT counted). > This doesn't fly: Americans barely vote at all (pitiful 50% turn-outs) > and they certainly are not going to verify ballot receipt via phone in > any significant volume. This leaves the system wide open to the > previously mentioned attacks of "losing" ballots from selected counties. Good point - voter apathy is a growing problem - one of the reasons vote-by-mail *is* so important. Even Canada only had 61% voter turnout in 2000. U.S. voter turnout in 2000 was 51% - BUT (specifically due to our mail-in voting,or so some people believe) voter turnout in Oergon was 80%. A mechanism where a return postcard was sent to the voter when their vote was received, would likely be something voters would start looking for. -- ====================================================================== Warren Harrison, EIC/IEEE Software Magazine warren@private Department of Computer Science http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~warren Portland State University PHONE: 503-725-3108 Portland, OR 97207-0751 FAX: 503-725-3211
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 11 2003 - 17:33:54 PDT