Posts Tagged ‘electronic’

German High Court Outlaws Electronic Voting

by Michael Collins, dailycensored.com, Oct 19, 2009 (yes its old, I just found out about it)

The justices above are clearly the most rational group of high level functionaries in the industrialized world. They did what no other court would do in Europe or the United States. They effectively outlawed electronic voting. On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.

They reasoned that electronic voting is not verifiable because citizen votes are counted in secret. It obscured a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates. Most importantly, the German high court noted, electronic voting machines don’t allow citizens to “reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner” Mar. 3, 2009.

The written opinion effectively bars electronic voting in future elections based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. This raises the bar of acceptability well above the meaningless solutions offered by “paper trails” for touch screen votIing or the so-called “paper ballots” for computerized optical scan voting machines, the most popular form of voting in the United States.

Germany’s 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots.

Read more at http://dailycensored.com/2009/10/19/a-censored-headline-and-why-it-matters/

Yes its old, I just found out about it. Now, since the US Supreme Court is starting to follow international precedents, will this one be among them?