The plan is necessarily bold and comprehensive, which is required to satisfy all the transparency issues. Because even with the remedies that GAO and others have urged, computers are by their nature complex devices, and who's inner workings are less visible than paper or punch ballots, which people on the left still prefer. The voting system I outline offers the efficiency and accommodation to the handicapped (etc.) that only computer interfaces can offer, but with the transparency and confidence that paper ballots are perceived to offer.

If DREs continue to be employed absent of a comprehensive plan like mine, then I fear that confidence in election results will wane. Computer glitches will never be proven to the losing side to be accidental. Opponents of electronic ballots will continue to argue that it's impossible to verify that the vote which was cast was the vote that got tabulated. And the other side will continue to allege that the vote that was cast wasn't from an eligible voter. And of course, whenever exit polls don't resemble the subsequent actual vote, the left will challenge the accuracy of the actual vote.

[Note that when this occurred in 2004, not only had left-wing Democrats dismiss the admissions from liberal mainstream media that their polling consortium had skewered their test samplings more toward Kerry, they also wouldn't accept the logical sequelae that it had the effect of discouraging Republican voters and depressing turnout for Bush. And all this occurred BEFORE their rage against the DRE machine had taken hold the way it has now. Today, the paranoia and distrust is at it's zenith.]

One can only appreciate the juxtaposition from the usual political stances: The Republicans favor the HAVA voting reforms that call for modernization, while Democrats prefer the status quo and urged states not to enact laws to qualify for the HAVA grants. They oppose robust voter eligibility screening and want states to keep using paper ballots or the old lever-operated mechanical machines.

Preventing Voter Fraud

The ideal remedy to all forms of voting frauds must be comprehensive, else those who feel cheated from ballot tampering will feel justified in perpetrating voter fraud, and vice versa. Thus, we cannot merely seek the ideal voting device, for example, without trying to get voter fraud under control. As John Fund notes in "Stealing Elections", prosecuting election fraud is almost nonexistent for a variety of both political and practical reasons. So we need a systemic, uniform and comprehensive solution.

Almost every type of flaw in our voting system which I mentioned in the previous sections can be traced to one factor common in all balloting systems used in the U.S.: A ballot once cast cannot be traced to the voter who cast it. It might seem obvious that this prevents us from discovering what Republicans seem most concerned about: ineligible voters. But it also prevents what Democrats claim to want most—that all ballots are counted, and counted accurately.

My proposed solution might also seem to violate an axiom in this country: the privacy of our vote. But with encryption technology, that should not be a concern. After I run through my proposed ballot system, you will see how that's accomplished:

The state supplies a registered voter with a unique registration number. That number will never have other data linked to it, other than the person's name, date of birth, current residential address, political party registration, and a face photograph of the person. As it's always been, voter registration information will be in the hands of local election officials, to allow them to properly identify people as eligible to vote or not. Election officials will never have access to how people voted. As you'll read later, such information might only need to be "unblinded" to authorized investigators to look into indications of fraud or tabulation errors. I suggest that it may be the state's attorney general, or some nonpartisan entity that the state may designate.

The sole reason for the ID number is that numbers are unique identifiers that cannot be duplicated, and it's required for the computer tracking process described later. Voters must register as usual. They will receive their voter registration card in the mail—sent to the address they claimed as theirs. The card itself will contain only 3 pieces of the total information: The person's photograph, his registration number, and his election district. It will also contain a magnetic strip of the registration number, so that the voter can "swipe it" while in the voting booth, for ease and speed.

That's right, voting will be a little like a transaction at an ATM booth. People will go to central locations to cast their votes, just like they do now. Casting your ballot will also be done in a private booth, just like it's done now. The voting machine would essentially be a computer terminal. The user interface will employ touch-screen activation, with the option for mouse input and voice recognition (for the visually-impaired).

Voters will either swipe their registration number into the computer, or enter it manually. The method of entering your votes might be through screen activation, or whichever method Congress deems best. After the voter reviews and confirms the entries on his ballot, he must enter his PIN (personal identification number). This PIN is just like a PIN you use on an ATM machine. It's not known to anyone but the voter. Without the correct PIN for that registration number, the votes entered into the computer will not be recorded, transmitted or tabulated. It won't go anywhere.