What follows in an annotated version of the official press release concerning the German Constitutional Court's decision of March 3, 2009 concerning voting machines. The original text is at : http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/en/press/bvg09-019en.html
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- Sheila Parks and Susan Shamblin like this.
I really like this part: "The use of voting machines which electronically record the voters’ votes and electronically ascertain the election result only meets the constitutional requirements if the essential... steps of the voting and of the ascertainment of the result can be examined reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject. While in a conventional election with ballot papers, manipulations or acts of electoral fraud are, under the framework conditions of the applicable provisions, at any rate only possible with considerable effort and with a very high risk of detection, which has a preventive effect, programming errors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed by manipulating the software of electronic voting machines can be recognised only with difficulty. The very wide-reaching effect of possible errors of the voting machines or of deliberate electoral fraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard the principle of the public nature of elections.
The voters themselves must be able to understand without detailed knowledge of computer technology whether their votes cast are recorded in an unadulterated manner as the basis of vote counting, or at any rate as the basis of a later recount. If the election result is determined through computer-controlled processing of the votes stored in an electronic memory, it is not sufficient if merely the result of the calculation process carried out in the voting machine can be taken note of by means of a summarising printout or an electronic display."