California has made the first steps toward improving the shameless quality of electronic voting machines in our country. Currently, touch screen voting provides no written record of the vote cast, allowing for mistakes, lost votes, and other well documented failures.

California in yesterday’s election introduced a printer on the side of machines displaying the vote cast, allowing voters to report any anomalies so they may re-vote. However, the printer is a journal record and does not provide users with a receipt of their vote.

I don’t understand why there is such opposition to providing receipts to voters. Cost effectiveness can’t be it, receipt paper, all paper, is very, very cheap. So why not give people official records of their vote? If I walk into a room with a machine and push a button it should print me a receipt listing what button was pushed, and what was recorded into memory. If there is a problem, it can be reported not only to election officials, but the receipts could serve as evidence if ever voter fraud occurred. Why should people be opposed to this?

It seems to me the only reason to oppose protecting votes, are to protect one’s interest in changing them.