International Law

Paper Trail for Voting Machines

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

The German Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that voting machines without paper trail violate the German Constitution. There is an English version of the press release here.

This follows from the requirement that voting procedures are public. Citizens must be able to verify the result of the process. That is impossible if all counting is performed only inside a machine, where no citizen can actually watch what is happening.

The Court also clarified that there is no relevant interest in speeding up things. Even without machines, results are available in a couple of hours.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on March 08, 2009 (boomark / email).