Why don “ballot images,” protective counters and other electronic records sufficiently protect the accuracy, integrity, and security of the results?
A “ballot image” is, assuming it is accurate, an electronic recording of a voter’s vote recorded and stored inside the voting machine that may be (but generally is not with the voter present) printed out as an individual record. A protective counter is a data receptacle inside a voting machine that records, in a “duplicate location”, the same set of data recorded in the “primary location” inside the machine. However, ballot images, data stored on protective counters and other electronic records are all recorded inside the voting machine, beyond the voters view and through the use of the same software that received and processed the incoming information. Anything that is electronic and internal to the voting system is subject to the same software glitches, bugs, irregularities and other security risks as the voting system itself. If the computer’s software processed the incoming data (votes cast) incorrectly in the first instance, the fact that it then stores that incorrect data in more
