The Importance of Transparency in Voting
This article does a wonderful job of explaining and educating the layman to the importance of transparency in our voting system. While outlining some of our rights as voters, you can now see why so many are behind the push to allow more Americans to submit and verify their vote. What many people may not understand is that the transparency in voting is not something that we earn or have to work towards, transparency in voting is our right as Americans.
If democracy is a painting created by its own audience, democracy without transparency is that audience blindfolded — trusting and hoping and not really knowing if they are having democracy at all.
Elections are the public act through which you assemble your democratic governance, and elections are only public when you and everyone else can fully participate. Full participation means you can choose to run for office, openly campaign, vote, and exercise oversight. Without public oversight you can participate in only the first few elements; it is elections in the dark, controlled by someone else, hopeful thinking rather than true participatory governance.
Public oversight starts with transparency in voting. Election transparency is the public ability to see and verify each essential step in elections, the essential steps being: (1) who can vote (voter list), (2) who did vote (poll list, or participating voter list), (3) counting of the vote, and (4) chain of custody. These four items are the key to public accountability in elections.
Read More Here: blackboxvoting.org
