If elected, I will push for the following election reforms. These reforms do not neccesarily favor any party over any other party and will better reflect the will of Hoosier voters.
1. Use voting machines that print out paper receipts so that voters can know that their votes will be counted even if the machine malfunctions.
2. End "Winner take all" system for assigning Indiana's presidential electors.
3. Adopt a law specifing the drawing of congressional and legislative districts that makes gerrymandering more difficult
4. Adopt a run-off voting system in which a candidate in a 3-way or 4-way race must win the majority of votes in order to win.
In this post I will start by talking about my first proposal. When you push that button in November, how do you know that the machine is in fact registering your vote? Most of us trust election officials to do their job properly. A small but significant minority contends that electronic voting machines are subject to covert tampering. There also exists the possibility that a voting machine may be accidently damaged, that a programmer might make a sincere mistake, or that it may spontaniously malfunction due to a bug in the source code.
To borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan, I trust the election officials but I wish to verify. Election results are too important to screw up. Democracy depends on both winners and losers recognizing the legitimacy of the results. This is an important step to take that will reassure voters that their votes are being counted.
Paperless voting is perhaps the biggest issue in polictics in the last 20 years, and no one is talking about. Every machine must have a voter verified paper trail. I'm glad you're going to sponsor that legislation.
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