This is surreal. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports (via TechDirt) that Ohio's Cuyahoga County—ground zero in the nationwide e-voting debacle that I've been chronicling here at Ars—is holding a "recount" of their November 6 local elections by going back to the memory cards in their Diebold touchscreen voting machines and reprinting all the paper ballots, so that they can tabulate paper copies of the votes in compliance with a law that defines the paper record as the only official record of the vote. How stupid is this idea?

This is like printing out all of your bank statements from Quicken, and totaling it all up by hand because you don't trust that the software is displaying your real balance on the screen... no, actually, it's even dumber than that. Let me see if I can explain.

The point of the ballot print-outs that Ohio law mandates is that they're from a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT); the voter casts a vote using the touchscreen, and then he or she confirms that the ballot has been correctly recorded by glancing at a printout of the vote. That voter-verified printout is supposed to go into a lockbox, where Ohio law declares it the official record of the vote. Notice the emphasis on the term "voter-verified" here—even if the touchscreen has been maliciously programmed to record the wrong vote on its internal memory card, the voter has verified that the paper record of her vote is accurate; hence making that paper record the official vote.

What happens if as many as 20 percent of those printouts are spoiled due to problems with the cheap thermal printers that Cuyahoga hurriedly tacked onto their Diebold touchscreen machines? Well, common sense tells you that you simply don't have a voter-verified record of those votes, so you can forget about detecting any election tampering that involves manipulating the electronic record. You might as well go back and tabulate the votes electronically, and hope that nobody has manipulated the memory cards either during or after the polling.

But Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has looked at the law, which again makes the paper record the official copy of the vote, and given the board of elections the go-ahead to reprint all of the ballots from the stored memory cards. Yes, you read that right: the paper ballots will be reprinted from the memory cards, counted (certainly with fresh errors introduced), and then declared the official tally over against the results of a totally electronic tally of those same memory cards.

What's really great is that the county board of elections now considers this idiotic reprint practice to be the gold standard for following in future elections, including the upcoming presidential contest. The Plain Dealer reports:

Board of Elections Director Jane Platten said the county now has a clear path to follow if the paper trail is unreadable in a recount. "Voters now have a fair opportunity to have their votes counted consistently throughout the whole election process, including election night, the official count and the recount process," Platten said Monday in an e-mail.

In another article on the 20 percent ballot spoilage numbers, Platten told the Plain Dealer, "I wish those paper trails would come out pristine—and they don't, and they're not going to. We're going to have to deal with it again."

I really don't know what to say here, except that if you live in Cuyahoga County, this should send you through the roof.

What's sad is that Cuyahoga has a history of recount shenanigans, some of which were documented in the documentary "Hacking Democracy." This is just the latest example of Cuyahoga's complete disregard for the machinery of democracy. For more on Ohio's e-voting woes, see the links below: