Voting machines should only ever be used to automate counting of votes. They should never mark the voting sheet. Having the physical paper lets us easily recount or reverify. If it was marked erroneously, all is lost.
Even if we insist on preserving traditional hand-counting of counting paper ballots, for good or ill, couldn't we use electronic voting machines to fill out paper ballots?
"We should just have paper scantron style ballots that people fill out. Then have scantron counting machines to tally them up after all voting nationwide has closed."
Vote counting machines are just as problematic as voting machines. We should just get rid of all of the machines and both vote and count by hand.
2) A machine in the booth to do the reading and counting with a step that shows the voter how it read their ballot and a big "confirm" button they press to count the vote and drop the ballot into the secured bin.
3) Pick X percent of the machines and manually verify their results. Any machine that votes significantly outside the bell curve should also be manually verified.
This gives "instant" counting to support the unwritten requirement that our elections return results on the night of voting so we can treat them like big sporting events, but also leaves the canonical vote outside of the machines where it can be used to verify the machine vote.
Machines are useful for accessibility. Rather than a total ban on voting machines, I'd rather see a ban on machines that don't produce a paper ballot that can be manually counted, and no results should be considered official until the physical ballots are hand-counted. (Electronic counts are fine to satisfy the desire for instant results.)
That wouldn't necessarily fix this particular issue (machines with bad UI selecting the wrong candidates), but at least it's easy for a voter to determine if something went wrong if the paper ballot is marked incorrectly.
No machines are needed for voting. Votes should be counted manually. Several tiers if error correction ensure honest counting and no manipulation. Counters should be paid well and be recruited from all parts of society.
The other reason I don't want to use machines for voting is that it's not that much work to count them manually. We've been doing it well before computers existed. Government has never been interested in efficiency before, so why suddenly care about it with the most important component of a democracy?
I like the pageantry and ceremony of paper ballots at specific voting locations followed by manual paper ballot counting. I know in principle it's easy to automate this away by introducing online voting and other things ... I think those things will further alienate people from their local communities and society at large.
I disagree. While I do agree that hand counting paper ballots is extremely time consuming and error prone, it's not the only alternative to an electronic voting machine. The other alternative is a mechanical voting machine. No electronics and no software involved. I grew up in south Louisiana and this is the kind of voting machine that was used when my parents went to vote. The downside is that the machines were big and heavy. The voter steps inside the curtains and pulls a big lever that closes the curtains behind them and makes the machine ready for voting. The voter physically moves a lever for each choice. When they're done voting, they pull the big lever in opposite direction and it tallies their votes, returns the levers to their original positions, and opens the curtains. I don't know the exact procedure of reporting the polling station results, but I'm sure it required multiple individuals (and maybe even a supervisor) to read off the results from each voting machine. Even if you have a polling station with say 20 voting machines, that's just 20 additions per voting choice that must be summed. This is much easier and faster than hand counting paper ballots. Additionally, I think it would be nearly impossible to alter the voting machines in an attempt to steal votes. I would like to see this everywhere. Voting integrity and quick results.
No. I won’t accept any technological innovations when it comes to voting. Votes should be paper and counted by hand. This is the ultimate safeguard against stealing an election - make sure as many pairs of eyes as possible are involved in every part of the process. Some things are important enough to be manual, cumbersome and expensive.
Exactly. I think that machines can be used just fine in a very specific configuration. I.e. you go to a machine, select the choices you want, that machine prints out a ballot with your choices. You review that ballot. If the ballot is correct, you go over to a tabulation machine, feed it in, and call it a day. That machine retains the paper ballots if verification is needed.
EDIT: And if someone wants to fill out a paper ballot manually, let them. Just have a few spares around, most people won't.
Voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.
The whole point of automation is to save on labor, at the cost of simplicity. Machines are excellent at handling complexity that some experts can come up with and can execute it reasonably well. Except that this is precisely the opposite of what's desired in an election.
Voting is one situation where it is DESIREABLE to have many people manually involved in a simple process. Auditing voting machines requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of information systems and experience with a lot of edge cases.
Proprietary voting machines only make auditing worse, basically hiding all flaws behind a curtain of marketing and legal threats. Over 95% of the citizens have no way of auditing the integrity of the results and have to put blind faith in for-profit corporations who are (1) disincentivized from disclosing flaws and (2) do not suffer penalties when security flaws are found to be present by researchers.
In a paper scheme, it takes more human effort to tally an election, but every citizen can participate in that process, and the others can safely observe and easily understand what's going on. The only downside is that it may take a few hours instead of seconds. But latency is infinitely preferable over opacity and potential inaccuracy.
I used to think e-voting would be OK if there was a requirement to use open-source voting software but even that is problematic. As a software engineer, it would be my pride to be able to help, however that would still be depriving non-software people from the ability to participate in the process, and I feel that is wrong. Now that my focus at work is on building resilient systems, I believe paper is the way to go, especially considering one of the other requirements is secrecy.
Not only should we not use electronic voting machines, we should not use electronic vote counting machines.
Paper ballots counted by electronic means should be just as suspect, as whoever hacks the counting machine could set vote totals to be just shy of the limit required to initiate a manual recount.
Why don't we start with voting machines that either produce or consume a paper ballot (with user confirmation that paper/electronic records match). Then have people count the paper ballots and compare their count to the computed electronic counts. The counts should match.
This is one of the few areas where paper is still king, IMHO.
Been filling out paper ballots for years. I don't want to vote on a machine. A machine can count my vote. But there should be a paper that goes in the ballot box, so it can be recounted using multiple methods. Different machines, humans, dogs, cats... whatever. There are real physical artifacts.
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