The point isn't to get a receipt that I personally voted. The receipt analogy isn't that exact. The point is create a verifiable paper trail for the event that some registered voter voted a certain way. Paper ballots do that. He's just pointing out how ridiculous it is to argue that it's somehow too expensive or onerous to create a paper trail when every parking lot, every coffee shop, every store is able to create a more extensive paper trail even for the most inconsequential transactions.
He's not referring to giving you a receipt, he's talking about voting machines that produce a paper print out that the voter quickly confirms at the polling place, then deposits in a ballot box. If the custody these paper ballots is managed carefully, they can later be used to verify any apparent funny business in the results of the electronic vote counting system.
The use of the word receipt is problematic since people believe that it means they can take it home with them and somehow use it later. It can be a "voter verified paper trail", I suppose. But, what's better is just having paper ballots that are optically scanned. If someone needs assistive software to fill out the paper ballot, so be it.
Even with paper ballots (or a vvpt), you still need regular procedures to audit the record to ensure that the counting and down-stream handling of the counts are correct.
Receipts are retained by the guys holding the election, not the voters. A physical record of which way a vote was cast would be an excellent way of enabling bribery of voters, and no sane system would allow it.
That's also why photographing a ballot paper is usually banned in polling stations.
That's good and all, but in the 4 states I've voted in, only one had a paper ballot. 3 were me showing up to the polling place and pressing buttons on a monitor. The 4th mails me a ballot, I fill things in, and send it back (so no receipt either).
Given my experience, and that several others tell me they do similar things, I don't understand your counter argument. We already do not have paper ballots to check. There is ZERO verification currently. If those ballots are printed out from the electronic machine that I voted on, well you still have to trust that a corporation did not mess with anything and printed out the wrong ballot, or just didn't print yours out. The way we are doing things and the way we used to do things don't enable the trust that you are suggesting.
But let's assume that the year is 2000 and we're voting on a paper ballot. We don't get to take a copy home. Once we leave we don't know what happens to that ballot in the box. Has our vote been counter? Did we fully punch out the paper chad? Did our ballot get lost when a country wide controversy started and my ballot got mailed around the state several times? Can I verify that the government's decision of how to count my vote reflected my actual intention?
The answer to these is that you can't do any verification of this. So I rather kinda like the idea of a website that I can go to and check that my vote was counted correctly and matches. The triviality of it from the voter side makes this process easy. Does it solve all verifiablity problems within the pipeline? No. Does it solve some? Yeah.
Personally I'd rather take a step forward, even if that step is small.
A paper trail doesn't mean giving people a receipt saying who they voted for. It means recording votes both digitally and physically so if there's concern about one, the other can be checked.
Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.
If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.
If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.
And since you can't know that the computer actually recorded what was printed on your paper receipt you have to dispute the result by default if a good democratic process is important to you.
So if you have to count the paper balloty anyway, why even bother with spending all that money for a voting machine?
Notice that nearly every state requires voters to approve the paper copy of their vote.
The digital record is only used to speed up tabulation. In the case of recounts or contested elections, paper records are hand tabulated by humans (a recent example were the Arizona recounts for the 2020 election).
Where are you located that you didn't have a paper receipt you were asked to approve when you voted?
stretchwithme addresses that in the third (and subsequent) sentences of his comment. I know that's a lot to read, but still. They were in fact describing a voter-verified paper trail system.
> "Electronic voting should be allowed but not unless it prints out a ballot with all your selections on it so you can verify and have a real paper trail"
The lack of a receipt is deliberate and prevents vote-buying. A carbon copy of your vote will open as many avenues to fraud as it will close.
> the paper records can be used to run a stop-loss audit to verify the electronic vote count
You can't do this. Probably the most fundamental problem with electronic vote verification is that you cannot give someone physical evidence of how their vote was cast, because it makes voter coercion feasible.
Its why almost all absentee / write in ballots are set up so that if you send multiple ballots only the last one is counted (or an in person vote if you give one). If someone tries to coerce your vote and use the absentee ballot as proof unless they keep you imprisoned until the election is over they can't prove you didn't resubmit / go in person to change your vote.
With receipts for in person ballots the only way to defeat coercion is to make it so you can, at the point of receipt, get issued an intentionally flawed receipt. But if you are verifying votes this way, it would have to be for another legitimate voter voting the exact way your coercer wanted. That sounds like a hugely limiting technical flaw.
> You can't do this. Probably the most fundamental problem with electronic vote verification is that you cannot give someone physical evidence of how their vote was cast, because it makes voter coercion feasible.
There are machines that print paper receipts to voters (presented under glass so voters can verify), and then drop the receipts into a traditional lockable ballot box. The voter cannot access the paper ballot without evidently tampering with the machine; the only issue is that you'd need a way to get poll workers the ballot at issue without identifying the voter.
"Receipts" are a problem - a key security goal of voting systems is that it should be impossible for the voter to be able to prove who they voted for (to prevent both voter coercion and vote-selling).
Paper trails that stay in the hands of the registrar of voters are a good idea, in that they can be used to cross-check the results of the counting. Sure, you now have to trust the people with custody of the physical ballots, but it expands the size of the required conspiracy to more than just a few people with access to the voting machine software.
well here is the rub, paper ballots are useless unless you can prove who is voting and yet we have nearly the same people yelling about how unfair it is to require people to prove who they are to vote.
you cannot have one without the other if your intent is to protect the system and to be honest you only need paper ballots as a receipt to allow verification in case of suspected interference. we have already seen that some paper ballot designs are more prone to fraud than others.
Those things in the past helped push for paper receipts. In every contested state there were paper receipts this time. We should expand that to everywhere that uses electronic voting, but we don't have to lie about irregularities to do it.
That's why I said that two copies of the receipt should be generated, both viewable by the voter, with one of them being retained within the machine.
The one given to the voter allows them to verify that their vote was cast correctly and gives them a piece of paper with I "vote ID" on it to show an election official if they notice a problem.
The one that is retained would be collected by election officials and stored. This would allow someone else to go back later using a separate counting device to verify that the automatic count from the voting machines.
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