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?
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.
The vast majority of voting machines in the US creates a paper trail. Usually, you vote and the system prints out a receipt showing your vote which is then kept in the case of later hand audits.
A paper trail doesn't necessarily require paper ballets. Electronic voting machines can spit out a receipt to be reviewed by the voter in order to be counted in a potential audit while allowing the electronic tally to be used for initial results. With electronic machines with no paper trail, there is no way to recover from a failed or compromised machine.
> "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.
Our new voting machines in our county are awesome, I hope they are used across the state (NJ).
You get a blank piece of paper that you insert into the machine. You vote electronically, and it prints your vote out in plain readable text on the paper, and presents it to you protected under a piece of glass (maybe pexiglass?) to validate your choices. If there is something wrong, you can reject it at this point. If you accept it, it records your vote electronically, and swallows the paper ballot as a record.
My understanding is that newer systems now let you vote at a machine, but it spits out a receipt that the county can hold on to for the sake of audits and recounts.
Not new. I've had paper voting receipts for at least 15 years. Probably longer.
Is this standard now, or on a state by state basis?
There are no voting machine standards. It varies by state, and in some states by county.
Some people see that as a flaw. I see the diversity of voting systems as a security plus. There was even an article in the newspaper shortly after the election stating that certain foreign governments looked into hacking America's voting systems, but it wasn't worth the effort because they were all constructed and implemented differently.
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.
> All electronic voting machines should output a paper human readable 'scantron' type ballot that is safely stored for verifying the internal digital tally.
And then that ballot should be what is actually tabulated and the internal digital tally ignored, or not even kept. The machine should be a device to facilitate creation of accurate, easily tabulated paper ballots, period.
> Any and all voting machines /must/ only ever be used to mark ballot papers that are filed in the usual way and can be counted in the usual way if there is any doubt whatsoever.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the machines used in this election do. Some counties use touchscreen ballot marking devices that print a ballot for scanning, others have the voter fill out their ballot with a pen and then feed that into the scanner. Of those two variants, I believe election security experts prefer the latter type. But as far as I know all voting machines used in the US do use a paper ballot as the permanent record.
Didn't help, here, since when they recounted those paper ballots the argument shifted to "well you have to re-check the signatures on the envelopes, those could've been fake ballots", or "well there was a lot of traditional fraud with mail-in ballot harvesting and dead people voting". But the same people were still saying the machines cheated, too -- especially whenever they were talking to a receptive audience.
I'm all for more openness in elections and publicly auditable data (and open-source voting machine code), but let's not pretend that it would've changed much here. People believed the election was stolen because they wanted to believe it was stolen.
The system for verifiable receipts in the article does not require electronic voting in either the vote-casting or vote-counting process. It's an explicitly paper system.
The electronic voting machines I use in Southern California actually print my selections on a piece of paper that I can look at under a little piece of plastic. I approve that it shows my votes accurately and then the paper slides away. Presumably kept with the machine so an audit could be done.
Yes, my county in California does this as well. A voter verifiable paper trail should be a requirement for voting systems - either as an optically read input, or a voter verifiable paper output placed into a ballot box as an audit check against the electronic results.
Pretty much everyone (i.e. by a margin that would be considered a landslide in a normal election) who works near tech agrees that electronic voting is fine as long as it produces a paper record (or a uses a paper ballot) per vote which provides a mechanism to verify the integrity of the system after the fact and makes tampering hard to scale.
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.
There are other ways to achieve an audit trail with paper ballots. Like cameras. Electronic voting is opaque by nature compared to a bunch of people in a room actually counting paper ballots.
It amazes me that there are places where there is electronic voting with no paper trail. That is placing way too much trust without any verification.
Really there should be a paper trail where each voter can check their votes on the paper and post-election auditing for a sample of precincts that the voting agrees with a hand count of the paper record.
The machine in question does produce a paper trail (at least when deployed in my state).
Computer systems are trying to bring forward all the hidden problems that aren't found until we have to fight about the result and put them right in front of the user. By design, they are going to show more errors, instead of hiding them from the voter.
(I shouldn't need to say this, but I'm not saying computer voting systems are better. I tend to prefer pure paper. But each system has trade-offs.)
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?
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