Massachusetts uses hand-marked printed paper forms that are fed into an optical-scanner, with the paper dropping into a lockbox for auditability. The paper is the vote, the scanner just allows you to count faster.
If you're blind or otherwise need assistance marking your form, you can bring along a person of your choosing or you can ask for two officials to help you out.
If you need accessibility and online voting, you're hosed: there's a system and it sucks.
Overall, there's room for improvement but it's better than all of the electronic-first systems.
The style where it prints out a ballot which you feed into the scanner is actually not-insane. It's good for accessibility (e.g. lets visually impaired people vote without assistance) but still leaves a paper trail for recounts and things.
My county uses a bubble form which I then place into a scanner and I can see the counter on the scanner increment. I can print out a sample ballot from the county website ahead of time.
This seems like the best system to me. Most Americans are very familiar with bubble forms and there is a clear paper trail while still allowing electronic counting. The only downside is the cost of the paper ballots, and I suppose, not allowing for last minute changes. I don’t know how accessibility issues are handled, but I believe there are attendants to help with that.
There’s just no way I will ever trust an touch screen voting system, especially from a single manufacturer. Maybe a system where a touch screen system from company A prints out a receipt which is then scanned by a scanner from company B and both systems have to match. Maybe.
Meanwhile the parties are fighting over voter ID though so I don’t see this getting any real attention.
I fill out the paper ballot, so no matter what I've voted. It is really clear how to use the system, and I'm not waiting on technology no matter what happens next.
Then I roll it into the machine itself and it goes into a locked box attached to the machine.
There is always a paper record.
The machines and votes are tied together so auditing is straightforward.
Computer-based systems that print out a machine-readable paper ballot that can be hand-counted as well. You vote (perhaps with a touch screen, perhaps not) by making your selections, printing out your ballot, examining it, and inserting it into the tabulator once printed.
There's still plenty of margin for error (for instance, the printer could run misprint or run out of ink, the tabulator could be buggy), and corruption ("here, let me file that for you...") but I think it maximizes the benefits of touchscreen voting for disabled voters while minimizing the downsides.
> IMHO, all the technology investment should be put into processing and validating ballots after they've been filled out
I think the opposite. When filling a ballot, the voter can use a machine with a touchscreen. The person with poor sight can use huge fonts, the blind can use a screen reader, etc. The output from this is a printed paper form, filled out with perfectly legibility. No hanging chads, ambiguous marks, etc.
At this point, the voter (or an assistant) can verify the form just as if a human had filled it out for them.
From there, these perfectly-filled forms can be counted the old-fashioned way with many witnesses.
This. I remember when they were completely automated, you just tapped the crappy 00s era touch-pad, and hoped it managed to submit the results the way you wanted. Then they added that stupid little receipt printer that told you what was submitted, so at least if there was a fuckup, you were informed of it.
Now, they are scantrons. You fill out a big paper ballot, and the machine counts it. It's exactly the system I want in place.
It can be a super helpful assistive tech. Also you can make selections before hand, and still secure the actual ballots. Tracking all printed, spoiled and cast ballots can be helpful.
Also, you get to examine the actual ballot before casting your vote, even if you don’t fill it out with a pencil.
Right. You can get all the supposed advantages of each system, if you want.
Use a touchscreen, fill out a ballot, hit the print button, receive a paper printed ballot, inspect it for errors, drop it into a scanning system that scans and retains it. Importantly, the optical scan is done not by reading any sort of barcode printed on the paper but by reading the same English letters as the voter is inspecting.
All the convenience of electronic systems, hand recount is available and easy. Hand audit some of the machines after every election to ensure accuracy. Doesn't matter how messed up the touchscreens are, since the paper ballot can be inspected by the voter before being cast. No such thing as hanging chad or butterfly ballot problems. Zero bad ballots. Voters who skip races will be doing so intentionally. "LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR: NO VOTE". If they turn that in to be scanned, that's what they wanted.
Virginia does this as well. I think it's a great system. No need for costly machines, just optical scanners which can be spot checked by pulling a percentage to verify. Plus you can scale it very easily, just add more people for ID checking and more spaces to sit and fill in the boxes.
Virginia has both right now and a lot of people prefer to wait for the machine. I would love for them to switch completely to the paper marked ballots.
The ones I saw seemed fine? You fill out a paper ballot, and you submit it to the worker at the end who scans it and drops the ballot in the box in one motion.
You have a paper trail, it anonymous, and it's pretty easy to understand.
I guess if you modified the firmware on the scanner to disclose the vote counters continuously, and the worker at the end knew me by sight (the worker I showed my I'd to is on the other end of the room) you could find my vote. But you could also hide a camera in the booth, which is easier.
Fist off where I've voted they switched from punched cards to scanning paper ballots. It's all typically run by three middle aged women with a printed book of who's registered to vote. You just tell the first one your name and they find your entry and you sign next to it. The next one hands you a scantron sheet. You mark it up. The the third one feeds your sheets into the machine as you watch. Machine records your votes and drops the sheets into a bin in the machine. That's a system I trust and it has the positive of civic engagement. And fundamentally it's not broken.
You now also have the option of mailing in a ballot. That's easier to corrupt I'm sure. But at least it's still paper.
All the fully computerized systems seem really really sketchy to me. Especially in low trust cultures where underhanded stuff is normalized.
Interesting. Good to see they seek information about systems that "are based on voters marking paper ballots".
Contrary to popular belief, in state or nation-wide elections paper is a safer way to vote than electronics because the former is simpler and thus easier to verify by the general public.
Most people don't realize how hard it is to beat the transparency and simplicity of a physical ballot box. It can be inspected by the public at the start of the day so anyone interested can verify it's empty and people can keep an eye on it during the day and see if anyone tampers with it. Then at the end of the day it's important the votes are manually tallied right after the ballot box is opened. This makes the process transparent to most people in society and assures the highest level of scrutiny and confidence that the vote and vote count are legit.
It's hard to replace this with anything more complex i.e. electronics.
I live in New Hampshire, and though I've never voted on a computer where I'm touching a screen, I still feed my paper ballot into a scantron machine that seems to do all the counting. I’ve voted in maybe 20 elections (between local, state, and federal) in my lifetime, and it's always been done this way around here. Maybe we all forget that that's a computer, too.
All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.
I don't understand why that's better than just doing a scantron style bubble form with a pen. That's what we do in Minnesota. Introducing computers to the actual voting (not counting) process seems like needless complexity. Software quality and UI design in 2022 is absolutely abysmal. Keep It Simple, <polite S-word>.
I like the system used in Minnesota (and elsewhere I assume).
1. Paper ballot that you fill out.
2. Then you put it through the scanner and it rolls into a locked box.
You get the efficiency of electronics and the assurance that a physical audit is still possible and any suspect electronics are pretty quickly narrowed down to the scanner or some other point in the system.
Or you could do it all by paper. I hate to sound like a luddite here, but there's simply no place for electronics in the electoral process.
Paper is excellent for ballots. It's easy to understand (put a mark next to whoever you want to elect). It's easy to collect (put ballot in a box). It's easy to count (have multiple people look at ballot, tally result). It's easy to secure (seal the boxes, keep them in a secure location). It's easy to verify (unseal the boxes, count again). It's tamper evident (examine ballots closely). You can ensure that the whole process is fair by having observers physically present each step of the process watching for shenanigans.
The only downside is that it's labour-intensive. But really, that's minor. Accept that as the cost of being confident in the election results. There are fewer things more important in a democratic society than free and fair elections.
The main arguments against paper ballots are that they allow for marks that make the intent of the voter unclear and that they take more time and effort to tabulate. The latter point shouldn't be an issue due to the importance of voting to Democracy. Allocate the money required for counting and simply deal with the time it takes to tabulate, which isn't all that long.
The former could be addressed by having ballot MARKING machines instead of voting machines. Some jurisdictions have already moved in this direction. With a ballot marking machine, you can use a device such as a touchscreen that then prints out a ballot with your selections on it. You verify the correctness of your votes on the ballot. If they are not correct, it is a spoiled ballot that you witness being destroyed before using the ballot marking machine again. If the ballot is correct, you turn it in just as you would a completed human marked ballot. Given the standardized printing of the ballots by the ballot marking machine, they should also be machine readable without bar codes or any other non human readable form. If there is a question about the accuracy of the machine count, a human count can be used to verify correctness. The real gain here is the elimination of ambiguity in voter intent and the elimination of ballots that only exist inside of a computer.
I live in Loudoun County, va, and we've always had the option of using paper with an electronic scanner. There have been touch screen voting machines in the last couple of elections, but I didn't use them,
If you're blind or otherwise need assistance marking your form, you can bring along a person of your choosing or you can ask for two officials to help you out.
If you need accessibility and online voting, you're hosed: there's a system and it sucks.
Overall, there's room for improvement but it's better than all of the electronic-first systems.
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