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How Would You Design the Voting Technology?
Bob Glickstein asks: "Punch-card ballot machines are now universally reviled, and we techies all know the perils of electronic ones. But I haven't seen anyone talk about a better solution. It's gotta be inexpensive, rugged, reliable, accurate, verifiable, tamper-resistant, simple to use, and secret. Verifying a vote tally should not result in TV news images of rooms full of election officials, squinting at ambiguous marks on a piece of paper. What contraption can possibly meet all these criteria?"
An electronic voting machine which should produce a printed record. Some type of blind-numbering system should be used for identities -- crypto theory has plenty of theoretical models for this. Users should be able to pick from a drop-down menu or type in a candidate, though for other countries (i.e., rural Africa, etc) or for certain classes of handicapped people, other methods, such as picking from a set of pictures, should be available.
This is pretty strightforward, but as diebold found out, the devil is in the details...
If the idea is to accurately count the voter's intentions (how absurd) this would work better:
:-)
1) Voter checks in at front desk, signs voter registration and is given a punch card.
2) Voter enters a voting booth, and inserts blank card.
3) Voter enters their vote choices on touch screen (with pictures of candidates even!) and when done, card is automatically punched with appropriate votes.
4) Voter takes punch card and inserts it into a Republican card reader.
5) Voter takes card and inserts it into a Democratic card reader.
6) Voter takes card and inserts it into independent card reader.
7) Voter gives card to election offical.
8) Election offical presses a button. If results from 4 & 5 & 6 do not ALL match, voter must start over (back to step 2) with a fresh card (current card is destroyed.)
9) Card where votes match placed into old fashioned voter box for recount broo-haa-haa. (sp?)
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But as Joseph Stalin, I would never advocate having multiple parties each having their own electronic systems in a polling place. Accurate vote counts are kind of antithetical for me.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
This is a matter of democracy not entertainment. The process is what is important. TV tries as hard as it can to influence the elections as it is, making the process entertaining would play into their manipulative agendas.
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"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Regardless of the system chosen, make sure that the same system is implemented consistently across the entire electorate. Voting procedures should be the same for each and every electorate and polling place - none of the BS where each state and/or county can decide how the elections are to be run. One system implemented identically across the whole country.
Why not stick to paper voting? The ballot box is locked for the whole day, and usually every party sends an observer/militant to scrutinize each voting place. Having around 500/1000 registered voters per ballot box makes it easy to count by hand (1 hour for 10 people). And every citizen is wellcome to look at the counting. So in every place, every citizen can be sure there was no cheating in his/her area. Then the authorities come out with spreadsheets of the result, and everybody can check the summing and the result for his/her area.
I'm strongly against any automatic machine counting, because cheating is too easy to conceal with those. No citizen can double check the process, and if a court apoints an expert to scrutinize the system, he's again a single point of failure.
Having a machine to count for you is a waste of resources, and driven only by lazyness, or by somebody who wants to look hip, and the danger of cheating is increased.
I guess you didn't understand my earlier post.
If there is ANY way to trace my vote to me, I can be compelled to vote a certain way. Blackmail, death threats, etc. If how I voted can be found out AFTER the election, it's still just as bad. Don't try to tell me that I wouldn't accidentally let my voter ID number slip if someone was holding a gun to my head.
The complementary scenario is where someone offers to pay $100 per vote in a certain district, payable upon proof of a certain vote. You think campaign finance laws are bad! Whoot! I think this scenario is significantly more open to abuse!
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
In the traditional UK system, every single step of the process is open to the public and visible, except for the voter marking the paper.
That's actually really surprising. I can watch in my local polling stations as voters ask for ballot papers, are given them, hide in a booth to mark them, come out and put them in a box. I can watch the box all day. I can see the box carried to the counting room, and stand on the balcony as counters take the papers out of the boxes and sort them into piles. I don't have to trust anyone else to oversee the process, it's all there for me (or any other voter or candidate) to check.
Nothing that happens inside a box with electronics is visible to an outsider.
The manual system is vulnerable to small human errors and small opportunistic fraud. It is totally immune to large systematic fraud.
The only disadvantage is the expense, but the authorities are considering switching from it to new systems that are several times more expensive to run.
Sounds like a return to literacy testing--especially if it requires the candidates name be written out or something similarly ridiculous. Before you get too crazy in replies--please recognize that the US does not have an official language, and that we have many voters that do not use a western alphabet--picture a Chinese grandmother being asked to write the number 7 on a slip of paper because the ballot said "Peace & Freedom -- 7". The same case applies for some Russian emigres, those of Persian/Arabic origin, and many Asian cultures. I think this system may be OK in a monoglot nation like Denmark, but it just won't work here.
blarg.
Ok - This is a huge myth. The problem in florida wasn't with butterfly ballots or punch card systems at all... It was with a faulty law saying that the vote counters had to determine the "intent of the voter" rather than just count votes. Simplify the law and say the intent of the voter is expressed when more than two corners (three, one, whatever) of the box are torn and there isn't a double vote of any kind... That removes ambiguity.
Now go back and realize that ALL of the florida recounts - No matter what any silly liberal will attempt to tell you - came out with GWBush in front. The problem being is that in each and every count the closeness of the count was well under 3 sigma to the error of the counting process, however we are rather sure that he got more votes than Gore did. If Gore wants to complain - why the heck didn't he win Tennesee, his home state - and make Florida mute.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
1. Electonic polling machine accepts voter's choices.
2. Polling machine adds voters choices to internal counters.
3. Polling machine prints paper slip with both a human readable and a machine readable record of voter's choices. This slip is placed in a sealed ballot box as in the current punched card system.
4. Once the polls close, the poll-workers, with the candidate's/party's representitives, record the tally from each machine. This becomes the official result unless a descrepancy is found in the following steps.
5. A random sample of n paper slips from each machine is machine counted based on the machine readable information. If this dosen't match the results from 4 pretty closely, a full hand count will be necessary.
6. A random sample of m paper slips (where m can be less than n) is counted based on the human readable information. If this dosent' match the results from 4 and 5 pretty closely, a full hand count will be necessary.
By printing the paper slips with human readable information, and machines mistalling votes will likely be noticed immediatly by the voters. Step 5 prevents tampering with the polling machine's internal results by ensuring that the printed slips match the internal tally. Step 6 prevents a more clever attacker from printing his or her desired vote on the machine-readable portion while recording the voter's choice on the human-readable portion.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!