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?"

Comments

Simple in concept, just not in practice

[melete]

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...

Depends on the desired outcome...

[StalinJoe]

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. :-)

Only manual is visible

[amcguinn]

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.