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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?"
Use Scantrons, where you bubble in the answer with a black pen or a #2 pencil. Have the people bubble in their votes, and run them through. This makes reading them very easy, especially since the machines are already in use across the country, and verification is as simple as looking at which one is bubbled.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
That said, I absolutely insist on machine-readable and hand-countable pen-marked paper ballots. This is the only way to insure both fast and accurate election night returns *and* verifiable beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt recount ability. These machines have been manufactured for many years and they *were not* responsible for the Florida cluster-fsk.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The most transparent technology there is at the moment for recording votes is for voters to tick boxes (or write numbers) on printed ballot papers and put them into ballot boxes.
In Sweden, we use a simplified version of this. Don't trust the voters with a pen! Each party has their own ballot with their name printed on it. You get them in the mail before the election, you get them when you vote and you have more ballots in your voting both.
Thus, 99% of all voters don't even need a pen.
The counting is done manually, and is 95% ready just a few hours after the voting is closed.
I would never trust any kind of "voting machine". There is no transparancy. Being an engineer, I can see too many ways to cheat with them.
(The exception (1%) is that you still CAN take a blank ballot and vote for whatever party you want, say the Donald Duck party. Those votes get counted too.)
)9TSS
In my state we use optical scan ballots and it seems to be an ideal balance between verifiable paper trail and machine counting. Once the ballot is marked the optical scanning does indeed work well and is very quick.
The ballot is placed inside an opaque folder to hide the actual votes, but an end sticks out. A poll assistant aids the voter in feeding the machine, which sucks the ballot in and counts it. If there's a problem the ballot doesn't get sucked in and corrective action can be taken.
What could be done to improve the process is a screen-based marking station. Do away with the pen and use a touch screen in its place. This would eliminate the "stray mark" problem.
After a voter touches up a ballot, print it out in the booth. Voter then verifies it and submits it to the counting machine. If the ballot is incorrectly marked the voter would take it to the poll taker as a spoiled ballot and have it destroyed and try again.
This two-phase process has the added benefit of increasing the difficulty of hacking the system, since there are now two separate components instead of a single box to compromise.