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

Just do what colleges do....

[innosent]

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.

I'm biased cause I worked in the industry...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

For 4 years. I've been to countless elections and given technical help and gruntwork help. I was the lead project engineer for a optical-scan high speed ballot counter.

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.

Re:Use a pencil and paper!

[pesc]

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.)