Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Who would you like to see the next US President?
George W. Bush
Howard Dean
Ralph Nader
I am Canadian, you insensitive clod.
CowboyNeal
Just have the candidates fight it out in armed combat.
Robert Anton Wilson
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.
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. Voting slips are counted by hand based, in the presence of witnesses. If the result is close, the voting slips can be recounted. This system works well in Australia at all levels of government.
OK, we do get problems occasionally. But they are typically things like people impersonating other voters, and people voting multiple times at different polling booths. However, the system copes with this. If the number of voting irregularities detected is sufficient to effect the outcome of an election, a by-election is called in the seats in dispute. It really helps that the courts in Australia are not heavily politicised like they are in the US of A.
(The problems with voter impersonation, etc are also present when voting machines are used. The same solutions could be used in both cases; e.g. requiring voters to present photo ids, and throwing rorters into jail for a long time.)
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...
When I visited Florida as a teenager fourteen years ago, I saw one of USA Today's cover polls that asked five year-olds who they'd like to have as their president. Top of the poll (with over 50 percent of the votes, if I remember correctly) was Big Bird from Sesame Street. Then came another bunch of fictional figures with Bill Cosby being the highest ranked human being (with around 10 percent, again IIRC).
Now, fourteen years on, these kids are just becoming elligible to vote for real. I'd think that either of those two choices, Big Bird or Bill Cosby, would make great candidates. For one thing, they have tangible diplomatic skills that have been tested over the years by the most feisty allies (Mr. Snuf-a-lufagus, Dr. Huxtable's wife), adversaries (Oscar the Grouch, the younger Huxtable kids) and special interest groups (Count Dracula, the older Huxtable kids).
Personally, my vote would go to Big Bird. I'd like to see a cabinet with real weight and authority and I think that his staff, including Bert and Ernie, would bring a certain gravitas to the West Wing that's been missing for the last few decades.
So, please, if we're going to see a Slashdot poll, can we add these two candidates for the benefit of that generation? Oh, and perhaps Britney Spears too.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
Oregon abolished the polling place. That's right, we haven't had a voting booth set up for an official election in Oregon starting with the 2000 Presidential Election (don't blame us, we didn't vote for him, and we didn't leave home to vote against him!).
So how do Oregonians vote? In the comfort of their own homes. About six weeks before election day, every residence with a mailbox gets a voter's guide that comes with a voter registration card (if you're not registered and want to vote, you turn it in at least 30 days before the first election you want to vote in). A week or two after that, your ballot, secrecy envelope and return mailing envelope come in the mail. You punch out the appropriate holes on the punch card. Stuff your ballot in the secrecy envelope, stuff the secrecy envelope in the mailing envelope, and put your signature on the back, and either mail it or drop it off at the elections office, or if it's within a week of election day, at any of dozens handy points at various public facilities (libraries, town squares, city halls, courthouses, election offices, etc) staffed by elections officials specifically to collect ballots.
But how does Oregon prevent voting fraud? Easy. We check signatures on the envelopes against the voter registration. Not sure what the sample rate is, but fraud has not been an issue. If you don't get the ballot and you were supposed to, you go down to the elections office, show your ID, they verify your registration and they void out the missing ballot (so even if someone turns it in, when they go to scan the barcode before checking sigs, they see it's void and throw it out). They issue you a ballot and hand it to you and you're on your way.
What does all this mean? Well, for starters, you get three or four weeks with your ballot instead of three or four minutes. Time is on your side in making an informed, well-thought decision without having to stress out that you're missing out on having a life to go down to the polls and vote.
Encourage your state to abolish the polling place
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