Florida Election Ballots to be Printed On-Demand

davidwr writes "The St. Petersburg, FL, Times reports that Florida is going back to paper ballots, but with a twist. They are printing the ballots on-demand, right there at the polling booth. This isn't machine-assisted voting where a touch-screen fills in your printed ballot for you. It's just a way to save printing costs and reduce paper waste. 'Without ballot on demand, poll workers at 13 early Hillsborough voting sites would need to stockpile stacks of every possible ballot type. With ballot on demand, poll workers can print out a person's distinct ballot type when he or she arrives to vote.'"

Comments

What happens in case of...

[Pichu0102]

...machine malfunction, or the printers not printing out the correct things?

What's wrong with paper

[Ckwop]

I like this move. With all the diebold problems and election computers found to be wanting, nobody has really addressed the question: "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"

Sure, it's slow to count but not overly so. While US ballots are more complicated than UK ballots they still take just over a day to count. If you can't wait that long, you're just impatient.

If you want a quick answer, just use exit polls. Until Bush's election fraud, these were a reliable way of having an idea of who has won the election.

We already have a well evolved security procedure for handling paper ballots. Why are people so quick to throw that away a proven solution and to try a totally closed computer system off a random vendor to solve a problem that never really existed anyway? I'll leave the answer is an exercise to the reader.

Simon

Re:What's wrong with paper

[mpe]

Electronic voting can force the voter to make a clear, unambiguous choice while paper cannot.

It can also force them to do things they may not wish to, but the person who designed the election thinks they should so. e.g. what happens if you have multiple elections on the same ballot. With a voter wishing to vote in some, abstain in others and "spoil their vote" with others.
The simple solution is to give them individual ballot papers for each election if they want to take some of them home to use as toilet paper then nobody should care too much.

2) Ballot stuffing should be much harder with e-voting. The machine can enforce hard limits (1 vote per minute or whatever) and perform basic sanity checks like making sure the polling place doesn't just get an extra 1000 votes mere minutes before closing, or 100s of votes in a row for the same candidate, or whatever. Can paper do any of that?

For any well designed electoral system any form of widescale electoral fraud is difficult because it requires a large conspiracy. This includes ballot stuffing. Whereas this can take place within electronic systems with ease and needs only a few people.
There is also the problem that scruitineering is virtually impossible with electronic voting systems. There just arn't enough people on the planet to do the job for an election of any size (even before you exclude those who are citizens of countries the US dosn't like). Added to that any effective techniques may well be destructive. (You cannot shut down a computer which may be running rogue code since this is likely to destroy any evidence.)
Whereas with paper ballots people (preferably lots of people) can watch what is going on.

3) Paper trail. That's right, an electronic machine can actually produce a time-stamped cryptographically signed paper trail authenticating every vote cast which will make it very hard to add even an extra 100 votes to the record...

And what's to verify that each vote actually corresponds to a voter performing some action the voter considered to be intentionally casting a vote.

With paper ballots alone you can just stuff all the extra ballots into the box any time you like and there is no way to reconstruct exactly what happened.

An election official, who should never be working at their designated voting location, has to be very careful that they don't get seen by anyone. If for some reason there arn't enough people around then multiple video cameras watching the ballot box are a far more useful application of technology.

4) Counting the results. I don't think I need to say more here.

Given a choice between something when can be seen to be fair and accurate and trusting a "magic box" you'd take the magic box!

Biometrics. It might be possible to make sure that a particular person only votes once (using a fingerprint hash for example). It sure beats purple finger or demanding people present ID and register to vote beforehand.

Why use a simple and reliable method when you could use a complex and unreliable one. Anyway don't they have indelible fluorescent ink in US?
again KISS!

Re:ink

[Gadget_Guy]

These machines will jam or run out of ink with no geeks around to fix it.

I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.

The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.

Re:Money-making opportunity

[LaughingCoder]

... and maybe the printers should run on non-standard electricity. And they could require some special atmosphere for the ink to properly dry. And then the ballots could be coated with some sort of toxic substance that, when handled, kills the person touching it in seconds. Only the specially powered printers operating in the specially formulated atmosphere can properly remove the toxic coating so that the ballots can be safely handled.

Seriously, the point of this idea is to save money. Inventing custom ink wouldn't seem to fit that mold.

Re:ink

[Xaositecte]

There's a reason geeks haven't made easy-to-use tech to fill every niche yet.

Job Security.

Re:ballot box stuffing

[avdp]

I don't think that the "paper trail" folks ignore it at all. At any given polling station there are (always?) various observers from all interested parties to watch the poll workers.

Re:End of the secret ballot! contradiction???

[jack_n_jill]

There is no contradiction, we are discussing on demand printed ballots vs. pre-printed ballots.
Pre-printed ballots probably waste paper but are secure against this type of privacy violation.

Re:Cryptographic verification

[mounthood]

What makes you think anyone outside slashdot wants voting to be secured by cryptography? It might as well be magic for most people, not just that they couldn't implement it, but that they don't even understand what it really means. SSL on websites makes it clear that people may trust it, sort of, but they sure don't understand it. A paper ballot though? Everyone can understand how that system works and whether it's fair or not.

You don't know in advance

[mudetroit]

The one thing that this system does address on some level is actually printing ballots that you know are needed, and enough to cover your needs. You say that you know how many to print ahead of time because you know how many people are entitled to vote. Do you really? 1. Registered voter records are incorrect when the ballots are published and shot count an area of the appropriate number of ballots. 2. Someone makes a mistake filling out a ballot and need a replacement. 3. Someone accidentally goes to the wrong precinct. One plus to Print on Demand is that you can cover for the scenarios in a much more systematic way. The other thing that this could allow for in the future is allowing people to vote at more convenient polling places for them. One of the fundamental systemic problems of the current voting system is that it requires you to show up at a specific polling place, which may not be the most logical place for you to vote depending upon your job, current residence, etc. In no way is this a perfect solution, but it does open up some possibilities that aren't present in the current system.

A few things people are missing

[Eravnrekaree]

There are a few points that should be made here that many people are missing. This on demand system will be used in early voting (before the official election date) where a voter can show up at any voting location in a county to vote. This is a problem since each precint needs a different ballot, for the congressional districts which vary by district. So they needed a way to give a person a ballot for their precinct, without having to have perhaps dozens of different ballots at the early voting locations. On the main election day, ballots will be preprinted, since everyone in a precinct uses the same ballot. As far as concerns about anonymity, it should be only necessary to type in the precinct number into the computer connected to the printer, not any of the voters identifiying information.

Paper ballots will be a definite improvement and certainly the move back to paper ballots should be appreciated. There needs to be a paper trail to verify that votes are being properly counted. Since one cannot see inside of a computer to verify that their vote was recorded onto the disk, it is essential to have a user verifiable paper ballot. Computer voting machines make rigging elections just too easy.