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Florida Election Ballots to be Printed On-Demand

Posted by Zonk on from the love-the-smell-of-a-fresh-ballot dept.

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.'"

26 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. ink by Turn-X+Alphonse · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    Welcome to good ideas which don't stand up to the reality of 5-6 old people monitoring a station.

    --
    I like muppets.
    1. Re:ink by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:ink by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you can print up your own ballots on any printer, what's to stop you from printing up extra ballots at home and slipping a few extras in the ballot box. Once they are in there, they would be hard to tell from the authentic ones. I hope they are incorporating some kind of security features into these ballots, and aren't just using standard inkjet printers on standard inkjet paper. The paper ballots we use up here in Canada are printed on special paper, to ensure that people aren't printing up extra ballots. Each printed ballot is accounted for.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    3. Re:ink by Xaositecte · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      Job Security.

  2. What happens in case of... by Pichu0102 · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  3. For your added convenience by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Funny

    They will be pre-filled in for the Republican candidate. To save you the time of thinking that your vote will actually be counted towards the candidate you intend to vote for.

    --
    Monstar L
    1. Re:For your added convenience by LaughingCoder · · Score: 3, Funny

      ... and if you are in the military, they will be printed with disappearing ink.

      --
      The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
    2. Re:For your added convenience by haakondahl · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Your post is deranged, so I'll respond to your .sig:

      An individual's pompous pronouncements on internet fora should be proportional to that person's ability to use the local language.

      Upon completing my liberal education, the real learning began.

      Of course the p.o.d. ballots are an accident waiting to happen. The whole point of printing the ballots ahead of time is to ensure to the extent possible *ahead of time*, i.e., with time for corrective action to be taken, that there will be no systemic failures. I am impressed by the spectacular cheapness displayed in the decision to go to a "just-in-time" solution for a system which should not accept delays.

      --
      Don't trust anyone under thirty.
  4. What's wrong with paper by Ckwop · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:What's wrong with paper by oliderid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"

      Here in Belgium we have electronic vote for more than ten years. I've seen recently a study comparing paper and electronic machine costs.

      I don't remember the figures precisly but it was something like:

      The cost per vote on paper 2 US$
      The cost per electronic vote 5 US$

      I always been extremely suspicious about these electronic voting machine. Especially those running Windows (Desktop PC) with accessible serial ports like those we have here.

      The good news is that the government plans to get rid of it (at least for a part of the country) and go back to the much safer (and cheaper) paper.

    2. Re:What's wrong with paper by mpe · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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!

  5. Money-making opportunity by Thunderstruck · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is a really great idea. I really, really great idea. This is the kind of "duh" stuff that all of our modern technology is supposed to help fix.

    You know what would be an even better idea? Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. This would help prevent counterfeit ballots. Of course, since you can't let these machines break down, the cartidges would probably have to have an internal sensor that shuts down the printer when the ink level gets low. Maybe, just to be safe, they would have to kick in when about 60% of the ink is gone. We need to protect the voters, after all. ...and really, how many tax-payers pay attention to the money their government spends on ink?

    --
    Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
    1. Re:Money-making opportunity by LaughingCoder · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. ... This would help prevent counterfeit ballots.
      A better way than special ink would be to have the blank ballots watermarked.
      --
      The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
    2. Re:Money-making opportunity by LaughingCoder · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ... 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.

      --
      The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
    3. Re:Money-making opportunity by Minwee · · Score: 3, Funny

      I think you're missing the point.

      There are already several companies making $8000 / gallon specialty ink distributed in highly secure cartridges tied to specific printers and designed to self-destruct before they have used 50% of their contents.

      You don't need a government contract to buy them. All you need to do is go to Staples.

  6. Re:Threat model by lachlan76 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Call in a mathematician and get them to figure out how many ballots should be needed to keep costs to a minimum, assuming you leave open the option of printing more ballots, in case the 5/1/0.01% probability comes back to bite you---whether printing it off with a printer on-site, or keeping a large-scale printer on standby in the event that it looks like you are to run out.

    The maths isn't exactly difficult---with sufficient historical data, one learns all that's necessary in high school, at least down my way.

    That said, we have compulsory voting down our way (Australia), so it's not really an issue that comes up. For that matter, does the risk of printing ~600 sheets of paper too many matter that much? It shouldn't be a problem.

  7. Cryptographic verification by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't get. We have had, in theory, the protocols to make cryptographically secure verifiable & anonymous e-voting for years now, and yet it hasn't been implemented.

    A bunch of hungover CS undergrads with 24 hours till their deadline, would come up with a better e-voting implementation than the hopelessly naive excuses spewed up by diebold et al.

    1. Re:Cryptographic verification by cfortin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, no we don't.

      Its the verifiable & anonymous that's hard. Perhaps you have a point if you assume that the machines are working as intended, the programs written correctly, and the code running on the machines is the same that was certified.

      Maintaining formal control over evoting machines, given the number of district and varying forms uses, can't help but cost orders of magnitude more than just using paper votes with an electronic counter, like they do here in RI.

      Diabold shows what happens whenever cost-to-impliment-correctly is significantly more than cost-to-look-like-you-satisfied-the-contract.

    2. Re:Cryptographic verification by mounthood · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      tomorrow who's gonna fuss
  8. Re:ballot box stuffing by avdp · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:End of the secret ballot! contradiction??? by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Pre-printed ballots have a security code on them (otherwise anyone with a decent photocopier could make 100 of them).

    It's theoretically possible to link the ballot number to the person but quite hard.

    The worst are postal ballots are 100% traceable, and 0% verifiable. In the UK they forced postal ballots on us for a couple of years (closed the polling stations) - you had to fill in your vote then sign and date the form!! So much for anonymous ballots... (only ref. I can find these days is an old blog: http://postalvoting.blogspot.com/)

    The practice was stopped, luckily. It was found people were stealing/buying unused ballot forms and sending them in bunches to influence the vote (the whole husband/wife thing came out.. with no anonymous voting the pressure on one person to vote the same as their spouse was extremely strong).

  10. Re:Our new hanging chads. by VGPowerlord · · Score: 2, Funny

    PC Load Letter?! WTF does that mean?!

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  11. You don't know in advance by mudetroit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  12. Session token by tepples · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How do you tell which ballots are fake??

    So you're talking about a replay attack, where someone reuses a challenge (blank ballot) to stuff a box with multiple responses (filled-in ballots). Here, we thwart replay attacks with a session token.

    Each polling place has a pair of public and private keys, such as RSA or ECC. Each ballot is printed with a barcode containing a session token. The token includes a code representing the polling place, a ballot serial number, and possibly some other information, along with an encrypted hash of this information. The counter looks for ballots whose decrypted hash does not match the hash of the cleartext and tosses those out as spoiled. Then it looks for ballots with duplicate serial numbers and chooses one randomly from each set.

  13. This is Florida by stimuli · · Score: 2, Funny

    Speaking as a Floridian, I think folks are missing the obvious point here: this is Florida, and we'll certainly screw it up.

  14. A few things people are missing by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.