Regardless of the benefits of the early tally, you're dead on about the number of ballots that are simply not marked correctly. By using a machine to catch such errors (HEY... WE DIDN'T REGISTER A VOTE BECAUSE YOU CROSSED OUT THE GUY YOU DIDN'T WANT INSTEAD OF FILLING IN THE OVAL FOR THE ONE YOU WANTED), you eliminate a huge number of questions about "voter intent," which is something that a hand count might not be able to definitively assess. This also includes from voting for more candidates than the contest allows, voting for the same person twice in a "Vote for Two" contest where that candidate is cross-filed, and other fun stuff (that varies from state to state).
There are a whole lot of things that pen and paper can't do, but the "let's go back to paper" crowd doesn't like to complicate matters with "real world" issues like that. Similarly, you have the whole issue of voter disenfranchisement for people with various accessibility needs, few of which are adequately addressed by non-electronic systems.
More specifically, because of the provisions of HAVA, the DOJ becomes involved if there is a question of voters who have various disabilities being denied the right to vote in the same manner as those without said disabilities. For example, can someone who is blind use a lever machine without assistance? What about an optical scan machine?
Ultimately, the solution that NY City proposed created regional voting centers for people with accessibility needs, what they informally called "Plan B" for HAVA compliance. The DOJ provisionally allowed this, but most people watching the situation were convinced that it would be a disaster for people with disabilities to be asked to use only one accessible system per borough in NY city.
Anyone who stops and thinks about this could have seen this was a flawed approach, but it became a matter of $$ as much as anything else, because purchasing machines that provided for the needs of accessible voters in each precinct, while complying with other NY-specific provisions (like presenting a "full face" ballot), would have cost something in the neighborhood of $1000-5000 per precinct (depending on which vendor system they selected).
I suggested that he is the "REAL AMERICAN HERO." After all, he now has his own ultimate grilling machine, his own TV show, can wear a fanny pack to the gym and not be ridiculed, and has the perfect way to deal with male pattern baldness.
Did Slaughter ever give us the demandments: train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself, be true to your country be a real American? Have you seen Slaughter lately? Would a REAL AMERICAN allow himself to fall into such a state of disrepair?
Thank you for posting one of the more coherent comments in this thread.
Even more unimpressive is the dramatic lack of understanding of the complexity of various state's laws with regard to voting (for example, many states require specific and repeatable candidate ordering), and the lack of understanding of how easily the average voter is overwhelmed by the least complexity (many voters are barely able to follow the simplest instructions such as "Vote for One," and "Mark only in the oval").
A system that results a piece of paper, whether that paper is optically scanned or hand-counted, and doesn't contain any other extraneous marks or numbers, holds the most promise for achieving something meaningful. In the meantime, there is so little voter angst over DRE (and what angst exists is frequently accompanied by conspiracy theories galore, which sound plausible, but are much less common in the real world than simple stupidity), and so much love for the systems within the various state legislatures, we're not likely to see changes of any magnitude for a long time.
BTW, systems that just print a receipt that the voter can hand-carry out of the polling place are strictly prohibited in some states, regardless of the technology you use to dress it up.
OK... ignoring the "good God" or "bad God" arguments...
First, there is no indication that they DIDN'T eat from the Tree Of Life (TOL) or shouldn't, per Gen 2:16-17.
Chapter 3 goes on to describe eating from the Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil (TOKOGAE). After doing so, they see themselves in a different way than they did before, and as a result, they get the boot from the garden.
Eating from TOKOGAE lead to an awareness (of self, of evil, of...?) which lead to getting the boot from the garden. Is it the knowledge of good & evil that earned them the boot, or the disobedience? The text doesn't say. There's no indication that they didn't eat from the TOL, and in fact they were told that everything *except* the TOKOGAE was good for food, and should be eaten.
OK... I don't read that story literally either, but technically, eating from the tree DID cause them to die, albeit not directly (as in, not a poison tree). Sometimes, what we know, does in fact bring about our demise. There is a tendency to read what the snake said and what God said and require that they be incongruent, but I've not seen it that way.
Taken that way, the entire story has a bit more depth, but still makes more sense (to me) as allegory.
Excellent point. Bartender, vacuum tubes... all around!
However, the number of vacuum tubes necessary to provide full voting support for the visually or physically impaired, takes a bit of power, and it's kinda cumbersome the way they fill up the room. So let's strike them off the list.
Likewise, doing reliable scanning of hand marked (and mismarked) ballots in an optical scanner requires either a bunch of hard-coded crap, or a whole lotta vacuum tubes to interpret all the variations of "completely filled in" that the average human is capable of.
Then there's the nasty problem of the hundreds of ballot styles that you may have within a given county, and the nasty complexity of counting all those bad boys between the primary, the almost-certain runoff election, and the subsequent general election. For reasonably large counties, we're gonna need a few hundred volunteers to hand-count them, or a library full of vacuum tubes (and a mountain of wire, and several man-years of programming in the ballot logic, and then there's the referendums that they always add at the last minute...).
Unless you're a single-city company, you're unlikely to get the kind of support from a white-box vendor. Again, it's not that you can't get it, it's that you can't get a blank-box easily.
With "Sure, the large vendors may make it tricky to buy a system without Windows...," you made the parent's point.
If I want to buy a name-brand box (so I can get the benefit of support for hardware issues, or so I can keep a consistent hardware platform across my company), it's very, very hard to do this. There are channels, but Microsoft has made sure that they are not well publicized, and has slapped the hands of vendors who have not played according to the rules (by bumping up the license fees, or put clauses in the license agreements to the same effect).
When you say "No one forces anyone to buy an OS with a PC...," the answer is what about the major PC manufacturers? For all intents and purposes, they do exactly that.
It seems to me that the GP didn't say that the high price made stealing OK. They merely said that reducing the price would reduce piracy. Look at AutoCAD. You can make a very strong argument that one of the primary reasons for its market position is because they looked the other way at piracy, while keeping the price ridiculously high. They got market share from piracy, and outrageous revenue from "honest" users.
Yeah, but sadly, you have to use the Task Manager all the time, because most of the included apps don't shut down when you close the window, in sharp contrast to app behavior on Windows.
Both of my sons tend to close windows on Mac applications, thinking that it's shut down the app. Then I point out to them that they've got 10 applications running, even though they think they have one. I sit down at an XP machine, and this issue goes away. Why does it reappear with more than half of the standard apps on my PPC-6700? Why does the thing sometimes get so unresponsive that I have waited 10 seconds for the screen to "come to life" from standby, only to determine that the thing has probably locked up, and rebooted it. (I tried calling it, just to make sure that it wasn't sleeping with the backlight off. No response.)
I would posit that it is virtually impossible for Apple to make a worse OS for a phone than WM5. All I can say good about it is that it's supposed to be better than the version before. THAT must have been painful. - Tim
Then again, you could be using a PPC-6700, running Windows Mobile 5.0, and not be able to sync with MS Exchange because of security certificate issues (assuming that you don't want to run OWA without a cert). Given that the mail interface is SMPT/POP and IMAP4 compatible, the lack of Outlook built-in appears to be a plus to me, particularly since I wouldn't be stuck with the absolutely worthless web browser that comes with WM5. - Tim
Sounds like you're describing the "Monoculture of Faith" that I've blogged about here, and here. I see it as a horrible byproduct of closed minds, but happens in church as well as any other social grouping. - Tim
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS?
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
If I am installing the same version of the OS (minus all the Dell add-ons), how would it not be? All I'm doing is effectively reinstalling the OS with the same license.
I'm not suggesting anything that deprives Dell of any $$, or MS for that matter. I build all our work systems from a base image, captured after doing just such an install. I can't see anything in the SLA that I'm missing, but INAL, so depriving Dell's bedfellows from slowing down my machine may in some obscure way violate it.
I'm not losing sleep over this.:-D
Tim
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS?
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
I should clarify.
All Dell laptops of similar vintage use the same license number for XP Pro.
All Dell desktops of similar vintage use the same number for XP Pro.
All Dell servers of similar vintage use the same number for Server 2003.
I would expect this to be the same for most OEMs, and to continue with Vista.
Tim
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS?
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
Actually, you don't.
Just use the XP license that Dell ships on every box it sells. They're all the same license number, regardless of the license that's on the shrink-wrap copy that MS ships with it.
Think about it. How would Dell mass manufacture all of those boxes, clearly built from images, and all of them have a unique license? No, they all use the exact same Dell license. If you scrape that off using RockXP (or something similar), you can install from an XP Install disk until the cows come home.
Guy Kawasaki would say the product has the "DICE factor." That is, it's:
Deep Indulgent Complete Elegant
Deep in terms of approachable depth. Kawasaki's example was "something that appeals to the shipmate working in the boiler room and the tourist up on the Promenade deck." Likewise many of the Canon consumer cameras, which a complete novice can use in full auto mode, but a pro can pick up and instantly go into full manual mode and do all sorts of creative things with it.
The rest of the acronyms are kinda self-evident, at least to iPod lovers.
1) Accessible voting that is independent and confidential
2) Electronic voting *can* guarantee a valid ballot (i.e. you can't overvote in a vote-for-3 contest, can't write-in a candidate multiple times in a vote-for-N contest)
3) Potential to eliminate counting errors
Of the three, I think the first two are definitely valid. The third is theoretical, as there is so much evidence of lousy counting in existing systems.
Is there anything "wrong" with paper? Listen to this, and decide for yourself:
http://www.nhpr.org/node/11788
For those of us without disabilities, voting independently and privately is a non-issue. Regardless of which vendor's accessible voting system is in place, the HAVA law was intended to address the exact situation this woman describes.
So tell me, how do you propose that someone who is blind be able to vote independently and privately?
YOU haven't addressed this, other than to throw the word INTEGRITY out a thousand times without being specific how the INTEGRITY of the process is harmed implicitly by technology.
HOW? HOW do you suggest that we do this without some level of technology?
Even then, there's no guarantee that Billy-Bob assisting me to vote is going to correctly mark the ballot in accordance with my intent. If my "trusted ballot marker" is a moron, I might not realize that he/she has marked my ballot in such a way that it's discarded. Did that protect the INTEGRITY of my vote? INTEGRITY was LOST because there is no way for me to KNOW! Do you not get that?
Again, HOW do you suggest that we address the needs of the disability community in the voting process? Regardless of your insults, you haven't shown yet that you truly understand the complexity of the situation.
So, back to INTEGRITY of process. If I, the voter, can confirm that my ballot is marked correctly, and I can do so anytime, at any place, would you agree that the integrity of the process is guaranteed? If the mechanism that provides this confirmation is sufficiently tested and verified, then that system can give me confidence in its INTEGRITY.
My votes are marked, I check that they are correct, and the system prevents me from voting in ways that are prohibited. Not only does this provide INTEGRITY for the voter (my votes are marked counted such that they accurately reflect voter intent), but it prevents intentional or accidental obstruction of the voting process by the voter, providing INTEGRITY that way too.
Did you miss the part where the VVPT guarantees INTEGRITY of the process for the voter? I think you must have missed that part. Did you miss that INTEGRITY of ballot marking can be guaranteed by an electronic voting system in a way that paper can't? (That is, the system just won't allow you to vote for 6 in a "vote for 5" contest, or other perversions of ballot intent.)
I've read my message several times, and at every stage, my comments addressed INTEGRITY of either side of the process. I find it highly unlikely that presenting the same information a different way will suddenly cause you to get this, but it's a Friday night, and Louisville is blowing out Middle Tenn., so I had time to waste.
Create paper that can't be incorrectly marked, and I might agree with you.
In that case, all in favor of candidate A, raise your right hand. Now, everyone hold still while I count, because this is the simplest thing that we can possibly do, and everyone knows that simpler is better! OK... all in favor of candidate B!
Oh... wait.
Someone held up their hand for two candidates in a vote-for-one. I've got more total votes here than we have voters.
Crap. And here I thought the simplest process served integrity best! Darn humans messing with the integrity of my simple process again...
The fundamental concept here that doesn't change is that people take the "make things as simple as possible..." and forget the other half that says "...but no simpler." Oddly enough, the simplest way to get to the moon isn't very simple. Lots of worthwhile things are complex, even in the simplest form.
BTW, one solution is to use technology as an electronic pencil to mark a ballot, and then count the paper. I doubt that it passes your "simple" test, but then, nothing you've suggested gives the voter independence and privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of the benefits of the early tally, you're dead on about the number of ballots that are simply not marked correctly. By using a machine to catch such errors (HEY... WE DIDN'T REGISTER A VOTE BECAUSE YOU CROSSED OUT THE GUY YOU DIDN'T WANT INSTEAD OF FILLING IN THE OVAL FOR THE ONE YOU WANTED), you eliminate a huge number of questions about "voter intent," which is something that a hand count might not be able to definitively assess. This also includes from voting for more candidates than the contest allows, voting for the same person twice in a "Vote for Two" contest where that candidate is cross-filed, and other fun stuff (that varies from state to state).
There are a whole lot of things that pen and paper can't do, but the "let's go back to paper" crowd doesn't like to complicate matters with "real world" issues like that. Similarly, you have the whole issue of voter disenfranchisement for people with various accessibility needs, few of which are adequately addressed by non-electronic systems.
Tim
More specifically, because of the provisions of HAVA, the DOJ becomes involved if there is a question of voters who have various disabilities being denied the right to vote in the same manner as those without said disabilities. For example, can someone who is blind use a lever machine without assistance? What about an optical scan machine?
Ultimately, the solution that NY City proposed created regional voting centers for people with accessibility needs, what they informally called "Plan B" for HAVA compliance. The DOJ provisionally allowed this, but most people watching the situation were convinced that it would be a disaster for people with disabilities to be asked to use only one accessible system per borough in NY city.
Anyone who stops and thinks about this could have seen this was a flawed approach, but it became a matter of $$ as much as anything else, because purchasing machines that provided for the needs of accessible voters in each precinct, while complying with other NY-specific provisions (like presenting a "full face" ballot), would have cost something in the neighborhood of $1000-5000 per precinct (depending on which vendor system they selected).
Tim
I think you're talking about NNS: Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority!
http://www.videoranch.com/html/NNSlarge.html
Tim
I didn't suggest that Hogan was a G.I.
I suggested that he is the "REAL AMERICAN HERO." After all, he now has his own ultimate grilling machine, his own TV show, can wear a fanny pack to the gym and not be ridiculed, and has the perfect way to deal with male pattern baldness.
Did Slaughter ever give us the demandments: train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself, be true to your country be a real American? Have you seen Slaughter lately? Would a REAL AMERICAN allow himself to fall into such a state of disrepair?
And you call yourself a patriot?
Tim
Tim
Thank you for posting one of the more coherent comments in this thread.
Even more unimpressive is the dramatic lack of understanding of the complexity of various state's laws with regard to voting (for example, many states require specific and repeatable candidate ordering), and the lack of understanding of how easily the average voter is overwhelmed by the least complexity (many voters are barely able to follow the simplest instructions such as "Vote for One," and "Mark only in the oval").
A system that results a piece of paper, whether that paper is optically scanned or hand-counted, and doesn't contain any other extraneous marks or numbers, holds the most promise for achieving something meaningful. In the meantime, there is so little voter angst over DRE (and what angst exists is frequently accompanied by conspiracy theories galore, which sound plausible, but are much less common in the real world than simple stupidity), and so much love for the systems within the various state legislatures, we're not likely to see changes of any magnitude for a long time.
BTW, systems that just print a receipt that the voter can hand-carry out of the polling place are strictly prohibited in some states, regardless of the technology you use to dress it up.
Tim
OK... ignoring the "good God" or "bad God" arguments...
First, there is no indication that they DIDN'T eat from the Tree Of Life (TOL) or shouldn't, per Gen 2:16-17.
Chapter 3 goes on to describe eating from the Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil (TOKOGAE). After doing so, they see themselves in a different way than they did before, and as a result, they get the boot from the garden.
Eating from TOKOGAE lead to an awareness (of self, of evil, of...?) which lead to getting the boot from the garden. Is it the knowledge of good & evil that earned them the boot, or the disobedience? The text doesn't say. There's no indication that they didn't eat from the TOL, and in fact they were told that everything *except* the TOKOGAE was good for food, and should be eaten.
What am I missing here?
OK... I don't read that story literally either, but technically, eating from the tree DID cause them to die, albeit not directly (as in, not a poison tree). Sometimes, what we know, does in fact bring about our demise. There is a tendency to read what the snake said and what God said and require that they be incongruent, but I've not seen it that way.
Taken that way, the entire story has a bit more depth, but still makes more sense (to me) as allegory.
Tim
Excellent point. Bartender, vacuum tubes... all around!
However, the number of vacuum tubes necessary to provide full voting support for the visually or physically impaired, takes a bit of power, and it's kinda cumbersome the way they fill up the room. So let's strike them off the list.
Likewise, doing reliable scanning of hand marked (and mismarked) ballots in an optical scanner requires either a bunch of hard-coded crap, or a whole lotta vacuum tubes to interpret all the variations of "completely filled in" that the average human is capable of.
Then there's the nasty problem of the hundreds of ballot styles that you may have within a given county, and the nasty complexity of counting all those bad boys between the primary, the almost-certain runoff election, and the subsequent general election. For reasonably large counties, we're gonna need a few hundred volunteers to hand-count them, or a library full of vacuum tubes (and a mountain of wire, and several man-years of programming in the ballot logic, and then there's the referendums that they always add at the last minute...).
...Debbie goes both ways? (Blu-ray and HD-DVD)
Tim
Unless you're a single-city company, you're unlikely to get the kind of support from a white-box vendor. Again, it's not that you can't get it, it's that you can't get a blank-box easily.
Tim
With "Sure, the large vendors may make it tricky to buy a system without Windows...," you made the parent's point.
If I want to buy a name-brand box (so I can get the benefit of support for hardware issues, or so I can keep a consistent hardware platform across my company), it's very, very hard to do this. There are channels, but Microsoft has made sure that they are not well publicized, and has slapped the hands of vendors who have not played according to the rules (by bumping up the license fees, or put clauses in the license agreements to the same effect).
When you say "No one forces anyone to buy an OS with a PC...," the answer is what about the major PC manufacturers? For all intents and purposes, they do exactly that.
Tim
It seems to me that the GP didn't say that the high price made stealing OK. They merely said that reducing the price would reduce piracy. Look at AutoCAD. You can make a very strong argument that one of the primary reasons for its market position is because they looked the other way at piracy, while keeping the price ridiculously high. They got market share from piracy, and outrageous revenue from "honest" users.
Sound familiar? - Tim
Yeah, but sadly, you have to use the Task Manager all the time, because most of the included apps don't shut down when you close the window, in sharp contrast to app behavior on Windows.
Both of my sons tend to close windows on Mac applications, thinking that it's shut down the app. Then I point out to them that they've got 10 applications running, even though they think they have one. I sit down at an XP machine, and this issue goes away. Why does it reappear with more than half of the standard apps on my PPC-6700? Why does the thing sometimes get so unresponsive that I have waited 10 seconds for the screen to "come to life" from standby, only to determine that the thing has probably locked up, and rebooted it. (I tried calling it, just to make sure that it wasn't sleeping with the backlight off. No response.)
I would posit that it is virtually impossible for Apple to make a worse OS for a phone than WM5. All I can say good about it is that it's supposed to be better than the version before. THAT must have been painful. - Tim
Then again, you could be using a PPC-6700, running Windows Mobile 5.0, and not be able to sync with MS Exchange because of security certificate issues (assuming that you don't want to run OWA without a cert). Given that the mail interface is SMPT/POP and IMAP4 compatible, the lack of Outlook built-in appears to be a plus to me, particularly since I wouldn't be stuck with the absolutely worthless web browser that comes with WM5. - Tim
Sounds like you're describing the "Monoculture of Faith" that I've blogged about here, and here. I see it as a horrible byproduct of closed minds, but happens in church as well as any other social grouping. - Tim
"After all, an inflexible plan is a bad plan."
Rummy? Is that you? How's unemployment?
If I am installing the same version of the OS (minus all the Dell add-ons), how would it not be? All I'm doing is effectively reinstalling the OS with the same license.
:-D
I'm not suggesting anything that deprives Dell of any $$, or MS for that matter. I build all our work systems from a base image, captured after doing just such an install. I can't see anything in the SLA that I'm missing, but INAL, so depriving Dell's bedfellows from slowing down my machine may in some obscure way violate it.
I'm not losing sleep over this.
Tim
I should clarify.
All Dell laptops of similar vintage use the same license number for XP Pro.
All Dell desktops of similar vintage use the same number for XP Pro.
All Dell servers of similar vintage use the same number for Server 2003.
I would expect this to be the same for most OEMs, and to continue with Vista.
Tim
Actually, you don't.
Just use the XP license that Dell ships on every box it sells. They're all the same license number, regardless of the license that's on the shrink-wrap copy that MS ships with it.
Think about it. How would Dell mass manufacture all of those boxes, clearly built from images, and all of them have a unique license? No, they all use the exact same Dell license. If you scrape that off using RockXP (or something similar), you can install from an XP Install disk until the cows come home.
Tim
Deep
Indulgent
Complete
Elegant
Deep in terms of approachable depth. Kawasaki's example was "something that appeals to the shipmate working in the boiler room and the tourist up on the Promenade deck." Likewise many of the Canon consumer cameras, which a complete novice can use in full auto mode, but a pro can pick up and instantly go into full manual mode and do all sorts of creative things with it.
The rest of the acronyms are kinda self-evident, at least to iPod lovers.
Tim
Three most-often quoted reasons:
1) Accessible voting that is independent and confidential
2) Electronic voting *can* guarantee a valid ballot (i.e. you can't overvote in a vote-for-3 contest, can't write-in a candidate multiple times in a vote-for-N contest)
3) Potential to eliminate counting errors
Of the three, I think the first two are definitely valid. The third is theoretical, as there is so much evidence of lousy counting in existing systems.
Is there anything "wrong" with paper? Listen to this, and decide for yourself:
http://www.nhpr.org/node/11788
For those of us without disabilities, voting independently and privately is a non-issue. Regardless of which vendor's accessible voting system is in place, the HAVA law was intended to address the exact situation this woman describes.
Tim
This may be the most accurate and insightful post I have ever read on any of the e-voting topics.
As for market share, I believe the parent poster is correct in placing the vendors:
1) ES&S
2) Sequoia
3) Deibold
However, it may be splitting hairs between 2 and 3.
Tim
So tell me, how do you propose that someone who is blind be able to vote independently and privately?
YOU haven't addressed this, other than to throw the word INTEGRITY out a thousand times without being specific how the INTEGRITY of the process is harmed implicitly by technology.
HOW? HOW do you suggest that we do this without some level of technology?
Even then, there's no guarantee that Billy-Bob assisting me to vote is going to correctly mark the ballot in accordance with my intent. If my "trusted ballot marker" is a moron, I might not realize that he/she has marked my ballot in such a way that it's discarded. Did that protect the INTEGRITY of my vote? INTEGRITY was LOST because there is no way for me to KNOW! Do you not get that?
Again, HOW do you suggest that we address the needs of the disability community in the voting process? Regardless of your insults, you haven't shown yet that you truly understand the complexity of the situation.
So, back to INTEGRITY of process. If I, the voter, can confirm that my ballot is marked correctly, and I can do so anytime, at any place, would you agree that the integrity of the process is guaranteed? If the mechanism that provides this confirmation is sufficiently tested and verified, then that system can give me confidence in its INTEGRITY.
My votes are marked, I check that they are correct, and the system prevents me from voting in ways that are prohibited. Not only does this provide INTEGRITY for the voter (my votes are marked counted such that they accurately reflect voter intent), but it prevents intentional or accidental obstruction of the voting process by the voter, providing INTEGRITY that way too.
Did you miss the part where the VVPT guarantees INTEGRITY of the process for the voter? I think you must have missed that part. Did you miss that INTEGRITY of ballot marking can be guaranteed by an electronic voting system in a way that paper can't? (That is, the system just won't allow you to vote for 6 in a "vote for 5" contest, or other perversions of ballot intent.)
I've read my message several times, and at every stage, my comments addressed INTEGRITY of either side of the process. I find it highly unlikely that presenting the same information a different way will suddenly cause you to get this, but it's a Friday night, and Louisville is blowing out Middle Tenn., so I had time to waste.
Create paper that can't be incorrectly marked, and I might agree with you.
Tim
In that case, all in favor of candidate A, raise your right hand. Now, everyone hold still while I count, because this is the simplest thing that we can possibly do, and everyone knows that simpler is better! OK... all in favor of candidate B!
Oh... wait.
Someone held up their hand for two candidates in a vote-for-one. I've got more total votes here than we have voters.
Crap. And here I thought the simplest process served integrity best! Darn humans messing with the integrity of my simple process again...
The fundamental concept here that doesn't change is that people take the "make things as simple as possible..." and forget the other half that says "...but no simpler." Oddly enough, the simplest way to get to the moon isn't very simple. Lots of worthwhile things are complex, even in the simplest form.
BTW, one solution is to use technology as an electronic pencil to mark a ballot, and then count the paper. I doubt that it passes your "simple" test, but then, nothing you've suggested gives the voter independence and privacy.