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"Congratulations, you have invented the most expansive pencil"

In France we don't actually write anything. When we enter the room we're given one paper per candidate with the name and logo printed clearly. Once in the voting booth we put one or none in the enveloppe. That's it. Problem solved.

How do you verify your vote is counted correctly and not made up? Having the voting ledger would be cool - you could verify with the "transaction id" and how it's recorded.

There is no way to implement verifiable voting which is not vulnerable to voter coercion. If you can verify your vote, so can the person threatening you.

The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.

Through process verification.

I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand elections are monitored by the Electoral Commission who employ people to watch every step of the process. In addition every political party is entitled to send scrutineers to polling places and the count. The boxes are shown to the scrutineers who verify it to be empty, then sealed. The boxes are never taken out of sight. Every step of the process is under multiple eyes.

This seems to work well. It's possible to double vote by visiting multiple stations but in practice this is rare. It does happen but the electoral commission do analysis on the votes to ensure it didn't affect the outcome. Those responsible are prosecuted.

That is also a solved problem. Polling places are only opened where representatives of all* candidates can be present plus sworn officials.

And if you think about it, you actually don't want to check that _your_ vote has been counted.

*reasonable exceptions exists

Same in Russia, but we also given bottle of vodka with candidate name.

Is it good quality vodka?

Interesting. What do you do with the other ones?

For example at the last presidential election last year there were 11 candidates, so there was a table with (simplifying) a pile of envelopes, 11 piles of papers (one for each candidate). Generally people don't take the whole 12 items with them. You would pick randomly between 2 or 11 papers (depending on your sense of theatrics) and the papers you're left with after the voting booth, in my case I crumble them and throw them in a bin. Crumbled paper can't be counted. Some people keep them in their pockets until they get home.

In Spain is the same. But political parties send you also a copy and an envelope. So you can bring your ballot from home.

If the envelope contains more than one vote, but all are the same, it counts as one. If the envelop contains more than one vote but they are different it does not count.

In the voting school there are randomly chosen citizens and party representatives that identify the voters, all adults must have a national ID, and count the votes.

It works, and it will need a massive amount of people to change a significant amount of votes.

It seems Spain and France have the exact same system.

I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve.

If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them.

A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.

> If it makes all ballots look alike

Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different?

> If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote

No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.

> Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different?

Yeah, they definitely are. People mark them all sorts of ways.

I think that referred to the suggestion of printing every ballot after the user selects their choice on the machine.

> Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different?

Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.

There's no need for any sort of automation.

Look at the last Russian election, there were a lot of districts where busy hands produced a lot more votes than the number of real people that actually showed up to vote. (Russian voting stations have live video feeds, and Polish journalists sat down to count the number of people who voted, and then compare that to the officially reported votes.)

Or the counts could have been simply altered as they were reported. Complaining, reporting would get people an unwanted visit, so why bother?

I guess my main concern from an election perspective is where no one is sure if the election is legitimate. There's not much you can do for this perspective when people know the election isn't legitimate, but are forced to accept the results for other sociopolitical reasons.

What kinds of scenarios can you imagine when enough people call an election's legitimacy into question and somehow machines (and the log files or other data) could resolve it?

> If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this.

Maybe. But keep in mind that they know how many people voted at a given venue. So it's not sufficient to simply add a bunch of ballots, you also have to remove and destroy the same number of legitimate ballots. Maybe the ballots will be timestamped/marked in some way that can't easily be faked? Then you have to use an actual machine, and space out the ballots so it doesn't look suspicious.

> A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.

That's certainly a concern, especially if the ballots are marked as I mentioned above.

> It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle"

Should people who screw up their votes that much even get their votes counted? Maybe these problems are filtering out people whose votes shouldn't be counted in the first place. If they don't understand the (very simple) mechanics of the voting process, I can't imagine how they can understand politics enough to make an intelligent vote.

Also, by the same logic, they could botch what they touch on the screen anyway, and the output of the machine wouldn't give us any insight into what happened during that process.

Sure, we can come up with all sorts of reasons why various groups' votes "shouldn't be counted". Or we could live in a pluralistic democracy where the right to vote is fundamental enough that we expend some effort making sure it works for everyone.

This is in my opinion, a solved problem. Us Brits have numerous rules around how paper ballots are marked & counted, for example - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/06/vote-with-a...

The fact is, in any election, you only get a few people marking papers like this. At the final local counts, the total spoiled, unmarked, etc. ballot counts are read out as separate totals. Very rarely is this total a number that has any affect on the overall outcome. Average rejection rate of ballot papers is around 0.28%. In those rare instances where it's that close to matter, there would be recounts & additional checks against those spoiled ballots.

As a side note, it baffles me that any country would ever not have simple paper ballots with pens/pencils. Pens are safest IMO & pencils should probably be discouraged, I don't personally agree with the (generally historic) reasons for pencils being preferred.

Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day and any issues will lead to people having to wait longer or not being able to vote at all.

Which you can already see happening in areas where voting machines are used. This is especially problematic if specific regions with known political majorities can be targeted and sabotaged.

There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher or an overhauled ballot design.

Even just keeping the problems that exist with paper ballots beats any risk that introducing electronics in the process pose.

> Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day

That's fair, but if that happens, we have a very gentle fallback to just manually marking the ballots again.

> There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher

I direct your attention to the state of Florida, November 2000.

What's the point?