Texans say voting machines changing straight-ticket choices
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> In a statement to supporters Friday, Cruz cited “multiple reports” of race selections changing and added “once you select the Republican party ticket, please be patient and do not select ‘next’ until the ballot has populated all of the selections.”
It reminds me of an era of "Please don't press 'Buy' twice or your credit card could be charged again."
And, any kind of real QA should have / would have caught this. Anything simulating a real user.
Leaving me with no confidence whatsoever in the design, engineering, and manufacturing of this system. This problem leaves no room for benefit of the doubt.
That reminds me of the Therac-25: "They determined that data entry speed during editing was the key factor in producing the error condition: If the prescription data was edited at a fast pace (as is natural for someone who has repeated the procedure a large number of times), the overdose occurred." (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf)
This. Even a humble accountant usually reverses entry errors immediately, yet this critical input was harder to double check.
The state of Texas should sue Hart eSlate and cite the Therac-25 story to argue that 30 years later, anyone halfway competent should know how to avoid race conditions in a user interface.
Preset values AND slow updates can't be excused like this.
That will solve all the immediate issues. Think of it as the equivalent of taking down a compromised server.
Then, companies that make those things can go back to the drawing table, actually think about what they're making this time, and try to convince us all that they did it right. It'll take a lot of convincing, and that's exactly how it should be. For starters, I'd want to hear about the exact problem being solved.
What would it take to make this happen? It feels like something that would carry more weight if the initial push came from the IT industry. People will listen better to something like, "I'm a software engineer with 20 years of experience, and in my educated opinion, electronic voting should be banned."
A main problem with voting machines is that they are a form of outsourcing of a government function which is critical to our society and our form of government. If we are to have machines, those producing them must be held accountable.
That wouldn't necessarily fix this particular issue (machines with bad UI selecting the wrong candidates), but at least it's easy for a voter to determine if something went wrong if the paper ballot is marked incorrectly.
Pencil and paper are boring and cheap. If your job is just to ensure the state buys enough pencils how do you justify an extra $25 000 next year? When voters insist they want to elect the deputy car wash attendants (another American trait - "democracy is good, therefore electing people is good, so the more elected officers the better") you just add another page to the printed ballot. No opportunity to innovate with auto-filling 600 separate elections from one party line decision.
Our system is a little different, here every citizen is mailed a “ticket” they can exchange for the voting ballot in the weeks leading up to the election. If yours is lost in the mail, no worry, we can print you a new one, and you can’t really use someone else’s because it has your name on it and we check.
In every ticket there is a barcode that we scan, to speed handing the out ballots up, this also counts the amount of voters, and that’s the digital part of the election. It’s also the most burdensome, so this is where digitisation saves us time.
The voting is done on paper and counted in hand, and checked with the amounts who have passed through the digital system, if it’s off by more than 1-3 votes there is a recount until it fits.
The counting takes a few hours at each location, but it’s done by the same people who’ve worked the voting place all day to ensure the safety of democracy, so it’s not really that expensive or inefficient.
And that’s not accounting for the cost of voting machines. The digital part of our elections is the most expensive part of the process, because digital systems are expensive.
We use them because they add convenience for the citizens since they eliminate queues, but it would actually be much cheaper to do the whole process on paper.
I’m not sure why America ever installed digital voting machines, but I can’t see any reason to do so. Especially not some that don’t leave a paper trail.
Because companies that make them lobbied state governments to use them. Usually by pitching various fraudulent claims, like "it's cheaper" and "it's safer" - but, of course, what really talks is money:
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article213558729.htm...
Keep in mind that here in US, even when it comes to the federal elections, the states are the ones that run them, and they have a lot of leeway in doing so. Thus you see a very wide spectrum, all the way from the craziness described in this article, to states like mine where all ballots are paper and election is handled by mail. Similar with voter registration and identifying voters.
It doesn't have to be that way - Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.". But they don't really use this power much; two prominent examples are the federal law that mandates single-member districts (which is bad, because it prevents states from experimenting with other electoral systems), and the law to establish a single voting day (which is Tuesday, because said law dates 170 years back, when primary consideration was to accommodate people travelling to polling places from remote locations by foot or by horse). Given the importance of federal politics these days, I think it's long overdue for much more stringent regulations to set a baseline that guarantees free and fair elections.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/why-is-ballot-coun...
Population of California: 39 million.
I really don't get why it's so hard for more people to get behind, other than the whole, trying to prevent certain groups from voting.
Yes, it's those stupid users' fault, of course.
Where I come from, data corruption is the worst severity of bug. If you see an input selection as data, this is clearly a data corruption severity.
Such machines should have all the fences to make sure whatever stupid thing you might do, it should still recover and work as intended.
Electronic gambling devices are intensely code reviewed. It's the law. Why not electronic voting machines?
That said, paper ballots and hand counting are the answer for secure and accurate vote counts.
One reason could be if the people who would legislate on this benefit when voting machines don't work properly?
Hand counts aren't particularly accurate. Change that to paper ballots counted by optical scanners with some clever ballot design using cryptographic techniques to allow voters to verify that their vote was included correctly in the count and to allow independent third party auditing of the results, and then you have a secure and accurate system.
One way to do that is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
Citation? Hand counts are as accurate as you want them to be. Just keep counting.
The problem with any form of voting that allows you to verify your vote was counted correctly, is that anyone can verify you voted 'correctly'.
The only way to ensure a fair election is to vote by paper ballot and have the count executed by anyone who wants to participate.
That's not correct. There are several systems that let you verify your ballot was included in the count and the count is correct, which together show that your vote was counted correctly, without letting anyone verify who specifically you voted for. See Punchscan, Prêt à Voter, and Scantegrity II for examples.
Look at the research literature under end to end auditable voting systems [1] for more on this topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
Pen and paper.
With simple hand counted paper ballots, the voter has no way of knowing that the chain of custody of their ballot was not compromised.
By enhancing the paper ballots with cryptographic techniques, we can make it so that lapses in the chain of custody do not allow tampering with the election results. We can make it so we only need observers from all parties observing at specific places in the process, which is much more practical. We can make it so the voter can know that their vote did it make it into the total and it was counted correctly. We can make it so we can have a fast machine count, but still have a paper trail that supports a hand recount, and we can do this in a way that allows outside independent checking of the machine count.
Put another way: the way you protect against the subversion or deception of very few humans is to build a system that by design requires very many humans to be involved.
> In a large election it is a big challenge to ensure that independent observers from all parties are present every place someone could potentially tamper with ballots in storage or in transit between the time they are cast (especially in jurisdictions where polls are open a long time) and are counted and the count is folded into the overall total.
Australia has done it this way for most of a century.
It's easy. Candidates are highly motivated to provide scrutineers because they distrust each other. And the rules require scrutineers to be present and cross-sign to assemble or open ballot boxes.
> With simple hand counted paper ballots, the voter has no way of knowing that the chain of custody of their ballot was not compromised.
With a software solution, no voter has a way of knowing if their vote and everyone else's vote has been counted correctly, unless ... you do verification by hand.
Seriously.
Pen and paper. It works. It's safe at scale. Everyone understands it. The US is not a special case.
It's actually pretty easy: Count the ballots at the polling place immediately after the polls close. That leaves no opportunity to leave them unguarded. Publish the results of each place so everyone can reproduce how they are summed up.
In that case, there is a simple way to do it. Just publish a list of all ballets (by random ID) and their matching votes (by another random ID). No math needed.
If similar review and certification was required, states would throw their hands up at the cost and just opt for optically scanned paper ballots.
I imagine that it is very hard to convince someone that was elected with electronic voting machines that there is a problem with electronic voting machines.
There's an article[0] with a powerful quote on the subject: "There is no one election in the United States, there are thousands of independent elections. ... They’re run with their own policies, and their own processes, and, frankly, in a lot of ways, their own vocabulary."
Machines are usually bought by local jurisdictions. Some states cover the costs for all elections; some for only some elections; over 6 cover nothing. In any case, local jurisdictions are faced with a conundrum: do we spend money for something that's used only a couple days a year, or fund more immediately beneficial programs (roads, aid programs, etc.)? Budgets can't even keep up with replacing equipment, let alone thorough code and security reviews. Assuming the administrators even recognize what kind of work needs done. It's outside their experience, and when you start considering the kind of attack vectors that freaking nation states can literally create, even the best efforts of well-intentioned election officials are going to be wholly insufficient. And when nation states that are willing to put in the effort are the threat you're protecting against, everything changes.
Individual states are unlikely to try and setup the kind of review that you're looking at. Or--possibly--even realize that they need to. It's expensive, and the people they're relying on to inform them about these matters are often the people selling the machines. Worse, you're looking at at least 50 separate efforts to secure voting machines. They may, or may not, somehow wind up coordinating with each other. The federal government could, but states guard their control over elections fiercely: just look at how almost all of them told the Obama administration to go pound sand when DHS warned them of potential hacking attempts.
Unless there's a major, undeniable breach, I don't expect much to change anytime soon in most states. Even then, we'll probably see a shift to paper ballots rather than the sort of hideously expensive expenditures needed for the sort of rigorous IT security efforts we now know are necessary for electronic voting in the current threat environment. Otherwise, we'll be lucky to see piecemeal incremental improvements when individual states get around to them.
0. https://www.propublica.org/article/election-security-a-high-...
A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.
I still think they should be paper, but those are the reasons.
For security however, after punching the numbers into the laptop, ballots are re-sealed into the urn and physically sent to the electoral authority, where in the following days public officers count them manually again. There has never been any meaningful deviation detected to date.
This way, you have the security of paper ballots (they are on sight of party volunteers at all times) with the speed of electronic vote aggregation.
This gives the system its agility. Our recent presidential election had a reliable statistical advance (PREP) at 23:00 the same day, and the next day every single vote of every remote booth was fully accounted, and the result confirmed the PREP.
The Mexican electoral system is surprisingly effective, yet we have the same core problem of democracy: we need better candidates and less gullible voters :/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mexico/comments/9rcyyt/ah_caray_no_...
Voting machines are just plain stupid.
You fill in the center of the arrow for who you're voting for, and there's an entry at the bottom for writen-ins. Afterwards this is scanned by a machine and the paper put in storage.
There are, however, concerns about coercion. Always tradeoffs.
Fast results, but still hand-verifiable.
The funny thing is that, when we go to a polling place on election day, we will almost always get a paper ballot to be used with an optical scan reader. This system actually hits me as an ideal: the electronic reader can be simpler and fairly decoupled from other systems, and each voter will leave a paper trail that should clearly indicate their intent. Admittedly, the electronic readers we use are probabally insecure and awful, but the concept hits me as fairly reasonable.
In this case, we are in the early voting period, and there are a reduced number of polling places - and each polling place can be used by any voter in that county, which means that voters might be (and probabally are) voting on slightly different races and using slightly different ballots. These machines remove the need for the early polling places to have a lot of valid paper ballots on hand while still allowing each voter to see and vote in all races they would be able to vote in on election day.
It's actually a fairly good use of voting machines, even if it would be nice if the machines were something other than terrible.
I've lived and voted in Austin for 15 years and have never seen a single paper ballot. Our voting machines are, and have been, simple screens with a scrolly-wheel interface. They produce no paper record for you to review or deposit anywhere.
This would, to me, seem to be a minimum requirement for anyone to have any belief that their vote has been counted correctly.
http://www.kut.org/post/travis-county-voters-are-getting-vot...
When I arrive, they ask for my ID (i.e., passport), look up my registered address, and the computer automatically prints out the correct set of ballots, and an envelope with the correct return address. I take them to the voting booth, stamp on the candidates I like, put the ballots into the envelope, seal the envelope, and put it in a box, and later all the envelopes in the box will be sorted and sent to the correct district so that they can be counted at the actual election day.
It's 2018, folks. This isn't magic.
they ask for my ID
This really upset a lot of people and they wanted _something_ to be done. A lot of people naively felt computerizing it would automatically fix everything. They were wrong, but that's how we got here.
George Bush vs. Al Gore and the hanging chads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
After the election the rallying cry was the losing side was that the human factor should be eliminated in order to have pristine elections.
Of course, we all know that electronic voting machines are still made by humans.
The end.
The state should also be refunded the full cost of a redo in every district.
This is a problem with the machine and the people who made it, not the people using it. "User error" is usually an poor excuse for lazy and/or bad design.
I asked her if she wanted my help to go back and finish her ballot. She declined, saying she'd managed the vote for President and that was all she really cared about.
Looks like NC is going to switch machines soon:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/articl...
And people internalize this stuff! When poorly-written software does something unexpected, they blame themselves, calling themselves "stupid" or "not good with computers". It's not you, it's us!
So, they fail Voter Verified Paper Trail (https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48). In this case, it doesn't matter what ever you see on the final page, what is stored in the computer can't be audited. It's been 15 years since technologists have been stating that we need a voter verified paper trail.
Why is this such a complicated problem? There doesn't seem to be any many issues to consider when designing the interface, logic, and storage for one of these machines. I feel like many programmers could develop something like this in a matter of hours.
I can imagine some issues if you try to introduce networking, but I don't see any reason why networking should be necessary. Just keep it simple.
Many people advocate for paper and pencil because of it's simplicity, but it should be obvious why that is potentially a much more complicated solution. It relies on humans to record and later read a large amount of information delivered in small chunks. Humans are terrible at that! Getting a machine to read data from the printed page hardly seems any more trivial. That's not even to mention the potential issues that arise from managing the large amount of physical voting cards.
If anyone has worked on one of these machines, I'd be very interested to hear their thoughts on the matter.
Because a software/hardware solution is inherently inscrutable to the overwhelming majority of the population. It's amenable to hacking and not amenable to auditing.
The problem is NOT "build a zero-stakes voting web app", it's more like "build a voting machine which ensures the voter can audit their vote and election auditors can audit election tallies with full transparency, and with a threat model of people trying to hack the voting machines to control election results". Getting better than pencil, scannable paper ballots, and auditors from all (political) parties involved in that election to cover vote counting / recounts –– that's the really, really hard part.
When I vote, it is my understanding that when I stuff my paper ballot into the box (or sometimes even just hand it over to someone), I am forced to trust the staff to account for my vote. Personally, I don't feel like I'm any more protected against bad actors by using pencil-and-paper.
The only truly-auditable solution I can think of is to have everyone make their vote public, but that is obviously not a reasonable solution.
At your polling place, you count the number of ballots going into each urn, and you count the number of ballots coming out of each urn when voting is over. You do a preliminary counting of the ballots, and then they get put back into the urns, that are then sealed, and sent off to some central place for a second counting.
So at every step there are multiple eyes on all pieces, and there are many points where you can discover discrepancies that might indicate cheating. And you can have as many observers as you like at any part of the process, from opposing political parties. So you use their distrust of each other to create trust in the process.
We could have a solution where the hardware and software are developed independently and both include logic to independently verify the other's authenticity... but that's still open to attack vectors (however difficult they may be).
All that said, the urn system you described does not reflect any experience I've had. I've always been asked to fill out a single paper form with choices for multiple offices and submit the form to either a ballot box or a worker at the polling location. That complicates the tallying process, but I can definitely see how it is still easier to audit than a voting machine.
Political distrust only goes so far, because winning elections tends to give you more control over the government, which in turn allows you to manipulate elections so that you continue to win them. On the local level, the opposition party often diminishes to the point where not only do they lack the manpower and organization to effectively even contest elections, but the national party effectively abandons the area entirely.
In banana republics, sure, in civilized countries, not so much.
> On the local level, the opposition party
Again, I'm sorry the US has the incredibly shitty first-past-the-post election shit, because that is the cause of the inevitable two-party system shit.
If the US had a better representative democracy, this wouldn't be a problem.
However, even with the situation you describe, it should be possible to guess which districts will be the closest in margin, and make sure you put more eyes on those districts, in favor of districts that are sure to go either way. That's good enough to secure the election result.
It's not just the US; it's every English-speaking country except New Zealand. Proportional representation doesn't really stop governments from manipulating their elections either--for example, the Russian Duma has proportional representation.
Many places do this.
Can't you just stay and watch the process?
I have just watched a video recently posted on youtube showing the innards of the Brazilian electronic ballot (which will be used for the 2nd turn elections on the whole country this Sunday): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI (unfortunately, in Portuguese only). He mentions some issues, for instance reliability: with tens of thousands of these devices, some will break, and you must be able to replace the device without losing votes. The device must be resistant to vandalism. The votes must be scrambled after each ballot so that it's not possible to discover who you voted for after the fact. For the same reason, it must be hard to insert a keylogger registering the keypresses. The central counting must be auditable. And so on.
YET someone that is barred from voting, someone that did jail time typically, is thrown in the fucking slammer for one vote cast (and they typically didn't even know they were not allowed to).
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
>If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways.
Bargl gave a counter-example, showing that a lack of bi-directional changes doesn't place such constraints on the possible nature of the problem.
> I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent and in this case a Republican. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
He wasn't claiming that the defaults must be relevant, only that they could be relevant.
With paper ballots, I know that there's no way my selection was changed before it was given to the poll worker (who is subject to public observation). With voting machines, I have no idea what the poll worker received.
Thankfully we can be sure that our votes have not been compromised in the past and there are no actors in the system who might benefit from avoiding looking into possible compromises.
Oh wait..
What motivation do they have to fix a system that put them in office in the first place? (hint: none, there is no motivation)
If you do early voting, you can only vote electronically. If you vote on election day, you can choose a paper ballot if you wish. Early voting is electronic only because you can vote anywhere in the city (if you work downtown you can do so on your lunch break no matter where in the city you live) and there are dozens of different ballots because we vote on things at the neighborhood level in addition to state and national candidates. Having paper ballots would be quite challenging.
Pretty much the only option.
Of course voter intimidation is a threat, but that doesn't have anything to do with the process of casting and counting ballots.
It's not impossible to change votes on an individual level, but all the attacks against it don't scale at all.
How many votes do you need to sway an election? There are about 50 precincts in my county, which is one of 67 counties in my state.
Even if you somehow manage to rig each precinct flawlessly, that's still a lot of people that have to know about the rigging, over a pretty large area, and not one of them can get caught or the whole thing is over.
And if the elections are done right, there should be a number of people from the public at each precinct watching those ballot boxes all day, counting along when tallying votes, and ensuring nobody casts more than one vote or tampers with the box. Hell, you don't even need to speak english or have gone to high school to help secure an election like this, literally anyone can do it.
Paper ballots don't break down, they don't have glitches, they don't require 24/7/365 security to prevent tampering, they don't require nearly as many ballot workers or helpers, they can't "underestimate" voter turnout and only have 2 machines in a precinct to make people not want to wait hours to vote, and they aren't going to be able to be hacked by one guy at the dock yard alone with a shipping container full of voting machines.
It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than voting machines, mechanical or electronic.
Nothing will change until something scares people enough to make them take action.
It seems like there should be some sort of nationwide ActBlue campaign to specifically focus on whatever Sec-Of-State races are relevant for that election season.
If this is really user error, the simplest solution for this is for half the machines to place the republican straight ticket first on the wheel, and on the other half, to place the democrat straight ticket first.
But somehow I think that level of fair-mindedness will be unlikely. (BTW, I lived in TX for a bit, so my jaundice was fairly earned.)
Shouldn't allow selections until they've all loaded.
And what are the incentives for using voting machines? They are harder to verify than people from multiple parties counting lines drawn on a sheet of paper. They are susceptible to conflicts of interest, general incompetence, and security risks.
You can also look at issues like undervotes and overvotes from the actual election. And ask people if they have any complaints about the process.
This is all somewhat studied already. We should study it a lot more.
This is in addition to doing systematic post-election recounts of a small % of ballots to verify that the counting machines are working.
Finally, everything is a voting "machine", including optical scan cards. Even if hand-counted. You should measure how well they work.
What's our incentive to switch to machines? Speed isn't a concern here.
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/post-election-audit...
One good way to implement this is with paper ballots and optical scan machines. You get speed/less labor with accuracy.
But you still need to study that the paper ballots are reliably usable by all types of voters, in addition to verifying that the machines count accurately.
It was paper ballots and optical scan machines that led to the whole "hanging chad" situation.
And filling in a bubble with a pen or pencil isn't going to help. Anyone who read BBS G-philes in the 80's knows how to defeat a Scan-Tron.
This is a problem with overtechnical solutions already. Random mechanical points of failure. Pencil drawing a line is unambiguous.
Re: ballots in a trunk
This was an auditing/ procedural issue.
Re: receipts
Why not just turn in the receipts and count them. Why have a black box do the counting? If a machine says candidate A had a thousand forty votes and B had a thousand thirty, what are you going to do? How do you know if your receipt lied? If people keep their receipts, you no longer have anonymous voting. And what are you going to do, track down every voter? If those running the election keep the receipts, they should just count them manually.
https://mobile.twitter.com/virginianpilot/status/94358996960...
Regardless, this is actually the fault of the user rather than machines. As far as I know you can still get a replacement if you do this.
If you let a machine count, you loose these checks.
Assuming it's a properly representative sample.
If speed is not an issue then the voting mechanism that everybody (even the technically unskilled) can understand is the best.
And beeing slow is not a bug, it is a feature. A feature that prevents all kinds of things from happening that would undermine trust in the system as a whole.
The method I like most is paper ballots with optical scanners, which the general public can understand. Random audits for confirmation, yes, the general public can understand. Recounts, and hand recounts, yes, the general public can understand.
A machine cannot be watched in the same way a human can. No scrutineer can prove that a ballot was counted correctly without ... seeing it counted.
2004, Bush vs Kerry in Ohio. The voting commissioner was Republican and had promised to deliver Ohio. Without Ohio, Bush would not have won the election.
Heavily Republican precincts were set up so that voting was easy all day.
Heavily Democratic precincts in Cincinnati got so backlogged that they closed the door and people had to be in line for hours to vote.
Bush won the state by 2.1%. He carried Harris County, which includes Cincinnati. No Republican has carried Harris County since.
Now tell me. Does the feature of voting "beeing slow" improve your faith in the fairness of that election?
The UI for the ballot is a series of rectangular tiles separated into two columns on a series of pages. Each tile represents a given race or proposition, with a title header, a description field, and then the various options to vote for stacked vertically as a collection of { radio button, option title }.
In order to navigate between pages, there are two digital "arrow" buttons for "Next" and "Back". To navigate within a page, and then within a tile, there is a clicky scroll wheel (rotation quantized in something on the order of 30 degree increments). To make a selection there is a separate button digital button "Enter".
The way the straight party selection is presented is as the first tile on the first page of partisan ballot options. Selecting straight party isn't a separate option on the underlying ballot; rather it is UI layer feature that fills in all of the partisan election options with the party of choice as if you had individually selected all of them.
I've never experienced the phenomenon described in the article, but I can imagine how it might happen. There is visible latency in interactions (selecting an option, moving between options/pages) and I could imagine someone selecting the straight party choice, pressing "Enter", not seeing an immediate result and pressing Enter again while rotating the wheel, and then being confused when they see the first partisan election race not reflecting their vote because they inadvertently made another selection on that race.
This seems like an easy thing to address and something that could/should have come up in UX usability testing. If anything should go through rigorous accessibility and usability testing, it should be voting processes (and that hold for whether elections are mediated by machines, paper ballots, or some other method).
The thought is, lets say there's 3 candidates, Alex, Becky, and Carl, and they're supposed to show in that order. But due to the slow loading time, you first see Becky and Carl, then Alex loads in a moment later and the other two shift down.
Since you've described the straight party selection as a separate button/option, the thought I had was, what if picking that is supposed to choose Becky, so Option 2. But if you hit it too soon, you've selected Becky as Option 1. And then Alex loads in and Becky becomes Option 2, but the vote didn't shift - it's still on Option 1.
Does that sound like a possibility, with your experience with these machines?
I'd even go as far as to say that it would make sense to not even list the party on ballots. If the only information a person has about a candidate is their name and the (D) or (R) next to it, they might just not be informed about that particular race. I'm less sure of that opinion though, and wouldn't defend it as ardently.
But it's also not the main point I was trying to argue.
On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.
Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you.
Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?
Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget must be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.
Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go.
Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.
If some malefactor wanted to buy 1 million votes at an average price of $50 each, that's $50 million of somewhat traceable money and 1 million people, some fraction of whom are certain to reveal they were paid. It won't remain a secret, and it will leave numerous evidence trails.
Contrast with fully electronic voting fraud - scalable, hard to detect, and (when well-executed) leaves little evidence to support nullifying an election and forcing a do-over.
Instead of money changing hands, there will be a threat of money ceasing to change hands, and that's much harder to prove
I would say that vote by mail isn't always the best option depending on circumstances but today in the US there is not much vote buying or coersion and it seems like a clearly less bad option than any of the alternatives considering how they are actually implemented. I would not recommend it for Mexico, which already has widespread vote buying even without being able to verify who voters actually vote for.
Seriously, yes, that system is preferred to increasing access and activity in our democracy, but it seems there's a large contingent that feel it's in their party's best interest to not make it easier to vote. I'm sure it's fair to claim that they honestly believe their party in power is for the good of the country, but then everyone feels that way about their desired political trajectories.
No missed work, no lines, no profiling. I read all the articles about issues with polling stations and all I can think about is systemic disenfranchisement.
And most importantly, who gets to write what goes into the voter guide?
The inner envelope is anonymous. They verify the outer envelope and open it, then pass the inner envelope to a separate area/volunteers to do the counting.
The contents of the voter guide are submitted by the candidates. For ballot measures, pro- and con- statements are submitted by sponsors or members of the public. I don't have mine handy but I think they actually print several pro/con statements for each.
I'm not sure how unique this is but ballot measures actually have brief statements printed on the ballot explaining what they will actually do, preventing issues where you're like "wait should I vote yes or no on this if I want this thing banned?"
> A YES vote will: Instruct the legislature to write a law preventing future taxes on groceries. A NO vote will: not send any recommendation to the legislature.
It outlines the different propositions, explains what happens for a yes or no vote and then has multiple pages devoted to showing arguments for and against mailed in by concerned citizens and organizations.
Parties are allowed to enter their own party descriptions. I haven't read the sections on candidates yet
Or at least I think they should display incumbent status on the ballot. That seems more important than party to me.
How is it possible that in 2018 our electronic voting systems are so broken? Is it really so difficult to build a basic UI and tally choices securely?
https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42 (November 2005)
It has proved its reliability in thousands of elections. It is cheap, universally-understood and basically impossible to subvert to a meaningful level of impact. It is understood by everyone who can vote.
Democracy doesn't need us to show off how clever and creative we are. It needs boring, simple, reliable mechanisms.
More like a page loading issue. Probably need to look at optimizing the page or display a simple big "LOADING..." in the middle of the screen while all fields and field values are being loaded. Also disable the actual page (all submit or selection buttons) while page is being loaded.
Definitely not user error. Different locations have different internet connection speed that will effect page loading.
Wait, what?
Are you claiming that these insecure, unusable, unfit-for-purpose excuses for a POS machines are also INTERNET-CONNECTED?
(For the record: if the page render after an action takes more than 100ms under any circumstances, the system is by definition broken. That's the lowest of the Nielsen thresholds.)