Georgia’s 127k Missing Votes, Disproportionate to African American Neighborhoods

Maybe having the skillset to design a reasonably usable voting machine also means having an understanding of why electronic voting is problematic, and wanting to have nothing to do with them...

You think electronic voting could be preferable paper ballots?

I checked and your county still offers touchscreen voting devices. Probably 1 per poll site, and at the early voting center, to comply with HAVA.

Let's wait until that system exists before we consider using it.

It is absolutely not decentralized though. It’s spaced out collection, still centralized accounting. All you are doing is allowing for more potential issues between collection and transport by having an insecure position up front.

How would you avoid something like the debacle in Broward County, Florida where boxes of ballots were found post election day? What prevents that when random people are running the show?

Just count all the votes by hand with scrutineers watching the counters. It's really as simple as that.

Just count the damn votes by hand.

Several mark/sense systems (paper ballot marked by voter, then scanned by/for voter in their presence) have the capability to record vote counts to multiple local magnetic storage devices.

At the end of the election period, poll workers would secure the scanned paper ballots and the magnetic cartridges, and mail one set of mag. carts. to the state elections officer, and carry the paper ballots and the other set of mag carts to the local (city or county) elections office.

The second set of mag carts provide the “election night” results. A local protocol & set of procedures cross-check the carts and the number of paper ballots and the number of voters who appeared to vote at each location/precinct. The first set of mag carts provide a cross-check and a backup copy. (A small number of exhausted elections officials will incorrectly put both sets of carts in a mail box, and hilarity will ensue.)

Election operations in the US have a long and complicated history. Reinventing elections as a greenfield _de novo_ exercise without considering most of the complexities that have grown up around them is appealing, like most big rewrites. Poorly-implemented electronic voting should be viewed with honest suspicion, IMHO.

It is a feature, not a bug. Variation in the system makes it harder for a single exploit or actor to rig the entire system.

As far as I know, this is similar to the systems Georgia is looking at deploying in our upgrade.

Having a paper audit trail has become a fairly big cause, so I'd be surprised if the legislature recommends solutions that don't satisfy this.

Fair call, I should have stressed that "system" is more than just marking and counting ballots. Operating a well-run election means staffing polling places with elections clerks from different parties (or no party) so they act as cross-checks on each other, making sure that spoiled or unused ballots are a) not counted, and b) accounted for, helping random citizens who are at the wrong polling place, or are not on the registry for some reason (registered elsewhere, changed their name, etc.).

In the worse cases it means dealing with voters who want to read the ballot aloud to their partner, or camp out in a voting booth for 30-40 minutes, or who are disruptive in some way. To be fair, the last general election here (Bay Area) had 21 races with 43 total significant candidates, plus 12 referendums/measures, for 67 items to count per ballot - this is not a good "count by hand" situation.

In the long run what people really want and need is an election system (including voting machines, ballots, voter rolls, polling places, staff) that gives them a sense that their votes count.

In California (which has a lot of vote by mail), it’s also legal to use a camera in the voting area. In this regards, I don’t think there’s particular weaknesses.

In general the voting system can guard against false positives or false negatives. By that it can either bar legitimate voters or allow illegitimate voters. Since the USA has a historic tendency of barring the poor, minorities and women from voting; elections officials should take that into account when considering trade offs.

There continue to be election integrity issues with vote by mail. The benefits may outweigh the risks.

From an election integrity standpoint, the modern implementations of vote by mail is little different from electronic voting.

--

The jurisdictions that I'm aware of scan AND tabulate ballots as they are received. This permits peeking at early results. Citizens expect that votes are not tabulated until polls close on election day. Administrators argue that the pre-scanning and tabulating isn't really a count and that only the final report is a count.

--

Until very recently, vote by mail lead to a novelty participation bump followed by a long decline. Explained by losing the culture of voting. Postage is now prepaid in some jurisdictions, which may have lead to a +4% boost in participation, matching prior poll site participation rates. But it's too early to separate the prepaid postage boost from the overall boost in 2018. Time will time.

--

The transition to vote by mail is driven solely by appropriations (pork) and administrator's desire for centralization.

With vote by mail comes new business models. Whereas with poll sites we'd only pay per ballot to accommodate projected turnout plus 10%, we now pay for every voter every election. Vote by mail ballot packets are ~$2 whereas poll ballots cost ~10c. Additionally, all new tasks like signature verification and ballot tracking are new opportunities for rent seeking. Again, per voter per election, vs time & materials.

There's all new gear to buy, of course. One could argue this is no different than any other IT lifecycle.

--

Another way vote by mail is like electronic voting is the complete loss of voter privacy (the secret ballot). Elections are administered per precinct. Received ballots are binned. So very likely that your ballot will be the only one from your precinct in the bin. To protect the secret ballot, ballots must be sorted into precincts before processing (opening). This adds considerable effort and expense to the entire process (logistic nightmare). Last time I checked, my jurisdiction still was not doing the legally required precinct presort.

--

Because voters are no longer able to fix their own errors (like with the mark sense poll based systems mentioned elsewhere), administrators have to adjudication voter intent. Now that ballots are optically scanned as they are received, like a fax machine vs the mark sense systems, voter intent is adjudicated electronically, meaning there's no paper trail. Makes the manual recounts and audits kind of tricky, if not completely suspect.

Nice try, Mr. von Spakovsky.

As is pretty clear from the linked Vox article, the proposed solutions for largely nonexistent voter fraud would have zero impact on this sort of election fraud.

Paper ballots with a public count work quite well. A number of countries have discontinues use of electronic voting in the last decade or so due to issues like this, and/or the fear of such issues.

Because it's an important distinction. OP is using "voter fraud" to refer to voters acting fraudulently, and "election fraud" to refer to election officials acting fraudulently. Of particular importance here is that the former is relatively rare (despite scaremongering by one side of the political spectrum) while the latter is decidedly less so.

Also, legally, neither one is treason.

I'm sure you read the article being discussed in this subthread (https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud...) -- it makes the same distinction.

> (b) treason

I think you need to look up the legal definition of treason as specified by Article 3, Section 3 of the US Constitution.

What the Republicans are trying to do does absolutely nothing about what Russia appears to have done.

"Securing" our elections is about suppressing the vote of the poor, not about stopping fraudulent voting.

The gold standard for election integrity is the Australian ballot (private voting, public counting), where ballots are issued & cast at poll sites, and tabulated on site when the polls close.

In my jurisdiction, trust is built on mutual distrust. Every receipt, seal, report, lock had to be handled and signed off by members of opposing parties.

Sure, it's possible to corrupt poll site based elections. But you have to corrupt many sites. You'd also have to corrupt upstream and downstream actors as well. Super unlikely to go unnoticed.

This becomes an especially crude way of purging when you realize that various systems deal with "complex" names differently.

People don't have the right to vote, at least not unconditionally. That's not how this works, nor how it has ever worked.

If you register to vote in Georgia, then move to Ohio and register there, you might have the right to vote in Ohio. You don't have the right to vote in Georgia, nor does anybody else have the right to vote in Georgia with your identity.

If you register with "Hyphenated-Name" after having previously registered with "Hyphenated Name", that doesn't mean you get to vote twice! You don't have that right.

Mistakes are a big deal. An improper vote is a denial of the rights of the legitimate voters to have their votes properly counted.

Fixing all the issues is difficult, but there is one simple improvement: have the federal government, perhaps the social security administration, publish a mapping from human to voting district.