We need the equivalent of a moped to do what we need done, but are being sold on F1 racecars which end up being built by equivalent of rednecks in a scrapyard to line the pockets of the scrapyard owners.
We need the equivalent of a moped to do what we need done, but are being sold on F1 racecars which end up being built by equivalent of rednecks in a scrapyard to line the pockets of the scrapyard owners.
Yeah, no thanks. We had that in The Netherlands. The NEDAP voting machines were running on m68k machines. With very weak cryptography. In mid '00s.
What we need to do, is keep this last part of technology out of our democratic process. When people count ballots, there are many eyes, and you do not know of each other which candidate or party you represent. Hence, the system works. It isn't broken. Why fix it with a worse solution? A solution not everyone understands? Yet everyone age ~5 and higher understands manual counting.
I've volunteered 3 times thus far (end of may is gonna be my 4th time) as ballot/vote counter in my country (NL). I can highly recommend to just try it once, to learn what it's like. Its also (mostly) fun to work in a diverse team with people of different backgrounds and ages. You never know who you're gonna get beforehand. One footnote: do not discuss politics while counting ballots. Its inappropriate (since you're supposed to be neutral and not know each other's preference) and pointless (won't affect the outcome anymore in any way).
Even that's too complicated to be trustworthy. That's why I think optical scan ballots are the way to go: even a totally unskilled, untrained regular person would feel fairly confident that they could count them.
IMHO, all the technology investment should be put into processing and validating ballots after they've been filled out. Personally, I like the idea of a voter being able to feed their optical-scan ballot into a machine at the voting booth that will let them verify it will be read exactly as they intend. Then they carry it over to the ballot box to be tallied by a separate machine there.
I think the opposite. When filling a ballot, the voter can use a machine with a touchscreen. The person with poor sight can use huge fonts, the blind can use a screen reader, etc. The output from this is a printed paper form, filled out with perfectly legibility. No hanging chads, ambiguous marks, etc.
At this point, the voter (or an assistant) can verify the form just as if a human had filled it out for them.
From there, these perfectly-filled forms can be counted the old-fashioned way with many witnesses.