> “There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.”
In any case, I don't think voting machines are a good idea.
I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make them secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'.
Paper voting and traditional election observers work in a nice 'analog' way. It's tangible, and even a 'village idiot' can understand how it works.
Most voting systems aren't complicated enough to need a computer to evaluate them.
(And those that are should arguable be changed.)
In my state, election workers have to ensure that the number of ballots is the same as the number recorded by the ballot box on election night - although we don’t recount who voted for who. The ballots are preserved.
Presumably the auditing process would involve tallying the votes manually... in case why bother with the electronic process? Unless you only run the audit if there's a complaint. Which I guess works. But personally for something as important as elections I would much more comfortable with a system where the transparent, hard-to-corrupt process is used by default.
All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.
Edit: I suppose that doesn't mean voting machines are required though, just that the results on each ballot paper need to be inputted to a computer to determine the outcome. A lot of data inputting required, but still auditable.
If traditional voting is required, I have higher hopes for approval voting or the slightly more complicated range voting. These are quite easy to evaluate completely by hand. Especially the former.
If you are happy to go a bit off the beaten track, using sortition amongst volunteers might be a good way to fill up a parliament. (Or any other body big enough for the law of large numbers to kick in.)
As a slightly more complicated system, I would have every voter indicate their favourite candidate on a ballot sheet, and then draw enough votes at random to fill up parliament.
(Use your favourite mechanism to handle the same candidate being voted for multiple times in your sample. Perhaps give them more weight, or re-draw, or have people write down an ordered list of preferred candidates, and admit the highest ranked one who isn't already in parliament, etc.)
Random sampling is surprisingly powerful. It also completely bypasses Arrow's impossibility theorem.
However, you can look at how the lottery does it, perhaps?
For example, they don't write the players names on the balls. They use more indirection. (And lots of other cleverness.)
Also keep in mind that I suggest to use this mechanism for something like filling up a parliament. The German Bundestag has about 600 members. The UK has 650 MPs in their House of Commons.
I posit that getting into parliament is perhaps comparable to winning the lottery, ie something people might trust lottery equipment and procedures to handle.
Becoming the president of the US is a bigger deal than winning the lottery, so we can't naively expect lottery equipment and procedures to be above suspicion.
I understand “voting machine” to be any mechanism that acts as a substitute for a paper ballot, or that acts as an intermediary between you and a paper ballot. And I would agree that the former are a terrible idea and the latter probably don’t provide much net benefit.
But ballot counting machines are a different matter. Here’s the thing: there’s no voting process without a ballot counting machine. It’s just a matter of whether that machine will be a carbon-based one subject to bias, fatigue, boredom and hunger, or an electronic one that excels at stupid-simple repetitive tasks and is subject to none of those things.
I know that human beings are fallible. That's why I wrote:
> I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make [electronic machines] secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'.
People are used to the failure modes of other humans. And they trust other humans in a way they don't trust machines.
This is similar to how juries still put a lot of stock in eye witnesses.
Potentially, yes. Especially if you used off-the-shelf machines that IBM built in 1920.
In any case, that's just a distraction. Just use humans.
We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.
I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
Spend: In the UK, price of counting ballots is far lower than price of paying poll booth staff. It costs approximately £0.10 per person (note, not per ballot) in the UK to count ballots in a nationwide election (as opposed to about £0.35 on keeping polling booths open). It’s likely that if the number of ballots went up by a factor of 10, further efficiencies would be found, but simple ‘ballots counted per hour’ metrics imply that the marginal cost should be relatively affordable.
Difficulty: While running a fair and free election is undeniably challenging, it naively would appear to be much less work than E.g. the USPS does each day to deliver the daily 300M pieces of mail.
The people running elections don't charge voters for voting.
So I'm not sure it's useful to compare the two?
(That the Americans feel like they need government mail when the supposedly more socialist Europeans mostly managed to privatise their former monopolists probably tells us.. something?)
Isn't that just checking that "x == x" in software if everything is done by machine?
2. The typical US ballot has a dozen or so different votes that need to be done.