Been filling out paper ballots for years. I don't want to vote on a machine. A machine can count my vote. But there should be a paper that goes in the ballot box, so it can be recounted using multiple methods. Different machines, humans, dogs, cats... whatever. There are real physical artifacts.
Unfortunately many people now conflate "voting machine" with direct-recording electronic or DRE machines. While DRE machines became common for a short period after the Helping America Vote Act imposed accessibility requirements that were difficult to meet with paper ballots, most voting machine vendors now offer "ballot marking machines" (sometimes integrated into the precinct tabulator) that allow individuals with special needs to mark a paper ballot using methods like voice feedback. The marked paper ballot can be verified by the voter or another individual before tabulation. Ballot marking machines have mostly eliminated the original motivation for DRE voting and the popularity of DRE voting across the United States has decreased since the shortly-post-HAVA period (2004 election cycle, basically), with many states prohibiting DRE entirely or DRE without voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), an arrangement in which all machines essentially function as ballot markers and produce a paper ballot with the voter's selections for the voter to inspect.
DRE with VVPAT can be attractive because it integrates the "ballot on demand" system into the voting machine, simplifying the three-step process typical of precinct tabulation where the voter obtains a ballot from a ballot-on-demand workstation, marks it, and then inserts it into a tabulator. Ballot-on-demand is functionally required by most modern election administrators because it facilitates "voter convenience" models where voters can appear at any precinct (usually within their county), not just at the single precinct in which they reside. The reason for this is simply that, considering the multiple taxing jurisdictions in most parts of the US, a single county election can have hundreds of distinct "ballot styles." Preprinting every ballot style for every precinct is impractical and encourages fraud due to the number of valid ballots "lying around." Ballot-on-demand tends to have a very positive impact on election integrity in this way: the ballot does not physically exist until it is issued by the BOD system which is typically integrated into the pollbook system such that a ballot cannot be issued without marking a voter as voted in the pollbook. DRE with VVPAT is mostly equivalent to precinct tabulation with BOD, but many prefer precinct tabulation with BOD because the majority of voters (those not using assistive technology) mark their ballots manually which decreases the risk of mismarking by a ballot marker.
It's important that American voters understand that non-auditable voting machines are no longer common in the US and are found only in some states, and the portion of votes counted by methods without paper audit trail is decreasing year over year as states replace aging DRE equipment.
Unfortunately, the larger problem with US election administration is not DRE machines but funding. State election administrators usually operate on extremely restrictive budgets. States originally purchased DRE machines mostly because they were the cheapest option that met HAVA requirements, which essentially required many states to wholesale replace their voting equipment on short notice. Most states that use DRE equipment today use it because they cannot afford to replace it. There is very little, even zero, real support for DRE machines other than for the simple reason that states cannot afford to purchase anything else... and this is no longer as true today due to more affordable ballot marking machines, and vanishingly few election administrators are choosing DRE when they have funding available to replace voting systems.
A larger concern in voting security is likely registration and pollbook systems, which are often poorly audited and from small software vendors, once again largely due to the small budgets available to pay for them. In the cases that voting irregularities have been found in the US, they are virtually all a result of defects or limitations of the pollbook system and unrelated to the actual vote tabulation. This encompasses situations like individuals voting multiple times---one voter, one vote is a responsibility of the pollbook system and not the tabulator, which is unaware of the voter's identity as a precaution to protect secrecy of the ballot, constitutionally required for federal and many state and local elections.
The trial described in the article:
> On November 8, VotingWorks machines will be used in a real election in real time. New Hampshire is the second state to use the open-source machines after Mississippi first did so in 2019. Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H.
It seems to involve paper ballots, as far as I can understand it.
And this is how the authors of the voting system describes it themselves: https://www.voting.works/voting-system
IE: Only Fred used the VMD... Or how does the counter interpret the VMD? Are people vigilant about checking their ballots?
Pen, paper -> Into Box -> Counting, KISS. I can deal with a scantron. Not much more is needed here. I'd rather we work on chain of custody and figuring out who has voted etc, that are harder to solve. Though honestly, the fraud rates are so low, on double voting, I suspect made up voters, and ballot box stuffing are bigger concerns.
> Been filling out paper ballots for years. I don't want to vote on a machine. A machine can count my vote. But there should be a paper that goes in the ballot box, so it can be recounted using multiple methods.
And that's what happens here. People vote on paper, they put their paper ballots in a box, a machine counts them, and they are also separately counted by hand, in public.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with 'VMDs', an abbreviation that nobody else in this thread has used, and which doesn't appear in the link from the GP post.
Are you for the system being used in New Hampshire, or not?
The only thing I'd like to see is a relaxation of this idea that ballots need perfect secrecy as the most important goal, because that runs directly at odds with accountability. I'd like my ballot to come with a UUID that I could put into the public web site and verify my votes were recorded correctly. All those UUIDs and corresponding votes should be public, so everyone can do their own math. It would make coercion easier, but I don't see that as the most important issue.
My assumptions are that 1) individual votes have almost no value on their own, so coercion or vote selling should be limited by low appeal, and 2) we still have a justice system, if someone forces you to vote a certain way, report it. Buying any significant number of votes would be exceedingly difficult to keep secret. Especially given how little compensation could be offered for them.
While it's true that law enforcement has a role to play here, if you're being paid, you probably aren't going to report on yourself.
> individual votes have almost no value on their own
That's probably true in a national election, but it might not be true in e.g. a mayoral race.
I have offered to sell my vote to anyone in my area (a swing area of New Hampshire) who wants another vote for their side in any election at any level. I've never even set a price.
Not one person has ever offered a cent for it.
I mention this just by way of making the point that small-scale vote buying, which would be the hardest kind to detect, isn't happening.
Theoretically at least, detecting and preventing vote-buying at a scale significant enough to change the outcome of an election should be much easier.
Would-be buyers have to get word out to enough people for it to matter, but if most people assume this is unethical (or even just undesirable), it shouldn't be hard to get nearly everyone else to be willing to rat out the buyers.
I don't think the problem is nearly as hard to solve as you're thinking it is.
The odds of your vote swinging an election at any level are lower than the risk of being struck by lightning twice. Nobody wants to buy one vote. They need to buy hundreds or thousands before it will matter, and that makes them easier to catch.
So your result is the expected one. But the outcome would not be the same with most types of harebrained "let's just vote with our phones" that people come up with regularly.
This is also why it is in most countries illegal to take photos or film around the voter booth.
A photo of me with my completed ballot, in the voting booth, has always been part of the offer, since that was the same year I finally quit bothering to cast my own ballot.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-appeals-court-r...
But I believe major point is still the same. Nobody knows if that's the actual posted ballot. You could easily take several and only cast one.
It is my personal belief that votes absolutely carry a market value, they're just very hard to monetize. (Which is usually regarded to be a virtue.)
If you hate abortion, but like $100 more than you hate abortion, then why shouldn't we just give you $100?
Of course, there is the knock-on effect of wanting inequality so you can control people and keep the vote price low, that's true. But that's just a question of the vote economics. I'm sure we can work something out.
Because it gives the person with more money more voting power (even moreso than they already have).
I think this is an area where you don't need a technological solution, just a legal one.
Vote selling/buying just needs to be as illegal as blackmail, fraud, etc. Fines and jail terms. (As I assume it already is?)
The thing is, it's going to be incredibly easy to catch, because if you're attempting to pay a group of people (employees, villagers, whatever) to sway their vote, there's always going to be at least one person who doesn't want to and inform the law. (Or else you don't need to be paying in the first place.) Hell, set up punitive damages so a whisteblower is guaranteed 50x whatever price they were being offered for their vote.
The idea is that people post their votes publicly, but encrypted, and there's a procedure (based on zero-knowledge proofs) that allows to check that an encrypted vote is correctly accounted for in the tally without decrypting said vote. If sufficiently many voters post their encrypted votes (and if it's not too predictable who will do so), a wrong tally will be detected with high probability.
Remember that hand-counting of ballots has been unusual in the US for quite some time. Some states process their mail-in ballots through large central tabulators even though they have only a small portion of mail-in votes, simply because they still have the central tabulators from before they switched to precinct tabulation, back when they used to drive the ballot boxes from every precinct and have staff re-stack the ballots and feed them to a tabulator after close.
Ballot secrecy is unlikely to change. It was widely adopted in the US as a direct result of the fact that non-secret ballots facilitated purchased and forced votes, since the payer could verify that the voter cast the ballot they were supposed to. This is not a theoretical problem but one that was widespread in the 19th century.
Something like you describe is already in available in many states, though, at the pollbook level rather than the tabulation level: in many states you can obtain a record online of whether or not you were issued a ballot and, if you were issued the ballot by mail, whether or not it was received back. The ballot is 'severed' from this record system (usually by physical means like dual-envelopes or even passing through a slot in a wall) before tabulation so that your voting choices cannot be proven after the fact to facilitate bribery or intimidation.
It's super convenient. You don't have to be at the polling place at a certain time in bad weather. Just fill out the form in the comfort of your home and drop it in the mailbox.
I hate it though because it really does make fraud and mismanagement easier:
- People are sent ballots for people who no longer live in the house, or are dead
- The post office fails to actually send you your ballot, as in this case: https://www.wmar2news.com/matterformallory/mail-in-ballots-f...
- This article details several more ways to commit fraud via mail-in voting/absentee ballots - and cites fraud cases from both Republicans and Democrats: https://insidesources.com/mail-in-ballots-make-voter-fraud-e...
Voting is not the process of marking the ballot. Voting is the act of casting a ballot (marked, unmarked, vandalized, etc.) into a secure pile of ballots therefore making it anonymous.
In terms of voting security the digital scanning and counting is much more problematic than electronically marking of choices on paper.
A voting machine that marks a paper ballot for you is the best of both worlds -- it is a paper ballot, but it marks it consistently, and allows the user to affirmatively confirm their choices were recorded correctly.
Were we to do that, we’d need a damn library full of paper in each booth, and someone to count how many slips of paper you’re dropping into each box. Doesn’t sound like it would work well for us.
As far as the "people don't color the circles correctly", the counter machine can kick that back and say "unclear scan, please verify all circles are colored correctly" and not count that ballot.
Maybe one way to address the issues of electronic counting would be to have parallel counts by each candidate (and their reps) using their own hardware and software with a manual count in case the electronic counts of every candidate do not match. But this means each candidate has to bring their own counting infrastructure which is prohibitive.
I have often imagined having say two scanners in physical sequence (so passing through a ballet is a single operation), and having more than one (competing) recorder for the output of each scanner head.
This would require some standardization of form factors and interfaces, but with small enough electronics units and scanners, in principle parallel data paths could be included in a single intentional "infrastructure".
Everyone thinks about counting. "We need fast counting, we need accurate counting" they say.
We also need to think about understanding and trust. Think of your neighbor, think of 'Florida man', do you expect them to understand a voting machine? Do you expect them to trust a voting machine? I'm a computer programmer and am hesitant to claim I understand voting machines. I do understand paper though, and I do trust the nice people I went to church with when I see them running the polls.