In the UK I walk into my local primary school/church/community hall (no more than a 5-10 min walk away), utter my name and address as identification (no other ID needed), and use a pencil to write a big 'X' against my preferences on a piece of paper I was handed when I entered the polling station.
There are multiple local party volunteers (I was one in the last election) from all the major parties at all stages of the process watching the flow of paper ballots from the sealed black collection bins to the voting halls where local council officals that volunteered, with paltry compensation, to a 12-18 hour shift to collect and count the vote. Some local councils take pride in being amoung the first to report their results, and there is a side competition to see who reports first.
We usually know the broad outcome of the election by the early hours of the next morning, with a handful of recounts in tight races going into the next couple of days.
I think the key factor in the superiority of paper balloting systems over electronic is exactly what you describe: the process is understandable, visible, and verifiable to human observers. Electronic voting does not meet this standard in any way.
Would that more people in the US understood the difference.
In the Japan I walk into my local school/community hall(on rare occasion, the church was used, no more than a 5-10 min walk away), present the voting announcement paper the govt send it to my physical address, and use a pencil to write a name of a candidates on a piece of paper I was exchanged it with my voting announcement paper.
In the Japanese writing system, candidate's name can be written in multiple ways. If writing doesn't match one of the exact registered candidates names, the human vote counter decides if it refer to the unambiguous candidate. If such candidate exists, it is counted to the voting for that candidate.
> utter my name and address as identification (no other ID needed),
How do they know that you actually cast the vote for you? Say my 5 best friends all tell me, "Nah, I'm not gonna vote. My vote doesn't count anyway." I then go to each of their districts, claim to be them by giving their name and address, and vote how I want. What's to stop that from happening?
Honestly not much, but voter fraud is unheard of in the UK and the UK doesn't have a universal ID card. There is no legal requirement for a UK citizen to carry or have any form of official ID. Its just very impractical when trying to access some public and private services, but its not uncommon for poorer people to lack forms of ID. There isn't a mainstream racist/classist attempt to disenfranchise poor people in the UK by using imaginary voter fraud as justification (there are some accusations with regards to disenfranchising university students and young people that move around a lot, but that's an issue of ease of registration).
Also you need to consider:
1) Those kinds of people are probably not registered to vote. Voter registration is not automatic in the UK. It takes 5 minutes with an online form, but some people are just that disengaged.
2) The 'wards' in which you vote are often quite small and in close proximity, so it might be a little hard to figure out which polling place your friends are registered at if you haven't received their polling notification card. You can get this information, but its a small barrier.
3) The 'wards' have an average population of a few thousand, so there is a risk that an official might recognise you as trying to double vote, but I can't imagine how they might confront if they aren't 100% personally certain.
None of those are strong guarantees. If evidence of wide spread fraud were to come to light, party policy ID requirements might change, but to date no party is seriously considering introducing them. Past governments have repeatedly tried to introduce a universal ID that could be used in part for voting ID, but each attempt has ended in failure due to public backlash over civil liberties concerns.
Because once there is a layer of "electronic" between you and the vote, there are millions of things that can be done to falsify one side or the other.
4% of the time it prints a different paper receipt, it just makes the electronic numbers go in someone's favor by a few percent in a couple choice districts. Or it uses crafty UX to make people vote for people or things they normally wouldn't.
And what if the numbers don't agree? Are you just going to pick one side? Are you going to hold a re-election? Will the re-election have the same turnout? Will people not go because their side won by a landslide before? Will some people change their mind because the media is reporting that side "X" is behind the discrepancy? Or will it just give side "Y" the few extra weeks they needed to campaign and win?
I can understand the risk of having a layer, and I do agree paper ballot does give better transparency. Here is the proposal:
Cast the ballot on paper. Every ballot has unique counterfeit patterns (totally randomized). The ballot is scanned and send to server, with both the scan of the ballot and the eletronic reading. Voter should be asked to verify (but we know half don't do it). The paper ballot is casted the same way as it has always been. We can also read the paper ballot one more time if we have to during the first round of counting. You can't have a fraud unless you cab mainpluate both paper and eletronic. Either both come to same number or they don't. I am just not familiar with how we verify eligibility tbh.
When we count paper ballot, we scan for the counterfeit. If the final number has mismatched, we either have a miscount or an error. Paper ballot will alwsys get recount when there is dispute.
Have we had a re-election in the entire American history, or at least in the past 30 years? Regardless, paper ballot fraud can lead to reelection so regardless of what proposal we will face re-election if we have to, but we normally don't.
This seems like over engineering, but we have to take into account people living abroad almost always now rely on eletronic voting if EV is offered.
Maybe not, but we should never stop entertaining other possibile improvements. The fact that mailing in ballot can be intercepted or even discarded is a problem. Sure sometimes the most primitive and simplest solution is often the best. Reasons we are having this conversation is because eletronic voting has flaws, and having a few people watching a locked box also has problem. The whole counting by hand also has problem. Is there an intersection we can meet between traditional method and technical method?
I am a novice on the whole voting system, but just off the top of head my proposal would seem to work in ideal situation. The fact we have a record of ubique vote electronically and on paper is cruical to the integrity of each vote. There must have been a few dozen studies already on this topic. I'd suprise if no one has a bullet proof system yet. It CAN'T be that hard. Just emulate cryptography here.
But you still need to validate the paper side, so that benefit is removed unless you trust it alone.
And requiring a large amount of manpower is a benefit of paper voting, not a problem. In the grand scheme of things it's a miniscule amount of work, and it ensures freedoms and laws for generations to come. This isn't an area where efficiency matters. The more manpower it takes, the harder it will be to "hack" it without being noticed.
Efficiency is not and should not be the primary concern in a democratic vote. Rather, accuracy and verifiability are far more important. Very little human time is wasted on paper-based elections, but even if it took a relatively large amount of human time to implement an accurate, verifiable voting system, it would be well worth it.
I'd say the point is that paper voting is extremely easy to organise, but also, most importantly, extremely easy to check and verify - you just count the votes again. With electronic machines you can't really do that, you can inspect logs but any of them can be fabricated incredibly easily.
We don't hold elections that often, nor do we need their results instantly. Voting with a pencil takes about as long as voting on a touchscreen. So why is there this stupid urge to optimise?
I would say voting with a pencil takes far less time for the voters. Electronic voting machines are inevitably going to be confusing to some people because they are built on asumptions about user interface that not everyone shares. But pretty much everyone who votes has a good intuition about how paper and pencil works.
Good on Virginia. When I voted there they had pretty modern and well run machines in my county with some sort of printout to confirm that you vote was cast. Voting is a messy process, but really important, and really important to have the counting be transparent and beyond reproach.
I don't think you should leave with any proof of who you voted for. I'm worried that it could be used by people to influence elections by paying for receipts from certain candidates or by punishing people who are not able to produce the correct receipt.
I think we should return back to paper ballots. When there are witnesses to elections, I don't think any of them are qualified to judge if an election has been done in a honest fashion. This would require experts on the voting equipment where they can guarantee that it has not been tampered with and that is too high a burden and something that complex can not be trusted.
Yes, they don't actually give you a receipt, for this reason.
One way it's done is that after entering your choices on touchscreen, you see the printed receipt through a glass window, and then it's stored so a recount can be done if necessary.
However, an electrically scanned paper ballot seems a lot simpler.
> you see the printed receipt through a glass window
I actually believe this is actually the best possible situation.
The voting machine should print a clear, unambiguous, ballot and on-screen tell you to verify it before you officially "cast" your vote. "If the ballot below does not represent your choices, please click <HERE> to request an attendant."
I'm thinking of this more as having printers that print out an unambiguous completed ballot and less as voting machines that "also print out a copy".
not sure how that helps. if you can verify the hash, it means the baddies can verify the hash as well, which means they can still operate a pay-for-receipts-shows-you-voted-for-our-guy program.
> I don't think you should leave with any proof of who you voted for.
I don't think you should leave without (at least seeing) proof that your votes were properly and accurately recorded.
If that means that you have to be given a "receipt" with the names of those you voted for on it, well, so be it. It isn't like your name and/or any other personally identifiable information would be on it -- just the minimal details needed to achieve the singlemost important purpose: verification.
>>If that means that you have to be given a "receipt" with the names of those you voted for on it, well, so be it. It isn't like your name and/or any other personally identifiable information would be on it -- just the minimal details needed to achieve the singlemost important purpose: verification.
Now imagine cults and other groups that pressure their members into producing those receipts with the correct candidate on them... or else.
That doesn't solve my concern. If your boss at work tells you to go vote and then demands you show your receipt when you get back it wont matter that your name isn't on it. You would be pressure to vote how they told you to.
The proof would be a paper ballot that you turn in. Your actual vote.
In RI --- we mark a paper, and surrender it to the scanner that stores it to a locked box before we exit the polling place.
A printed receipt, from an electronic polling place could just as easily be placed in a secure box prior to leaving.
It's amusing watching "ballot selfies" issue too -- it seems that folks just don't understand how important it is not allowing any coercive force influencing or verifying your vote.
All new electronic voting machines in Virginia have been required to be optical scan since 2007. Unfortunately when the law was changed the state didn't mandate a date for localities to replace their current touch screen machines with optical scan. The board of elections was given the power to decertify existing machines, which they just used, but have been hesitant to do so due to political pressure from localities that don't want have to pay for new machines.
Usually governor has a friend who just happens to own a company which makes and sells voting machines. All of the sudden the state "needs" voting machines.
Voting on the machines per se is not the problem, rather the current system is. In India electronic voting machines are exclusively used for all state and national elections and were kept deliberately non-networked by design.IIRC the technology is being 'exported' to other countries as well.
http://www.firstpost.com/india/evm-tampering-why-india-stand...
Because it is part of the American mind to believe in technology. (Often a larger part, the less that one knows about the technology.)
One thing I will say is that the US often has a lot more offices on the ballot than some other counties. In Washington, DC, a ballot can include Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner (somebody representing an area of a maybe twenty blocks), city council member, school board member, mayor, non-voting delegate to congress, and depending on the year "shadow senator" and president. In other places one may have county commissioners, judges, sheriffs, etc. That does make for a lot of tabulation.
Because we're becoming lazier with each passing day?
I do think we need paper -- a "hard copy" -- at some level, whether for the ballot itself or just a verifiable audit trail. I think 100% electronic voting would be fine so long as there's an audit trail that matches the (electronically) talkied results perfectly. I don't think dealing with millions of paper ballots would be any more advantageous than that -- you'd have to distribute and collect them (although that would happen at the centralized polling places), a few people would have to hand tally them (to ensure everyone's numbers match up), and then securely store them (via very strict "physical security" procedures/protocols) until, at some later point, they can be properly destroyed.
Logistically, electronic voting with a paper audit trail would be much easier, would require fewer people (i.e., election workers -- who are already in short supply), would give us results much quicker, and would be easier to verify/authenticate later (in the event of disputes).
> Logistically, electronic voting with a paper audit trail would be much easier,
Putting a piece of paper in a box is something everyone understands how to do, even elderly people who have never touched a computer -- how is electronic voting easier?
> would require fewer people (i.e., election workers -- who are already in short supply)
They are? I can't believe it would be more expensive to hire a few more election workers for one day than we're paying for these machines.
> would give us results much quicker,
France uses paper ballots and results are known within hours.
> and would be easier to verify/authenticate later (in the event of disputes).
This is not realistic. We are never going to go back and change an election result whether or not records of the votes were saved. Cf. Florida 2000.
Even with electric voting, there are 2 witnesses who's duties are to just watch the election IIRC. FYI: I've done this before and got paid about $10 an hour to do it several years ago while I was in college.
Part of the witness duties should be making sure the votes for that polling location are counted accurately and there is no way to do that with electric voting systems. It's just a black box you have to trust.
Hanging chads were a problem because we tried to use machine-readable ballots. That's the whole point.
Here's a better system: you go into the voting booth. They have some envelopes and stacks of preprinted ballots, each with one candidate's name. You take a ballot for the candidate you want, and put it in the envelope. Then you come out of the booth and drop the sealed envelope in a box.
After polls close, they open the box and all the envelopes, and count the ballots, in the open. Anyone can go watch. If an envelope is empty or has more than one ballot inside, the vote doesn't count.
> Here's a better system: you go into the voting booth. They have some envelopes and stacks of preprinted ballots, each with one candidate's name. You take a ballot for the candidate you want, and put it in the envelope. Then you come out of the booth and drop the sealed envelope in a box.
Works well for elections with one race; those with a dozen offices being elected and an equal number of ballot measures make that... impractical.
This is the system used in Germany, all votes are hand-counted. And it's also used for very complicated local elections that allow very fine-grained votes for individual candidates.
The size of the ballots isn't the issue; the issue with “provide pre-marked ballots from which the voter chooses the one matching their preferences and discards the rest” for multi-race elections is the number of pre-printed ballots that have to be given to each voter to take to the booth and select from.
With 5 offices with 6 candidates each and 10 yes/no measures (a fairly modest ballot for a California election) this would require each voter be handed a packet of nearly eight million ballots to choose from.
I don't know about that specific one but elections with complicated rules and multiple votes (where you can "kumulieren" and "panaschieren") are usually counted with the help of software where the election officers manually enter every ballot into the computer after inspecting it visually and have to trust that the displayed end result is correct (although there are some manual consistency checks).
In WA we have absentee ballots which is really the best of all worlds. You fill it in, sign it and mail it back. Couldn't be easier and you don't have to worry about polling locations. They are also hardcore about checking your signature; If it doesn't match your voter registration the ballot isn't counted and you get a letter in the mail.
The problem with this system is that it's possible to prove to someone else who you voted for.
Voting needs plausible deniability so you can't be coerced or bribed into voting for a particular candidate as was alleged to happen in the Balkans many times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_train
I've read accounts that many absentee ballots are invalidated by a very sketchy process of signature verification. And that was in Alameda County in CA, a very liberal place. It seems attacks on voting are coming from all sides.
I live in Loudoun County, va, and we've always had the option of using paper with an electronic scanner. There have been touch screen voting machines in the last couple of elections, but I didn't use them,
I think blockchain is a perfect application for voting machines. Blockchain is public, immutable, cryptographic. Every voter can vote and then verify their vote was actually registered and was untampered via a web platform or something.
The network can be run by the public. Ofcourse there is risk associated with the 51% attack, but it's still a more transparent process than what we have today.
Using a system like ZCash the government could have citizens register a public address, then 1 token is distributed to each public address, votes work by sending the token to the candidate you vote for, whomever has the highest balance at the end of the election is the electee (this even allows for off ballot candidates, but up to rules). ZCash is designed so that you can't tell the contents of a transaction despite it being immutably on the blockchain
Another important property of voting systems is that you can't prove who you voted for, so that you can't be forced or paid to vote for someone. A blockchain based solution, even like ZCash does not fulfil this.
You can prove who you voted for by taking a picture of your ballot when you vote. Some thug could rough you up if you can't provide a selfie of your ballot being marked for some candidate
You must not be able to prove who you voted for. Otherwise you are still at risk of retaliation, coercion and can sell your vote. For the very same reasons the government must not be able to know who you voted for either.
Secret paper ballots really deserve more credit. The tech might be old but it gets the essential features right.
There are multiple local party volunteers (I was one in the last election) from all the major parties at all stages of the process watching the flow of paper ballots from the sealed black collection bins to the voting halls where local council officals that volunteered, with paltry compensation, to a 12-18 hour shift to collect and count the vote. Some local councils take pride in being amoung the first to report their results, and there is a side competition to see who reports first.
We usually know the broad outcome of the election by the early hours of the next morning, with a handful of recounts in tight races going into the next couple of days.