On Fri, 11 May 2007 11:31:48 +0100, SomeBloke wrote:
> Why don't they all use that tried and tested system of voting. Turn up and
> write your cross on a piece of paper next to your favoured candidates name
> and then put it in the ballot box. This is just what I and many others did
> I our local council elections.
Yes, i'm sure that would work. And you can count all 100 million votes
yourself. That shouldn't take too much time.
Look, after the 2000 election, it became clear that any method that
required end users to mark a ballot had a huge margin of error. Hanging
chads and all that. This created opportunities for candidates to declare
various ballots invalid, and try to alter the election results.
The idea behind the touch screen machines is that no ballot can be
incorrectly recorded. That doesn't stop someone from accidentally voting
for the wrong person somehow (people do it), but it prevents the
uncertainty about which candidate was actually voted for.
What I would like to see is a touch-screen system for ballot printing,
signed with a private key to prevent pre-manufactured ballots. You go into
a booth, indicate who you want to vote for, then a paper ballot is printed
with the choices you made, which you can verify by looking at it. This
then gets fed into an optical scanner machine (such as those used for the
last 20-30 years, very reliably) and the ballot is dropped into the
machines collection bin.
This does several things. First, it removes the human error in marking the
ballot (but not the human error of choosing the wrong candidate). Second,
it creates a verifiable way for the voter to check that the touch screen
device created a proper ballot. Third, it creates a paper trail in the
form of official ballots that can be hand counted if necessary. Fourth, it
eliminates the issues we've seen with not printing enough ballots for a
precinct. Fifth, it eliminates any possibility of fraudulent voting
machines, whether they be open or closed source. And Sixth, it means only
the optical scanner (one per precinct, no matter how large) need be kept
secure. The paper trail means that any voting machine fraud would be
caught when any hand recount occured.
This allows for automated tabulations, which speed up precinct closings and
allow official vote numbers to be submitted to the secretary of state of
each state in a timely manner, regardless of how many voters there are. In
other words, it scales, something that paper ballots alone cannot do. And
it makes each ballot 100% countable, with no fear of recounts eliminating
votes from contention for being invalid.
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