An oldie but a goodie: Florida Voting Machine, 2004
That’s exactly what Michigan does. Fill in ovals with black ballpoint pen, place your ballot in the folder, go up to a precinct inspector, who will tear the strip off the top and keep it. You’re handed your ballot-in-folder and you feed it into the optical scanner without having to remove it from the folder yourself. The scanner processes the ballot, increments the counter on the display and stores the paper ballot in a locked compartment.
We have that where I vote in Florida as well. I think Florida voting methods are decided by county though.
Secure, efficient all-electronic voting is possible. But a great many people, not being computer scientists or cybersecurity experts, would have a difficult time believing that any all-electronic system was secure. Given that, and given that confidence in the security of the system is second only to the actual security itself, I support a hybrid approach that includes a human-readable paper trail. Filling out scan-tron ballots is fine. Voting on a touchscreen that printed out a scan-tron ballot that the voter could look over before putting in the box would also be fine, and possibly more convenient, though probably more expensive. Either of these is slightly less secure than a properly-designed all-electronic system, but they’re good enough, and certainly far better than the all-electronic systems that have actually been implemented in the real world.
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No, it’s not. Target has been hacked, Home Depot has been hacked, SONY has been hacked, even the White House has been hacked.
But electronic voting machines, which are stored for 18+ months after every use, are somehow free from manipulation? Is that because people are basically honest and law-abiding?
Financial stuff gets the closest. All the financial hacks have been on hardware - no retailer has had a huge breach of its website.
But physical voting machines are, of course, hardware. Maybe people should vote on the internet with a transparent system.
There are three issues that electronic voting systems are trying to fix:
- Accessibility: It’s much easier to deal with voters who need ballots in different languages, with low-vision features, etc.
- Accuracy: People are stupid and can’t follow directions to, for example, fill in an oval completely*.
- Speed: I don’t know why it’s so onerous to wait more than a couple of hours for election returns, but this is a factor.
There’s a very simple solution to all the issues above that doesn’t compromise security: Have the machines not record anything themselves, but simply print out a machine- and human-readable, properly completed ballot that the voter can then check over and turn in as usual.
- My favorite example is the one from here, where the voter wrote in the word ‘Yes’ in each oval.