… yet we cannot get our voting system to function efficiently?
What is holding such an invention from being created and instituted?
Because if we get a few votes wrong, well no one pretty much cares.
But if an ATM makes one transaction, all hell would break loose
Incentive NOT to make an error is a great motivater (yes, I’m aware of ATM errors :))
Who says the voting system isn’t functioning efficiently? You have to handle, what?, 50 million extremely complex transactions in about 12-14 hours. An ATM network would crash under that load.
How do you use an ATM? With a card encoding information in a magnetic strip that is instantly machine readable.
Give everybody a voter i.d. card with a magnetic strip and individual voting transactions would be much easier.
But people will willingly give their information to a thousand businesses but go screaming insane if you suggested letting the government have a fraction of that information for one special purpose. (And this is true even though identity theft is a huge problem and card mistakes occur a million times a day, although that’s a small percentage of the several billion transactions a day.)
The problem, as is inevitable with these questions, is a human one, not a technology one.
If a bank has $1000 and 200 customers each have $2 and 100 customers each transfer $1 to somebody else, it is possible to debug the system and fix it if somebody ends up with the wrong amount of money.
If there are 1000 voters and 400 people vote for Tom and 400 people vote for Dick but Loretta wins the election, as long as Loretta gets somewhat less than 1000 votes, there is no detectable error … so the election does not get fixed.
Remember that polling stations are temporary. They’re in use for what… 2 or 3 days per year?
I used to work for an ATM maker.
If you’d called up and said you needed them to install and bring online 250,000 ATMs on November 2nd and then tear them all down on November 4th, they’d have been unable to accommodate you.
You lost me. I imagine that what you are saying is that some of Tom’s votes and some of Dick’s votes are converted to Loretta votes.
But that can happen now in any type of system, including written hand ballots. All it takes is for the counters to be dishonest.
But that can be minimized by having a tracking system that produces a record of each individual ballot. Many automatic voting systems already have them. The ones that don’t create enormous controversy because they are open to this kind of fraud. They probably won’t last long and auditable tracking systems will be put into place everywhere in the U.S.
Back a few decades ago some prominent news anchor suggested a bank holiday on election day and actually using the ATMs for voting. The suggestion was mentioned on NPR but I don’t recall any discussion.
Given that poor people and the elderly have little experience or comfort with ATM’s, this would be a good way to bias elections in favor of Republicans!
Another reason is that it’s hard to duplicate the anonymity of the current process and keep a paper trail that can be recounted, all while making it nigh impossible to scam on a large level. Every ATM transaction is logged in multiple different ways that would not be allowed in a national election.
There are ways to do a computer election but relatively few people would understand how the encryption (and thus anonymity) work, so few would trust it.
You are asking to mix politics with good governance, and make it all balance. Ain’t gonna happen.
Except that one of the nice features of an ATM is it gives you access to your bank during off hours. If they really wanted to be clever they would do it on a normal banking day, when you can go to a teller instead.
I’m sure that’s not the case. ATM networks must handle 50M transactions routinely. Especially since, as the OP mentions, they operate correctly worldwide.
I bet a Friday night for a national bank’s ATM transactions equals that easily, if not more.