I am not asking for a political debate.
In all the world, is there some system of recording people’s vote which is the best? Robust, secure, reliable and easy?
The U.S. has a lot of different systems. Four years ago people were upset about old-fashioned punch cards. Now people are concerned about newfangled computer thingees.
Certainly some jurisdiction must have found a superior system to get this job done. Please tell me about it.
I’m not sure if there’s any place that does it now, but I believe that requiring all machines to spit out a receipt after the vote would go a long way toward making the system more reliable. Even better, print out two copies of the receipt: one for the voter, one for the state.
Nevada has something similar, the machines punch the card after the voter logs their vote, and the voter can’t touch the roll of ballots. I haven’t heard any controversy coming out of there so far this year.
There are two possible meanings of “voting system” that are worth looking at. The first, which you have in mind, is the actual hardware used to record votes. The folks over at the Open Voting Consortium have a pretty well-thought out opinion on that.
The second is the actual method for voters to record their preferences among candidates. Way back when, Kenneth Arrow proved that there is no ideal voting system in that sense of the phrase, but there are some that are pretty good. Here are links to advocacy groups for approval voting and Condorcet voting, the only voting systems that I think are worth considering. Instant runoff voting has its advocates as well, but it’s a fundamentally flawed system and should never be considered.
We had a discussion recently on the relative merits of IRV and Condorcet and approval voting methods if you’d like to read it for yourself.
The ideal voting system would be accurate, transparent, verifiable, private and safe.
rwjefferson
Peace through Liberty
Bruce Schneier recently wrote something interesting on the topic:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_wit.html
Avi Rubin also has quite a bit to say:
I am more interested (at this point) in the mechanical side of it.
I like this method; especially if the voter gets to choose which receipt he saves and which is put in a recount box. I even tried to patent a method so that voters could check to see if their vote was accurately tallied. The one drawback is that giving the voter a receipt would make it easier to sell votes.
Much of this is IMHO:
As rwjefferson said, a good system has to be “accurate, transparent, verifiable, private and safe.” It should also have the following features:
You eliminated paper, cards, mechanical, and machines that require electricity.
The only thing left would be an interview in a confessional booth where your privacy is protected, the poll worker asks you the choices (to prevent overvotes and unintentional undervotes), and then slides the ballot through a slot for you to review. If it’s correct, you slide it through another slot to cast it.
From reading these boards, I’m convinced that, in the minds of many posters of all political persuations, the only ideal voting system is one that consistently elects their candidate. Any other result is per se invalid.
I don’t see this at all. Rather, I see that many posters would agree with **ultrafilter ** that the Condorcet criterion is key.
In a two candidate race, this is of course how it always works (excepting fraud). The real fun starts when there are more than two candidates.
I think Oregon State has a damn fine way of doing things. You get a paper ballot in the mail about 2 weeks before “voting day”. It is on a 8.5x11 sheet of heavy paper and is laid out in an easy to read (and complete) way.
You then have two weeks to fill out the ballot and drop it in the mail or at a ballot box anywhere in the state. This eliminates all that “trying to block people from voting in areas that commonly vote X way” because those people can drop their ballots off anywhere. Tampering with the ballots at the post office would then hold an extra charge of tampering with US Mail. IT would also be damn hard because in a pile of envelopes that all look the same, you’d be hard pressed to know which ballot voted which way.
I think the single thing that would help the elections in the USA is to stop all this “vote in one day” stupidity. If everyone moved to a mailed ballot system it would remove the need for a quick, easy way to file people through the voting system in one day. Enter electronic voting. I think electronic voting without a paper trail is damn stupid. The opportunity for abuse it too great. Moving to a mail in ballot would pretty much make that system go away.
I also think registering to vote is dumb. I think you should register if you want to align yourself to a party -which is needed for the primary- but everyone with a SSN who can vote (not minors, felons, etc) should automaticly be mailed a ballot. Everyone who fails to register as a party will be considered “not affiliated” for the sake of Fox News polling. Of course, overnight, I think the Not Affiliated Party will be the strongest party in the US. heh heh.
You’d want to refine this a bit. The SSAN is not a national ID number. Its use in the government is actually pretty restricted, although there are no restrictions for business. Add on the fact that there are no national elections, you’d have to convince the several states to follow the scheme independantly.
Ok, so my 15 minute idea on how to improve voting needs a few tweaks. 
I certainly am no expert, but Seven has made a good case that the Oregon system is the way to go.
I live in NY and have only ever voted on the old 60s style big, shower curtain, lever machines. And I was absolutely shocked to discover in 2000 that I’m in the serious minority! I thought stuffing pieces of paper into a box was something only third world countries did! But an MSNBC story said only about 15% of votes are cast with lever machines.
To me its kind of like how bad an idea it was for car manufacturers to switch to digital odometers. They did it because they’re cheaper. But go on eBay and search for ‘pathfinder’ and you’ll see auctions for odometer setting computers! Odometers (and voting machines) should be a mechanical device, not electronic!
They are inherently reliable, tamper resistant, accurate, and long-lived. The story said they weren’t cheap, but think of the millions being spent on electronic systems as well. Once you build enough mechanical ones they’d last for generations. They only get used once a year and really seriously used only every four!
A separate but related issue is that elections for federal offices are run by state and local authorities, who make their own decisions about registration procedures and deadlines, voter qualifications, ballot design, voting machines etc. I think any fair voting system must include a paper trail of some kind, and there’s plenty of room for discussion about how to accomplish that. But I would like to see uniform standards across the country for the conduct of federal elections. That might mean that separate ballots would be provided for federal and local elections, or that the federal government could require procedures different from those for state elections, etc. But it would eliminate a lot of disputes and voter confusion if everybody was reading from the same playbook on election day.
I’d also like to see the polls open for a continuous 24 hours or longer, including some weekend time, maybe noon Friday to midnight Saturday, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to find time to get to the polls. I’m not sure about the Oregon all-by-mail plan. I’d like to know more about it.
I’m confused about Oregon’s system, Seven.
Do you put your SSN on the ballot you mail in? If so, that could raise a lot of privacy concerns.
If not, then what’s to stop someone from printing up a few thousand ballots and sending them all in? (Or, even if they’re magically un-reproducible, going down the street the day they’re mailed and stealing them from everyone’s mailbox. Yes it’s a federal crime, but that asn’t stopped people before).
According to some reports, this already happened in Oregon.
You sign your name on the envelope. There are two envelopes. An inside “privacy envelope” which is unmarked and contains your ballot, and an outside envelope with the voter ID on it. You must sign the outer envelope. The signatures are checked one-by-one against the signatures on file. I know this works, becuase a friend of mine tried voting for his son (with his son’s permission) and the forged name was detected and rejected.
The privacy envelopes are opened and tallied separately from the outer envelopes to ensure privacy. Not perfect, perhaps, but effective and convenient.
If you are worried about having it stolen, you can drop it off at an official ballot drop. You can also check to see if your ballot was received.