Mmm. Spoiled ballots can be caused by people overvoting (marking say, Clinton and Trump) and plenty of those ballots weren’t counted due to undervoting (not voting for any candidate).
In my county, they actually tally how many votes are invalid or due to overvoting or undervoting and the overwhelming majority of spoiled ballots in the last Presidential election were due to undervoting.
Let me play Devil’s Advocate and comment on the Wright Brothers’ first flight: “That’s ridiculous, only 120 feet? What’s the value in that? Horses are a much more reliable method of transportation. If God had meant man to fly, etc”.
My point being that, yes, maybe voting machines aren’t perfect, but the early models of any technology are fraught with problems.
good idea. lets do it.
Oh, sure. Like in the 2000 election. Especially in Florida.
Yes, yes, but make sure you read Ken Thompson’s “Reflections on Trusting Trust”.
(tl;dr: all the open-source software in the world won’t help you if your toolchain’s been subverted, and just compiling the toolchain itself from source isn’t a guarantee against such a subversion.)
Not seeing an ‘HB’ project on GitHub, therefore not open source 
And that’s when we have a do-over with new candidates!
Voting machine are a technological solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
All you need is paper, ballots and a lot of volunteers and voting places. A machine is an unnecessary sped added to the process.
Really interesting, thanks for this !
You don’t need or want machines at all. Eyeballs, in redundant numbers to guard against corruption.
Always done that down here.
Why pencils? Would you believe invisible ink? Or at least that’s the reason I was given. The theory is that someone could just replace the pen they have there with one whose ink fades quickly. By the time the ballot box is unsealed and the votes are counted, the vote is gone and it doesn’t get counted.
How practical this is, I don’t know, but that’s what I was told when I asked why #2 pencils only.
Ah, I looked more into it and your machines fall very much into the “really expensive pencils” variant of electronic voting, which I guess is fine for counties that are very wealthy and also full of incompetent people. Ultimately it still prints out a paper ballot which is visually reviewed and actually submitted by hand and which is the final source of truth.
Although I wonder how it handles write-ins, I couldn’t find any details on that. It doesn’t seem like it would be possible to automate the counting of write-ins, so most electronic voting machines simply… disallow it. Which is pretty messed up.
Not quite. The initial results are from the electronic method which negates the need to hire hand ballot counters. The paper allows the voter to see what the machine will enter as their vote and provides a paper trail in the event a recount is requested. It’s the best of both worlds in my view.
I would go the other way, in stating that you can use a voting machine to help prepare your ballot, or to check that the ballot was properly filled out. The paper is the ballot, the machine is reduced to the role of the pen that fills out the ballot. It keeps no count.
Even in the role of automatic counting, a tally machine is only an aid, the official tally is hand-signed by the precinct official who should at least count the ballots by hand to verify.
There is a reason why I do not think a ballot should not be “counted” by any machine until the poll has closed, and that is because it tempts to peek at the running tally. Just put the paper ballot in the box, and let the officials feed them into a dedicated counter once polling has closed and the box has been unsealed. If it seems like more work, well, experience with purely human ballot counting is that the results come in just as fast. After all, there are also absentee ballots and recounts before the certified result is signed.
You can have an accurate vote, a fair vote and a fast vote. Choose two.
Does having an electronic machine tally the votes necessitate releasing the tally before the polls close?
It does not necessitate, but it does facilitate. It is much easier to say “no peeking!” if there are less ways to peek.
And, there are lots of ‘spoiled’ ballots which are perfectly readable by humans, but which are categorized as “spoiled” by Republicans who run Democratic voting districts. Because they can.
That sort of **** needs to stop, and the only way to do that is to have human eyes look at every questionable ballot.
Yet, no need for anything automated whatsoever. Saves money and ends speculation re cheating. What possible advantage to automation?
