There’s at least one other category of person who could be expected to dispute it: a person who wants to vote for who they want to vote for, and not merely to have voted. Presumably many or even most people who make the effort to go to the polls on a Tuesday actually give a shit about having their vote reflect their intent. I don’t doubt some people would be sufficiently cowed by embarrassment to prefer a mis-vote over having to interact with another human being, but I’m not convinced that being confident with technology is the main predictor of willingness to raise an objection.
(To phrase the above differently, if the printed receipt showed a vote at odds with my intent, I for one wouldn’t give a good god damn if it was my fault or the machine’s: my vote’s not right, let’s fix it. This isn’t unique to touchscreen machines, see below.)
I don’t know from personal experience since where I vote we do use scantron-type marked forms, but every jurisdiction has some procedure for spoiled ballots, this isn’t unique to touchscreen machines. With the scantron forms in my precinct, you tell a poll worker you spoiled your ballot, they dispose of the spoiled one according to a procedure and give you a new one that you vote. If you really want to know the answers to your questions, I imagine you can dig them up from the web site of the clerk of a jurisdiction that uses touchscreens. But they are likely to vary from state to state and even county to county, of course.
Machine procurement is top-down and subject to all kinds of shenanigans. I don’t think it necessarily reflects on the front-line poll workers, who let us remember are volunteers (at least around here). While nothing is universal, I have high regard for the competence and dedication of the poll workers I’ve interacted with – and it’s those poll workers who are the first line of defense against the kind of election tampering we’re talking about.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s kind of like the retail-level “voter fraud” argument – the risk/reward ratio doesn’t look favorable.
Uh, that seems pretty easy to fix. Not only will print shops cut your order to size, many will even add embossing, die cuts, raised ink, print on special paper, etc.
In new york, the voter fills out a paper ballot BEFORE putting it in the computer to be scanned. So the machine is not creating the paper record, he voters are. Those paper ballots are locked into some sort of box as they are scanned. I’m not sure about the one in the article, but I was assuming if there are paper ballots, that’s what they mean no? or are these votes created on a touch screen and a paper print is generated afterward?
Quick preliminary counting, and more timely reporting from precincts. Less human involvement in counts where interpretation or ulterior motives can lead to miscounting or deliberately discounting votes. Or endless arguement about what was intended on each ballot. All of which we saw in Florida and other states during the 2000 election. And have continued to see where humans are directly involved in such things.
It can lower costs. Because when elections aren’t close, and there’s no reason to believe any funny business is going on. You aren’t paying large numbers of humans to spend weeks or months to hand count.
And if done right it can reduce the traditional steal/destroy ballots or just “misplace” whole ballot box approach. Ballot stuffing and the like. Because it gives you the ability to have multiple, independent, redundant records of the vote. So those tactics become visible, and won’t neccisarily impact outcome.
And those aren’t new concerns/goals. Many places used mechanical machines exactly this way for decades. And some of the call to switch to electronic systems rolled out of problems with those machines. Those chads we heard so much about in 2000 were intended to be read by machine, and later electronic systems similar to a scantron. While eliminating the problem of messily filled bubbles or filled with the wrong sort of pen or pencil.
The problem here isn’t the concept, its the execution. Too many places prefer it messy. Or are more concerned with costs and sweet sweet government contracts than the rest of the list. The expectation being that since the word “computer” is involved its already taken care of.
Poll workers aren’t the ones in charge of the elections though. If an honest, hard-working poll worker notices that the voting machines are experiencing counting errors or that the ballots are poorly designed or that the people in their neighborhood seem to be disproportionately left off the voter rolls then there’s not much they can do about it without support from higher up the food chain.
All of these benefits exist when using the fill-in-the-bubble + scantron system of voting, as many precincts do.
The ballot is only marked up by the voter. The scanning takes seconds. The machine tells you if something is illegible, in which case the ballot is spoiled and you do it again (so no “hanging chads” situation). The counting is instantaneous. And the original records are all there in case of audit or dispute.
County officials who led the purchase of the machines have argued that the system actually functioned as it should: The paper ballot backup process worked. The touch screens failed, but the backups had the correct vote, so while it was inconvenient, it proved the necessity of a paper backup.
What does in mean that the touch screens failed? The touch screens are an input device. If the input failed, then the paper receipts couldn’t have produced the correct response.
The failure was that what was being recorded on paper and what was being recorded in memory were completely different.
As a software engineer I struggle to understand how this was even possible, but more concerning to me is it being blithely dismissed as a “touch screen failure.” That both indicates the general lack of knowledge of the participants (a typical miscategorization of the screen and the “computer” as the same thing), and also allows them to dismiss it as a physical problem, fixable by calibration or something, rather than a software/security problem.
It’s always bad when the plot of Man of the Year becomes inexplicably more plausible as time goes on.
The plot, in case you haven’t seen the movie (please don’t, it’s Bad), is that Robin Williams plays a Jon Stewart analogue who runs for president on a lark, then wins the presidency as a third-party because a glitch in the most widely-used voting machine software meant that he swept all of the 13 states where he was on the ballot, giving him enough electoral votes for victory. The glitch? Well, his character’s last name was Dobbs, and his opponents’ names were Kellogg and Mills, and for whatever reason, when candidates have double letters in their last names, the voting software ranks the candidates in double-letter alphabetical order, so Dobbs, then Kellogg, then Mills (because the double-G in Kellogg counted, not the double-L? I don’t know the plot was Dumb).
Here in New Jersey the machines are designed to only allow the voter to redo the paper ballot twice. On the third try the machine will cast the vote for what’s printed on the paper whether the voter agrees or not. I don’t know about the rest of the state but in Union County poll workers were instructed that the machines never make errors printing the paper ballot therefore it must be the voter who made the error. Voters are made to go to the end of the line if they wish to print a new paper ballot.
Yeah. And all of those things work better, or only work. With electronic counting of ballots, over an electronic ballot. Which is all the “Scantron” model is.
It doesn’t solve the “hanging chad” problem, since the chads were a “Scantron” system. Not using chads solves chads. They are too unreliable a marking method, and too disputable.
If the Scantron system detects that the ballot is spoilt and returns it to the voter, there’s much less of a problem of ambiguous ballots - particularly if the Scantron is set to favour falsely rejecting ballots rather than permissively accepting them.
The other critical thing that’s needed is risk-limiting audits done routinely on all electoral contests.
A chad ballot is essentially a computer punch card. Holes were punched in a physical ballot to allow it to be read by a computer, or mechanical machines. Either through a physical contact made through the hole or later light shining through it. It was an early approach to the same scanning marks on a page thing the scantron did. But also an attempt to eliminate the earlier devices’ sensitivity to marking. Where things needed really specific, non perminant marks and perfectly filled bubbles.
Problem being those little punch outs caused all sorts of problems. Pre-preforated chads could fall out without someone deliberately marking them. An incompletely separated chad could fold over the hole as the sheet was fed, causing it to read as closed. Incompletely punched holes read as closed. And so on.
All of which prevented the device (and still prevents them cause we’re still using chad ballots and they’re still causing problems) from detecting a problem with the ballot. So you you can’t reliably do that important step of rejecting roached ballots. And in checking your physical ballots, all that unreliability in poking holes turns into a bunch of rejected ballots and arguments that votes for candidate A are really votes for candidate B or aren’t votes at all. But random chad problems. So auditing things becomes much more complicated.
Perminant ink marks on separate paper ballots. Scanned and counted by an electronic machine that maintains separate paper and electronic records. With the original ballots preserved and stored/controlled separately has turned out to be the best way to go about this. And you can add additional layers of redundancy as well. Like scanned images of ballots as a separate record, and receipts or take home copies for voters.
The biggest issue when the machine is the ballot. Is it drops the most critical layer of redundancy. The physical ballot that’s got no contact with the machine. So you skip a couple of the checking steps, and all the records directly involve the machine. So if the machine’s a problem you got nothing independent to check it against.
Also makes it possible to conduct multiple counts as a matter of course.
You’re counting ballots on site at the polling place. And you can run them through a separate set of machines when they hit the board of elections. Since you need fewer machines total to conduct the election, some of them can be ear marked for an extra round of counting and it still costs less.
