What's worse than shitty, hacked voting machines? Unauditable, shitty voting machines

[smulder]

@Wanderfound

while volunteer representatives from each of the candidates watch over their shoulders to make sure they’re doing it right

This seems like the important part, and the reason optical-scan systems are not good enough.

[fnordius]

Exactly. The ballot printer only prepares, and you can look at the page before putting it in the box. If you cannot verify without a reader, then it isn’t a valid ballot. And the printers should not keep a tally, so that the wardens at the end of voting don’t get tempted to cut corners and save themselves work.

Sure, counting ballots can be tedious, but it cannot happen in a black box.

[kelly_anquoe]

can we vote on how to vote?

[Mister44]

I worked the election in 2004. We hand counted the NUMBER of ballots, but not the results. They were a “push the provided pen in this hole, mark the ballot” type system and they would be shipped off to get tallied at the main place.

Everything was done in 2s, with one R and one D for everything.

@smulder

This seems like the important part, and the reason optical-scan systems are not good enough.

Why is that?

See I still don’t really trust human ability to tabulate votes any more than I do the machines. I really don’t mind the auto machines tallying paper votes. Especially when the average age of the people doing the voting booth has to be around 60. I suppose if you employed those people who do the inventory counting for big box stores, maybe. But I don’t see why modern vote counters would be any worse than humans, and they could kick out any weird votes for humans to look at.

Again, I think the key here is paper trail. I really don’t like the ones that are just a screen and thats it.

Also, partly due to working the polls that one year, I think most of the voter fraud stuff is BS.

You guys should find out if you an help out at the next election. Its only one day, though I think there are one or two meetings before that and they pay you like $80 bucks.

[Alton]

Having spent most of my career as a useless municipal bureaucrat, I can testify that conducting an election is time consuming and costly… not to mention a royal pain in the ass. Not just the $80 a day poll watchers, but the cost of advertising, mailings, printing (and then reprinting because some idiot didn’t adequately proof before the first run), counting, certifying, etc. It’s easy to understand the incentives driving the proliferation of automated voting. Poor systems analysis and worse testing design are the proximate causes of the current shit show but that’s pretty typical for government computer system development (remember ACA year one). As often seems the case in government initiatives, it was a well intentioned effort doomed by the curse of unintended consequences.

A return to manual counts is a little too Luddite for my taste (and certainly no guarantee of an unrigged result) but a hard copy paper trail should absolutely have been part of the original systems requirement.

[Wry]

Numerous advanced nations have abolished electronic “voting” because they know it can’t be secured. It’s more than 59 now. You know that if Germany rejects a technology there is something seriously wrong with it.

"Fifty-nine countries, including advanced industrialized nations such as Germany, Canada, Australia, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and Spain, now have returned to purely hand-counted, paper ballot voting systems."
http://talkpoliticshere.com/ballots.html

[Pradaldi]

Okay, that’s interesting, France didn’t switch back to paper only, there is a moratorium on electronic vote. To be clear, place that already have a voting machine can keep it but nobody can switch anymore from paper to electronic.
As a result 82 communes in 2007 use machines, now it’s 64.

[Wanderfound]

@Mister44

See I still don’t really trust human ability to tabulate votes any more than I do the machines.

Human counting is imperfect, but when it’s supervised by scrutineers it’s imperfect in an unbiased way.

On the rare occasions where a result is close enough that counting errors could have influenced the outcome, they do a careful recount.

[anon68952647]

@Wanderfound

On the rare occasions where a result is close enough that counting errors could have influenced the outcome, they do a careful recount.

Classic Chad.

[Wanderfound]

Ain’t no chads down here.

Registered Democrats (mostly young and/or racialised) who didn't vote cost Hillary the election

BTW: how instant runoff voting works in practice. The typical number of candidates for a parliamentary seat is a dozen or less. Two major parties, a couple of significant minor parties, some trivial minor parties plus a couple of local independents. The ballot lists these dozen names, with an open box beside each. You use a pencil to number them in order of preference; 1 for your favourite, 2 for your next-best, etc. At counting time, they begin by just throwing them into piles according to t…

[anon68952647]

@Mister44

See I still don’t really trust human ability to tabulate votes any more than I do the machines.

That’s not a flaw with either system. That just sounds like a problem with voting.

@Mister44

But I don’t see why modern vote counters would be any worse than humans,

Humans already exist, and reliably show up to volunteer. There are three reasons.

[Wry]

Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, Stephen Unger:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/articles/manualCount.html

[Medievalist]

@Mister44

Also, partly due to working the polls that one year, I think most of the voter fraud stuff is BS.

That’s interesting - I had the exact opposite experience. We had a more complicated system, though, with no way to validate the counts. Your state’s system sounds better.

I lost count of the number of ways I could’ve hacked the Delaware voting system. It relies utterly on all of the technically skilled people in the system being inhumanly trustworthy, which I find unlikely.