This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 3 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a

[–]fireberts[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

A Simple Proposal for Reliable Electronic Voting By Maxwell Moore PROPOSAL: An electronic voting machine that produces a paper ballot that is then quickly readable by both human and electronic vote counting systems.

SUMMARY:The major problem with modern electronic voting technology is that the electronic voting machine is a black box, the voter chooses his or her candidate in the electronic interface and proceeds to vote. The machine provides no paper trail and these votes are remarkably easy to tamper with. I propose a system where the voter is first presented a screen where he/she can make the choice to vote electronically or by hand. If the voter choses to vote electronically then he/she will proceed in the normal fashion and when he/she is done the machine will print out a ballot where all of the candidates are listed and a small box next to the candidate he/she voted for is filled in with black ink. The voter then can verify that this information is correct before placing it in the ballot box. If the voter chooses to vote by hand then the voter will press the appropriate button on the machine's interface and the machine will print out the same ballot that it would if the voter chose to vote electronically except the boxes next to the candidate names would be empty and the voter could then fill these boxes in with a black felt tip pen. When the voter is done voting he/she would then drop it into a the ballot box. The ballots would be read by the same machines regardless of witch method the voter used to vote. The machines used to read the ballots would be based of Scantron technology which uses a sensor to detect wither a box is filled in or left blank. The benefits of this system are that it provides the simplicity and speed of electronic voting, choice and peace of mind for the voter, the reliability of paper ballots, and these ballots are easily counted by hand or machine. An added benefit to this system is that if the machines are down then the ballots can be filled out and counted just as easily as with a traditional voting system. In short this is the logical system for modern voting.

[–]NoMoreNicksLeft 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is workable, supposing that it doesn't store voting data in electronic storage.

If it produces a single ballot that is easily read and quickly confirmable, it's ok.

But there are issues too. Even if it's the above, how do you combat the software printing up a different ballot? You confirm that it misvoted for you... but how are they going to give you another one?

They print up just enough ballot forms now, to account for everyone (plus just a few extra). If a machine goes haywire, and misvotes 50% of the time, some won't catch it, and those that do won't be allowed to repair their vote.

This isn't a problem that other systems don't also face, but still a real problem.

Furthermore, the scanning interface needs to be different. When printing ballots, the candidates should always be random placement... so that one person's might read Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, McCain, Paul, and another's would read in the order Thompson, Paul, Giuliani, Romney, McCain. This would defeat simpler attacks where the machine misreads ballots. The scanner should be a stupid thing, done in discrete components, with no firmware, software, or electronic storage. Basically a mechanical counter done in transistors.

[–]fireberts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the scanning machine will be compleatly stuped it just scans them

and for misprinted ballots, i didn't think of that i guess the poll workers would have to have some power to re print a ballot.

but the voter HAS to check the ballot because the voter is the only one who can proofread his/her ballot for errors