There was a lot of effort put in to changing how those machines work, based largely on the work of a few independant researchers in the early 2000’s. Newer machines are more secure, auditable, and have a documented paper trail of all votes that can be recounted. These companies had to be shamed into doing the right thing, but at least they did it.
Many still have notable gaps in voter verification - for example, the ballots are tallied by reading a printed QR code, which the voter has no means to verify. So close to voter-verifiable, yet not voter-verifiable.
In addition, polling places are often bottlenecked by the limited number of expensive machines, which local precincts have no power to remedy - especially in dense urban areas.
I have to wonder why bubble (scantron) forms, which are simple, cheap, low-infrastructure, and present vastly less software surface area (they can be counted by an array of photosensors and discrete flip-flop registers) were not the preferred choice. And, it’s always possible to have a touchscreen machine which prints a filled bubble form - which the voter can actually verify.
The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn’t. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.
Many machines now are paper based, the machines just scan the paper and deposit it in a lockbox, and the physical paper can be recounted if necessary. These are the machines I use in my district.
The ballot is scanned right in front of you, and if you made a stray mark that would cause the ballot to be invalidated, or it detects an over/under vote, it informs you so that you have a chance to destroy the ballot and re-vote if necessary.
But what’s the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.
And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.
Ghe point is that the automatic process tends to be very reliable and instantaneous while hand counts can be used as an auditing process. So machines that are easily auditable and have an inherent paper trail because thenvotes are on actual paper ballots are the best combination of steps for voting.
Auditable machines make ballot stuffing impossible.
There was a lot of effort put in to changing how those machines work, based largely on the work of a few independant researchers in the early 2000’s. Newer machines are more secure, auditable, and have a documented paper trail of all votes that can be recounted. These companies had to be shamed into doing the right thing, but at least they did it.
Many still have notable gaps in voter verification - for example, the ballots are tallied by reading a printed QR code, which the voter has no means to verify. So close to voter-verifiable, yet not voter-verifiable.
In addition, polling places are often bottlenecked by the limited number of expensive machines, which local precincts have no power to remedy - especially in dense urban areas.
I have to wonder why bubble (scantron) forms, which are simple, cheap, low-infrastructure, and present vastly less software surface area (they can be counted by an array of photosensors and discrete flip-flop registers) were not the preferred choice. And, it’s always possible to have a touchscreen machine which prints a filled bubble form - which the voter can actually verify.
The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn’t. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.
Many machines now are paper based, the machines just scan the paper and deposit it in a lockbox, and the physical paper can be recounted if necessary. These are the machines I use in my district.
The ballot is scanned right in front of you, and if you made a stray mark that would cause the ballot to be invalidated, or it detects an over/under vote, it informs you so that you have a chance to destroy the ballot and re-vote if necessary.
But what’s the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.
And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.
Ghe point is that the automatic process tends to be very reliable and instantaneous while hand counts can be used as an auditing process. So machines that are easily auditable and have an inherent paper trail because thenvotes are on actual paper ballots are the best combination of steps for voting.
Auditable machines make ballot stuffing impossible.
Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.