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.
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.