Paper Ballots vs. Voting Machines vs. both

[Ken]

That's true, although I'm not sure what "lower income" has to do with it. In my state, elections are run at the country level. Funding generally comes from the state as a whole and is distributed to electoral districts based on the number of registered voters in that district. Whether a place is higher or lower income has nothing to do with it.

Election workers are paid uniformly regardless of if they are in the most expensive zip code in the state or the poorest one. There may be varying levels of competence. Perhaps in lower-income areas, the workers aren't as competent and let the machines sit around broken? But I don't see how that's anyone's fault except the workers themselves: they're all paid the same. If anything, the cost of living in lower income areas is lower, so their pay goes farther.

Lower income has to do with it because those are the communities where voting machines always seem to end up in shortest supply. Whether that is deliberate and malevolent or simply a consequence of those jurisdictions having fewer resources.

The cavalier attitude you just expressed about it is an example of the problem. It isn't the voters fault that they live in a jurisdiction where elections are run poorly. That would seem to be an argument for more Federal control and oversight. But it is certainly another argument for keeping things simple and low-tech with paper ballots. And if local jurisdictions can't run polling places competently then it is an argument for county and state administered mail-in voting as well.

[Josh]

Computer science experts and cybersecurity experts have been saying since 2000 that electronic voting systems are not a good idea and won’t make elections safer.

Why not listen to the experts?

I agree that we should listen to the experts. Which sounds like "both" to me, where there's some guarantee that the paper and electronic versions agree.

I think the experts are saying it's important to have a paper trail that can be verified. I think they are mostly saying that a hybrid system is best - ultimately, this all goes into computers regardless, it would be very hard to verify hand counts nationwide quickly.

The experts (if we believe computer science professors and cybersecurity people know what they're talking about) have been pretty adamant that there is no need for voting machines at all, and that they don't see any benefit that outweighs the risks.

Of course, they're ignored.

[Josh]

Lower income has to do with it because those are the communities where voting machines always seem to end up in shortest supply. Whether that is deliberate and malevolent or simply a consequence of those jurisdictions having fewer resources.

This sounds like an unfounded conspiracy theory. Voting machines are assigned and doled out at the state level, purely by the number of voters in each election district. (In Ohio, it is based on registered voters, not on turnout, so low-turnout districts tend to end up with more machines than they need.)

There is no such thing as electoral districts with fewer resources. All of the exact same resources are given to each precinct. The only qualitative difference there could possibly be is pollworkers. All pollworkers are paid the same.

[quote[The cavalier attitude you just expressed about it is an example of the problem. It isn't the voters fault that they live in a jurisdiction where elections are run poorly. That would seem to be an argument for more Federal control and oversight. But it is certainly another argument for keeping things simple and low-tech with paper ballots. And if local jurisdictions can't run polling places competently then it is an argument for county and state administered mail-in voting as well.
[/quote]

My "attitude" is based on boots-on-the-ground experience as a pollworker (including in an ultra-low-income district). There is no reason to have more federal control and oversight just because some people believe in conspiracy theories.

I don't see why mail-in voting is needed and would suffer from the same problems you claim would be happening. And mail-in voting invites massive fraud.

[Ken]

Lower income has to do with it because those are the communities where voting machines always seem to end up in shortest supply. Whether that is deliberate and malevolent or simply a consequence of those jurisdictions having fewer resources.

This sounds like an unfounded conspiracy theory. Voting machines are assigned and doled out at the state level, purely by the number of voters in each election district. (In Ohio, it is based on registered voters, not on turnout, so low-turnout districts tend to end up with more machines than they need.)

There is no such thing as electoral districts with fewer resources. All of the exact same resources are given to each precinct. The only qualitative difference there could possibly be is pollworkers. All pollworkers are paid the same.

The cavalier attitude you just expressed about it is an example of the problem. It isn't the voters fault that they live in a jurisdiction where elections are run poorly. That would seem to be an argument for more Federal control and oversight. But it is certainly another argument for keeping things simple and low-tech with paper ballots. And if local jurisdictions can't run polling places competently then it is an argument for county and state administered mail-in voting as well.

My "attitude" is based on boots-on-the-ground experience as a pollworker (including in an ultra-low-income district). There is no reason to have more federal control and oversight just because some people believe in conspiracy theories.

I don't see why mail-in voting is needed and would suffer from the same problems you claim would be happening. And mail-in voting invites massive fraud.

Not every state does things like Ohio. Conspiracy theory or not, it happens frequently. And it is made WORSE by reliance on complicated voting machines. In many states this sort of thing happens at the county level and there are huge discrepancies in resources allocated to different parts of the county. No one should have to wait 6 hours to vote regardless of the reason.

For example, here is Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston where students were forced to wait 6 hours to vote in a recent election. Due to shortages of functioning voting machines and a dual-party election which forced them to set out equal numbers of machines for both Republican and Democratic voters. While at the same time there were no lines at all in the affluent (and white) parts of Harris County like the Woodlands and Katy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html and https://www.texasobserver.org/an-electi ... -in-texas/

The larger point is that regardless of WHY you think this sort of thing happens. The REASON it happens is that they are using complicated touch-screen voting machines instead of paper ballots. With paper ballots there would have been no lines at all. Or very short ones since there would be no limit to the number of people who could vote at one time.

[Bootstrap]

I think the experts are saying it's important to have a paper trail that can be verified. I think they are mostly saying that a hybrid system is best - ultimately, this all goes into computers regardless, it would be very hard to verify hand counts nationwide quickly.

The experts (if we believe computer science professors and cybersecurity people know what they're talking about) have been pretty adamant that there is no need for voting machines at all, and that they don't see any benefit that outweighs the risks.

Of course, they're ignored.

Well, that's quite simply not true. Unless you only consider people expert if they agree with you. Seems like you are ignoring a lot of experts who have reached different conclusions.

A useful answer depends on tests that compare the manual process to automated ones, and the results depend a lot on which two systems you are comparing. Which machines are you opposed to? All machines? Are OCR machines OK? How about punch cards? Which manual processes are you advocating? When you say "paper ballot", what exactly do you mean? Without that, it's hard to set up the comparison.

But if you take human error and auditing into account, I think you will find that:

1. Human beings can misread, miscount, or mishandle ballots, leading to inaccuracies in the election results. Most of the systems used in elections have proven that they can do better than human beings do. Those test results were an important reason they were adopted in the first place.
2. Paper ballots are physically vulnerable. They can be damaged, lost, or tampered with. And sometimes lost ballots have been a real issue.
3. Paper ballots take up space, and it's hard to pull them up quickly for reference or auditing. Especially if you want to archive them for decades to allow research or later audits.
4. Auditing paper ballots is very labor-intensive. Digital records allow a lot more audit trails and analytics.

Whether or not you have paper ballots, you need electronic systems too, and you need to be able to make sure that they correspond.

[Ken]

I think the experts are saying it's important to have a paper trail that can be verified. I think they are mostly saying that a hybrid system is best - ultimately, this all goes into computers regardless, it would be very hard to verify hand counts nationwide quickly.

The experts (if we believe computer science professors and cybersecurity people know what they're talking about) have been pretty adamant that there is no need for voting machines at all, and that they don't see any benefit that outweighs the risks.

Of course, they're ignored.

Well, that's quite simply not true. Unless you only consider people expert if they agree with you. Seems like you are ignoring a lot of experts who have reached different conclusions.

A useful answer depends on tests that compare the manual process to automated ones, and the results depend a lot on which two systems you are comparing. Which machines are you opposed to? All machines? Are OCR machines OK? How about punch cards? Which manual processes are you advocating? When you say "paper ballot", what exactly do you mean? Without that, it's hard to set up the comparison.

But if you take human error and auditing into account, I think you will find that:

1. Human beings can misread, miscount, or mishandle ballots, leading to inaccuracies in the election results. Most of the systems used in elections have proven that they can do better than human beings do. Those test results were an important reason they were adopted in the first place.
2. Paper ballots are physically vulnerable. They can be damaged, lost, or tampered with. And sometimes lost ballots have been a real issue.
3. Paper ballots take up space, and it's hard to pull them up quickly for reference or auditing. Especially if you want to archive them for decades to allow research or later audits.
4. Auditing paper ballots is very labor-intensive. Digital records allow a lot more audit trails and analytics.

Whether or not you have paper ballots, you need electronic systems too, and you need to be able to make sure that they correspond.

I think we are drawing a distinction between VOTING MACHINES and VOTE COUNTING MACHINES. They are not the same thing at all.

Electronic voting machines are some sort of electronic touch-screen machine in which votes are recorded electronically onto some sort of digital file that is electronically transmitted to a central election headquarters. Or sometimes stored onto a flash drive and hand-carried to a vote center. There are a variety of issues with voting this way not the least of which is digital security.

Vote counting machines are optical scanning devices used in elections headquarters to scan and count paper ballots. They are usually not connected to the internet and the technology is simple and often open-source and simply automate the tedious process of counting paper ballots.

[Josh]

Well, that's quite simply not true. Unless you only consider people expert if they agree with you. Seems like you are ignoring a lot of experts who have reached different conclusions.

A useful answer depends on tests that compare the manual process to automated ones, and the results depend a lot on which two systems you are comparing. Which machines are you opposed to? All machines? Are OCR machines OK? How about punch cards? Which manual processes are you advocating? When you say "paper ballot", what exactly do you mean? Without that, it's hard to set up the comparison.

But if you take human error and auditing into account, I think you will find that:

1. Human beings can misread, miscount, or mishandle ballots, leading to inaccuracies in the election results. Most of the systems used in elections have proven that they can do better than human beings do. Those test results were an important reason they were adopted in the first place.

Applies to electronic voting machines too

2. Paper ballots are physically vulnerable. They can be damaged, lost, or tampered with. And sometimes lost ballots have been a real issue.

Digital records are also vulnerable, and can be damaged or tampered with and is far more difficult for the average person to understand or detect.

3. Paper ballots take up space, and it's hard to pull them up quickly for reference or auditing. Especially if you want to archive them for decades to allow research or later audits.

This isn't an issue at all. Scan them and record the results. Archiving digital data has just as many problems (arguably worse), particularly if you're talking about archiving really old digital data on a 10 or 20 year span.

4. Auditing paper ballots is very labor-intensive. Digital records allow a lot more audit trails and analytics.

Does it? Digital records are notoriously hard to audit. I'd like to see how you think there are a lot more "audit trails" of things like ensuring none of the machines are tampered with, the servers they use are secure, the networks involved are secure, the workstations involved are secure, etc. etc.

You may want to pause and consider that I work on this stuff for a living and I would never make so bold a statement as "Digital records allow a lot more audit trails and analytics."

Whether or not you have paper ballots, you need electronic systems too, and you need to be able to make sure that they correspond.

Boot, the issue at hand was using electronic voting machines versus filling out paper ballots. The consensus of experts is basically unaminous on that front. And this is an issue I've been following since 2001. The consensus hasn't changed.

I don't have a horse in the race of hand counting vs optical scanning etc.

[Josh]

I think we are drawing a distinction between VOTING MACHINES and VOTE COUNTING MACHINES. They are not the same thing at all.

Electronic voting machines are some sort of electronic touch-screen machine in which votes are recorded electronically onto some sort of digital file that is electronically transmitted to a central election headquarters. Or sometimes stored onto a flash drive and hand-carried to a vote center. There are a variety of issues with voting this way not the least of which is digital security.

Vote counting machines are optical scanning devices used in elections headquarters to scan and count paper ballots. They are usually not connected to the internet and the technology is simple and often open-source and simply automate the tedious process of counting paper ballots.

Counting machines have been around since the 1960s. Not exactly new stuff and doesn't require fancy computer networks and other things that are difficult to audit.

[Josh]

Not every state does things like Ohio. Conspiracy theory or not, it happens frequently. And it is made WORSE by reliance on complicated voting machines. In many states this sort of thing happens at the county level and there are huge discrepancies in resources allocated to different parts of the county. No one should have to wait 6 hours to vote regardless of the reason.

If this is happening it's due to incompetence or corruption on the part of electoral workers. I just checked, and Texas doles out funds at the state level too to pay for elections. There is no difference regardless of local funding, although counties sometimes can contribute additional. In your example above, too, it was all in the same county... so there is absolutely no way this is happening.

What is much more likely (and which I have personally experienced) is local staff in "low income" districts sometimes are incompetent, lazy, and just refuse to fix things. They are hard to hold accountable or get fired. I had to deal with one of these myself. She was representing the Democratic party, I was representing the Libertarian party at the time. Whenever anyone needed help in a voting booth (which was quite often), pollworkers from two different parties were supposed to go in.

Well this worker preferred to just sit in her chair and I had to repeatedly ask her to join me. This was in a district that was almost 100% either registered Democrats or independents, so it made me very uncomfortable that she expected me to go assist voters and see their ballots (sometimes having to do everything short of holding their hand to touch the screen) and see their voting choices. Yet that is the reality in many of these "low-income" districts you are concerned about.

Both of us were paid the same wage, so the difference was that I cared about carefully following procedures and ensuring a fair election - and she didn't. (The other Democrat I was working with was very sincere about her duties as well, and eventually took over from this other girl who basically spent the day sitting around.)

The larger point is that regardless of WHY you think this sort of thing happens. The REASON it happens is that they are using complicated touch-screen voting machines instead of paper ballots. With paper ballots there would have been no lines at all. Or very short ones since there would be no limit to the number of people who could vote at one time.

Yes, not having "technical issues" is a good reason to user paper ballots. The average voter should completely understand end to end how each vote is cast and counted. Very few people understand how computers work end to end. The average reasonable person can completely understand how a paper ballot is cast, counted, and the vote totals tallied up and reported.

[Ken]

4. Auditing paper ballots is very labor-intensive. Digital records allow a lot more audit trails and analytics.

Does it? Digital records are notoriously hard to audit. I'd like to see how you think there are a lot more "audit trails" of things like ensuring none of the machines are tampered with, the servers they use are secure, the networks involved are secure, the workstations involved are secure, etc. etc

Normally the first round of auditing called "canvassing" happens at the precinct level so the numbers are manageable.

If a precinct had 357 voters sign into the precinct to vote they should have 357 ballots. The canvassing process is this initial reconciliation of ballots to voters and is done with observers from both (or all) parties present.

If the number of ballots doesn't match the number of voters they need to reconcile why. If there are extra ballots they need to go through the serial numbers of the ballots issued to each voter (which will be on the voting register). They usually use stickers or hand-write the serial number of the ballot next to the voter. So if there were 357 voters and 360 ballots turn up they can figure out which are the three extra ones that don't correspond to any voter and set them aside.

If they come up short of ballots they need to figure out what happened to the missing ballots. Is there some stuck somewhere like in a ballot box? What happened to them? Sometimes people sign in to vote but then walk out without voting and bring their ballot with them so they need to account for that. Sometimes a voter soils a ballot and needs to get another one and the clerk should invalidate the first ballot and issue a new one with a new serial number, etc.

So if there are discrepancies in the overall vote count the elections officials can isolate them to a specific precinct and figure out what happened.

During the actual counting process there are always undervotes (ballots that had no choice selected for a particular ballot item) and there will be over-votes (ballots that have two choices selected for a ballot item. Neither of these will count towards the vote totals, only ballots that have one and only one choice made per ballot item. And there are also soiled or unreadable or ambiguous ballots that the machines can't count and these are separated out for hand inspection to see if the voter's intent can be discerned. So the number of ballots usually doesn't exactly match the number of votes.

Normally none of this really matters much if races aren't close. But if they are razor close the you have to really count and recount each ballot carefully.