Paper Ballots vs. Voting Machines vs. both

[Josh]

Elections are safest when many citizens are involved. I don’t trust people who design computers and computer software and are responsible for cybersecurity.

[Ken]

Elections are safest when many citizens are involved. I don’t trust people who design computers and computer software and are responsible for cybersecurity.

Optical-scan vote counting software and scanning machines are old technology that has been around for decades and there are open-source options. They are also fully auditable meaning that you can run any number of paper ballots through them and then verify the results. Which is something that every jurisdiction using them does on a regular basis. And you can audit the entire election which is what a hand-recount is. There is no reason why every jurisdiction can't use optical scanning machinery that uses open-source software.

But every jurisdiction in the modern world uses computers to tabulate votes. Even Australia. They don't use an abacus to tally up the vote totals from every precinct and jurisdiction in the county and then report the results on clay tablets. They use computers. And even if it is just an Excel spreadsheet or similar, it is still probably commercial software they are using that isn't open-source. The key isn't avoiding computer technology and automation of rote tasks. The key is to run your elections in a manner that can be audited and verified.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Australia conducts multi-party ranked choice voting entirely in paper.

There is six weeks’ advance notice to set up the polling places.

They seem to have elections that run just fine.

But, alas, they typically have only one office up for grab per election, right? And votes are counted within one constituency/riding, right?

If those conditions are yrue, paper works just fine. Our elections are nightmares by comparison.

When elections are called multiple candidates could be on the ballot, but often it's just 1. If there is a lot of political upheaval than state/local stuff often ends up being called when national is too.

Each electoral district (called a "returning office") sets up its election equipment, polling places, hires workers, and so forth. I had the opportunity to work one of these and would have really enjoyed it but didn't feel comfortable as an Anabaptist, particularly since I beg every election to be excused from voting, which is not a right C.O.'s actually have anywhere. My sister in law regularly works these elections.

Australian politics have their issues but they would hard to defraud on a mass scale. The kind of shennanigans reported in America just wouldn't fly there. (Of course, this doesn't mean Australia is more conservative or less likely to vote in liberal politicians, etc., it's just got more honest elections than we do.)

On the flip side, voting machine companies don't get to make as much money there selling electronic voting machines...

Do you submit a “Donkey Ballot?”

I could imagine what would go on here in ‘muricia if the results were delayed 7 days.

[Josh]

So far I’ve been excused every time I’ve asked. I forgot about one election (you have only 6 weeks’ advance notice, and believe it or not, I don’t really keep up on the news consistently), and I got a fine for not voting. I sent in a letter begging for leniency and was granted it.

The last election, my ballot showed up after the election, so when I called to tell them this and asked to be excused from voting, they granted it.

[Bootstrap]

I'm a big fan of both.

Remember Bush v. Gore? The issue involved hanging chads, it's not always easy to judge a paper ballot and it takes time. People don't always mark clearly and consistently. And if their ballot is rejected or misinterpreted, a voter has no way to know that. So paper doesn't solve all the problems.

But electronic voting without a paper record is also vulnerable - people have no way of verifying that their vote was counted correctly, and it's possible that someone could figure out a way to hack the system.

So most election security people I read advocate some combination. So does Amy Totenburg, FWIW, in a case that was mentioned recently in another thread:

https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-el ... SFRRNV2MM/

Georgia uses a voting system where voters fill out their ballots on touchscreens, which are attached to printers that create a paper ballot. The ballot displays voters’ choices in human-readable text alongside a QR code that is read and counted by scanning machines.

Critics of the technology say voters can’t be sure that the code accurately reflects their selections. Recounts and audits in Georgia have routinely confirmed the accuracy of vote counts.

Totenberg proposed eliminating the QR codes currently used to count paper ballots, holding more election audits and implementing cybersecurity measures.

I don't think there's evidence of widespread problems, but I think that having both paper and electronic voting records makes it easier to audit in case there are problems in a given election. And the ability to audit results is really, really important. For Georgia, the biggest gap seems to be that voters can't look at the QR codes and confirm that the electronic record matches what they intended at the time they vote. Changing that to a readable record that they can confirm seems like a good move.

An expert for the plaintiffs, University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman, identified vulnerabilities in the voting system’s software. He wrote a report that said votes could be altered by someone who gained access to voting equipment, such as a voter in a polling place or a corrupt election official.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed the vulnerabilities last year, but it found no evidence that weaknesses have ever been exploited in an election.

And we do know that one of the political campaigns did manage to gain direct access to voting machines in at least Coffee County, Georgia in 2020. People involved in that have pleaded guilty. So this is a real concern.

[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?

[Ken]

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?

There are other reasons why electronic voting machines are not a good idea. Namely that they are not scalable. And are often rationed in low income areas which produces long lines and the polls and discourages people from voting. Nearly every single time you read about long lines at the polling places, especially in the south. It is the result of electronic voting machines. And strangely it never seems to happen in wealthy suburbs. We could pull up hundreds of photos of long lines at the polls. It is nearly always the result of having too few machines, machines that are broken down, etc. Well, I have read of instances of polling places running out of ballots but that is just sheer incompetence or possibly malevolence.

If you put 5 electronic voting machines in a polling place you can only have 5 people voting at a time. And if the ballot is long and complicated that is going to create lines. If you are using paper ballots you can have 100 people voting at once if that is how many show up. They don't even need tables and voting booths, they can sit in a corner, fill out their ballot, go out in the hall and do it on the floor, etc. You can pass out as many ballots as you have.

[Josh]

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.

[Bootstrap]

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.

[Bootstrap]

Elections are safest when many citizens are involved. I don’t trust people who design computers and computer software and are responsible for cybersecurity.

Optical-scan vote counting software and scanning machines are old technology that has been around for decades and there are open-source options. They are also fully auditable meaning that you can run any number of paper ballots through them and then verify the results. Which is something that every jurisdiction using them does on a regular basis. And you can audit the entire election which is what a hand-recount is. There is no reason why every jurisdiction can't use optical scanning machinery that uses open-source software.

But every jurisdiction in the modern world uses computers to tabulate votes. Even Australia. They don't use an abacus to tally up the vote totals from every precinct and jurisdiction in the county and then report the results on clay tablets. They use computers. And even if it is just an Excel spreadsheet or similar, it is still probably commercial software they are using that isn't open-source. The key isn't avoiding computer technology and automation of rote tasks. The key is to run your elections in a manner that can be audited and verified.

Either way, people or machines can make mistakes. People can cheat, either with machines or without machines. Verifiable systems and audits is where the action is.