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Some useful information about paper ballot process, based on my experience as a Minnesota election judge. Minnesota has excellent election law and process, whic

by beat 8y ago

Some useful information about paper ballot process, based on my experience as a Minnesota election judge. Minnesota has excellent election law and process, which is how we've survived two high-profile statewide recounts in the recent past without incident. First and foremost, paper ballots everywhere. No touchscreens. Second, from printing time onward, all handling of ballots, whether marked or unmarked, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties. At no point are ballots left alone with individuals or only one party (this is something a lot of states could learn from us!). This eliminates many avenues for cheating by adding or removing ballots from the count. The ballots themselves are Scantron, fill in the dots with ink. The state provides standardized pens for this. All registered voters in a precinct are tracked in a paper roll. In order to get a ballot, voters must either be in the registration book, or apply for a provisional ballot (which requires identification). Names are marked off the registration roll as they get their ballots, and a count is kept. At the end of voting, the total count of the voting machines must match the total count of voters exactly. Any difference triggers a manual count. Scantron machines are randomly spot-checked - some percentage of them will be hand-counted, and those counts checked against the machine results. Multiple mismatches across the district/state would trigger an election-wide hand count. This insures against cheating by altering the behavior of the machines. (This is also where touch-screen machines fall down, imho, and should be flatly banned! There is no manual guarantee of the integrity of the results in a touch-screen machine.) Initial counts on election day are provisional, and need to be certified via additional checks before being finalized (including the possibility of recounts). There's more, but these are the big ones, and you get the idea. This entire system depends on protecting the integrity of physical ballots, which as you can see, is pretty straightforward.

beat 8y ago
One important consequence of this is that, as long as you can control the integrity of the paper ballots, then cheating the software of the voting machines does not matter. It will simply get caught, and replaced with a manual count.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
BoiledCabbage 8y ago
Such incredibly simple steps. Who thought it was a good idea to "disrupt" voting by going electronic?
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  The same kind of guys who scrapped William Binneys working multimillion dollar thinthread project for a multibillion dollar project that didn't work... Eg, the oligarchs and good Ole boys
- beat 8y ago
  It's not just electronic voting. Let's look at a real attempt to subvert elections - Voter ID laws. Voter ID is presented as a solution to a problem that actually does not exist, given this system. In Minnesota, you show up at the polling place, say your name and address, they find you on the registration list, check you off, and hand you a ballot. No need to prove you are who you say you are. If someone pretends to be you before you vote, then it's immediately and obviously brought to the attention of the judges (and we aren't seeing a massive wave of fakery now). If someone pretended to be you after you vote, they'd get caught. Of course, someone could fake it, with someone's registration that they know won't vote. But if they repeated it at a single precinct, the odds of being recognized as a repeat voter by the election judges goes up. So they would have to move from precinct to precinct, with a list of viable registered non-voters to use. Now, consider scale. A statewide Minnesota election is about 1.5M voters. To move the outcome 1% requires 15,000 votes. If one person can manage to vote illegally ten times in a day, it would require 1500 people in a conspiracy. Plus data management, tight enough for no errors. And NO leaks while these 1500 people are trained (and probably paid, if you want that many). With that in mind, the idea of actually manipulating the election with votes that could be prevented with Voter ID is absurd. But! If we put ID laws in place, we could well reduce the number of voters by 1%, and that result would be biased toward people who are poor or otherwise not fully integrated into mainstream society. Election manipulation, completely legal, and more effective than the mechanism it purports to prevent. Ugh. And hey, if voters are dumb enough to fall for that, maybe we can get them excited for touchscreen machines!
  - 8y ago
bdamm 8y ago
This sounds like an outstanding model. Other states have complained that such process would be too expensive. How has Minnesota resisted being "too cheap" on election? And in general I'm impressed by Minnesota's governance. Maybe the answer is a deeper look at Minnesota's government structure.
- beat 8y ago
  It's not any more expensive than any other state. Minnesota doesn't use an unusually high number of election judges - the usual collection of old ladies who do election judge work can handle this. States that let individuals handle ballots and stuff are either incompetent or malicious. There's no excuse for not solving easily solved problems with simple, proven solutions, when our democracy is at stake.
  - extrapickles 8y ago
    In King County in Washington state, they stream on the internet the entire processing of the ballots, and there is a tracker that tells you if your vote has been officially counted. https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security-and-accountability/watch-us-in-action.aspx https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security...
donarb 8y ago
In Seattle (which has mail-in voting) all ballot envelopes and ballots are digitally photographed as they enter the elections facility. This sets a baseline count before any ballots are tallied making the process of adding/removing ballots as well as changing votes much more difficult.
tzs 8y ago
> The ballots themselves are Scantron, fill in the dots with ink. The state provides standardized pens for this. I wonder if they have considered augmenting that. Add this [1] to it and it would still work pretty much the same as far as voters are concerned when they are in the voting both--the ballots would be printed a little differently and the pens would be different, but it would still be rub the dot with the pen. Afterwards, though, when the results are released individual voters can verify that their vote was counted and that it went toward the correct candidate. There are other advantages discussed in the link below. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
rootusrootus 8y ago
I think several states do it this way. Oregon is much the same way. Boxes, not scantron bubbles, but conceptually the same. And vote-by-mail, not in-person. But as you say, always representatives from both large political parties, etc.
jacques_chester 8y ago
> First and foremost, paper ballots everywhere. No touchscreens. > Second, from printing time onward, all handling of ballots, whether marked or unmarked, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties. Australia does this at all levels of government, up to national elections. The people nominated by candidates are called "scrutineers" and every candidate may nominate at least one for every polling station and several for every counting room. The count is done manually, thrice, again with scrutineer oversight. Here's a photo of a close count occurring under scrutiny: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-06/counting-resumes-in-seat-of-cowan-after-2016-election/7572876 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-06/counting-resumes-in-se... At the last Federal election, 3 boxes of Senate ballots in Western Australia were lost. The matter wound up in the High Court. Because there was a very slight but non-zero mathematical possibility that those ballots could have changed the outcome, the election was voided and run again from scratch. This stuff isn't rocket science. You just have to pretend that it's important.
- beat 8y ago
  They call those "poll watchers" in Minnesota. And yes, every party is allowed to place poll watchers at any/all precincts. Poll watchers are also allowed to challenge the registrations of any individuals coming to vote. I don't remember the exact details around it, but they aren't powerless. I remember one election in particular where I was working a mixed-race, poor neighborhood precinct in Minneapolis. The Democratic poll-watcher was convinced the Republican one was going to challenge every single voter and paralyze the precinct, preventing hundreds from voting. The Republican poll watcher was convinced that Democrats were going to bus in thousands of paid illegal black voters from Wisconsin. Of course, neither of these things happened.

by beat 8y ago

beat 8y ago

One important consequence of this is that, as long as you can control the integrity of the paper ballots, then cheating the software of the voting machines does not matter. It will simply get caught, and replaced with a manual count.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

BoiledCabbage 8y ago

Such incredibly simple steps. Who thought it was a good idea to "disrupt" voting by going electronic?

arminiusreturns 8y ago
The same kind of guys who scrapped William Binneys working multimillion dollar thinthread project for a multibillion dollar project that didn't work... Eg, the oligarchs and good Ole boys
beat 8y ago
It's not just electronic voting. Let's look at a real attempt to subvert elections - Voter ID laws. Voter ID is presented as a solution to a problem that actually does not exist, given this system. In Minnesota, you show up at the polling place, say your name and address, they find you on the registration list, check you off, and hand you a ballot. No need to prove you are who you say you are. If someone pretends to be you before you vote, then it's immediately and obviously brought to the attention of the judges (and we aren't seeing a massive wave of fakery now). If someone pretended to be you after you vote, they'd get caught. Of course, someone could fake it, with someone's registration that they know won't vote. But if they repeated it at a single precinct, the odds of being recognized as a repeat voter by the election judges goes up. So they would have to move from precinct to precinct, with a list of viable registered non-voters to use. Now, consider scale. A statewide Minnesota election is about 1.5M voters. To move the outcome 1% requires 15,000 votes. If one person can manage to vote illegally ten times in a day, it would require 1500 people in a conspiracy. Plus data management, tight enough for no errors. And NO leaks while these 1500 people are trained (and probably paid, if you want that many). With that in mind, the idea of actually manipulating the election with votes that could be prevented with Voter ID is absurd. But! If we put ID laws in place, we could well reduce the number of voters by 1%, and that result would be biased toward people who are poor or otherwise not fully integrated into mainstream society. Election manipulation, completely legal, and more effective than the mechanism it purports to prevent. Ugh. And hey, if voters are dumb enough to fall for that, maybe we can get them excited for touchscreen machines!
- 8y ago

bdamm 8y ago

This sounds like an outstanding model. Other states have complained that such process would be too expensive. How has Minnesota resisted being "too cheap" on election? And in general I'm impressed by Minnesota's governance. Maybe the answer is a deeper look at Minnesota's government structure.

beat 8y ago
It's not any more expensive than any other state. Minnesota doesn't use an unusually high number of election judges - the usual collection of old ladies who do election judge work can handle this. States that let individuals handle ballots and stuff are either incompetent or malicious. There's no excuse for not solving easily solved problems with simple, proven solutions, when our democracy is at stake.
- extrapickles 8y ago
  In King County in Washington state, they stream on the internet the entire processing of the ballots, and there is a tracker that tells you if your vote has been officially counted. https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security-and-accountability/watch-us-in-action.aspx https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security...

donarb 8y ago

In Seattle (which has mail-in voting) all ballot envelopes and ballots are digitally photographed as they enter the elections facility. This sets a baseline count before any ballots are tallied making the process of adding/removing ballots as well as changing votes much more difficult.

tzs 8y ago

> The ballots themselves are Scantron, fill in the dots with ink. The state provides standardized pens for this. I wonder if they have considered augmenting that. Add this [1] to it and it would still work pretty much the same as far as voters are concerned when they are in the voting both--the ballots would be printed a little differently and the pens would be different, but it would still be rub the dot with the pen. Afterwards, though, when the results are released individual voters can verify that their vote was counted and that it went toward the correct candidate. There are other advantages discussed in the link below. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

rootusrootus 8y ago

I think several states do it this way. Oregon is much the same way. Boxes, not scantron bubbles, but conceptually the same. And vote-by-mail, not in-person. But as you say, always representatives from both large political parties, etc.

jacques_chester 8y ago

> First and foremost, paper ballots everywhere. No touchscreens. > Second, from printing time onward, all handling of ballots, whether marked or unmarked, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties. Australia does this at all levels of government, up to national elections. The people nominated by candidates are called "scrutineers" and every candidate may nominate at least one for every polling station and several for every counting room. The count is done manually, thrice, again with scrutineer oversight. Here's a photo of a close count occurring under scrutiny: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-06/counting-resumes-in-seat-of-cowan-after-2016-election/7572876 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-06/counting-resumes-in-se... At the last Federal election, 3 boxes of Senate ballots in Western Australia were lost. The matter wound up in the High Court. Because there was a very slight but non-zero mathematical possibility that those ballots could have changed the outcome, the election was voided and run again from scratch. This stuff isn't rocket science. You just have to pretend that it's important.

beat 8y ago
They call those "poll watchers" in Minnesota. And yes, every party is allowed to place poll watchers at any/all precincts. Poll watchers are also allowed to challenge the registrations of any individuals coming to vote. I don't remember the exact details around it, but they aren't powerless. I remember one election in particular where I was working a mixed-race, poor neighborhood precinct in Minneapolis. The Democratic poll-watcher was convinced the Republican one was going to challenge every single voter and paralyze the precinct, preventing hundreds from voting. The Republican poll watcher was convinced that Democrats were going to bus in thousands of paid illegal black voters from Wisconsin. Of course, neither of these things happened.