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Totally agreed, but there's a variation on electronic voting I've heard proposed that I think would be very, very helpful. Long story short, the machine doesn't

Totally agreed, but there's a variation on electronic voting I've heard proposed that I think would be very, very helpful. Long story short, the machine doesn't record the vote, it just produces the ballot. You enter all your choices on the machine, then the machine spits out a piece of paper, and the paper itself is your voting record. You verify that it is correct before it goes into the ballot box. Nothing's perfect, but this doesn't seem to have any weaknesses that existing paper ballots don't, and it gets rid of a few. It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle", and real errors like overvoting. Software shenanigans are almost pointless, because the piece of paper is the vote record, and the voter checks it.* Machines can also be more usable for people with input/output difficulties (poor eyesight, motor control, whatever). --- *I say "almost" because we all know that plenty of people won't check it. Vision problems are also a concern here, but not any more so than with plain paper.

cf498 8y ago
Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day and any issues will lead to people having to wait longer or not being able to vote at all. Which you can already see happening in areas where voting machines are used. This is especially problematic if specific regions with known political majorities can be targeted and sabotaged. There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher or an overhauled ballot design. Even just keeping the problems that exist with paper ballots beats any risk that introducing electronics in the process pose.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  > Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day That's fair, but if that happens, we have a very gentle fallback to just manually marking the ballots again. > There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher I direct your attention to the state of Florida, November 2000.
dan-robertson 8y ago
I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve. If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them. A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  > If it makes all ballots look alike Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? > If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    > Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Yeah, they definitely are. People mark them all sorts of ways.
    - ygra 8y ago
      I think that referred to the suggestion of printing every ballot after the user selects their choice on the machine.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    > Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.
s3m4j 8y ago
"Congratulations, you have invented the most expansive pencil" In France we don't actually write anything. When we enter the room we're given one paper per candidate with the name and logo printed clearly. Once in the voting booth we put one or none in the enveloppe. That's it. Problem solved.
- tehlike 8y ago
  How do you verify your vote is counted correctly and not made up? Having the voting ledger would be cool - you could verify with the "transaction id" and how it's recorded.
  - aninhumer 8y ago
    There is no way to implement verifiable voting which is not vulnerable to voter coercion. If you can verify your vote, so can the person threatening you. The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.
  - sitharus 8y ago
    Through process verification. I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand elections are monitored by the Electoral Commission who employ people to watch every step of the process. In addition every political party is entitled to send scrutineers to polling places and the count. The boxes are shown to the scrutineers who verify it to be empty, then sealed. The boxes are never taken out of sight. Every step of the process is under multiple eyes. This seems to work well. It's possible to double vote by visiting multiple stations but in practice this is rare. It does happen but the electoral commission do analysis on the votes to ensure it didn't affect the outcome. Those responsible are prosecuted.
  - s3m4j 8y ago
    That is also a solved problem. Polling places are only opened where representatives of all* candidates can be present plus sworn officials. And if you think about it, you actually don't want to check that _your_ vote has been counted. *reasonable exceptions exists
fragsworth 8y ago
> It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle" Should people who screw up their votes that much even get their votes counted? Maybe these problems are filtering out people whose votes shouldn't be counted in the first place. If they don't understand the (very simple) mechanics of the voting process, I can't imagine how they can understand politics enough to make an intelligent vote. Also, by the same logic, they could botch what they touch on the screen anyway, and the output of the machine wouldn't give us any insight into what happened during that process.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Sure, we can come up with all sorts of reasons why various groups' votes "shouldn't be counted". Or we could live in a pluralistic democracy where the right to vote is fundamental enough that we expend some effort making sure it works for everyone.
- christoph 8y ago
  This is in my opinion, a solved problem. Us Brits have numerous rules around how paper ballots are marked & counted, for example - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/06/vote-with-a-smiley-face-electoral-guide-says-x-doesnt-have-to-mark-the-spot https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/06/vote-with-a... The fact is, in any election, you only get a few people marking papers like this. At the final local counts, the total spoiled, unmarked, etc. ballot counts are read out as separate totals. Very rarely is this total a number that has any affect on the overall outcome. Average rejection rate of ballot papers is around 0.28%. In those rare instances where it's that close to matter, there would be recounts & additional checks against those spoiled ballots. As a side note, it baffles me that any country would ever not have simple paper ballots with pens/pencils. Pens are safest IMO & pencils should probably be discouraged, I don't personally agree with the (generally historic) reasons for pencils being preferred.
madeofpalk 8y ago
What's the point?

cf498 8y ago

Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day and any issues will lead to people having to wait longer or not being able to vote at all. Which you can already see happening in areas where voting machines are used. This is especially problematic if specific regions with known political majorities can be targeted and sabotaged. There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher or an overhauled ballot design. Even just keeping the problems that exist with paper ballots beats any risk that introducing electronics in the process pose.

wool_gather 8y ago
> Machines have a higher chance of not working on election day That's fair, but if that happens, we have a very gentle fallback to just manually marking the ballots again. > There is absolutely no reason to not just use a hole puncher I direct your attention to the state of Florida, November 2000.

dan-robertson 8y ago

I don’t understand what weakness of paper ballots this is supposed to solve. If it makes all ballots look alike then surely it’s easier to stuff ballots with this. If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote then you would worry about losing anonymity. The machine would perhaps be less accessible than voting by paper (although there is always proxy voting). Is this just meant to solve the problem of people accidentally spoiling their ballots? Even if it does, the systems afterwards can’t assume that the ballots are not spoiled as people would still find a way to deliberately spoil their ballots. And there would still be the hard problem of unfolding paper ballots (can this even be done at any speed by a machine?) before reading them. A second worry I would have using such a machine is that the mackhine would secretly deanonymise ballots with some steganographic techniques.

wool_gather 8y ago
> If it makes all ballots look alike Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? > If the machine is to also verify that you are registered to vote No, it would be the same as now. Walk into the polling station, give the nice volunteer your name/ID/whatever, wait your turn to use the next machine. Current machines don't know your identity, neither does this one.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  > Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Yeah, they definitely are. People mark them all sorts of ways.
  - ygra 8y ago
    I think that referred to the suggestion of printing every ballot after the user selects their choice on the machine.
- monocasa 8y ago
  > Ballots aren't physically distinguishable now; what's different? Pencil marks are from eachother. That makes stuffing attacks more difficult because it's harder to use automation to create the ballots in the first place without it being obvious.

s3m4j 8y ago

"Congratulations, you have invented the most expansive pencil" In France we don't actually write anything. When we enter the room we're given one paper per candidate with the name and logo printed clearly. Once in the voting booth we put one or none in the enveloppe. That's it. Problem solved.

tehlike 8y ago
How do you verify your vote is counted correctly and not made up? Having the voting ledger would be cool - you could verify with the "transaction id" and how it's recorded.
- aninhumer 8y ago
  There is no way to implement verifiable voting which is not vulnerable to voter coercion. If you can verify your vote, so can the person threatening you. The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.
- sitharus 8y ago
  Through process verification. I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand elections are monitored by the Electoral Commission who employ people to watch every step of the process. In addition every political party is entitled to send scrutineers to polling places and the count. The boxes are shown to the scrutineers who verify it to be empty, then sealed. The boxes are never taken out of sight. Every step of the process is under multiple eyes. This seems to work well. It's possible to double vote by visiting multiple stations but in practice this is rare. It does happen but the electoral commission do analysis on the votes to ensure it didn't affect the outcome. Those responsible are prosecuted.
- s3m4j 8y ago
  That is also a solved problem. Polling places are only opened where representatives of all* candidates can be present plus sworn officials. And if you think about it, you actually don't want to check that _your_ vote has been counted. *reasonable exceptions exists

fragsworth 8y ago

> It has potential to greatly reduce ballot problems, both crap like hanging chads, "voter used an X mark instead of filling in the circle" Should people who screw up their votes that much even get their votes counted? Maybe these problems are filtering out people whose votes shouldn't be counted in the first place. If they don't understand the (very simple) mechanics of the voting process, I can't imagine how they can understand politics enough to make an intelligent vote. Also, by the same logic, they could botch what they touch on the screen anyway, and the output of the machine wouldn't give us any insight into what happened during that process.

wool_gather 8y ago
Sure, we can come up with all sorts of reasons why various groups' votes "shouldn't be counted". Or we could live in a pluralistic democracy where the right to vote is fundamental enough that we expend some effort making sure it works for everyone.
christoph 8y ago
This is in my opinion, a solved problem. Us Brits have numerous rules around how paper ballots are marked & counted, for example - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/06/vote-with-a-smiley-face-electoral-guide-says-x-doesnt-have-to-mark-the-spot https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/06/vote-with-a... The fact is, in any election, you only get a few people marking papers like this. At the final local counts, the total spoiled, unmarked, etc. ballot counts are read out as separate totals. Very rarely is this total a number that has any affect on the overall outcome. Average rejection rate of ballot papers is around 0.28%. In those rare instances where it's that close to matter, there would be recounts & additional checks against those spoiled ballots. As a side note, it baffles me that any country would ever not have simple paper ballots with pens/pencils. Pens are safest IMO & pencils should probably be discouraged, I don't personally agree with the (generally historic) reasons for pencils being preferred.

madeofpalk 8y ago

What's the point?