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I've read a few studies in the past. What you do to experiment is send people to use the equipment, then quiz them about how they voted, and see what the equipm
by greglindahl 8y ago
I've read a few studies in the past. What you do to experiment is send people to use the equipment, then quiz them about how they voted, and see what the equipment says they voted. Problems like the confusing "butterfly ballot" in the famous Florida election pop right out.
You can also look at issues like undervotes and overvotes from the actual election. And ask people if they have any complaints about the process.
This is all somewhat studied already. We should study it a lot more.
This is in addition to doing systematic post-election recounts of a small % of ballots to verify that the counting machines are working.
Finally, everything is a voting "machine", including optical scan cards. Even if hand-counted. You should measure how well they work.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoEven if we somehow verify that reliable machines exist, how do we verify that the machines haven't been tampered with? So far we've seen all sorts of problems with the machines in practice, usually in favor of the party in power. What's our incentive to switch to machines? Speed isn't a concern here.
- greglindahl 8y agoHere's one audit scheme to verify that the counting machines are reliable: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/post-election-audits/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/post-election-audit... One good way to implement this is with paper ballots and optical scan machines. You get speed/less labor with accuracy. But you still need to study that the paper ballots are reliably usable by all types of voters, in addition to verifying that the machines count accurately.