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>Creating a voting system for a many-race election that is intrinsically resistant to manipulation is harder that it first appears. Isn’t that somewhat contrad

>Creating a voting system for a many-race election that is intrinsically resistant to manipulation is harder that it first appears. Isn’t that somewhat contradictory to the rest of your comment? The mark & scan machines work well and have for decades, and not just in voting but in standardized testing in various contexts (school, drivers license tests, etc). It seems the voting machine element of the equation “intrinsically resistant to manipulation” is pretty much solved, if election officials would just keep what’s worked well for decades rather than transitioning to shiny new digital toys with no paper trails and poor security.

dmckeon 8y ago
Fair call, I should have stressed that "system" is more than just marking and counting ballots. Operating a well-run election means staffing polling places with elections clerks from different parties (or no party) so they act as cross-checks on each other, making sure that spoiled or unused ballots are a) not counted, and b) accounted for, helping random citizens who are at the wrong polling place, or are not on the registry for some reason (registered elsewhere, changed their name, etc.). In the worse cases it means dealing with voters who want to read the ballot aloud to their partner, or camp out in a voting booth for 30-40 minutes, or who are disruptive in some way. To be fair, the last general election here (Bay Area) had 21 races with 43 total significant candidates, plus 12 referendums/measures, for 67 items to count per ballot - this is not a good "count by hand" situation. In the long run what people really want and need is an election system (including voting machines, ballots, voter rolls, polling places, staff) that gives them a sense that their votes count.
- SkyMarshal 8y ago
  Yeah, the people part of the system a hard problem, no argument.

dmckeon 8y ago

Fair call, I should have stressed that "system" is more than just marking and counting ballots. Operating a well-run election means staffing polling places with elections clerks from different parties (or no party) so they act as cross-checks on each other, making sure that spoiled or unused ballots are a) not counted, and b) accounted for, helping random citizens who are at the wrong polling place, or are not on the registry for some reason (registered elsewhere, changed their name, etc.). In the worse cases it means dealing with voters who want to read the ballot aloud to their partner, or camp out in a voting booth for 30-40 minutes, or who are disruptive in some way. To be fair, the last general election here (Bay Area) had 21 races with 43 total significant candidates, plus 12 referendums/measures, for 67 items to count per ballot - this is not a good "count by hand" situation. In the long run what people really want and need is an election system (including voting machines, ballots, voter rolls, polling places, staff) that gives them a sense that their votes count.

SkyMarshal 8y ago
Yeah, the people part of the system a hard problem, no argument.