12 ms·

or just use paper ballots like other countries do ..

dragontamer 8y ago
The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's benefit to one of the major research institutions of this country telling the rest of the country how things should be done.
- misingnoglic 8y ago
  Give America an idea, and SOMEONE will find a way to exploit it
  - MrQuincle 8y ago
    In this case perhaps paper where you don't see anything, but that will trip up the scanner. You only need to have votes declared invalid. Of course, preferably just a random subset of them. You can choose for districts you don't like and distribute that paper there.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. They were particularly badly arranged punch card ballots; the solutions to both the bad arrangement (“don't do that, like most people didn't do previously”) and the punch card (”use optical scan”) related problems are not only well known but pretty widely adopted.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    I agree. But why did butterfly ballots proliferate in Florida? Ultimately: the administrators weren't thinking about ballot issues. Palm Beach, Florida, was understaffed and underpaid, under-invested. They had other things on their mind when they deployed their machines. They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to. They had the same issue in 1996 before the famous year 2000 issue. It was known, but not much could be done about it. ---------- I guess this printer methodology from DARPA might be too expensive. Or maybe the scanning machines can be owned by the state, so that poorer areas won't have to invest into the machines. Etc. etc. There's a lot of issues aside from "use paper ballots". The entire voting system needs to be considered. I hope that DARPA's challenge will include these issues in their design process.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to Sure, but moving money around to deal with that problem is easy (and mostly doable intrastate, but, a federal role isn't unreasonable.) But this isn't a problem calling for novel technology. (As has already been demonstrated by the move to e-voting that happened in many places after 2000, though some people got the wrong message and decided that we just chose the wrong technical solution—but a lot of that is due to lobbying by the people selling technical solutions.)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- azernik 8y ago
  > Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. More specifically - it's a big country with a fantastic amount of decentralization. Elections are run and ballots are designed not, by national governments, not by state governments, but by county governments. The chance that someone will mess up is a lot higher. (Of course, this does have the advantage that centralized tampering with the ballot is harder.)
tamaharbor 8y ago
And add fingerprint identification, like other countries do.
- hx2a 8y ago
  You mean like the purple finger thing? I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US to help prevent or ease people's concerns about potential voter fraud. It's simple, low-tech, and hard to screw up. Unless if I'm missing something, which of course is possible. Can someone tell me what the downsides are to an idea like that?
  - adestefan 8y ago
    Because voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the US. Now election fraud is a different issue.
    - bigj0n 8y ago
      There have been lots of reports of non-citizens being registered to vote in the US. It is very rare, but elections are also generally very close races. I dont get how people can just shrug off reports of dead people and non-citizens being registered to vote as a non-issue.
      - dboreham 8y ago
        Perhaps the reports are false?
        OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
        Perhaps they're true but since non citizens and dead people vote left overwhelmingly it gets shrugged off by leftist media and leftist tech site commenters?
        bigj0n 8y ago
        Yeah I'm sure all of them are false, and our voter registration systems with practically zero layers of authentication have proven to be infallible over the years.

The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. DARPA is working to come up with the standard that the whole country should follow. That's good and useful research. Even if it comes out to be the obvious solution (a paper ballot off of a damn printer), there's benefit to one of the major research institutions of this country telling the rest of the country how things should be done.

misingnoglic 8y ago
Give America an idea, and SOMEONE will find a way to exploit it
- MrQuincle 8y ago
  In this case perhaps paper where you don't see anything, but that will trip up the scanner. You only need to have votes declared invalid. Of course, preferably just a random subset of them. You can choose for districts you don't like and distribute that paper there.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> The Butterfly ballots WERE paper ballots. They were particularly badly arranged punch card ballots; the solutions to both the bad arrangement (“don't do that, like most people didn't do previously”) and the punch card (”use optical scan”) related problems are not only well known but pretty widely adopted.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  I agree. But why did butterfly ballots proliferate in Florida? Ultimately: the administrators weren't thinking about ballot issues. Palm Beach, Florida, was understaffed and underpaid, under-invested. They had other things on their mind when they deployed their machines. They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to. They had the same issue in 1996 before the famous year 2000 issue. It was known, but not much could be done about it. ---------- I guess this printer methodology from DARPA might be too expensive. Or maybe the scanning machines can be owned by the state, so that poorer areas won't have to invest into the machines. Etc. etc. There's a lot of issues aside from "use paper ballots". The entire voting system needs to be considered. I hope that DARPA's challenge will include these issues in their design process.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > They needed to move off of the punch-card system ASAP, but they couldn't afford to Sure, but moving money around to deal with that problem is easy (and mostly doable intrastate, but, a federal role isn't unreasonable.) But this isn't a problem calling for novel technology. (As has already been demonstrated by the move to e-voting that happened in many places after 2000, though some people got the wrong message and decided that we just chose the wrong technical solution—but a lot of that is due to lobbying by the people selling technical solutions.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
azernik 8y ago
> Give America an idea, and SOMEONE in America will royally screw it up. Its a big country filled with lots of smart people, but also filled with lots of dumb people. More specifically - it's a big country with a fantastic amount of decentralization. Elections are run and ballots are designed not, by national governments, not by state governments, but by county governments. The chance that someone will mess up is a lot higher. (Of course, this does have the advantage that centralized tampering with the ballot is harder.)

tamaharbor 8y ago

And add fingerprint identification, like other countries do.

hx2a 8y ago
You mean like the purple finger thing? I've always wondered why nobody suggests doing that in the US to help prevent or ease people's concerns about potential voter fraud. It's simple, low-tech, and hard to screw up. Unless if I'm missing something, which of course is possible. Can someone tell me what the downsides are to an idea like that?
- adestefan 8y ago
  Because voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the US. Now election fraud is a different issue.
  - bigj0n 8y ago
    There have been lots of reports of non-citizens being registered to vote in the US. It is very rare, but elections are also generally very close races. I dont get how people can just shrug off reports of dead people and non-citizens being registered to vote as a non-issue.
    - dboreham 8y ago
      Perhaps the reports are false?
      - OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
        Perhaps they're true but since non citizens and dead people vote left overwhelmingly it gets shrugged off by leftist media and leftist tech site commenters?
      - bigj0n 8y ago
        Yeah I'm sure all of them are false, and our voter registration systems with practically zero layers of authentication have proven to be infallible over the years.