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This 100%. I'm French, and I always volunteer to count votes after the ballots. Honestly the system is really robust, it's probably very very hard to cheat with

by forty 6y ago

This 100%. I'm French, and I always volunteer to count votes after the ballots. Honestly the system is really robust, it's probably very very hard to cheat without being noticed, everything is done twice, with everyone being able to watch the whole process. No way we can have something even close in term of confidence with something digital. If we really want to use new technologies to make things even safer, we could film and broadcast everything so anyone could check that there was no cheating (and I assume some people would record it so we could check also after the fact)

williamdclt 6y ago
You could even still have a counting machine: stick the papers in it, it scans the vote, it spits out the paper and humans do their own manual count. Compare the numbers of the unbiased but hackable machine and the biased but unhackable humans. Not sure it's a step in the good direction, too easy to remove the humans some time later, but if we want to use technology to make counting more secure there's definitely easy ways
- dsr_ 6y ago
  This is how Massachusetts has been doing it for years. Fast local counts, complete paper trail.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Yup. The Australian Ballot is private voting, public counting. The gold standard implementation is ballots cast at poll sites, tabulated on site, the moment the polls close, all results immediately shared publicly. For better or for worse, many postal balloting implementations are as bad as touchscreen voting, election integrity wise. Much care is needed to preserve voter privacy and ensure physical chain of custody. For example, many jurisdictions process ballots daily, image both signatures and votes, using image processing to recognize votes, and adjudicate voter intent (manually override errors) in the database. One side effect of daily processing is the running daily total. What you and I would call tabulation, but admins claim only the final report is the tabulation. Etc.
- forty 6y ago
  That works only as long as the machine is truly optional, ie you cannot have a case of people not able to vote because the machine doesn't work.
  - stepstop 6y ago
    > That works only as long as the machine is truly optional, ie you cannot have a case of people not able to vote because the machine doesn't work. The OP said the machine was for counting, not for voting.

by forty 6y ago

williamdclt 6y ago

You could even still have a counting machine: stick the papers in it, it scans the vote, it spits out the paper and humans do their own manual count. Compare the numbers of the unbiased but hackable machine and the biased but unhackable humans. Not sure it's a step in the good direction, too easy to remove the humans some time later, but if we want to use technology to make counting more secure there's definitely easy ways

dsr_ 6y ago
This is how Massachusetts has been doing it for years. Fast local counts, complete paper trail.
- specialist 6y ago
  Yup. The Australian Ballot is private voting, public counting. The gold standard implementation is ballots cast at poll sites, tabulated on site, the moment the polls close, all results immediately shared publicly. For better or for worse, many postal balloting implementations are as bad as touchscreen voting, election integrity wise. Much care is needed to preserve voter privacy and ensure physical chain of custody. For example, many jurisdictions process ballots daily, image both signatures and votes, using image processing to recognize votes, and adjudicate voter intent (manually override errors) in the database. One side effect of daily processing is the running daily total. What you and I would call tabulation, but admins claim only the final report is the tabulation. Etc.
forty 6y ago
That works only as long as the machine is truly optional, ie you cannot have a case of people not able to vote because the machine doesn't work.
- stepstop 6y ago
  > That works only as long as the machine is truly optional, ie you cannot have a case of people not able to vote because the machine doesn't work. The OP said the machine was for counting, not for voting.