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My only issue with a paper-only drop box is there's no redundancy. I would think with having poll watchers from multiple affiliations and multiple shifts per da
by sfteus 5y ago
My only issue with a paper-only drop box is there's no redundancy. I would think with having poll watchers from multiple affiliations and multiple shifts per day to ensure you have many eyes on the box it wouldn't be a concern. But, if someone or some group managed to figure out a way to "stuff the box," you'd have no proof it happened.
I really like the system we have in DFW now. We have a global voter roll so you can vote in any location in your county. You submit your vote on a machine, which keeps a local machine-level tally and prints out a paper ballot. You verify the contents of the paper ballot, then drop it into a vote counting box, which scans, tallies, and displays your vote for you to confirm. If at any time anything looks wrong, you notify a poll worker to resolve it. At the end of each day, they verify the counts on the machines and ballot box match, then the ballot counter/box is locked along with the memory cards of each individual machine, so you have day-by-day results.
When the election ends, the ballot boxes are delivered to a central county counting system where they are put into another large-scale counting machine to verify that the counts there match the local counter/box. If at any point there's too many discrepancies, they'll do hand counts of the paper ballots. They can also unlock the voting machine memory cards if necessary. All of this process is done under the supervision of poll watchers.
In theory, you get near instantaneous results as each voting location can simply total the ballot box results and report them. You also have 4 separate systems (voting machine, local counter/ballot box, central counter, paper backups) that would need to be compromised to successfully tamper with the results.
I'm sure it wouldn't make a conspiracy theorist satisfied, but to me, it's a system that balances speed and convenience with the simplicity and security(?) of a paper ballot, without unnecessarily obfuscating the process behind electronic-only voting.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y agoJust add some risk-limiting audits (like what Colorado has, incidentally) and this is the kind of election system I would like. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf
- xadhominemx 5y agoIt’s hard to stuff the box because fraud would be instantly detected when many voters submitted multiple ballots.