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There was a voting machine posted here a while back that was literally transparent, as in you would literally be able to see the computer marking off the paper

by alexb_ 4y ago

There was a voting machine posted here a while back that was literally transparent, as in you would literally be able to see the computer marking off the paper ballot through a transparent box. Is this the same thing, or is this something different? I don't think "computer experts say it's okay" is going to help build trust when people are distrusting of authority in the first place, so I hope it's the transparent one.

eru 4y ago
The article says: > “There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.” In any case, I don't think voting machines are a good idea. I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make them secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. Paper voting and traditional election observers work in a nice 'analog' way. It's tangible, and even a 'village idiot' can understand how it works. Most voting systems aren't complicated enough to need a computer to evaluate them. (And those that are should arguable be changed.)
- nicoburns 4y ago
  IMO secure isn't enough. You also need to make it auditable. As far as I can see, it's pretty much impossible to do this satisfactorily with a digital solution. It also seems entirely unnecessary. Manual counting systems work well, and allow people to feel like they are participating in the democratic process (because they are).
  - johnsbrayton 4y ago
    Ballot boxes that scan ballots are auditable because they keep the paper ballots. In my state, election workers have to ensure that the number of ballots is the same as the number recorded by the ballot box on election night - although we don’t recount who voted for who. The ballots are preserved.
  - frob 4y ago
    Most states use paper ballots that are then run through electronic tallying machines. This process is completely auditable. This is how people lying about the 2020 election were able to do all of their sham audits in Arizona and Wisconsin.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > This process is completely auditable Presumably the auditing process would involve tallying the votes manually... in case why bother with the electronic process? Unless you only run the audit if there's a complaint. Which I guess works. But personally for something as important as elections I would much more comfortable with a system where the transparent, hard-to-corrupt process is used by default.
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      You are missing the part that somebody could add additional ballots which is a claim that is being made. Supposedly there was a water leak and then people brought in some extra ballots.
- fredleblanc 4y ago
  I live in New Hampshire, and though I've never voted on a computer where I'm touching a screen, I still feed my paper ballot into a scantron machine that seems to do all the counting. I’ve voted in maybe 20 elections (between local, state, and federal) in my lifetime, and it's always been done this way around here. Maybe we all forget that that's a computer, too. All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Ranked choice voting systems (e.g. single transferable vote) have a lot of "game theory" advantages over e.g. first-past-the-post, but are hard to implement with manual counting. Edit: I suppose that doesn't mean voting machines are required though, just that the results on each ballot paper need to be inputted to a computer to determine the outcome. A lot of data inputting required, but still auditable.
  - eru 4y ago
    First-past-the-post is pretty horrible. Alas, experience from Australia shows that single transferable vote isn't any better in practice, either. It's more complicated with no benefit in practice. (See https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html for more details on Australia.) If traditional voting is required, I have higher hopes for approval voting or the slightly more complicated range voting. These are quite easy to evaluate completely by hand. Especially the former. If you are happy to go a bit off the beaten track, using sortition amongst volunteers might be a good way to fill up a parliament. (Or any other body big enough for the law of large numbers to kick in.) As a slightly more complicated system, I would have every voter indicate their favourite candidate on a ballot sheet, and then draw enough votes at random to fill up parliament. (Use your favourite mechanism to handle the same candidate being voted for multiple times in your sample. Perhaps give them more weight, or re-draw, or have people write down an ordered list of preferred candidates, and admit the highest ranked one who isn't already in parliament, etc.) Random sampling is surprisingly powerful. It also completely bypasses Arrow's impossibility theorem.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Does it ?! Wow, that is tempting...
      - eru 4y ago
        Well, Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic procedures.
      - Vecr 4y ago
- velcrovan 4y ago
  I’m curious, do you distinguish between ballot counting machines (what the NH SoS is talking about) and voting machines (your term)? I understand “voting machine” to be any mechanism that acts as a substitute for a paper ballot, or that acts as an intermediary between you and a paper ballot. And I would agree that the former are a terrible idea and the latter probably don’t provide much net benefit. But ballot counting machines are a different matter. Here’s the thing: there’s no voting process without a ballot counting machine. It’s just a matter of whether that machine will be a carbon-based one subject to bias, fatigue, boredom and hunger, or an electronic one that excels at stupid-simple repetitive tasks and is subject to none of those things.
  - eru 4y ago
    There's a third option: a mechanical ballot counter. I know that human beings are fallible. That's why I wrote: > I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make [electronic machines] secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. People are used to the failure modes of other humans. And they trust other humans in a way they don't trust machines. This is similar to how juries still put a lot of stock in eye witnesses.
    - velcrovan 4y ago
      How is “mechanical ballot counter” a third, distinct option from “ballot counting machine”? Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy?
      - eru 4y ago
        > Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy? Potentially, yes. Especially if you used off-the-shelf machines that IBM built in 1920. In any case, that's just a distraction. Just use humans.
- frob 4y ago
  Electronic ballot-tallying machines are necessary to running accurate and speedy elections. As we saw in the Arizona fiasco with the "Cyber Ninjas," hand-counting ballots takes weeks, if not months. Additionally, hand-counting has an error margin of 1-2%. In a era where many races are within a point or two, hand-counting ballots will lead to the wrong person winning office. We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.
  - CHY872 4y ago
    In the UK all ballots are hand counted, and the counting is done within a day. I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
    - eru 4y ago
      Same in Germany.
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      How many races are on your ballot? Next Tuesday, I'll have 11 races to vote for, plus 4 ballot referendums. That's probably a median election ballot in the US.
      - whoooooo123 4y ago
        In the UK? Typically just one race: you vote to elect your local MP. You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
      - 4y ago
snarf21 4y ago
Voting machines should only ever be used to automate counting of votes. They should never mark the voting sheet. Having the physical paper lets us easily recount or reverify. If it was marked erroneously, all is lost.
- kube-system 4y ago
  No, the paper should be marked by a machine, and displayed to the user for confirmation. If you let the user mark the paper, you get 'hanging chad' problems.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by alexb_ 4y ago

eru 4y ago

The article says: > “There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.” In any case, I don't think voting machines are a good idea. I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make them secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. Paper voting and traditional election observers work in a nice 'analog' way. It's tangible, and even a 'village idiot' can understand how it works. Most voting systems aren't complicated enough to need a computer to evaluate them. (And those that are should arguable be changed.)

nicoburns 4y ago
IMO secure isn't enough. You also need to make it auditable. As far as I can see, it's pretty much impossible to do this satisfactorily with a digital solution. It also seems entirely unnecessary. Manual counting systems work well, and allow people to feel like they are participating in the democratic process (because they are).
- johnsbrayton 4y ago
  Ballot boxes that scan ballots are auditable because they keep the paper ballots. In my state, election workers have to ensure that the number of ballots is the same as the number recorded by the ballot box on election night - although we don’t recount who voted for who. The ballots are preserved.
- frob 4y ago
  Most states use paper ballots that are then run through electronic tallying machines. This process is completely auditable. This is how people lying about the 2020 election were able to do all of their sham audits in Arizona and Wisconsin.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > This process is completely auditable Presumably the auditing process would involve tallying the votes manually... in case why bother with the electronic process? Unless you only run the audit if there's a complaint. Which I guess works. But personally for something as important as elections I would much more comfortable with a system where the transparent, hard-to-corrupt process is used by default.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    You are missing the part that somebody could add additional ballots which is a claim that is being made. Supposedly there was a water leak and then people brought in some extra ballots.
fredleblanc 4y ago
I live in New Hampshire, and though I've never voted on a computer where I'm touching a screen, I still feed my paper ballot into a scantron machine that seems to do all the counting. I’ve voted in maybe 20 elections (between local, state, and federal) in my lifetime, and it's always been done this way around here. Maybe we all forget that that's a computer, too. All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.
HPsquared 4y ago
Ranked choice voting systems (e.g. single transferable vote) have a lot of "game theory" advantages over e.g. first-past-the-post, but are hard to implement with manual counting. Edit: I suppose that doesn't mean voting machines are required though, just that the results on each ballot paper need to be inputted to a computer to determine the outcome. A lot of data inputting required, but still auditable.
- eru 4y ago
  First-past-the-post is pretty horrible. Alas, experience from Australia shows that single transferable vote isn't any better in practice, either. It's more complicated with no benefit in practice. (See https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html for more details on Australia.) If traditional voting is required, I have higher hopes for approval voting or the slightly more complicated range voting. These are quite easy to evaluate completely by hand. Especially the former. If you are happy to go a bit off the beaten track, using sortition amongst volunteers might be a good way to fill up a parliament. (Or any other body big enough for the law of large numbers to kick in.) As a slightly more complicated system, I would have every voter indicate their favourite candidate on a ballot sheet, and then draw enough votes at random to fill up parliament. (Use your favourite mechanism to handle the same candidate being voted for multiple times in your sample. Perhaps give them more weight, or re-draw, or have people write down an ordered list of preferred candidates, and admit the highest ranked one who isn't already in parliament, etc.) Random sampling is surprisingly powerful. It also completely bypasses Arrow's impossibility theorem.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Does it ?! Wow, that is tempting...
    - eru 4y ago
      Well, Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic procedures.
    - Vecr 4y ago
velcrovan 4y ago
I’m curious, do you distinguish between ballot counting machines (what the NH SoS is talking about) and voting machines (your term)? I understand “voting machine” to be any mechanism that acts as a substitute for a paper ballot, or that acts as an intermediary between you and a paper ballot. And I would agree that the former are a terrible idea and the latter probably don’t provide much net benefit. But ballot counting machines are a different matter. Here’s the thing: there’s no voting process without a ballot counting machine. It’s just a matter of whether that machine will be a carbon-based one subject to bias, fatigue, boredom and hunger, or an electronic one that excels at stupid-simple repetitive tasks and is subject to none of those things.
- eru 4y ago
  There's a third option: a mechanical ballot counter. I know that human beings are fallible. That's why I wrote: > I know that you can use enough cryptography and enough open sourcing to make [electronic machines] secure, but what might convince me wouldn't convince the 'village idiot'. People are used to the failure modes of other humans. And they trust other humans in a way they don't trust machines. This is similar to how juries still put a lot of stock in eye witnesses.
  - velcrovan 4y ago
    How is “mechanical ballot counter” a third, distinct option from “ballot counting machine”? Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy?
    - eru 4y ago
      > Are you saying that if it had no electronics and operated solely by a human turning a crank on a bunch of gears, springs and levers, people would see it as more reliable and trustworthy? Potentially, yes. Especially if you used off-the-shelf machines that IBM built in 1920. In any case, that's just a distraction. Just use humans.
frob 4y ago
Electronic ballot-tallying machines are necessary to running accurate and speedy elections. As we saw in the Arizona fiasco with the "Cyber Ninjas," hand-counting ballots takes weeks, if not months. Additionally, hand-counting has an error margin of 1-2%. In a era where many races are within a point or two, hand-counting ballots will lead to the wrong person winning office. We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.
- CHY872 4y ago
  In the UK all ballots are hand counted, and the counting is done within a day. I would expect that the amount of time it takes to tally a paper election is related to how many people you have counting.
  - eru 4y ago
    Same in Germany.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    How many races are on your ballot? Next Tuesday, I'll have 11 races to vote for, plus 4 ballot referendums. That's probably a median election ballot in the US.
    - whoooooo123 4y ago
      In the UK? Typically just one race: you vote to elect your local MP. You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
    - 4y ago

snarf21 4y ago

Voting machines should only ever be used to automate counting of votes. They should never mark the voting sheet. Having the physical paper lets us easily recount or reverify. If it was marked erroneously, all is lost.

kube-system 4y ago
No, the paper should be marked by a machine, and displayed to the user for confirmation. If you let the user mark the paper, you get 'hanging chad' problems.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]