Reminder: It's possible to have a national election without voting-machines.

[DetlefK]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142346625

Concerning the topic of hackable voting-machines: It's possible to conduct an entire national election without electronic voting-machines. All it takes is proper preparation and organization. Germany does it this way:

* Elections are always held on a Sunday, to not mess with people's work-day.

* A national standard what does and what doesn't count as voter-ID.

* There are no state-wide voter-rolls. Each precinct has their own voter-roll and you can only vote in your precinct. (That massively speeds up the whole process on election-day.)

* 1 month before the election you get an official notification by paper-mail:
Your name, your address, your serial-number in your precinct's voter-roll and when and where to vote.
If you don't get a notification, you automatically know in advance that you will be not on the voter-roll on election-day and have time to do something about it.

* If there's a problem with the voter-roll, it's handled right here and right now by city-hall, not by some far-away state-authority.

* When voting, you identify yourself by showing the notification and an ID.

* Ballots are pen&paper.

* Votes are counted by hand. Citizens may witness the hand-count, as long as they do not disturb the process. Citizens may record the hand-count, as long as they do not disturb the process.

In Germany, the polls close at 6 pm, then come 2 hours of exit-polls, interviews and punditry, and by 8 pm there's the final result.



Good luck hacking that.

[rampartc]

1. i work as a voting commissioner. the machines are an unnecessary nuisense.

there would have to be increased security around the ballot boxes, but our elections could use un or ngo supervision anyway.

use of a thumb print would be so easy to cross reference to a registrar of voter's data base in this day.

[True Blue American]

2. As a former Poll worker

I agree with everything you say. But the former punch cards were awful, too!
We need paper, nothing else. The Diebold machines are awful.

[Thyla]

3. Yes

Plus in Australia you get a sausage.

I don't think there is any good excuse to not use paper ballots. Granted the task would be bigger in the US but should be doable.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. I hate to remind everyone, but the reason we HAVE voting machines is...

that hand counted paper ballots had been a miserable failure.

First problem is mismarked ballots that can't be counted-- our scanners alert on those so they can be corrected.

Second problem is fraud-- entire ballot boxes have disappeared, and the "wrong" ballots have been altered to make them uncountable.

Third problem is human error and fatigue. To spend a 16 hour day and then start counting ballots is just too much to expect. Even with the lever machines we took a lot of time and occasionally made errors. An option might be to have a separate "ballot count" team come in after closing, but that leads to more problems. Not the least of which is we already have a huge problem getting people to work the polls.

We normally have up to 1500 registered voters per ED, and turnouts may be 30% for local and primary elections and 60% for presidential. So, take up to seven party lines and up to 15 offices to vote for (and then the propositions on the back!) and it starts to seem highly improbable to get an accurate count on the first shot.

My favorite screwup is for the judges-- Surrogate, vote for one, Supreme Court, vote for three, Town Justice Court-- vote for two... And on it goes. Town council also sometimes has you pick two out of five candidates.

BTW, we have county rolls, and any problems can be resolved by judges on duty and/or affidavit ballots at the county HQ. We also have postcards mailed to eligible voters, but people around here move a lot or have PO boxes.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. the reason we have electronic voting machines is they are easier to rig

Every problem you listed is one of implementation, not a problem inherent in paper balloting.

A voter cannot verify his or her own vote with electronic voting machines. The public cannot verify a voter has voted with electronic voting machines. No one can verify the legitimacy of the count with electronic voting machines.

Paper allows the voter to verify the vote, the public to verify the process, and the public to verify the count.

[TreasonousBastard]

12. Purely electronic machines with no proper audit trail, sure, but we use paper ballots and a scanner.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

13. same here, but electronics are still in the path

Any electronic device in the path from vote to count can be corrupted.

It is harder to corrupt a gang of people counting paper ballots around a table while surrounded by members of the general public, watching the counts.

Voting precincts should be small enough to accommodate a manual count.

[TreasonousBastard]

14. To go back to what I said-- manual count problems are WHY we have machines.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

16. manual count problems are easily fixed; you can't fix the abstractions of electronics

[KentuckyWoman]

18. I'd like to put forth the reason we have machines

is because it is a lot easier to program the machine to lie about the actual vote than it is to stuff the ballot box.

[watoos]

5. Most states are controlled by Republicans,

Here in Pa. we have a Democratic governor who wants to upgrade our present voting machines but the Republican majority is stalling, it wants to use the old machines. I have been voting into a black hole ever since we got voting machines. Every time I vote I ask for a paper receipt and am denied one. I have no idea if the machine registered my vote properly and there is no way to verify my vote once cast.

Now tell me that my marking my choices on a piece of paper and putting said paper in a box which will be later counted with Dems and Reps present to watch said count is a worse system than what I do now, voting into a black hole. I'm stupid but I'm not dumb.

Voting by mail would also be a great way to vote, anything other than voting into machines that are never independently audited. Please again don't insult my little bit of intelligence by claiming that machines are checked. The owners claim proprietary rights with their software, you know, 1+1=2 or 3 or 4 has to be kept a secret.

Stories I read about machines malfunctioning are that maybe they are pulled offline for a while until the commotion dies down and then they are slipped back into line.

When actual votes don't match the exit polling you can bet your lucky stars that machines are flipping votes, and there is absolutely no way we can prove that. Now tell me one more time why paper ballots are worse.

[jberryhill]

6. Reminder: the US does not have "national elections"

[NightWatcher]

8. We have a National Election Day but 50 states with hundred of Supervisors of Elections

It's a miracle we haven't elected Boaty McBoatface yet.

Now they're all being hacked and adjusted juuuust enough to throw the election without being noticed.

We need a grand hack that gives one side 99%-0% so that it's obviously hacked.

[brooklynite]

7. Reminder: It's possible to steal votes without voting machines

As for your other points:

The US doesn't issue a national ID, and States have made it difficult for marginal people to obtain them. That's why there's opposition to requiring ID as opposed to a signature match (as we have in NY)

Voter rolls are precinct based here as well; the point is that the State assembles and validates them. Unless your argument is that every city block in Munich has a seperate agency who maintains the database, this isn't an improvement.

Many States send out an election notice in the US. The problem is that voters don't necessarily notice that they didn't get a card and check the status of their registration.

Problems with the voter roils are handled by County or City election boards here/

FWIW - the standard argument that "Europe does it" doesn't apply, because Europe also doesn't have set elections, a frequently votes for only one thing at a time. Consider how you'd handle a California election for President, Senate, House, State Legislature and 20 referendums.

[DetlefK]

10. re

1. Yes, it's still possible to steal votes, but it would be way harder if you don't have to fool one authority but a dozen authorities.

2. No national ID necessary, just a national standard what is and what is not a valid ID for the purpose of voting. In order to commit voter-fraud in Germany, you would have to intercept/forge the notification-letter and use a fake ID. And if you forge it, you would have to get the serial-number of the impersonated voter right (which you don't know).

3. There is absolutely no need for a state-wide voter-roll. You don't live in a state, you live in a city within a state. If you move, you move from city to city. Involving the state is just an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. If you move, your old city removes you from your old voter-roll and your new city puts you on the new voter-roll. No need for the state to get involved.

4. Of course there could be problems with local voter-rolls, but the points are: 1. If there are shenanigans, they are contained to one city/precinct. 2. If there is a problem, you can actually walk up to the public employee in city-hall who's responsible for maintaining the voter-roll.

5. That's correct. Europe doesn't have that many elections happening. The most I have seen were 3 ballots during election-day.

[Baltimike]

9. knr

[Gidney N Cloyd]

15. One of the reasons we want voting machines is so the media can report the results right away.

Too bad.

Here in the Chicago area (Cook county) we have a mix of machines-- fully computerized or paper ballot that gets scanned once the voter fills it out. Each voter places his own ballot in the scanner. The scanner catches problems like undervotes and gives the voter a chance to fix it or go ahead and submit.

While making sure we have methods in place to best help those with disabilities, I'd rely mostly on the paper & scanner system.
Then when the polls close you can release the scanned numbers to the media as the initial (and probably accurate) but unofficial count.
Secure the paper ballots overnight. Everyone gets a good night sleep and the next day the hand count begins. If the hand count agrees with the machine count then the results are official.

[DetlefK]

17. Scanners can be hacked, have a life-span of 10 years and are expensive to replace.

As a rule of thumb, any electronic device based on silicon-microchips has a maximum life-span of 10-15 years. (If you want electronics that are worse but that can easily last decades or centuries, go with old-fashioned vacuum-tubes.)

Silicon-based electronics age due to atomic diffusion mixing up layers inside the microchips that should stay separated. After 10-15 years, this mixing-up has reached a critical threshold where errors and bugs start piling up to an unacceptable degree.

Not every district can afford to buy new scanners every 2-3 presidential elections.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

19. Yes, scanners can likely be hacked. But why do it if there's an automatic official hand count later?

As for the cost to poorer districts, I'd say that's what federal grants are for.

[Retrograde]

20. How many races are on a typical German ballot?

My November 2020 ballot will have at a minimum races for president, US Representative, state senator, state assembly - plus whatever ballot measures the voters decide to stick on, and probably some local offices. My 2018 ballot was 5 pages long - both sides of two sheets and one additional one (and those pages have 3 columns each), and I've had longer ones. Maybe the Germans follow the UK model, where there's just one big issue, like Brexit, on the ballot and it's easy to separate the votes into yes and no piles: it's not so easy when one contest may have a clear winner but another is close enough to require a recount.

[DetlefK]

21. The most I have seen were 3 races at the same time, but it's always just 1 ballot per race.

Each race gets their own ballot in a different color and they go into different urns for separate vote-counts.

Who would make one humonguous ballot that is valid for 5 different races at the same time??? That makes the vote-count so much harder!!!