Technology Liberation Front - Latest Comments in The Ideal Voting Machine?

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Cog — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:07:29 -0000

Two important reasons to use computerized ballot-marking machines are user interface and accessibility.

(1) You can do automated consistency checking, so that e.g. voters cannot mark more than one candidate for a given office.

(2) Disabled (blind, etc.) users can mark their ballots secretly using audio or other assistive interfaces. Currently many disabled voters rely on human assistance or special ballots, both of which can compromise ballot secrecy.

These may not overcome the cost or security objections completely, but they should not be ignored.

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Bill G — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:31:28 -0000

One of the very few things the city of San Francisco seems to do effectively is handle the voting process.

Everyone gets a very human readable paper ballot that you mark by joining the head and tail of an arrow pointing at the candidate's name.

The ballots are electronically tabulated in machines and the paper ballots saved for recounting.

No lines at voting machines, everyone has their own ballot that they can mark in their own time anywhere they want too.

So simple, so seemingly attractive, yet not so used. Very surprising to me.

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Walter_E_Wallis — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:31:07 -0000

Anyone wanna bet a ballot scanner can't be fixed?
Remember the way different precincts change the order of names on ballots so no one gets first place advantage everywhere? The counter has to acknowledge the type of ballot, and with just a bit of clever programming...

Or you can just write down wrong totals. Vote stealing may well have been the third oldest profession. Get over it, and use checksums, independendant validations and all the other means used throught the ages to make cheating harder.

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Tim Lee — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:55:02 -0000

Ben: The point of having the barcodes be human-readable is so the voter can verify that the vote was recorded correctly. Otherwise, if the voting machine was compromised, there would be no way for the voter to detect the problem.

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Ben Fulton — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:33:07 -0000

I don't see much point in making the paper human-readable. Surely converting the ballot into a bar code or similar would do the trick, save paper, and be confirmable by an independently created and built scanner.

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Ed Felten — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:06:59 -0000

A small correction: the article gives Wired's voting-machine recommendations, arrived at after talking to Dave Wagner and me. Don't assume that Dave and I both agree with every last thing in the article.