Electronic voting. Sigh.

It's all of those old retirees down there

What bothers me most about even those machines that generate a paper record, is that they don't generate a paper ballot. The most I've ever heard of is that they generate some kind of reciept that the voter takes with them.

I want a system that generates an unabmigously marked ballot I can put in a ballot box. Which ballots and boxes can be watched by Mk 1 eyeballs.

I don't trust electronic record keeping where it comes to voting. You have to admit that while there was much debate about chads, mismarked ballots and who should or should not have voted. Nobody argued that any of the ballots themselves, had been replaced with fakes.

For once, there was what seemed at first sight to be a sensible suggestion on Slashdot. Here's my slightly more expanded version. Shoot holes in it for me.

The whole point of the punched ballots or the electronic voting system is to make the counting more efficient, right? Manual counting is too slow.

Giving the user an electronic receipt opens the door to vote coercion.

The punched card systems didn't work because the butterfly ballots were confusing to those senile old biddies who still, for some reason, are considered able to vote, even though they're all probably too old to go to the bathroom unaided.

They also suffered from "hanging chads".

The electronic system doesn't work. There's no record kept.

The suggestion on Slashdot was this (expanded by me):

You have a touchscreen (or whatever) PC which the voter makes their choice on. With some UI design skills, and sufficiently large fonts -- even pictures of the candidates -- these should be easy to use and less confusing.

This then prints out a combined machine-/human-readable ticket, so that the user can confirm that their vote is correct. If it's wrong, they do whatever they would have done if they screw up a normal paper ballot (I don't know what happens here). If it's right, they put it in an electronic ballot box.

This is exactly like a normal ballot box: paper goes in, paper doesn't come out, except that it's got an electronic reader in it which reads the machine readable part of the card.

If the count screws up, you just put the box of cards back through the machine. So it's like the punched card thing, only it won't suffer from hanging chads ('cos it's not punched), it won't suffer from the confusion of the butterfly ballot ('cos you've got UI experts in).

Now, it's potentially still open to abuse by the e-voting machine manufacturer, because it could print different human-/machine-readable values on the one card, thus electronically stuffing the vote. It's still just as good as any other e-voting machine in this regard, though. You might be able to come up with a system that uses dummy ballot papers (that don't actually get counted in the final totals), and you can check that they got registered correctly. The guys in the booth just pop these in the machine at intervals through the day, and they can be checked against their known values.

Thoughts?

Read that /. posting too... Makes sense to me; if anyone/anything throws doubt on the machine count, one could use humans to read the humanreadable part and base the count on that. Slower, but hopefully checked for correctness by the voter (if not, tough luck...)

Hanging Chads?

I think there is some only mildly-invasive surgery to correct the problem

For years in NC, we've had this mark sense system where each option is next to the beginning and end of an arrow with a missing middle. To vote for one, you draw a line to "finish" the arrow. Pretty simple.

Are the ballots checked for validity before being handed in? Problem with mark sense is [when the race is close enough to be argued...] people that cross-out drawn lines and draw new ones etc. While technically a faulty ballot that is to be rejected, it opens up for the "what was the intent of the voter" the same way the pregnant chads and multiple punched cards stuff we saw in Florida...