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Paper ballots then!Paper ballots then!Posted Oct 15, 2008 13:26 UTC (Wed) by freemars (subscriber, #4235)In reply to: Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) by drag Parent article: Video and photos show Linux booting on the Brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)
It's vastly more expensive, inaccurate, and slower to count paper ballots. And much much more complicated to coordinate. And, believe it or not; prone to fraud. Optical scan paper ballots work well. A counting (not a voting) machine tabulates the ballots at the most local level. After the polls close election judges look at and sign off on the totals, and can call them in to HQ for the unofficial count. The machine, the tally sheet and the original/official ballots go back to election HQ for any recounts. Fairly fast, not too expensive, and easy to audit.
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machine counting can still be a problem Posted Oct 15, 2008 20:05 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
remember the florida fiasco? those were machine counted ballots.
a perfectly filled out ballot isn't the problem, the imperfectly filled out ballots are the problem
in Florida the ballots were pre-perferated to make it easier to punch out the vote that you wanted. the problem was that punching out the tab sometimes didn't completely remove it, combined with the pieces sometimes comeing loos with lots of handling of the ballot.
with optical scan ballots you have the problem of incomplely filled out circles, smudges causing non-filled out circles to be read as being filled out, etc.
I happen to agree that optically scanned ballots are probably the best bet right now for rapid and (reasonably) accurate counts. but I don't believe that they are completely reliable and error free.
Paper ballots then! Posted Oct 16, 2008 9:41 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] The "counting machines" have again been found to count wrong. These machines are broken by design, anyway. Counting votes starts with sorting votes - you look at the paper, and put it on an appropriate stack. You can identify dubious votes (e.g. cross not in the circle, but at the side, candidates stroked through, handwritten explanations on the paper like "I promised to vote for Osama to my grandchilds, but because he's a black terrorist, I vote for McSame", inappropriate pens causing marks elsewhere, etc.), and after a debate decide on which stack they go. You can recheck the stacks again and again, and by nature, your result will stabilize. The result of a counting machine which doesn't sort however will never stabilize. Each time, it will interpret dubious votes differently, and therefore it looks like a Rübezahl effort. It's just because the machine is broken by design, because the designers never saw a real ballot counting procedure. The only risk of fraud is when votes are replaced during the counting process.
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