voting "machines" eliminate voting [LWN.net]

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 18:51 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (guest, #15888)
In reply to: voting "machines" eliminate voting by smoogen
Parent article: Sequoia v. Ed Felten

Plenty of countries, and subdivisions thereof, around the world have no problem manually
counting paper ballots in a timely fashion.  It is a task that can be (and usually is) broken
down into many parallel sub-tasks.

Mind, that's simplified even further if you print up a separate ballot for each separate
contest/issue in the election, as opposed to e.g. some of the massive four-page ballots I've
seen with multiple issues and positions to vote on.   Color code them so they get put in the
right ballot boxes.

Reliable paper-balloting systems aren't difficult (there'll still be attempts to defraud, as
with missing ballot boxes, improperly registered voters, etc, these tend to be rather
obvious).  Even automated paper-counting systems can be spot-checked with manual counts, and
the whole automatic count thrown out if there's a problem (you may end up with the "hanging
chad" issue; that can be resolved by ballot redesign and making very clear ahead of time what
constitutes a valid vs invalid vote.) Reliable machine-balloting systems are extremely
difficult, with too many ways to stealthily influence the outcome.

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voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 20:32 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (3 responses)

> Plenty of countries, and subdivisions thereof, around the world have no 
> problem manually counting paper ballots in a timely fashion.  It is a
> task that can be (and usually is) broken down into many parallel
> sub-tasks.

OK for the record I am for paper ballots, but I do not see them as a panacea as places like
Chicago, Louisiana and New Mexico have shown that they can be rigged for a long time. 

The main problem is that as much as we argue about accountability, that is not what matters..
cost matters. The cost of using an automated counting system with a cramped ballot versus the
cost of paying 10's of thousands of people to count ballots by hand, ( and then doing
background checks on those people to see which ones have been paid off by various 'interested'
groups etc). And the problems are those are short term costs versus trying to figure out what
a long term cost of a subverted election would be. As long as the perceived cost of the
machines is smaller than the man-power costs.. you are on a losing argument.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 8:25 UTC (Wed) by riddochc (guest, #43) [Link] (2 responses)

What?

Are you seriously arguing that having an affordable system is more important than
accountability?  I don't know the numbers on how much it costs to run an election with the
different systems we're talking about, but really... if accountability doesn't matter more
than cost, what's the point of holding the election?  Let's just skip the election and just
give the presidency to whichever candidate is more popular with the supreme court.  That *has*
to be more affordable, and therefore better than actually bothering to count votes.

Oh, wait.  Somehow, I get the feeling that this could be a really, really bad idea.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 14:51 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I am not arguing that affordable is better than accountability.. I am arguing that it is
usually considered more important by people. People as a group are usually short-sighted and
end up with not thinking things through. So when they see they have to hire more people to run
an election or get some roads repaired, or raise taxes.. they will go with the roads getting
repaired. If they have the choice between hiring more people for an election or a bright
shiney gadget that will solve their problems and they dont have to stop road repairs or raise
taxes.. they will go for the gadget (because don't gadgets always make life easier?)

And only when it turns out that they made a bad decision, they will hem and haw for a couple
more elections until some better gadget comes out.. because we humans are built not to
recognize we bought a lemon.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 22, 2008 2:39 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

If something is not affordable, it won't happen. In a count of hands, you can do a recount
easily. A vote of the populace is rarely a complete recount, because it's too expensive to. If
the equivalent of recounting the paper ballots is cheap, it may be standard practice for every
ballot; if it's too expensive, it will only occur when a smoking gun appears. That's reality.