Audio here sucks, but touch Obama and you get Baldwin, touch McKinney (EW!) and you get the write-in screen, touch straight DP ticket and you get McCain.
In CA the absentee ballot in my county has an arrow with a gap in it next to the choices, and we’re supposed to fill in the arrow. Not exactly the simplest, but it could be worse.
kiddleddee
October 31, 2008
Mike, even drunks can fill out paper ballots the way the are told to. When I was a kid growing up in a small town in North Carolina, I remember my father telling of a certain sheriff who would win reelection by rounding up all the county drunks, getting them liquered up, then taking them to the polls to cast their ballot for him and his Democrat Party cronies.
I’ve heard that India has mechanical, but not electronic, voting machines that work very well. But I don’t know much about them beyond that.
JimDavidson
October 31, 2008
Mike, the notoriety of paper ballots is legendary. In the New Hampshire primary, Ron Paul’s people reported numerous boxes supposedly delivered by special courier actually arriving already slit open. The term “stuffing the ballot boxes” reflects poorly on the history of paper balloting.
There is no technological fix, it’s true. I agree with Peter that I see no special urgency. I don’t say that it is impossible to create a verifiable voting machine system, especially with contemporary cryptographic protocols, but I do say that it is very hard to be sure if such a system has been perverted.
I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done some work in this area, especially to prove that the Diebold machines don’t work, aren’t reliable, etc. You might get one or two EFF experts to suggest that there is a way of creating a validate-able vote where the individual voter can establish before the count and after that his vote is in the system the way he cast it.
But, I don’t think there is a way to create a vote count that cannot be subverted. Everyone does not know everyone else, so within the constraint of registered voters, it would be possible to stuff the vote. And it seems relatively easy to generate registrants, too.
Do I have any answers? No. I don’t claim to be able to validate any voting process.
Mike Gillis
October 31, 2008
No, I don’t mean punch card machines.
I mean a simple check or fill in the box next to the candidates’ name and count them.
Unless you’re drunk, it’s very hard to miss and accidently vote for the wrong candidate on an old school paper ballot.
JimDavidson
October 31, 2008
Of course! Nobody ever cheated anyone with a paper ballot. No, wait, that’s not it.
Everybody always cheated everyone with paper ballots. Or pretty near.
When punch card balloting came to Louisiana in the 1930s, it is said that Huey Long was unhappy. Then the makers of the machine gave him a private run through of how it works. Afterward, Long came out on the statehouse steps to talk to reporters and said, “I can make that machine sing Dixie!”
You can imagine the elation amongst black voters on hearing that news.
Mike Gillis
October 31, 2008
So… paper ballots, then?
JimDavidson
October 31, 2008
“Now it’s calibrated. Vote straight ticket Republican. Oops, now it’s not calibrated.”
If I were expecting the votes to be counted accurately, it would be sad. But, as it fulfills ever so many expectations of the opposite, it is quite zany in a funny, slapstick way.
Audio here sucks, but touch Obama and you get Baldwin, touch McKinney (EW!) and you get the write-in screen, touch straight DP ticket and you get McCain.
In CA the absentee ballot in my county has an arrow with a gap in it next to the choices, and we’re supposed to fill in the arrow. Not exactly the simplest, but it could be worse.
Mike, even drunks can fill out paper ballots the way the are told to. When I was a kid growing up in a small town in North Carolina, I remember my father telling of a certain sheriff who would win reelection by rounding up all the county drunks, getting them liquered up, then taking them to the polls to cast their ballot for him and his Democrat Party cronies.
I’ve heard that India has mechanical, but not electronic, voting machines that work very well. But I don’t know much about them beyond that.
Mike, the notoriety of paper ballots is legendary. In the New Hampshire primary, Ron Paul’s people reported numerous boxes supposedly delivered by special courier actually arriving already slit open. The term “stuffing the ballot boxes” reflects poorly on the history of paper balloting.
There is no technological fix, it’s true. I agree with Peter that I see no special urgency. I don’t say that it is impossible to create a verifiable voting machine system, especially with contemporary cryptographic protocols, but I do say that it is very hard to be sure if such a system has been perverted.
I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done some work in this area, especially to prove that the Diebold machines don’t work, aren’t reliable, etc. You might get one or two EFF experts to suggest that there is a way of creating a validate-able vote where the individual voter can establish before the count and after that his vote is in the system the way he cast it.
But, I don’t think there is a way to create a vote count that cannot be subverted. Everyone does not know everyone else, so within the constraint of registered voters, it would be possible to stuff the vote. And it seems relatively easy to generate registrants, too.
Do I have any answers? No. I don’t claim to be able to validate any voting process.
No, I don’t mean punch card machines.
I mean a simple check or fill in the box next to the candidates’ name and count them.
Unless you’re drunk, it’s very hard to miss and accidently vote for the wrong candidate on an old school paper ballot.
Of course! Nobody ever cheated anyone with a paper ballot. No, wait, that’s not it.
Everybody always cheated everyone with paper ballots. Or pretty near.
When punch card balloting came to Louisiana in the 1930s, it is said that Huey Long was unhappy. Then the makers of the machine gave him a private run through of how it works. Afterward, Long came out on the statehouse steps to talk to reporters and said, “I can make that machine sing Dixie!”
You can imagine the elation amongst black voters on hearing that news.
So… paper ballots, then?
“Now it’s calibrated. Vote straight ticket Republican. Oops, now it’s not calibrated.”
If I were expecting the votes to be counted accurately, it would be sad. But, as it fulfills ever so many expectations of the opposite, it is quite zany in a funny, slapstick way.