There. Done.
Edit: changed wording, receipt vs record.
Even with paper ballots (or a vvpt), you still need regular procedures to audit the record to ensure that the counting and down-stream handling of the counts are correct.
This may not make sense intuitively, but counting paper scales quite well by being distributed to the polling locations and physically sorting the paper ballots. The Australian Electoral Commission documents the counting process quite thoroughly [0].
The only time counting paper takes a long time to get a win/lose result is when results are close enough that every vote needs to be counted. This is surprisingly rare in practice.
Whatever counting method you are using and whatever reporting method you are using, it needs to be verifiable. I still can't believe we had ballots from 2016 that were destroyed after brin subpoenaed, without any consequence for those who had charge of their possession and safety.
I mean, the 2000 US presidential election had a recount... that was cancelled. The Brexit referendum had a bunch of spending irregularities... but the result stands. The 2016 US presidential election had allegations of Russian interference... but the result stands.
It's pointless having an early electronic result and a late paper result if the early result always stands - the late paper result gives you nothing except a false sense of security.
In none of those cases was there proof that actual vote counts were altered.
There are still ongoing investigations into Russia's interference, but the side that the interference helped is the on that's currently in power, and there's enough ambiguity for them to avoid taking any direct action. If we'd had a paper ballots that proved that Russia hacked voting machines and actually changed 100k or so votes--I'm 100% confident we'd have had a completely different outcome.
In none of those cases was there proof
that actual vote counts were altered.
More broadly, I hoped to illustrate the fact winners oppose fishing expeditions to double-check election integrity.
I simply don't believe we have the option of getting the result wrong on the first announcement. It has to be right the first time. And because it has to be right first time, we should apply our most trusted counting method the first time; the addition of an early-but-untrustworthy count is a move in the wrong direction.
But you can. Many states already have automatic recount laws when vote totals are close. In many cases candidates can pay for recounts even if they aren't close.
Recounts are common in American politics, and sometimes they even change the result--Al Franken won in 2008 after a recount flipped the result.
The Florida recount would most certainly have been finished if any of the counties had found obvious cases of voting machine hacking. Every country completed at least 1 recount, and most completed manual recounts.
There. No.
Voters strictly can't take a record of their receipt; this opens up a whole other level of voter intimidation, where, if you voted for the wrong person you lose your job, lose benefits, get beat up, get killed.
The "receipt" was a perforated piece of paper with a barcode. The votes were cast by connecting lines, and the right half of that line crossed the perforation lines, and was mine to keep. This seemed like a reasonable system, and I could then verify that my vote was counted.
As for voter intimidation, if we really believe that our democracy is worth killing and dying for in foreign wars, then it would logically follow that we must accept the risk of demanding accountability domestically.
Ideally, assuming you would be voting with a key linked to your identity (SIN), both the IDs of voters and their votes could be entirely public and on your receipt.
The act of counting votes would be for a set of parties to be work with only the public list and given the private key(s) to generate results. The trust there should be similar to counting paper ballots, especially if independent parties combine subsets and arrive at the same result.
> Ideally, assuming you would be voting with a key linked to your identity (SIN), both the IDs of voters and their votes could be entirely public and on your receipt.
What piece of your identity does your employer not have access to? In the U.S. they've typically seen your id, your passport, your pay stubs, your health insurance.
If you put them all into a black box machine (or set of machines) that spits out a total at the end, you've recreated all the same issues.
You can automatically verify some random percentage of them and do a full recount if needed.
The ambiguities we had in the 2000 election in Florida were from people improperly marking their ballots (hanging chads, etc.). If the paper ballots are generated by machines, or at least have already been verified as being readable by a machine at the time the ballot was cast, then you will have a much lower margin of error during the manual recount.