An electronic scanning system could easily be vulnerable to many of the same issues that are presented here.
Instead, have everyone mark their ballots like normal, then get a bunch of people in a room who all don't trust one another and have them count/tally votes together. Just about everyone that can vote can help count (unlike with electronic counting machines where only a very competent engineer could even begin to audit a machine like that, assuming that they were allowed to even do so), and in places that run elections like this, there is almost never a shortage of people willing to assist counting votes, especially when the election is particularly controversial ("I'm not going to let that [side a] person from screwing over us on [side b]! Let's go get 20 of us there watching to make sure nothing bad is happening!")
Voting should be hard, voting should be expensive (for the country, not for individual people). Why "optimize" the one thing that secures our country with alternatives that are less secure, have more points of failure, and are overall less understood both by the voters and by the people using the machines to tally votes?
After all, a lot of those counting machines are proprietary and un-auditable, so you have no way of knowing if they are actually just windows-xp wireless laptops crammed into a fancy plastic case.
I don't know enough about it in this situation to know, but things like that can sometimes cause a false sense of security or improvement that can actually make things worse in the long run.
In New York City, optical scanners are used. As a check, random precincts’ ballots are manually tallied. This is a good compromise between cost and security.
(There are additional checks, like a public and private count and vote aggregates being publicly posted at every precinct at the end of the night. Observers can also audit the public and private count of any machine at any time of the day, and they do.)
Do they significantly improve accuracy? Do they save a significant amount of money? Do they increase the speed that things are tallied, and does that make a significant difference or improvement anywhere (because unless i'm missing something, getting results a few hours earlier is not a good reason to lessen the security of an election)?
I genuinely don't know, and I'd love to see more information if anyone has it on this.
Because to me, without knowing all of the details, it reads like "we trade some security to save costs by just not tallying some precincts at random".
If it's saving a significant amount of money, to the point where the state is much better off because of it, or if the usage of them somehow increases turnout by decreasing the time it takes to count votes, then I would agree with you. But without evidence like that, I'm sitting here wondering why these machines keep getting used.
Often times things that seem like they shouldn't be secure often are, and I'd love to be wrong about this one.
> Do they improve accuracy?
I think they pretty clearly would increase accuracy, modulo any potential tampering. Some of this is structural -- each ballot has multiple elections, some in which the same candidate can be featured multiple times under different party affiliations. Tallying this by hand seems intrinsically error-prone. It's arguable that simplifying the ballot could help both tallying and voting, but given the current design optical scanning seems like a huge increase in accuracy.
> do they save a significant amount of money?
Once again, I suspect yes -- tallying the votes by hand takes a lot of time and a lot of people. Poll workers aren't well-compensated by any means, but there's still a cost.
> Do they increase the speed that things are tallied, and does that make a significant difference or improvement anywhere (because unless i'm missing something, getting results a few hours earlier is not a good reason to lessen the security of an election)?
I think yes to the first and a matter of opinion on the second. I'm with you that speed of results is either a non-goal or an anti-goal -- states that release precinct-level results when voting is still open elsewhere in the country are implicitly engaging in electioneering in my mind, and should be explicitly forbidden from doing so.
An automated system combined with random manual tallies seems pretty good to me from a security standpoint. As an aside, in addition to the random tallies I believe there is a process where any party can request a certain number of explicit audits if they feel that the results seem questionable from a given precinct, and an additional layer of election supervisors who can make a non-partisan request if there are inconsistencies from previous election cycles) seems like
In New York I would prefer that the focus be on distributing voter information earlier and more widely would be a much better use of time than further changing the actual voting. When I lived in Washington state, you got a voter information guide with all the candidates and ballot measures, statements for and against, and an explicit statement as to what is being voted on, well in advance of the election. In New York, half the time I have to really dig to even find out what is going to be on my ballot, and finding the full text of ballot measures is an exercise in futility as you try to navigate through the NY Department of State to try to find the information. Third-party sources like local newspapers actually do a significantly better job than the state does here.
And while I'm sure they save some money, is it worth it? I'd like to get an idea of the scale involved. Because saving a few hundred thousand dollars a year for a state would make it absolutely not worth it in my opinion, but a few hundred million might be.
And finding exact numbers is extremely hard (at least for me), combined with the fact that these companies basically never release that kind of information, and I know it's not the best idea to read into these things, but I can't help but think that they would release these numbers if they were significant and showed the company saving tons of money for the state.
But i completely agree that there are much better things we can do to improve voting overall (personally my vote is for changing to a "ranked voting" system), but these machines still feel like a giant red flag to me. There's not a lot that can be done to swing an election by just a few people, but put some kind of electronic or computerized system in the mix, and now there's one dock worker that has access to a large number of the machines as they get shipped, and now you have a single point of failure.
While in school in the 80's I learned that the standardized tests the school were administering didn't mean anything. They had no barring on my ability to graduate or go to college so I stopped caring about them. This opened up the freedom to do things like fill out multiple bubbles per line and otherwise get creative. About a month after filling out a test like this I got called into the office along with my parents. I was a pretty well known hacker at the time, running a couple local BBS's and whatnot. The state superintendent of schools was in the meeting and demanded to know what I did to their test scanning system. It turns out that I most likely caused a buffer overflow as line after line of multiple answers on the bubble sheet caused the system to crash. It took them weeks to figure out it was my test and in the mean time deadlines were being missed, etc.
One of the models (the ES&S M650) might be the actual scanners you are talking about, and that model has a number of terrifying vulnerabilities!