Voting machines are inherently wrong because any bugs are unacceptable, especially in this case where "performance" is irrelevant. Paper and pen(cil) is the way to go. Draw a line, that's it. No fuckery.
And what are the incentives for using voting machines? They are harder to verify than people from multiple parties counting lines drawn on a sheet of paper. They are susceptible to conflicts of interest, general incompetence, and security risks.
You can also look at issues like undervotes and overvotes from the actual election. And ask people if they have any complaints about the process.
This is all somewhat studied already. We should study it a lot more.
This is in addition to doing systematic post-election recounts of a small % of ballots to verify that the counting machines are working.
Finally, everything is a voting "machine", including optical scan cards. Even if hand-counted. You should measure how well they work.
What's our incentive to switch to machines? Speed isn't a concern here.
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/post-election-audit...
One good way to implement this is with paper ballots and optical scan machines. You get speed/less labor with accuracy.
But you still need to study that the paper ballots are reliably usable by all types of voters, in addition to verifying that the machines count accurately.
It was paper ballots and optical scan machines that led to the whole "hanging chad" situation.
And filling in a bubble with a pen or pencil isn't going to help. Anyone who read BBS G-philes in the 80's knows how to defeat a Scan-Tron.
This is a problem with overtechnical solutions already. Random mechanical points of failure. Pencil drawing a line is unambiguous.
Re: ballots in a trunk
This was an auditing/ procedural issue.
Re: receipts
Why not just turn in the receipts and count them. Why have a black box do the counting? If a machine says candidate A had a thousand forty votes and B had a thousand thirty, what are you going to do? How do you know if your receipt lied? If people keep their receipts, you no longer have anonymous voting. And what are you going to do, track down every voter? If those running the election keep the receipts, they should just count them manually.
https://mobile.twitter.com/virginianpilot/status/94358996960...
Regardless, this is actually the fault of the user rather than machines. As far as I know you can still get a replacement if you do this.
If you let a machine count, you loose these checks.
Assuming it's a properly representative sample.
If speed is not an issue then the voting mechanism that everybody (even the technically unskilled) can understand is the best.
And beeing slow is not a bug, it is a feature. A feature that prevents all kinds of things from happening that would undermine trust in the system as a whole.
The method I like most is paper ballots with optical scanners, which the general public can understand. Random audits for confirmation, yes, the general public can understand. Recounts, and hand recounts, yes, the general public can understand.
A machine cannot be watched in the same way a human can. No scrutineer can prove that a ballot was counted correctly without ... seeing it counted.
2004, Bush vs Kerry in Ohio. The voting commissioner was Republican and had promised to deliver Ohio. Without Ohio, Bush would not have won the election.
Heavily Republican precincts were set up so that voting was easy all day.
Heavily Democratic precincts in Cincinnati got so backlogged that they closed the door and people had to be in line for hours to vote.
Bush won the state by 2.1%. He carried Harris County, which includes Cincinnati. No Republican has carried Harris County since.
Now tell me. Does the feature of voting "beeing slow" improve your faith in the fairness of that election?