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Comment by sturgill | Hacker News Reader

Paper ballots aren’t immune to issues. Like the Al Franken election and ballots in the trunk; hanging chads in Florida; etc. I don’t know what the answer is here. I do not trust electronic voting machines. Paper isn’t immune to issues. Personally I’d love to see a dual system: votes are recorded electronically with a paper receipt.

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Re: hanging chads

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.

The receipt is not to be taken by the voter. The voter will check that the receipt is correct and it will be deposited into the voting urn. Then, manual counting may be done for all precincts or by sampling.

Right. And in the paper-plus-optical-scan system, the receipt is the thing the voter directly marked. No machine between voter and ballot, no different thing to check.

The counting is still not trustworthy if performed by a machine.

Its not unambiguous, look at this ballot and tell me who they voted for. It tied a race in Virginia just last year.

https://mobile.twitter.com/virginianpilot/status/94358996960...

This is why I like lines instead of bubbles and pencils instead of pens.

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.

Pencils scare me. Mutable paper trails seem less than ideal. I think I prefer a pen along with an option to request a new form in the event of a mistake. Optical scan for counting along with a paper trail for random sampling. I don’t know the perfect system, but a dual recording mechanism for back checks seems better than just relying on paper or just relying on machines.

Paper ballots with optical scan machines are popular in states that care about these issues. Compared to your suggestion there are fewer machines, easier recounts and audits, and it's very easy for the public to understand.

Paper ballots with optical scan machines are the reason we have electronic voting now.

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.

... I wasn't recommending using the worst possible paper ballot. The modern version, that tests well, is where you draw a line to complete an arrow. And this modern version is the one that's becoming popular.

Hand counting is important, because it involves many eyes. If you want to manipulate the counting on a huge scale you cant, if you have to worry about idealistic volunteers.

If you let a machine count, you loose these checks.

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