Voter ID and Paper Ballots are a great first step for preventing voting fraud. But they aren’t nearly enough. What happens when the paper ballots are submitted? How are they counted – by humans or by machines? How can we be sure that what’s counted matches what’s on the paper ballots? How are the totals counted at each voting location, forwarded to a central place and totaled? These are each opportunities for massive fraud to take place – unless systems are put in place to prevent it.
There are low-tech ways to solve each of these problems that can and should be implemented quickly. However, people determined to manipulate the results will be able to get around the low-tech methods in some places. Open-source, completely auditable high-tech methods following proven success patterns can be built that eliminate the remaining opportunities for cheating. Both the low-tech and high-tech methods enable continuous counting of ballots as they are submitted, with visible running totals and final results possible minutes after the polls close. In either case, no custom voting equipment would be required anywhere.
I can think of no reason other than inertia and the desire to enable cheating why neither of these approaches have been implemented in US. The low-tech one should be implemented immediately and the high-tech one as soon as possible – it should take no more than weeks for a first version to be implemented and months for a solid version to get working. Both approaches can and should be implemented in parallel. Both can be operated in parallel, each serving as a check for the other.
What’s the problem?
Everyone talks about Voter ID and paper ballots. Good topics. No one seems to talk about what happens next in the “back office” of the voting centers where ballots are counted, usually by machines even with paper ballots.
One important issue that every voting district has its own unique ballot! You experience this when you vote, but with all the concentration on national and state-wide candidates, it’s easy to ignore the fact that county and local candidates require that each locality (city or town) has its own unique ballot! When the paper ballots are counted by machine, a local administrator has to use complex administrative software to customize it for the local ballot. This is an opportunity for error and cheating. Of course the machine also counts the totals, generates them and somehow – by means that are never disclosed! – sends them to a central location where they are summed – again in secret! This is the problem: the secret, unauditable local back office operations, usually with proprietary computer hardware and software.
Who else has renounced or ignored voting automation?
Computer automation is everywhere. Isn’t it ignorant and backward to resist or, worse, to throw out computers? Is it even possible to handle huge voting rolls without computers?
The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections. Countries such as Germany Norway, Netherlands, France, Canada, Denmark, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, and most other countries, protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.
Some countries have implemented automated counting but have dumped it. Japan stopped using voting machines in 2018. Netherlands stopped in 2007
Norway trialed in 2003 but hasn’t used them. El Salvador moved to hand-counting after election irregularities.
Machine-voting was allowed as an experiment starting in 2002, but the purchase of new machines has been frozen since 2008 due to security concerns. Only a few dozen towns still use them.
How about mail-in voting? Terrible idea. France has more than 48 million voters.
People who can’t go to the polls for various reasons can authorize someone else to vote for them.
To do so, a voter must fill out a form ahead of time and bring it to a police station. A person can be the proxy of no more than one voter living in France — and potentially one additional person living abroad.
Up to 7% of people voted by proxy in the last presidential election five years ago.
…
Mail-in voting was banned in 1975 amid fears of potential fraud.
We should follow the lead of other countries that have reverted to hand-counting because, in the case of voting, it’s simpler, less expensive and more reliable.
Are there people who argue strongly in favor of machine counting with invisible software in locked back offices? Yes. Their arguments sound impressive unless you look at the facts and reality.
The low-tech solution
The low-tech solution is simple: hand-counting and hand-tallying of the ballots. Lots of places do it quickly, accurately and in great volume. Nothing needs to be invented. It just needs to be systematized, probably state-by-state, practiced to train people and weed out issues, and then implemented with full openness, including on-site auditors and cameras with visual and audio feeds that are publicly available.
The high-tech solution
I like this approach because I'm a long-time software guy, but truthfully, we can do just fine with the low-tech approach by itself.
The high-tech solution has never been implemented, to my knowledge, but can be done following widely proven success patterns. It starts with the voter placing his paper ballot in an off-the-shelf paper scanner that scans the ballot, stores it in the cloud, and displays it on the screen. The voter verifies that it’s a good image. Then the ballot is “read” by multiple pieces of software created by different groups and the totals displayed. The voter again verifies the accuracy. The votes are then sent from the cloud ballot readers to multiple cloud totallers, which make their results publicly readable in real-time, with a transaction stream that shows the origins and ID of each ballot that has been added. This enables each total to be tracked back to the physical ballots that contributed to it. Physical auditing can and should be done to expose cheats. Even better, run the low-tech and high-tech solutions in parallel, each serving as a check for fraud in the other.
Summary
The current voting system gives losers of elections lots of opportunities to claim cheating. And cheating probably has taken place! Because of the system’s opacity, we have no way of knowing whether or how much cheating has taken place. Moving to at least the low-tech system described here will make voting completely transparent, removing the cause of widespread suspicions that a group’s preferred candidate has lost. It’s not mysterious, expensive or difficult. Let’s do it!
Here is more about the problem of local control.
Here are details on how the hIgh-tech solution could be implemented.
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