[tokai]

Voting machines are always a bad idea. There are issues of trust and security that can never be solved. So trying to open-wash this dangerous way of voting is at best just as bad as closed machines and at worst an angle to make people think its a safe and good idea.

[kube-system]

But it is a solved problem. You can use machines to mark paper ballots, and to quickly tabulate them. This is the best of all worlds: the results are auditable, the user can confirm their ballot was recorded properly, and the election officials can quickly count the ballots.

[falafelite]

Why are they always a bad idea in your view? I'd imagine that they're quite nice from the point of view of those who run elections and actually have to count them. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[yifanl]

Consider: the number of available volunteers to count votes scales directly with the number of voters in a given electorate.

[Loughla]

Yes and no. There is never a situation where electronic voting with no paper back up that must be stored and catalogued for a prescribed time via law is a good idea.

But a system that uses electronics to tabulate votes that can be verified via paper ballots that are stored long-term, securely? Why not?

Edit: Maybe I didn't describe this well. The person makes the vote on paper. The paper is counted by a machine (like the article is saying). The paper is stored securely and catalogued for later reference and audit. What is the problem there?

[nyokodo]

> But a system that uses electronics to tabulate votes that can be verified via paper ballots that are stored long-term, securely? Why not?

If the paper ballots as backup are manually created by the voter then while it’s still possible it’s much harder to fake the votes en masse but there’s more scope for human error (what if they vote in two different ways). If the paper backup is automatically generated then can they check it? If not then there’s little improvement over purely digital voting. If yes, do they actually check it? Many won’t bother and maybe there’s an exploit there. Then there’s the fact that this system would require regular auditing, and lawsuits and close contests will force a certain number of audits every election. No one can reliably predict which districts will require audits so presumably they’ll need to hire sufficient people to do a manual recount anyway which eliminates the labor cost advantage.

If by using electronic voting we are opening up new potential exploits, even with paper backups, and not really gaining much of an advantage why would we go to the expense and bother of implementing electronic voting?

[Loughla]

Sorry, when I say backups, I mean paper voted created by the voter's own hand as the original vote, counted by machine, and held securely as a way to verify the vote if any of the candidates call the election into question.

There is no system in which electronically cast and electronically created backups are a good idea.

[nyokodo]

> when I say backups, I mean paper voted created by the voter's own hand as the original vote

Fair enough, however the issue of the thread is electronic voting machines not electronic paper vote tabulation.

[Loughla]

The story is about electronic paper vote tabulation.