A big idea these days in voting tech is "software independence", where a certain degree of manual audit of ballots can defend against the machines being buggy or nefarious in most ways, so that you don't need to trust them very much. It does seems like voting machines should be relatively off-the-shelf items when all is said and done.

I said years ago that all voting should be with ballot marking assist that is independent from the tallying. If you have long lines you increase capacity by letting some people fill the bubbles by hand (although some long lines are about ID verification process not actual voting.) People can independently see that they voted for who they intended to vote for before putting it in the counting machine. There's an easily auditable paper trail with fewer arguments about hanging chads or voter intent. Optical counting is a common technology so you could have a number of platforms compatible with the ballots and even require some kind of cross verification if there's a question about the security protocols on a particular type of tabulator.

Or just only vote on one thing at at time. I get so annoyed comparing the logistics of UK elections to US.

It began to dawn on Caulfield, slowly at first, that the amount the public didn't know about these companies was vast. Quarterly profits, regional market share, R&D budgets, even the number of employees--often, there was simply nothing. "Basic, basic data--the basic layout of the industry--was just not out there," Caulfield recalls. "Eventually, we realized that it didn't exist."

I'm sure people are more willing to divulge this stuff to students than, say, financial journalists, but it still doesn't seem particularly surprising to me that this stuff is "just not out there". As mentioned in the Miami thread, the US (and the same applies to Canada) is extremely opaque when it comes to private companies.

I don't understand why states don't just go with bubble scan machines. They are cheap, reliable, easily qualified, and totally auditable.

Nobody wants GRE flashbacks?

As I have said before, and will keep on saying probably until I die, the solution to voting machine problems is not to have voting machines. Pencil, paper ballot, ballot in box. Count ballots by hand with as many observers as you want. Store the counted ballots as long as you want. Sample and double-check as often as you want. This is so easy that the poorest and most dysfunctional states on earth manage to do it on a regular basis, with very high confidence in the results. The smaller ones even finish counting in under 24 hours. By the time he retires Mr. Caulfield will probably have demonstrated it costs less too.

Because American kids grew up with Sesame Street, we can only count if we say 'ah, ah, ah" between each number. It's maddeningly slow.

You've all seen this, right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXPnH0C9UA

Mossy beat me to it.

I've never voted with just regular pen and paper since I left my small native village in search of education, decent restaurants, and the chance to avoid everyone I grew up with who couldn't get in to college. Lincoln used scan machines as per Apo's 5. Ohio and Pennsylvania always used machines. They used to be mechanical and you got to pull a lever, which really made a good metaphor. Anyway, I'm not opposed to voting on paper like it's picking an office Secret Santa, but I wonder if everybody is aware of the sheer number of choices you need to make on your ballot as an America voter. Sometimes it's several dozen. The judicial stuff, which is often "pick up to five" or similar, would be potentially problematic on paper where nobody could stop you from voting for too many people.

(Counter to obvious counter-argument: Yes, we vote on too much shit. I don't know how to stop that.)

I loved the old PA lever machines. They made a satisfying clink when you submitted your vote.

We vote on paper, and I like it. We use tabulators to count, and then humans look at anything that didn't register.

If you're supposed to vote for 3 and you choose 4, the humans will look at the ballot to see if you're somehow indicated what you want. And if not, too bad, no votes in that race count.

where nobody could stop you from voting for too many people
Then you've spoiled your ballot. And while you may have more elected offices than most countries, you have very few parties.

And then you get pwned.

7: And it even scales to complex systems. (Ahem, NYC.) Ireland and Northern Ireland implement STV by hand (with IIRC random transfer of excess votes, which is weird, but probably more efficient than fractional votes). Takes them a few days, but the American need to have elections done at 3am the next morning is bonkers.

The old PA lever machines were very satisfying, but I never got to vote on one myself.

In CA we vote with paper ballots that are machine-tabulated. We get -big- sheets of paper, with a rip-off barcode thing we walk away with, as proof of -which- ballot paper we actually marked. The choices are in the form of a big arrow with a gap in the middle straight part; you fill that in with your marker, so unlike bubble-forms, it's really easy-to-do and difficult-to-screw-up. It doesn't solve the problem for disabled folks, but for everybody else, it's straightforward. And the voter throughput is mostly driven by how many little "marking stations" (small table with opaque barrier around 3 sides, so nobody can see what you're marking): the tabulators are pretty quick.

Been that way for over a decade, IIRC.

As long as the ballots are paper, lasting, and human-readable, I don't see the added benefit of hand-counting over scanning plus audit. Keynesian, I guess.

Hi!

18: What do you mean by Keynesian?

He really liked counting.

Stimulating the economy by paying people to do pointless busywork is Keynesian (I mean, in an oversimplified kind of way.)

14: It will not shock you that the GOP opposes straight-ticket voting.