- get ID validated & ability to vote
- get an initialized smart card
- insert in polling machine, fill out stuff
- submit, get printout from printer
- scan printout into a machine
- return smart card
At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout.
The printing and the scanning felt terribly wasteful but as it turned out, it became a precious way to audit. The bonus is that the printout is normalized, not some person's handwriting that could be subject to misinterpretation.
Were these Dominion voting machines?
Poll worker validates proper ID, get ballot code for your precinct, walk to voting system, poll worker enters the precinct, voter validates info on screen, voter votes on the touch screen, system prints out choices, walk to scanner system, vote gets scanned, scanner stores those ballots in it's tray in case need for audit.
How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?
The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.
As far as I know every state will issue a picture ID, similar to a driver's license but which doesn't confer driving privileges. to someone who doesn't drive.
If the argument is that people who can't drive will find it more difficult to make it to the office that gives out government issued IDs, the obvious solutions are (1) put more of those offices in places like inner cities, convenient to public transportation, and (2) have the political activists who spend so much time complaining about disenfranchisement do some actual work instead and provide people transportation to and from the offices.
> the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote
The solution to that is obvious too: either fix the state law or fix the tribal ID requirements so they meet existing state law.
When you're done, the machine prints a paper ballot and asks you to inspect it. You then click OK on the machine, take the ballot from your booth over to a separate counting machine, and deposit it there.
It's really quite pleasant, there is a strong audit trail, and the machines afford a wide variety of assistive options (large font, headphone jack for audio, different languages, etc)
Also I had the option to get a printed ballot and fill it out witih a pen if I wanted to.
Mail-in ballots work the same way they have since 1864. You fill out a paper ballot and mail it back.
> Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.
16% of counties - when more than half the US population lives in just 4.6% of the counties. Remember that many counties are nearly empty and have few voters. Due to the rural/urban political divide, sparsely populated rural counties typically vote for the GOP in recent elections while densely populated suburbs and cities lean more towards the Democrats.
Biden’s numbers in general were similar to Hillary’s in 2016, but he gained ground in the suburbs due to white educated voters fleeing from Trump after the last 4 years. There is no indication that a “few key counties” were targeted - the shift was seen in all 50 states. Compare Texas suburban county votes in 2016 to 2020.
Mail-in ballots get counted by machines.
Read the interview I posted with Philip Stark, Berkeley Math Dean who is probably the leading expert on election auditing having designed the procedures for conducting risk-limiting audits in many states. He explains this in detail.
What would you have people do? Maybe have the volunteers just scan the ballot by hand and then write down on paper the vote totals?
The argument just boils down to “machines are scary to me” and that isn’t a good enough reason to abandon progress that is routinely shown to work just fine.
Creating accounts to do that with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
These rules apply regardless of which ideology an account is battling for or against. Our goal is not to have this site burn to a crisp of a particular color, but rather to have it not burn to a crisp at all.
If the voter can easily see that the ballot reflects their choices, then it's not useless as an auditing mechanism. That's hyperbole.
Remember, if there is massive/systematic fraud going on, then every instance doesn't have to be caught to uncover it.
I was curious who makes the voting machines that are used here. It's apparently a company called ES&S:
"Election Systems and Software (ES&S) 11208 John Galt Blvd, Omaha NE"
Someone has a sense of humor, at least.
The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.
Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:
> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.
> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.
I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.
Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.
I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.
I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.
Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.
There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.
So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.
Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.
[1] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[2] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/19/spoilt-ballots-pc...
[4] https://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/Klinkner%20Analysis.pd...
Or maybe you didn't read the study....
On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.
In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.
This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).
What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.
Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.
If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.
If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.