There was a lot of effort put in to changing how those machines work, based largely on the work of a few independant researchers in the early 2000’s. Newer machines are more secure, auditable, and have a documented paper trail of all votes that can be recounted. These companies had to be shamed into doing the right thing, but at least they did it.
Many still have notable gaps in voter verification - for example, the ballots are tallied by reading a printed QR code, which the voter has no means to verify. So close to voter-verifiable, yet not voter-verifiable.
In addition, polling places are often bottlenecked by the limited number of expensive machines, which local precincts have no power to remedy - especially in dense urban areas.
I have to wonder why bubble (scantron) forms, which are simple, cheap, low-infrastructure, and present vastly less software surface area (they can be counted by an array of photosensors and discrete flip-flop registers) were not the preferred choice. And, it’s always possible to have a touchscreen machine which prints a filled bubble form - which the voter can actually verify.
The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn’t. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.
Many machines now are paper based, the machines just scan the paper and deposit it in a lockbox, and the physical paper can be recounted if necessary. These are the machines I use in my district.
The ballot is scanned right in front of you, and if you made a stray mark that would cause the ballot to be invalidated, or it detects an over/under vote, it informs you so that you have a chance to destroy the ballot and re-vote if necessary.
But what’s the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.
And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.
Ghe point is that the automatic process tends to be very reliable and instantaneous while hand counts can be used as an auditing process. So machines that are easily auditable and have an inherent paper trail because thenvotes are on actual paper ballots are the best combination of steps for voting.
Auditable machines make ballot stuffing impossible.
They couldn’t even hand count an election of 127 people correctly. Imagine how big the errors would have been with thousands of votes.
The fact is that this isn’t being counted by full time well-trained accountants, but by temporary and on-call employees at best, and lots of them are retirees, who can afford not to have a full-time gig.
Hand counting requires more blind faith trust than a machine you can easily audit at any time.
It’s not just about the speed, it’s about an inhuman level of consistency and memory that the machine provides.
Every state has it’s own laws and every set of equipment is a little different, so each county can be a little different too , but the basics are that you pull a few scan batches, count them by hand, and then compare to what the computer says. If the two ever don’t match, you know you have a problem and you count again to make sure the problem wasn’t the humans recounting. Then you check to make sure they weren’t scanned wrong. If you still have a problem after that, the auditor should be calling the secretary of state as fast as they can and I would guess the goal would be to get a new tabulator in there ASAP to start fresh on a completely different system.
With regard to machines with no paper trail, counties can choose to be as OCD or laid back as the law and their elected official (the auditor) wants them to be; the auditor is theoretically there to represent the interests of the people and make sure the system is trustworthy.
I’m my county the April election was small enough that they ended up recounting every single ballot as part off the audit since it was only about 200 ballots for one taxing district.
You should also be able to observe if you want to, contact your county and ask how to get on the list and you can observe first-hand exactly how they do it.
I’ll also point out before I go, that the audits of the machine show that the system looks to be working right, but when you batch audit a hand count all you can do is verify that one batch because humans are not a consistent process.
There was a lot of effort put in to changing how those machines work, based largely on the work of a few independant researchers in the early 2000’s. Newer machines are more secure, auditable, and have a documented paper trail of all votes that can be recounted. These companies had to be shamed into doing the right thing, but at least they did it.
Many still have notable gaps in voter verification - for example, the ballots are tallied by reading a printed QR code, which the voter has no means to verify. So close to voter-verifiable, yet not voter-verifiable.
In addition, polling places are often bottlenecked by the limited number of expensive machines, which local precincts have no power to remedy - especially in dense urban areas.
I have to wonder why bubble (scantron) forms, which are simple, cheap, low-infrastructure, and present vastly less software surface area (they can be counted by an array of photosensors and discrete flip-flop registers) were not the preferred choice. And, it’s always possible to have a touchscreen machine which prints a filled bubble form - which the voter can actually verify.
The right thing would be to abandon the concept altogether. Paper is accessible and obvious to everybody, auditing an election machine isn’t. Just keep it simple, even if it takes longer.
Many machines now are paper based, the machines just scan the paper and deposit it in a lockbox, and the physical paper can be recounted if necessary. These are the machines I use in my district.
The ballot is scanned right in front of you, and if you made a stray mark that would cause the ballot to be invalidated, or it detects an over/under vote, it informs you so that you have a chance to destroy the ballot and re-vote if necessary.
But what’s the point? Count everything by hand instead of relying on the machine to report anomalies, do exit polls to satisfy the news cycle. This seems too important to introduce an ultimately opaque machine into and also costs a lot for zero gain.
And then there are also the machines that so take over the process more thoroughly.
Ghe point is that the automatic process tends to be very reliable and instantaneous while hand counts can be used as an auditing process. So machines that are easily auditable and have an inherent paper trail because thenvotes are on actual paper ballots are the best combination of steps for voting.
Auditable machines make ballot stuffing impossible.
Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.
They couldn’t even hand count an election of 127 people correctly. Imagine how big the errors would have been with thousands of votes.
The fact is that this isn’t being counted by full time well-trained accountants, but by temporary and on-call employees at best, and lots of them are retirees, who can afford not to have a full-time gig.
Hand counting requires more blind faith trust than a machine you can easily audit at any time.
It’s not just about the speed, it’s about an inhuman level of consistency and memory that the machine provides.
How does the auditing work in these cases?
Also I found news reports about some US states still using machines without paper trail…
Every state has it’s own laws and every set of equipment is a little different, so each county can be a little different too , but the basics are that you pull a few scan batches, count them by hand, and then compare to what the computer says. If the two ever don’t match, you know you have a problem and you count again to make sure the problem wasn’t the humans recounting. Then you check to make sure they weren’t scanned wrong. If you still have a problem after that, the auditor should be calling the secretary of state as fast as they can and I would guess the goal would be to get a new tabulator in there ASAP to start fresh on a completely different system.
With regard to machines with no paper trail, counties can choose to be as OCD or laid back as the law and their elected official (the auditor) wants them to be; the auditor is theoretically there to represent the interests of the people and make sure the system is trustworthy.
I’m my county the April election was small enough that they ended up recounting every single ballot as part off the audit since it was only about 200 ballots for one taxing district.
You should also be able to observe if you want to, contact your county and ask how to get on the list and you can observe first-hand exactly how they do it.
I’ll also point out before I go, that the audits of the machine show that the system looks to be working right, but when you batch audit a hand count all you can do is verify that one batch because humans are not a consistent process.