While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between.
I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.
No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.
It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.
> The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.
You are misunderstanding "who to trust".
The source of trust in a paper vote election is your party's representative + independent election observers. You believe them that they were sitting at the polling station all day, watching both the voting and counting, and nothing fishy happened. You don't have to trust the state officials in any way, and you don't have to trust any one else either. Just your party - which is kind of the point. The only people you maximally trust is your party.
In your proposal, you are saying that to trust the outcome, I must trust the state officials - the ones who built the machines. Those are exactly the people I distrust to do a fair election.
The poster is also trusting the database provider, database admin, the voting machine provider, the voting machine maintenance person, etc in an electronic voting machine since they implied this by saying database. Manual paper counts with multiple counters and multiple counts that resolve differences are hard to top when each set of counters is adversarial. In spite of that one thing I thought might be useful and point of failure if electronic voting were allowed is from Venezuela of all places. Each precinct printed an initial tally, the opposition collected most of them and claimed they were cheated. They might have had a fair election up until the voting machines were summed up at a central location -it appears the ruling party cheated when adding up the precincts. https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-election-maduro-machado...
The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.
This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot.
There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.
The US has roughly 10x more population than Canada. The solution is really simple, just hire 10x more humans to manage the vote counting.
Paper voting worked for thousands of years and was at the core of the foundation of this country.
There is no need to compromise the results of the election just to scale in a slightly more efficient way. If you need 10x more people because the volume is 10x higher, just hire 10x more people.
Voting machines here (Indiana) will print a sheet with your choices, which you can review before feeding it to a counting machine. That way you have a paper trail for recounts, and a sanity check before the vote is cast.
>I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database
If it's counted electronically from the database, the piece of paper is completely worthless. Unless you can get the entire voting population to give you their paper and then count them, you will never know if the count is right. If a hacker switched 15% of the vote from one party to another, how could you tell from a piece of paper that tells you who you voted for?
you can count the paper votes only in your voting point/building. If there are abnormalities you can alert other people to trigger the global recounting
Yes, it's not foolproof, attacker can just modify the electronic voting data in places where he knows people don't usually do recounting. But it makes his job harder
I think this is probably sufficient, but also wonder if theres a circular logic to the "No way to hack that" claim. If the hypothetical hack could both corrupt the digital votes and the printing it could ensure the vote counts line up. I guess it maybe makes it harder, but if the printed paper votes are there to validate the digital votes and vice-versa I'm not sure its quite as air-tight as claimed.
Edit: I just realized you also mentioned "voter-passes" when entering the voting site. That definitely makes it much harder! If those were corrupted you could still pull it off, but that level of sophistication is really likely to get caught.
Ireland has both paper only voting, and a PR-STV voting system. Counting can take, literally, days (the most recent EU election took five days to fill all the seats). It is a spectator sport for a certain type of nerd.
> I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database.
They absolutely can. Brazil uses electronic voting machines and that exact method was proposed to increase the trustworthiness of the system. We'd get the best of both worlds: fast vote counting and an auditable paper trail that serves as the ultimate truth.
Supreme court declared it unconstitutional using total bullshit arguments ranging from "it compromises voting secrecy" to "it's hard to implement", thereby fueling concerns that the voting machines are compromised.
I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.
No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.
It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.