Glenn Fleishman says,
I don't think I've seen this mentioned on BoingBoing at all, but there's a very funny way to avoid the Diebold and related machines and have a paper trail. Vote absentee. In most states, there's no requirement to state that you will be physically incapable of reaching a polling place. More than 50 percent of King County (Seattle's county) voters now vote absentee. The county proposes eliminating all but a few polling places in about two to three years, which would also produce a relatively large savings.
There's two outcomes from this.
First, a paper trail is established for ballots. Ballots are still machine processed, but there's a paper, hand-marked backup. This defeats voting machines or tabulators that are programmed to cheat as long as a recount is required. In Washington State, a losing party may ask for a recount, and they are not required to pay if the recount changes the outcome or results in a change of more than certain percentage. This happened in our last gubernatorial election.
Secondly, it does establish one point of entry — albeit heavily secured — in which state-controlled malefactors could tamper with ballots. However, tampering with massive enough numbers of paper ballots over long periods of time involving sometimes hundreds of vote counters is a substantially more difficult problem than reprogramming weakly protected voting systems.
When I visited my polling place — I haven't switched to absentee yet — for the primaries several weeks ago, a poll worker said I could use a computer voting system, or a fill-in-the-bubble sheet. I opted for the latter. He said, "I don't blame you."
I don't know what every county does with absentee voting, but it's a very interesting analog response to a digital problem. Let's hack the vote by moving backwards to a more reliable paper trail, that has a long, long history of operation and thus is more transparent to abuse because of the many, many working parts involved. Absentee voting would also have solved the problems of disenfranchisement and intimidation in Ohio. I didn't hear any reports about absentee ballots being destroyed, stolen, or miscounted. (Perhaps that's the next strategy.)
Reader comment: BB reader Mark (who, in his not-to-be-disclosed real life gig, knows a thing or two about the topic) says:
Another benefit: the jurisdictions I’m familiar with typically don’t even open absentee ballots until after Election Day. If enough people vote absentee, it will let all the (insufferably hot) air out of the election night TV specials, which have become a bloated parody of kill-the-viewers-with-graphics sports coverage. There is something bizarrely attractive about the prospect of reverting to an electoral system not based on instant info-gratification.
Pat Race says,
Many people are turning to absentee voting as a way to skirt the issues with electronic voting but absentee voting eliminates many of the securities of the secret ballot and introduces a lot of room for fraud and coercion.
In nursing homes many people get "assistance" with absentee voting. An employer or controlling spouse could also easily interfere with the secrecy of an absentee vote.
I think since we already have a system with such limited secrecy we should eliminate the problems with electronic voting and give each voter a reciept or verification number so they can immediately go online and check to see that their vote was registered correctly?
Keep the curtains in place and make sure the law prohibits people from demanding your verification number and it will be the same level of secrecy as absentee voting with a much more reliable overall return. Link.
Matt Blank says,
Just some more info on this matter: If you live in some counties in Utah you can register to have your ballot mailed to your house a week before the election whenever you are eligible to vote (this includes general and primary elections). It's not really absentee, but more of an early voting automation thing. More info at Link, and Link.
