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A Better Approach to Elections
Our elections are an embarrassing third-world mess.
On top of that, there’s no mechanism to test or improve the accuracy of elections. Nobody’s even talking about improving them. And every change that gets implemented makes the system more susceptible to fraud. (Like that wasn’t the whole point.)
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur in me sees every problem as a business opportunity. I’ve posted twice before about a potential voting machine startup company, first as an application for blockchain technology, and second as a voting system that uses software technology to verify accuracy.
But now I’m thinking that’s the wrong approach. That the very idea of a “voting machine” is broken. That the direction of the nation should not be in the hands of a weird mystery machine.
So I’ll present a new suggestion. It would be great if folks could chime in with ideas.
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I think the biggest obstacles to a fair election are:
- Ballot drop boxes. With ballot harvesting and a lack of supervision. And even with security cams, in practice the cams are pointed in the wrong direction.
- Shipping ballots to a centralized location for tabulation. The high activity creates opportunities for fraud and confusion, the high volume means that the fraud can have a larger effect, ballots can come in from anywhere, and the counting center is always located in a disproportionately high Dem, high crime area.
- The tabulating machines themselves. It’s not possible to know what the machines are *really* doing, and there are oodles of ways to manipulate their results. On any of the machines. And since billions of dollars go into elections, the incentive and temptation to skew the machines is sky high.
None of this is necessary.
Here’s the idea:
One-day voting, no drop boxes, paper ballots (required for a physical archive).
Once the paper ballots have been scanned, an open-source tabulating software app could run through the image files, interpret the dots, and count the votes very, very quickly. This would eliminate the tabulating machines.
Multiple independent tabulating apps could be certified and run through the images simultaneously, and their results would have to agree within a tiny margin of error.
The scanned images would be publicly available online for transparency, and to assist in the development and improvement of tabulating software.
The ballot scanning would be performed at the local precinct, using an off-the-shelf scanner. This avoids the central scanning operation. The voter gets a ballot, fills it out, scans it, approves the scan image, and places the ballot in the box.
Almost no humans are involved in the counting process. And no adjudication is necessary. Maybe just for write-in candidates.
So this is a proposal that gets rid of voting machines, uses regular scanners to scan ballots at the local precinct, and the tabulation process can be an open book online. It’s fully transparent, involves much less labor, uses familiar off-the-shelf hardware, and anybody can run a recount any time on the publicly available ballot images.
An added point that was brought up in the comments:
How do you get it adopted?
Well, I haven’t seen anybody propose a viable alternative other than hand counting (which would still be open to fraud). So this stands as a workable example.
You’d have to start with the states that are amenable to it; states that actually want proper elections.
Thoughts?
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Or perpetuates Democrat Party hold on office.
Don’t you think they’d lose first choice votes to the Greens or some such? If there were enough it would be that third (or fourth) party that won the seat.
The Green Party is a vanity party. Now that the so-called progressives have taken over the Democrat Party, the Greens have shriveled like a raisin.
The dark money/deep staters will guarantee that there will be fragmentation on the center, center-right, and the right. They will fund 2, 3, or 4 opposition candidates and thus grease their preferred candidates’s paths to victory.
With Ranked Choice Voting you let people say “If I had my druthers, I’d vote for this person.” “But I’m realistic. When that person is defeated as having received the fewest first choices, I’ll switch my vote to this other person.”
You get to vote your dream impractical candidates while having a safe fallback to supporting your actual first choice candidate. So e.g. everybody picks a different Republican in the 2016 primary, but everybody does Trump as 2nd choice. When all the others are eliminated, we’re back to all supporting Trump, not as our first choice… but he’d still get in office.
Yeah, I understand the intent. And it’s clever and all.
But that’s not what elections are for.
(And nobody would vote for Trump as a 2nd choice.)
Back to the problem at hand…
So we see, in Arizona, how their election system has somehow become completely dependent upon these mysterious black-box voting machines, which can be selectively disabled in certain areas to implement election fraud.
My proposed system doesn’t involve voting machines. You just scan the ballots with an off-the-shelf scanner, which can’t be selectively disabled, and y’r good to go.
I had a question about that. How do you validate your pictured ballot got to the storage machine right?
That’s a good point. There would probably be a tiny open-source app that handled the user experience. And it could include:
Also, there should be one or more backup drives.
When the polls close, the drives are independently encrypted, and ballot boxes and drives are signed, sealed, delivered.
Currently we’re completely dependent on the closed black-box machines to do the tabulation, so with inside knowledge any or all of the machines could be hacked in any number of ways.
Here, the polling place only delivers paper ballots and images, the images are made public, available for fast software tabulation, or independent examination, any number of times or ways.
I wouldn’t rule it out for myself.
I know I read this when you posted it, but I do not know why I didn’t respond then. Perhaps I felt that others had responded already. I did want to point you to What is ElectionGuard? – ElectionGuard which is Microsoft’s Open Source election code that is based on the PhD work of Josh Benaloh. Is it perfect? I have not read the code, but I do like that its audits are designed to be open and easily published and verified. A few places have run pilots of the software. Franklin County, VA performed a pilot in the 22 election cycle, and Preston, ID also ran a pilot in 2022.
The system is designed to print out a check code when a voter votes that they can later use to see that their ballot was counted and even validate that it was as they marked it. I have some minor reservations about the potential lack of secrecy involved in that, but it is in the voter’s hands.
Interesting.
My go-to approach would be some sort of public/private key arrangement, but it’s not my field of expertise.
I’m not sure secrecy is all that big an issue in the grand scheme of things. After all, the political party you registered with is public information, and any political contributions you’ve made are public information. And it’s really, really likely that folks will be voting that way.
Likely, but not guaranteed. My Dad has been a registered Democrat his entire adult life, but hasn’t voted for a Democrat for President since McGovern I think.
The secret ballot is there to prevent intimidation and fraud and was created for a darn good reason because, before that, those things were rampant. As I mentioned before, allowing a person to see that their ballot was counted and even displaying who they voted for might be worth the nominal risk of someone being able to pull up that information based on the code on the receipt. The page should not display any PII which would help a great deal.
They’re rampant now.
Most famously, Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, was thrown out of Mozilla, the company he founded, because of a small donation to California’s Proposition 8, the anti gay marriage bill (which passed).
So that is different because a donation is not secret under many circumstances, but ballots are. It is bad enough that the mob will go after a person for donating to a candidate or a cause, but imagine how much worse it will be if they know how you actually vote.
Update:
Polaris Recount is a web site that crowdsources the recounting of ballot images.
The site has obtained ballot images from some counties, volunteers can sign up, they pick a county, and they get assigned a random ballot to evaluate, mark the votes, submit the form, and repeat. Each ballot needs to be checked by multiple volunteers.
So this is the direction, I think.
It’s really quite easy for open source software to replace the humans here. But still have the images available for humans, or for independent software development.