Re: Dual DRE/paper system

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 03:34:00PM -0700, Nicholas Bernstein wrote:
> 1. Do you agree that absentee voting already provides a loop hole by 
> which votes /could/ be bought?
> 
> 2. Do you think the number of votes that would be bought under such a 
> system would be greater than the number of errors (typically in the 3-5% 
> range) that that go undetected in paper systems.

I don't accept the notion that hand-marked ballots, when counted by
optical scanners, has anything like a 3-5% error rate.  And
ballot-marking-machine ballots should have a much lower rate than
hand-marked ballots.  Do you have references?  I think the Caltech/MIT
study has these sorts of numbers, and I mean to look at it at some
point....

A voting system that allows mail-in ballots is risky for many reasons.
One of those is the possibility of vote-buying.  E.g. say that
Alice is entitled to vote, and Mallet wants to buy her vote.
Alice could sign the outside of her ballot and [illegally] give
it to Mallet who could fill it in and deliver it.
If Mallet wants to do this on a wide scale, it will be difficult
to deliver lots of ballots without drawing suspicion.  I hope
the post office takes not of occasions when they find a bunch of
ballots deposited in mailboxes all on top of each other.  And
driving around the county depositing thousands of ballots on
random days to random mailboxes might also raise suspicions.

But note that absentee voting can be done in many ways.  Often, people
will go to the clerk's office when they have an opportunity, weeks
ahead of the normal deadline.  Mallet can't interfere here.

I generally recommend against mail-in ballots, and especially
elections that are fully mail-in (like in Oregon on odd years - sigh).

> 3. If you really don't like the concept of having voters validate their 
> receipt, you could have a system where the public lists and the voter 
> receipts just have the ballot ID. This way, voters could check that at 
> least their vote has been counted. The validation would be left up to 
> the voting officials.  All the same benefits exist as far as validating 
> ballots to a higher accuracy (because the ballot id can still link the 
> recount receipt to the electronic ballot), the drawback is that the onus 
> to validate these checks is on voting officals rather than the voters. I 
> suppose it's not a big deal to validate the 700 ballots to ensure 1% 
> accuracy (better than checking 10000, for sure), but in close elections 
> this would mean slightly more work than a voter-checked system.
> 
> Do you have any problems with this revised method?

It seems to introduce more complication than necessary, and would be a
headache for election officials to deal with.

I still prefer hand-marked ballots for most folks, and
ballot-marking-machines for accessibility

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60