A logical way to return to a simple and effective voting system:
- One day voting. No electronic devices (including cell phones) will be allowed.
- Photo ID must be presented and verified.
- Voter role books are signed by voter.
- Signature is immediately verified by existing voter role registry (separate area).
- Paper ballot is then filled out by voter and placed in secure container.
- Votes are counted on premises by citizens.*
- Citizen counters will be selected the same as jury duty members in advance. They are subjected to Voltaire in order to weed out the unqualified.
NO ELECTRONIC TABULATORS USED.
We need something similar to this folks. What do you think?
Here is my solution.
3 part ballot that you tear apart (think forensic tear)
Left side -- actual vote (you put this in the vote bin)
Middle part --- your receipt (you take this home)
Right part --- voter info, signature (you put this in the voters bin)
100 ballots per lot number---- all three parts will be marked with that lot number
All of the "vote" and "voters" tickets will be scanned and posted online by lot number. No "tear" connection can be made between the two without the missing middle receipt piece.
Anyone can check their "forensic tears" online. Only the receipt holder can match both sides.
Raffle tickets use this tearing method to validate a winning ticket.
ALSO:
ANYONE can do can recount from the ballot images.
That would apply to #5. Good idea.
I don't like the Q-codes/barcodes. These are a hack waiting to happen.
I think we should post the human readable, raw data, paper ballot images online.
Have it to where ONLY the voter can check THEIR ballot online.
Paper tears, at the time of vote, would be hard for a computer algorithm to fake and doable to check by a human in lots of 100.
With the right side tear, a person could verify (with their receipt) that THEY were the person that voted and could challenge fake entries.
This is a "many eyes" approach.
The right side of the ballot would be your voter role (to be posted online)
The difference is that it's forensically matched to the receipt with the tear.
If someone uses a unique pen their vote could be matched to their info that way. Imagine this nonsense of giving sharpies vs ball points out. Probably a good reason to do non-partisan voter registration.
Also people will end up drawing or writing on their vote if they know it's going to be posted online.
Could fingerprints be seen on scanned ballots? I think not. But how much quality would be needed to match the tears?
That would not be consistent.
With the tear it would be something that you were going to do anyway.
Random ---- but not too random....
Years ago I had a Mavica floppy disk camera.
IIRC it could put about 20 decent quality pictures on a 1.44MB floppy.
Good question.
If you limit your color palate you can compress the shit out of it.
My ballpark guess --- 1MB storage per ballot
You could store a million ballots on a $50 terabyte drive --- EASY
With some tweaking you could get 10 times as much.