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from the newer-is-not-necessarily-better dept.
The Intercept reports
The nation's secretaries of state gathered for a multi-day National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference in Washington, D.C., this weekend, with cybersecurity on the mind.
Panels and lectures centered around the integrity of America's election process, with the federal probe into alleged Russian government attempts to penetrate voting systems a frequent topic of discussion.
[...] One way to allay concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machine infrastructure, however, is to simply not use it. Over the past year, a number of states are moving back towards the use of paper ballots or at least requiring a paper trail of votes cast.
For instance, Pennsylvania just moved to require all voting systems to keep a paper record of votes cast. Prior to last year's elections in Virginia, the commonwealth's board of elections voted to decertify paperless voting machines--voters statewide instead voted the old-fashioned way, with paper ballots.
[...] Oregon is one of two states in the country to require its residents to vote by mail, a system that was established via referendum in 1998. [Oregon Secretary of State Dennis] Richardson argued that this old-fashioned system offers some of the best defense there is against cyber interference.
"We're using paper and we're never involved with the Internet. The Internet is not involved at all until there's an announcement by each of our 36 counties to [the capital] Salem of what the results are and then that's done orally and through a confirmation e-mail and the county clerks in each of the counties are very careful to ensure that the numbers that actually are posted are the ones that they have," he said. "Oregon's in a pretty unique situation."
[...] In New Hampshire, the state uses a hybrid system that includes both paper ballots and machines that electronically count paper ballots with a paper trail.
Karen Ladd, the assistant secretary of state for New Hampshire, touted the merits of the system to The Intercept. "We do a lot of recounts, and you can only have a recount with a paper ballot. You can't do a recount with a machine!" she said.
America's paper ballot states may seem antiquated to some, but our neighbors to the north have used paper ballots for federal elections for their entire history. Thanks to an army of officials at 25,000 election stations, the integrity of Canada's elections is never in doubt.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:52PM (3 children)
Why does there have to be one system?
Once you have scantron optical ballots not only can you write the tabulation software but theoretically you could write scanning software to use anything from the dedicated scantron testing machines we already have, to OCR style scanning of ballot pictures.
For that matter we're about at the point of being able to take a pix of every vote cast and put the archive on the internet.
Of course that puts us back in the situation of voting districts where 110% of the registered population voted for candidate X (mostly left wing doing this kind of stuff, which then politicizes discussion debate or actually fixing things into right vs left thus preventing repair)
Of course the "real" problem is fourteen Russian PR people supposedly warped the election more than millions of illegal aliens. Or for political bias reasons, the legacy media provided trillions of dollars of free propaganda to the candidate that none the less lost, at least in part because most of the population hates the legacy media, which is kinda funny. Then theres the billions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of political contributions, vs the billions of dollars of pork barrel kickbacks in payment. I'm just saying WRT subversion of the will of the people, extremely obscure voting technical attacks are probably not the biggest problem we have nor is it a very hard problem to solve.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:41PM (2 children)
With proof of identity? If no, the idea is useless, if yes, that's a crime. I already said in another comment: one of the major design goals is to ensure people can't sell their vote by proving who they voted for. That's why it's illegal to record yourself placing your vote, and should remain so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @10:15PM
That's how Alabama's system works.
...and when Roy Moore got beaten there, the preservation|erasure of those images became an issue.
it's illegal to record yourself placing your vote
Depends on where you are.
Want to take "ballot selfie"? Here's where it's legal, and not [usatoday.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 20 2018, @11:55PM
It would be trivial technologically to post process the images before posting to mask out everything except the scantron image windows (where you scribble a mark or not).
That would make it impossible to write in the margin "VLM was here" thus selling my vote.
The idea being you could re-examine poorly marked ballots.