Why is the US so set on voting machine to begin with? They clearly aren't secure, and apparently they are't as user-friendly as the paper ballots they're replacing?
A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.
The funny thing is that, when we go to a polling place on election day, we will almost always get a paper ballot to be used with an optical scan reader. This system actually hits me as an ideal: the electronic reader can be simpler and fairly decoupled from other systems, and each voter will leave a paper trail that should clearly indicate their intent. Admittedly, the electronic readers we use are probabally insecure and awful, but the concept hits me as fairly reasonable.
In this case, we are in the early voting period, and there are a reduced number of polling places - and each polling place can be used by any voter in that county, which means that voters might be (and probabally are) voting on slightly different races and using slightly different ballots. These machines remove the need for the early polling places to have a lot of valid paper ballots on hand while still allowing each voter to see and vote in all races they would be able to vote in on election day.
It's actually a fairly good use of voting machines, even if it would be nice if the machines were something other than terrible.
I'm a South Korean national living in the Silicon Valley area. I've participated in South Korean election several times, including one (or two?) congressional election. Luckily for me, they open a voting booth in San Jose so that every Korean citizen in the area can come and vote.
When I arrive, they ask for my ID (i.e., passport), look up my registered address, and the computer automatically prints out the correct set of ballots, and an envelope with the correct return address. I take them to the voting booth, stamp on the candidates I like, put the ballots into the envelope, seal the envelope, and put it in a box, and later all the envelopes in the box will be sorted and sent to the correct district so that they can be counted at the actual election day.
Another Texan here. That has not been my experience.
I've lived and voted in Austin for 15 years and have never seen a single paper ballot. Our voting machines are, and have been, simple screens with a scrolly-wheel interface. They produce no paper record for you to review or deposit anywhere.
This would, to me, seem to be a minimum requirement for anyone to have any belief that their vote has been counted correctly.
There is a paper record. Watch the people running the ballots next time. Your session there was recorded but your vote is not directly tied to you as that would be illegal.
The 2000 presidential election was really close in the state of Florida. There were some legitimate issues with the design of the paper ballots, and this generated a lot of controversy.
This really upset a lot of people and they wanted _something_ to be done. A lot of people naively felt computerizing it would automatically fix everything. They were wrong, but that's how we got here.
There's no contradiction between paper ballots and speed. In my country we all vote with paper ballots, then at the closing of the polling stations the members of each voting table punch the results of their urn into a laptop which connects to the electoral authority. In 3-4h max the elections results are out.
For security however, after punching the numbers into the laptop, ballots are re-sealed into the urn and physically sent to the electoral authority, where in the following days public officers count them manually again. There has never been any meaningful deviation detected to date.
This way, you have the security of paper ballots (they are on sight of party volunteers at all times) with the speed of electronic vote aggregation.
Are you Mexican? Our system is the same, but a critical factor helps it. Every citizen has a voting credential, and every booth has a list of voters. You can't vote without your id, and while you can vote in secret, you can only vote in your designated booth.
This gives the system its agility. Our recent presidential election had a reliable statistical advance (PREP) at 23:00 the same day, and the next day every single vote of every remote booth was fully accounted, and the result confirmed the PREP.
The Mexican electoral system is surprisingly effective, yet we have the same core problem of democracy: we need better candidates and less gullible voters :/
This thread [1] on /r/Mexico made me think that voting credentials don't work very well. I haven't read any technical analysis of the system, but everyone in the thread is talking about how easy it is to vote multiple times.
In Alameda County you deposit non-provisional paper ballots in a scanner which tallies it up. At the end of the day you get a printout of results (assuming there are enough voters to preserve privacy) which is posted outside and submitted to the election office. The machine's flash memory is also submitted, as are the paper ballots.
Paper ballots mailed to voters are speedy, convienent, reliable. Especially when read with a machine. Plus anyone can do Quality Assurace by counting a portion of ballots themselves, and comparing it to the scanned total, making it hard to rig.
Some states use paper ballots with bubbles that are filled in with pencil or ink. The benefit is that they're simply tabulated automatically and provide an original record to refer to.
That's literally the only way I've ever voted, in 2 different states. Scantron is a perfectly reasonably way to do things, and the technology has been around for ages.
Scantron doesn't allow for write-in candidates and it's very easy to design an unusable scantron form that's confusing and difficult to follow. Another issue is that often the scantron circles are small and too close together, making it difficult for people without fine motor control to vote: the solution is a form with much larger circles and spacing but that would be wasteful and inefficient for the majority of voters.
The Washington voting system allows for write-in candidates despite also having a bubble that the voter fills in with ink or pencil. If the write-in votes outnumber any of the winning candidates, they could hypothetically count them by hand, but that never really happens.
You fill in the center of the arrow for who you're voting for, and there's an entry at the bottom for writen-ins. Afterwards this is scanned by a machine and the paper put in storage.
There are plenty of issues with 'fill in the bubble' type ballots. Bubbles partially filled in, filled in then crossed out with another bubble filled in, etc...
A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.