Greetings!

I'm interested in discussing possible solutions to the vote problem with other people who also have been thinking about it and trying to come up with a solution.

We're kind of stuck with dems manning elections in many states - not much we can do about that - so I'm trying to figure out methods which would still mitigate the obvious cheating problem.

I'm thinking along the lines of a federal mandate that all state elections which can affect other states must comply to certain absolutely mandatory requirements for allowing all parties to observe the ENTIRE process, and that the ENTIRE process can be FULLY audited after the fact if there are any questions. (And allowing audits would be part of the stipulation.)

The way I see it, anonymous votes are a real problem. Once the ballots are separated from the voter's ID, then any fraud cannot be empirically detected in an audit.

For example, fake ballots could be imported, and switched out with real ballots. The number of ballots would still match the number of voters, so there's no concrete evidence of fraud even though it may be massive.

Of course some stuff can be forensically tested - type of paper, type of ink, look for fold creases --- but the problem is that can all be bypassed. Armies of human ballot filler-outers can be hired to literally fill out hundreds of thousands of ballots in advance, on official ballot stock, using real pens, with real coffee mugs to stain the ballots.

Heh, I'm into robotics - I could make a machine that filled out ballots with a random selection of ball point pens, a random selection of down-ticket selections, and 98.89% for the favored presidential candidate - as well as adding random coffee stains. Easy to also fill in the ovals with random variation. Could churn them out by the thousands and they'd be forensically authentic to a high degree.

The point is, if the dems are printing the ballots, they can print extras, have them filled out, and inject them into the ballot stream after the ballots are separated from the voters.

Enforcing strict chain of custody where Dem+Republican+etc pairs are required to be present for every transfer of all ballots could help. But there's still going to be ways to switch out a 100k here and a 100k there without being detected.

And of course when ballots are switched like that, a recount will give the exact same count as before - just counting fakes again.

The only way around this problem that I can see is to violate the secret voting - if every ballot had a unique ID linking it to the voter, then an audit could start calling people and asking them how they voted. A random sampling of a 100k calls could give an idea of accuracy, and detect if there was a bias to the error.

This too is flawed because people could forget how they voted, or possibly lie about how they voted in order to cause a false positive fraud check.

You have to think about how the system will be misused, then you have to think about how the anti-misuse mechanisms will be misused :D

So maybe voters actually get a carbon copy ballot, and they keep a copy, and in an audit, they are asked to send a pic of their copy of their ballot so there's no question about how they actually voted.

As to the loss of secret voting, we sort of already lost it. I mean technically it's there, but it's no good. There are databases of how people vote, who they financially support, and you can search the internet to find the opinions of people - then at poling stations, the workers can see who votes for who, and the people opening envelopes sees the party since it's usually marked on the envelope, so I don't see much being lost if secret ballot is lost. If someone was gonna be targeted for how they voted, it could already happen so easily.

Alternatively, the ballot could be in carbon copy form, and a copy gets sent to both the R's and the D's, and they can all count eachother's votes as well as their own, and if the numbers disagree, then there is quite a paper trail to explore.

But then there is the chance that one party loses some ballots, and claims the other party fabricated their copy of those ballots.

I have thought about the possibility of electronic voting machines, but then it's right back to the dominion problem - they can (and will) be hacked. It's fine if machines are used in counting, but the primary authoritative ballot flow needs to be in physical ballots or something.

And the process needs to be simple and observable so that anybody can understand it.

I also think mail-in voting for the general public will have to be gone. It's just too hard to maintain chain of custody when ballots are being shuttled all over by over worked and under paid USPS employees who aren't even subordinate to the elections authorities.

State ID must be required during voting.

Anyway, there's LOTS of things that could be done to make it incrementally harder to cheat based on the old rules, but once these small improvements were made, then they'd just cheat around the new rules.

I'm trying to logically chase that cat and mouse game all the way to the top floor where it would simply be very difficult to cheat and get away with it, even with unlimited time and money to get around the rules.

Anybody else been thinking about this? Got any ideas? Feel free to poke holes in my ideas.