Its beyond time to ban voting machines. Heres my simple solution to the issue.
Standard format paper ballot across the whole country.
Standard set of rules for counting across the whole country.
No early voting. No mass mail-in voting. Those who absolutely must vote by mail (people traveling for business, people in the hospital etc) must prove ahead of time that they need a mail in ballot. All mail-in ballots must be received by the voter’s home precinct no later than the Monday before election day. All mail-in envelopes to be stamped with a received on date and kept in a separate sealed container.
All voters must display a voter ID. Upon voting, all voters must dip a finger in election ink.
All precincts must have at least 1 observer from the left, right and independents.
All filled out ballots are placed in a sealed box, not computerized counting machine.
After the final voter casts their vote, the sealed box is opened in full view of all observers and ballots are counted at the precinct, not trucked into a central location. All ballots must be counted in full view of all observers. In addition to the observers, every counting table has a camera over it, allowing anyone in the country to log into any counting table cam at any time. If a camera goes down, counting stops at that table until the situation can be fixed. Any ballot that cannot be interpreted is discarded.
Vote tallies are reported to the state election commission on the same night from every precinct using an official online system. All observers from each party must approve the number on the screen before the count is submitted. Anyone in the country can log in at any time to see the results from every precinct reported live. Media outlets can only report official numbers as shown on the website with no projections or editorialization.
All counted and discarded ballots are stored at the town/city hall for at least 10 years. Mail-in ballots and their envelopes to be stored separate from in-person ballots.
1 & 2 violates states rights. Some states have vote by party, some have ranked choice voting, etc. All of that necessitates a different ballot structure. Do you trust the federal government to coordinate all that? When states use a bad ballot system, they should be called out, like Florida was after the 2000 election.
Early in-person voting within a reasonable time frame is fine. It hasn't been shown to contribute to any significant fraud.
ID yes. Ink is unnecessary. A person voting in-person multiple times is rare, accounts for a handful of votes, and is usually caught. Requiring ID makes that practice harder.
Rather than "must", as this would hamper the system in rural areas, it did be that observers must always be allowed.
The computers aren't the problem; it's the people running the computers. If you did random samples of scanned votes and count them by hand, you can be reasonably certain that the computer counted accurately. This is what the audits are trying to accomplish.
Decentralized counting doesn't fix any problems, and makes your proposed electronic monitoring prohibitively expensive.
Some areas have a lot more voters. You're also contradicting yourself. You want a digital vote tally system - connected to the internet - but don't want digital scanners.
Storing ballots and other election artifacts is required in many areas already.
What you really need are:
Voter ID with strict limitations on mail-in voting.
Paper trails for any electronic voting system.
Ability for any party to audit the paper artifacts.
Unfortunately, this doesn't address the phantom voter problem where many bogus ballots are added to the real totals. It's nearly impossible to solve because of the secret ballot system - you can't link a ballot back to the person who cast it.
We also need a notation on drivers licenses that says, “NOT A US CITIZEN. THIS CANNOT BE USED FOR VOTER ID.” Because many many states give drivers licenses to illegals and also have ‘motor voter’ registration when you go get a license. Also, the constitution plainly states that state legislatures own the voting laws. The federal government can’t do anything in this arena (well, for as long as we’re pretending to follow the constitution).
We may have to eventually give up the secret ballot. Either that or implement some kind of blockchain system.
But you're right about the computers. They're not the problem. Heck, all these voting machines are counting paper ballots. What we need is some damn accountability.
We don't need to give up the secret ballot, there are ways to do this.
I personally would like a receipt for my vote, doesn't need to have anything identifying me to my vote, but it would give me the ability to see how my vote was counted after the fact.
I’ve thought about that, but there is a chance of losing anonymity. If you can audit your own vote with a private key, that means in theory anyone has access to your vote as long as they have your key. Which goes back to the whole vote harvesting and vote buying issue. It actually will make it worse since today you can tell someone trying to buy your vote “yeah, i voted for your guy, now give me my $50” but with a system that lets them audit your vote, less people will be willing to lie.
How would being paid to vote in an electronic system be any different from buying votes by going around apartments in poor neighborhoods? In fact, due to the geographic system of representation/voting for most offices, doing it on foot may still be the more effective.
The real issue with a blockchain system is that your vote can be traced back to you because of its hash.
Its beyond time to ban voting machines. Heres my simple solution to the issue.
Standard format paper ballot across the whole country.
Standard set of rules for counting across the whole country.
No early voting. No mass mail-in voting. Those who absolutely must vote by mail (people traveling for business, people in the hospital etc) must prove ahead of time that they need a mail in ballot. All mail-in ballots must be received by the voter’s home precinct no later than the Monday before election day. All mail-in envelopes to be stamped with a received on date and kept in a separate sealed container.
All voters must display a voter ID. Upon voting, all voters must dip a finger in election ink.
All precincts must have at least 1 observer from the left, right and independents.
All filled out ballots are placed in a sealed box, not computerized counting machine.
After the final voter casts their vote, the sealed box is opened in full view of all observers and ballots are counted at the precinct, not trucked into a central location. All ballots must be counted in full view of all observers. In addition to the observers, every counting table has a camera over it, allowing anyone in the country to log into any counting table cam at any time. If a camera goes down, counting stops at that table until the situation can be fixed. Any ballot that cannot be interpreted is discarded.
Vote tallies are reported to the state election commission on the same night from every precinct using an official online system. All observers from each party must approve the number on the screen before the count is submitted. Anyone in the country can log in at any time to see the results from every precinct reported live. Media outlets can only report official numbers as shown on the website with no projections or editorialization.
All counted and discarded ballots are stored at the town/city hall for at least 10 years. Mail-in ballots and their envelopes to be stored separate from in-person ballots.
Democrats:
"Dominion go brrrrrrrrr"
Not gonna happen, communist party won't vote themselves out.
We have been owned by China for a while. It’s either war or collapse at this point.
1 & 2 violates states rights. Some states have vote by party, some have ranked choice voting, etc. All of that necessitates a different ballot structure. Do you trust the federal government to coordinate all that? When states use a bad ballot system, they should be called out, like Florida was after the 2000 election.
Early in-person voting within a reasonable time frame is fine. It hasn't been shown to contribute to any significant fraud.
ID yes. Ink is unnecessary. A person voting in-person multiple times is rare, accounts for a handful of votes, and is usually caught. Requiring ID makes that practice harder.
Rather than "must", as this would hamper the system in rural areas, it did be that observers must always be allowed.
The computers aren't the problem; it's the people running the computers. If you did random samples of scanned votes and count them by hand, you can be reasonably certain that the computer counted accurately. This is what the audits are trying to accomplish.
Decentralized counting doesn't fix any problems, and makes your proposed electronic monitoring prohibitively expensive.
Some areas have a lot more voters. You're also contradicting yourself. You want a digital vote tally system - connected to the internet - but don't want digital scanners.
Storing ballots and other election artifacts is required in many areas already.
What you really need are:
Unfortunately, this doesn't address the phantom voter problem where many bogus ballots are added to the real totals. It's nearly impossible to solve because of the secret ballot system - you can't link a ballot back to the person who cast it.
We also need a notation on drivers licenses that says, “NOT A US CITIZEN. THIS CANNOT BE USED FOR VOTER ID.” Because many many states give drivers licenses to illegals and also have ‘motor voter’ registration when you go get a license. Also, the constitution plainly states that state legislatures own the voting laws. The federal government can’t do anything in this arena (well, for as long as we’re pretending to follow the constitution).
We may have to eventually give up the secret ballot. Either that or implement some kind of blockchain system.
But you're right about the computers. They're not the problem. Heck, all these voting machines are counting paper ballots. What we need is some damn accountability.
We don't need to give up the secret ballot, there are ways to do this.
I personally would like a receipt for my vote, doesn't need to have anything identifying me to my vote, but it would give me the ability to see how my vote was counted after the fact.
I’m sure a blockchain system is possible where your own vote can be audited by you and the entire result can be audited by anyone.
I’ve thought about that, but there is a chance of losing anonymity. If you can audit your own vote with a private key, that means in theory anyone has access to your vote as long as they have your key. Which goes back to the whole vote harvesting and vote buying issue. It actually will make it worse since today you can tell someone trying to buy your vote “yeah, i voted for your guy, now give me my $50” but with a system that lets them audit your vote, less people will be willing to lie.
How would being paid to vote in an electronic system be any different from buying votes by going around apartments in poor neighborhoods? In fact, due to the geographic system of representation/voting for most offices, doing it on foot may still be the more effective.
The real issue with a blockchain system is that your vote can be traced back to you because of its hash.
And that's the problem. I fear there's no easy solution.
Great point.
It's not. A blockchain can't verify someone's physical identity.
That’s a different part of the problem. You do the physical identity check before you issue the token which allows them to vote.