In the UK I walk into my local primary school/church/community hall (no more than a 5-10 min walk away), utter my name and address as identification (no other ID needed), and use a pencil to write a big 'X' against my preferences on a piece of paper I was handed when I entered the polling station.
There are multiple local party volunteers (I was one in the last election) from all the major parties at all stages of the process watching the flow of paper ballots from the sealed black collection bins to the voting halls where local council officals that volunteered, with paltry compensation, to a 12-18 hour shift to collect and count the vote. Some local councils take pride in being amoung the first to report their results, and there is a side competition to see who reports first.
We usually know the broad outcome of the election by the early hours of the next morning, with a handful of recounts in tight races going into the next couple of days.
I think the key factor in the superiority of paper balloting systems over electronic is exactly what you describe: the process is understandable, visible, and verifiable to human observers. Electronic voting does not meet this standard in any way.
Would that more people in the US understood the difference.
In the Japan I walk into my local school/community hall(on rare occasion, the church was used, no more than a 5-10 min walk away), present the voting announcement paper the govt send it to my physical address, and use a pencil to write a name of a candidates on a piece of paper I was exchanged it with my voting announcement paper.
In the Japanese writing system, candidate's name can be written in multiple ways. If writing doesn't match one of the exact registered candidates names, the human vote counter decides if it refer to the unambiguous candidate. If such candidate exists, it is counted to the voting for that candidate.
> utter my name and address as identification (no other ID needed),
How do they know that you actually cast the vote for you? Say my 5 best friends all tell me, "Nah, I'm not gonna vote. My vote doesn't count anyway." I then go to each of their districts, claim to be them by giving their name and address, and vote how I want. What's to stop that from happening?
Honestly not much, but voter fraud is unheard of in the UK and the UK doesn't have a universal ID card. There is no legal requirement for a UK citizen to carry or have any form of official ID. Its just very impractical when trying to access some public and private services, but its not uncommon for poorer people to lack forms of ID. There isn't a mainstream racist/classist attempt to disenfranchise poor people in the UK by using imaginary voter fraud as justification (there are some accusations with regards to disenfranchising university students and young people that move around a lot, but that's an issue of ease of registration).
Also you need to consider:
1) Those kinds of people are probably not registered to vote. Voter registration is not automatic in the UK. It takes 5 minutes with an online form, but some people are just that disengaged.
2) The 'wards' in which you vote are often quite small and in close proximity, so it might be a little hard to figure out which polling place your friends are registered at if you haven't received their polling notification card. You can get this information, but its a small barrier.
3) The 'wards' have an average population of a few thousand, so there is a risk that an official might recognise you as trying to double vote, but I can't imagine how they might confront if they aren't 100% personally certain.
None of those are strong guarantees. If evidence of wide spread fraud were to come to light, party policy ID requirements might change, but to date no party is seriously considering introducing them. Past governments have repeatedly tried to introduce a universal ID that could be used in part for voting ID, but each attempt has ended in failure due to public backlash over civil liberties concerns.
Because once there is a layer of "electronic" between you and the vote, there are millions of things that can be done to falsify one side or the other.
4% of the time it prints a different paper receipt, it just makes the electronic numbers go in someone's favor by a few percent in a couple choice districts. Or it uses crafty UX to make people vote for people or things they normally wouldn't.
And what if the numbers don't agree? Are you just going to pick one side? Are you going to hold a re-election? Will the re-election have the same turnout? Will people not go because their side won by a landslide before? Will some people change their mind because the media is reporting that side "X" is behind the discrepancy? Or will it just give side "Y" the few extra weeks they needed to campaign and win?
I can understand the risk of having a layer, and I do agree paper ballot does give better transparency. Here is the proposal:
Cast the ballot on paper. Every ballot has unique counterfeit patterns (totally randomized). The ballot is scanned and send to server, with both the scan of the ballot and the eletronic reading. Voter should be asked to verify (but we know half don't do it). The paper ballot is casted the same way as it has always been. We can also read the paper ballot one more time if we have to during the first round of counting. You can't have a fraud unless you cab mainpluate both paper and eletronic. Either both come to same number or they don't. I am just not familiar with how we verify eligibility tbh.
When we count paper ballot, we scan for the counterfeit. If the final number has mismatched, we either have a miscount or an error. Paper ballot will alwsys get recount when there is dispute.
Have we had a re-election in the entire American history, or at least in the past 30 years? Regardless, paper ballot fraud can lead to reelection so regardless of what proposal we will face re-election if we have to, but we normally don't.
This seems like over engineering, but we have to take into account people living abroad almost always now rely on eletronic voting if EV is offered.
Maybe not, but we should never stop entertaining other possibile improvements. The fact that mailing in ballot can be intercepted or even discarded is a problem. Sure sometimes the most primitive and simplest solution is often the best. Reasons we are having this conversation is because eletronic voting has flaws, and having a few people watching a locked box also has problem. The whole counting by hand also has problem. Is there an intersection we can meet between traditional method and technical method?
I am a novice on the whole voting system, but just off the top of head my proposal would seem to work in ideal situation. The fact we have a record of ubique vote electronically and on paper is cruical to the integrity of each vote. There must have been a few dozen studies already on this topic. I'd suprise if no one has a bullet proof system yet. It CAN'T be that hard. Just emulate cryptography here.
But you still need to validate the paper side, so that benefit is removed unless you trust it alone.
And requiring a large amount of manpower is a benefit of paper voting, not a problem. In the grand scheme of things it's a miniscule amount of work, and it ensures freedoms and laws for generations to come. This isn't an area where efficiency matters. The more manpower it takes, the harder it will be to "hack" it without being noticed.
Efficiency is not and should not be the primary concern in a democratic vote. Rather, accuracy and verifiability are far more important. Very little human time is wasted on paper-based elections, but even if it took a relatively large amount of human time to implement an accurate, verifiable voting system, it would be well worth it.
I'd say the point is that paper voting is extremely easy to organise, but also, most importantly, extremely easy to check and verify - you just count the votes again. With electronic machines you can't really do that, you can inspect logs but any of them can be fabricated incredibly easily.
We don't hold elections that often, nor do we need their results instantly. Voting with a pencil takes about as long as voting on a touchscreen. So why is there this stupid urge to optimise?
I would say voting with a pencil takes far less time for the voters. Electronic voting machines are inevitably going to be confusing to some people because they are built on asumptions about user interface that not everyone shares. But pretty much everyone who votes has a good intuition about how paper and pencil works.
There are multiple local party volunteers (I was one in the last election) from all the major parties at all stages of the process watching the flow of paper ballots from the sealed black collection bins to the voting halls where local council officals that volunteered, with paltry compensation, to a 12-18 hour shift to collect and count the vote. Some local councils take pride in being amoung the first to report their results, and there is a side competition to see who reports first.
We usually know the broad outcome of the election by the early hours of the next morning, with a handful of recounts in tight races going into the next couple of days.