It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
>> You understand paper and pen. It's right there.
> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
Punch cards are not "paper and pen."
> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.
No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.
Yes, hanging chads created by a machine, punching answers through perforated hole cutouts. Perforated holes, which started to break and fall out more and more as the ballots were counted.
The ballots were fragile, and this is an example of not using pen and paper.
You're actually proving my point here. Keep it simple! Pen and paper is perfectly fine, and all problems with how to handle the marking has been resolved for centuries.
It's change that is the problem here, and change for no sensible reason.
There's nothing to fix, to improve, to resolve with paper ballots. Nothing, except the pocket books of companies pushing ridiculous solutions.
In some ways, but the ability to erase a pencil mark is a huge issue with ballots.
IMHO, pens with tamper resistant ink, plus a process for making an exchange for a new ballot paper in case of a marking error, is a much better choice.
Canada uses pencil too. Erasing ballots and remarking them is never an issue, why would it be?
The security is in how ballots are treated, how they are monitored and handled, not how they are marked. It's never a problem that they are in pencil. Ever.
If someone has an opportunity to monkey with the ballots? The system has already failed.
As I said in another post, if you think you found a hole, it's because you didn't research what's actuallly happening.
It works fine until there's a high-profile, close election. Then you'll discover the data source was noisier than you thought. We're only talking about one in a thousand people goofing up a vote and moving on.
> Some of those challenged ballots in San Mateo County had illegible or no postmark dates and Assistant Chief Elections Officer Jim Irizarry said they were waiting on information from the U.S. Postal Service
With small margins, an election could come down to how people read a smudged postmark. It might not be an issue, but you won't know who "really" won, either. It depends how you count it.
You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.