‘Bout Time
Paper ballots are back in the news again.
I vote a paper ballot because Texas law says a person who is over 65, disabled, or is going to be out of the county during the voting period can vote by mail. I also serve on the ballot board, where mail ballots are tediously verified by signature with both a Democrat and a Republican present, then opened and laid flat for the voting machine to count them. It’s a tedious two-week job but it restores my faith in democracy and in voting.
I do not like electronic voting. My county’s voting machines are radial dial, which are difficult to use, and that causes voter suppression. I don’t like them and you can’t make me.
Denton, Texas, just north of Dallas – or, as the locals say, “if Oklahoma sucked just a little more, they’d pull Denton out of Texas.” – has decided to go back to paper ballots. Their last election was a damn mess. The people who make voting machines claim it was a human mistake, the humans say no the hell not.
I dunno for sure, but I think it would be harder for the Russians to steal an election with paper ballots, especially since you can hand-count paper ballots for a recount.
I damn well hope the rest of Texas falls in the paper ballot box before too long. Yeah, they can be stolen and messed with, but it just damn harder to do if you have a metal box and good lock.
Thanks to Marc for the heads up.
What bothers me about mail-in paper ballots is that they can locked up and forgotten, nmever counted and of course destroyed.
Electronic voting is just a digital signal which can be tampered with or destroyed if hacked. And perhaps even denied with a paper receipt.
1Here in WA and in neighboring OR, EVERYONE gets a paper ballot in the mail several weeks before election day. We have time to go over the ballot, and make our decisions. We can either drop it in the regular mail with a stamp, drop it in a lockbox for free, or take it to the county auditor’s office personally. We get a couple of weeks to do this. At our convenience. Our county usually beats the state average in voting percentage. I’ve attended the scanner testings and the process is solid. Scanned signatures are matched with your license/ID signature, and if there is a question about your vote’s authenticity, you are contacted. Every citizen of our country should be able to vote this easily. We still have to do GOTV, to get those ballots off the counter and into the hands of the Auditor, but no one has to stand in line for hours, or have roadblocks to participation. We can track where our vote is in the process online. Sure, we lose that feel good moment of doing our civic duty with our neighbors, but I’m happy to feel good when I drop that ballot in the box. Because it’s really not about me and my neighbors saying hello at the poll or complaining about the long waits/lines. It’s about every person getting their vote counted.
2Signatures are a problem, though. Authenticating with them is archaic and, imho, prone to false negatives and forgery. My signature is different every time, depending on my mood, how rushed I feel, and how much sleep I got the night before; conversely, it’s little more than a scribble anymore, so it wouldn’t be hard to duplicate. In this day and age, when kids aren’t even taught to write in cursive anymore, we need to either eliminate that kind of authentication of the ballots altogether or use something more modern and concrete.
I work in identity management, and I could go on and on, but I won’t. You’re welcome.
3I just moved to Ohio from Oregon–People’s Republic of Portland–and I’m not looking forward to voting in person, on a damned machine. I think they’ve stolen more elections here than the entire West combined.
4A few years ago in Maryland my husband and I voted by mail because we didn’t trust the machines. My husband got his letter printed in the WashPost asking how in the heck he was supposed to vote by mail when it said “Do Not Fold” except on the lines and it wouldn’t fit in the damn return envelope provided unless you did. Fortunately in MD and our county you pretty much know the Dem is going to win, but they don’t always make it easy.
5We have a stand up comedian locally who claims she was down in Alabama for a conference about her real job when she saw a TV interview about a local election that was exceedingly close. A precinct closed and a poll watcher known as Junior was anointed to deliver the ballots to City Hall in his open pick up truck. Seems that Junior developed a thirst and there was an intermediate watering hole. When he came back out to the truck, the bed was empty and the ballots went missing. Junior’s comment to the live television interviewer about the missing ballots was, “First they was there, then they wasn’t.”
6When I lived in Arizona, I loved the ability to vote via mail. It gave me the time to check out the numerous ballot issues and to investigate different candidates. (In Arizona, you can vote for “Constables”).
Now I live in Indiana where it is all electronic voting and the machines aren’t the best. I wish Indiana would go to mail in ballots as well.
7Comrade Stalin said that in an election it wasn’t who or how they voted, but who and how the votes were counted. In electronic computer voting it is probably who and how it is programmed that can decide the election.
8Paper ballots can be miss counted in honest error, but in narrow margin elections there is the remedy of recount. Not that one should trust all the election judges but the presence of judges from all parties can minimize the abuse. There are still problems such as party thugs trying to intimidate the counters and if this fails , there are partisan justices of the Supreme Court to insure the out outcome.
No system is tamper proof but there are some that systems that beg to be abused. Electronic systems are one of these.
I’m glad Minnesota uses paper ballots. In addition, citizens can vote up to 2 weeks early for any reason and register at the time of voting. Last, MN usually leads the nation in percentage of eligible voters participating in presidential election years. We’re very smug about that.
9Just recently in the Virginia primary I voted with a pencil and a ballot form. Easy peasy. Then it was slid into a vote counting machine. I guess thats having the cake and still eating it.
I have also voted electronically with push buttons. The machines were, frankly, 10th century in looks and technology. Half the time one of the poll workers had to come and unjam a frozen screen and I had to start over again. I guess thats why we are now back to paper and pencil.
10It is my understanding that W. Germany, since the end of WW 2 has voted by paper ballot and that each ballot is counted by a member of each political party. D’ya s’pose they’ve learned something we haven’t yet?
11A lot of good points here tonight about voting – in person, by mail, or electronically. Yes, Oxford commas do matter.
12Looking forward to more discussion.
There was a documentary called Hacking Democracy made back in 2006, detailing how easy it is to tamper with electronic voting machines and how it likely ensured a 2004 Bush re-election. These same voting machines are still in use and are still subject to manipulation. It costs $2.99 to stream it, but I think it’s well worth it. http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/watch-movie
13In Virginia we chucked those damn machines for paper. A great improvement as I don’t trust the machine. They break down. If your pencil breaks you get another one. Easy. If those ^*+# machines break down votes get lost somewhere in some cloud. Or similar entity. Paper and pencil please. Ok the vote is counted by machine but there are still humans there. No system is perfect or unhackable. We must do the best we can with what is available. Now to rid ourselves of the obsolete electoral college …
14My wife and I both preferred the old-fashioned,mechanical, ‘turn the switches down, then pull the big red lever’ machines we grew up using here in NYC, bit — like my favorite instant tea — they are no longer being made. Nor are parts available for the old clunkers, but I trusted them better than the new style.
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However, security needs to be tightened all along the process. Maybe no votes were switched in the key seven or so states that seemed to move in lock-step at about 11:00, all universally finding red ballots that swung every one of them firmly in the Trump camp. (The results might have even been credible, but I’d love for someone to make a chart of how the vote swung in all those states almost simultaneously, like a column of soldiers turning.)
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One other thing that I wish would be checked would be a precinct by precinct comparison of the totals recorded locally and those recorded at a state level or by the network totals. There will be some disagreement because of human error, of course, but if the preponderance is one-way, well, maybe the individual machines are too diverse to hack, but those transmission belts might be easier.
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I don’t want to go all Bradblog here, the odds are that the vote was honest, and the Clinton campaign was so unfocused and confused that at the beginning of October I was saying how glad I was Hillary was running against Trump, because she’d be 10 points down against any credible candidate.
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Still, the swing seems to have happened in states that were ‘same day only’ voting states. There are a lot of questions that deserve looking at like whether our diversity of methods and machines saves us or makes us more vulnerable, and whether we realize how narrow the vote differences were. You don’t have to hack every machine in the country or a state, a few votes added in obscure rural precincts would have been enough in this undeservedly close an election.
as a former election judge i have never trusted voting machines that leave no verifible trail….
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