I love how people are conflating in regards to the recent advent of voting machines. It all boils down to this question: do you support a centralized, unchecked authority counting a majority of the votes (and electronic voting), or do you not? Because you see, if you support electronic voting, then you support fascism. -.- See here's how it works: instead of having humans count votes and screw up, we have a machine count votes, and also we hand over the control of our voting system to centralized, unchecked authority. Now far be it from me to criticize, but isn't it the second part of that equation the problem, not the fact that it's electronic?
Paper Voting -> Electronic Voting + Hitler
So here's my idea. Call it revolutionary, or just call it common sense. How about we have no paper trail. No physical copy of the vote to be dimpled, smudged, punched, crumpled, or trod underfoot. Instead we store the vote on electronic media, like a compact disc for instance. Now, each voting machine will simply be a computer with only a touchscreen on it, no keyboard or mouse. For sanity's sake, let's force them all to be computers running the Intel chipset, Award BIOS, and then peer reviewed software from the ground up. Yes, by peer reviewed I mean open source.
Now, each person votes into this machine, and at the end of the day that machine spits out a CD containing a list of who got which vote. Each voter does not get a receipt because receipts are virtually useless since there are 250 million people in the country, and the Supreme Court is easily swayed into overriding recounts. That's not the solution to keeping these machines safe, any more than it's the solution to a rigged paper ballot. You have no way of ensuring the people running the polling place are counting your vote correctly, even if you hold a copy of it in your hand.
So here's how we keep the vote from being rigged: first there's one copy of the software each voting machine is allowed to run, so taking a simple MD5 hash of every file will ensure that file has not been modified. You take an MD5 hash of the pristine copy, and it's almost certain that if the working copy has a different MD5 hash, then it was somehow modified and isn't secure. In accomplishing this, no polling place is allowed to destroy their voting machine, or prevent the MD5 hashes from being calculated. Someone whose hashes are wrong, that's equivalent to someone discovering burnt scraps of Democrat punchcards in the wastebin behind the polling place. At that point you have to revote, no matter what the Supreme Court says. Because of the hash it isn't up for debate or human error; it's in black and white.
Other hashes may be preferable to MD5, like SHA1 or SHA256. The important thing is if someone, anyone, can demonstrate fooling the hash, then it can't be used. Same goes for operating systems. As long as the same algorithm, from boot to vote is used. Before and after the vote, at least 5 purportedly independant parties should be able to validate the hashes of the files on the voting machine's files, using their own validation machines which are pretty much computers you can plug a hard disk into. Even if some of these 5 try and collude, the law of fives prevents them from all conspiring with the polling place people. They should also be allowed to verify that the CD did come from the voting machine they're inspecting, and to verify the number of votes on that CD.
Once the voting and verification have finished, then you end up with thousands of different polling places each with their own CD of votes. If you make 1 of the 5 parties the press, and another of the 5 parties the government, then the votes for that place will both be publicized and tallied. In a way all 5 must be the press, because even in the government's case, they are tallying the votes in order to report to the people who was elected. To hardcore anti-government Libertarian types, it might be noted that while 1 of these 5 can be the government, it doesn't have to be.
These 5 parties can then all sum up the values they collected from the polling places, and report the total. For someone to rig the vote at this point, they would have to conspire with 5 members of 5 parties, all who were assigned to the same voting machine, so you'd have to conspire with the party officials too, and you'd have to conspire with the people running the polling place. If anyone reported a discrepency in their vote, each party could compare the contents of each CD from each polling place. Everywhere there was a conspiracy, the CDs would not match the number of votes to which candidate, and the state or whatever authority could swoop down on that polling place and inspect the machine for corruption. Even if the machine's corruption has been surrepetiously removed, unless all 5 parties have the same vote count, then it has to be recounted there, and the people whose CD was erroneous can be publically flagged as untrustworthy.
Each party doesn't have to be trustworthy necessarily, only independant. Even if they aren't independant, and are secretly working together (aka a conspiracy) then the law of fives rears its ugly head again. It's almost impossible to have a conspiracy of 6 without someone conspiring against the conspiracy and leaking the information. So now since we cannot have any ambiguity in whether or not our vote was corrupted, then the motivation to corrupt the vote will effectively vanish. It even puts negative pressure on corruption, since it mandates a re-vote. We end up with people touching a screen when they go to vote, and a few weeks later the elected being announced without conflict.
I know a re-vote sounds like a lot of trouble, but if you learned that someone discovered a bunch of charred ballots in the waste receptacle behind your polling place, and your name was vaguely legible on one scrap of a ballot, I assume you'd rather go back to the polling place and have your vote counted by different people this time, than stay at home and not have your vote counted at all. It may be a convoluted system, but this is the sanctity of our vote we're trying to protect, and we should take every measure we can without stopping us in our tracks. In the end things are much more fair this way. The problem with a paper trail is, supposing it's discovered somebody's votes were counted wrong. How do we tell which person to ask for their paper ballot?
I should conclude by mentioning that in our current paper voting system, since the 1970s the polling places are not allowed to report the numbers of votes they received for which candidate. Instead they're all bundled up in a lockbox, and sent secretly to a centralized organization who then counts them and reports the totals. If you don't think that's easy to rig, I have some land in Florida to sell you. I stand by the statement that we should stop whining about useless paper receipts, and make some real and necessary changes to our system. We can stop killing trees, and allow the polling places to report their votes, reclaiming the death by a thousand polling places to anyone who conspires to elect someone against the will of the people.
Oh, and also if you still think a paper receipt is worth something, I present this small voting program in python for your review. If I were Diebold, the contents of this program would be protected by law as a proprietary trade secret, and I would spend lengthy court battles to prevent you from seeing it. I wonder why?
#!python
Lily = 1
Jeb = 2
Amir = 3
Tasci = 4
def vote(touchscreen,printer):
result = Jeb
throwaway = touchscreen.get_result()
printer.print_receipt(throwaway)
return result
from IO import Touchscreen,Printer,Network
n = Network()
t = Touchscreen()
p = Printer()
n.connect("countthevotes.gov")
n.send(vote(t,p))
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