Should elections use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines?
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Why "instead of"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not combine the best of both. Machine-marked paper ballots provide the legibility of a machine and the recount-ability of a paper ballot. Machine-counted paper ballots provide the speed of machines without the large number of people required for a fast manual count.
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Re:Why "instead of"?? [but beyond...] (Score:2)
This thread seems to cover most of my thoughts on the topic, and the obvious missing poll answer we aren't supposed to complain about was "Both".
But while I have your attention, let me go radically beyond the topic on you. I think we could do MUCH better with modern technology. This is a two-and-a-half level solution approach I've been diddling with for some years. I'm going to approach it from a functional level as to how it would work, with a few thoughts on the justifications. To simplify the presentatio
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Major screw up? I could have claimed that it was Cowboy Neal's idea...
Re: Why "instead of"?? [but beyond...] (Score:1)
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Hmm... Thanks, but? I think the voting process needs to be as simple as possible. Yeah, many of the voters are dumber than average, but "unalienable rights" and all that stuff.
I actually think the system I suggested would be "mostly harmless" because a lot of dumb voters would toss their vote at "famous names", which is usually harmless. If the name wins a seat, then that is kind of annoying, but most of the names are idiots full of "sound and fury", but "signifying nothing". Voters who want to put in more
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Vote electronically (which makes voting and tallying fast) and then it prints out a paper copy that can later be used as a backup or recount if needed.
How to you know it prints the vote properly without looking at it? Does it prints sequentially the votes, so you could figure out who voted for whom by using the order that people voted? How can that process be monitored by an average person?
So many questions! So few answers!
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It's not who votes that counts (Score:2)
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I guess keep it primitive is a good thing here.
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If Scantron was good enough for a generation of school kids to graduate; it is good enough here...
Not sure what moron downvoted you, but that is exactly what we use. Fill in the bubble next to your choice, insert into slot of machine, wait for verification votes are counted. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
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By "paper ballots" I'm assuming a piece of paper that is the actual vote. The paper can be marked by a machine and read by another machine. It has to be designed so that a human can read it, but humans are only used to spot check that the machines are doing the right thing.
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By "paper ballots" I'm assuming a piece of paper that is the actual vote. The paper can be marked by a machine and read by another machine. It has to be designed so that a human can read it, but humans are only used to spot check that the machines are doing the right thing.
See the comment above. Scantron is what you're describing. The machine reads your choices, but if there is any question the ballot can be examined by human eyes to verify the ballot was correctly recorded and processed.
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Why not combine the best of both. Machine-marked paper ballots provide the legibility of a machine and the recount-ability of a paper ballot. Machine-counted paper ballots provide the speed of machines without the large number of people required for a fast manual count.
I think the discussion is over at this point. The fact that this issue is so simple and easy to see is why I don't trust all of the endless issues "they" seem to have implementing it. This isn't rocket surgery folks.
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This is how the systems in my county in Texas do it.
In Canada (Score:2)
we use paper ballor and usually have the result of our election in the same evening.
On each polling station, we have one member of the two dominant parties and a officer, Every polling station are counted by these officials and the result is fast and conform.
Similar setup in Australia (Score:3)
The US just seems intent on using systems that don't work as well as the tried and true systems used in other democracies.
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The US just seems intent on using systems that don't work as well as the tried and true systems used in other democracies.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
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504 gallons per mile, interesting ride you have there.
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Re:In Canada (Score:4, Insightful)
it's a republic (government by the elite).
Oh god the ignorance is stupendous!
Republic means "public thing". Basically, it means that the country is it's own thing, and not some king's realm.
Republics ARE NOT monarchies! "Republic" means nothing else.
Here are some republics:
The USA
The Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United States of Mexico - the actual name)
Brazil
Italy
Germany
France
China
Uruguay
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Republics ARE NOT monarchies!
Nobody said they were?
You can equivocate all you want, but in terms of governmental systems that we're talking about: a "republic" (in contrast to a "democracy") is government by the privileged (instead of government by the people).
But - if you can't get past the fact that words mean different things in different contexts and are not restricted to their strict latin interpretations - let's use"flibberty-gibbet" instead of "republic" to mean "government by the elite".
The US is a flibberty-gibbet by definitio
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On each polling station, we have one member of the two dominant parties and a officer, Every polling station are counted by these officials and the result is fast and conform.
Canadian electoral officer (ARO - assistant returning officer for a riding) here. The PC (poll clerk) position has been suspended for now, following the COVID, so there is only the DRO (deputy returning officer) now. Political nominations have been dwindling significantly that they are not really relevant nowadays.
This means that every poll has one officer only. However, they cannot count ballots alone, they must have an assistant supervisor present. Of course, at any step of the process, a candidate repre
Mechanical machines were reliable (Score:2)
Paper obviously (Score:2)
In the UK, we have a manual paper system, and our previous Prime Minister was out of Downing Street 12 hours after the polls closed.
Yes, there are about 5x as many people in the US, but that also means 5x as many people to count the votes, so I don't see any scalability problems. It might take a bit longer for the winning candidates to physically get to Washington, but were are talking a few hours extra at most.
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It might take a bit longer for the winning candidates to physically get to Washington, but were are talking a few hours extra at most.
Not really an issue in the US. The 118th Congress convened on January 3, 2023 after elections on November 8, 2022. Inauguration day for the president is usually January 20. It used to be March 4 when travel took longer.
Yes there should be a paper trail (Score:2)
And while I have nothing against distributing ballots by mail, they should be turned in in-person, with photo id.
Good statecraft entails security, transparency, and the conspicuous image of both when it comes to elections. Anything less invites conspiracy theories, and occasionally actual conspiracies.
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Basically, all you want is to prevent poor/brown people from voting.
What the heck? (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, first I will give the site operators credit for listening to us. And I will admit I'm not part of the earliest crowd, joining after the site was already becoming popular amongst the nerd set. But since the current management wasn't around during Slashdot's heyday, let me explain something.
The point of the "CowboyNeal" poll options on surveys is to provide a humorous choice, that is true. But the crux of the concept is to create a CowboyNeal-related twist that's at least superficially relates to the topic. In this case, option 3 could have been something along the lines of:
- CowboyNeal holds my proxy ballot
- All votes should be hand-counted by CowboyNeal
- Whatever gets CowboyNeal fastest to 270 electoral votes
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Thank you! I came here to complain about this, and you expressed it much better than I would have.
Paper ballots are the way to go. (Score:3)
But this is not the case; a big difference from banking is that voting must, yes, positivey identify the voter, but then it must absolutely SEPARATE the voting input from the identifying information so that the vote must remain secret.
Furthermore, voting must be transparent; anyone with 5 minutes of training can see how the vote proceeds and that no disruption of the confidentiality occurs as well as voters can be identified.
It’s impossible to do this with machine voting because they are basically blackboxen whose workings are totally mysterious to the average individual and cannot reasonably me monitored even with the best debugging tools.
And no, open-source cannot be a solution; who will actually be perusing the source code to make sure it is safe? And once it is vetted to be safe, how to you know that THIS version is the one that is loaded on the actual voting machines? Yes, you can MD5 the memory contents of the machine, but can we really trust the machine to MD5 itself? How do you know that the MD5 routine does not display the "proper" MD5 instead of the actual MD5 of the memory contents? You equip every poll watcher with a device that clips on the memory chips inside, like they check slot machines software? How do you know that there isn’t another memory chip that is actually used? And so on, and so on...
This has not been even able to scratch the surface of internet voting. What a can of worms it can be! It's impossible to guarantee that the vote is secret; how do you know someone is not watching how other people in the house are voting?
Of course, someone will inevitably harp in with HARP HARP HARP BLOCKCHAIN HARP HARP HARP... Amongst IT professionals which percentage of them understand how blockchains work AND can determine that the voting is not rigged? Look at my user number. Do I look like someone who understand blockchains? Now put the average voter in my place and watch the extra-befuddlement!
For the last 20+ years, I've been involved with elections in Canada, rising to the post of constituency assistant returning officer (this means I must be able to do every job of an election and train the people who will do work it) at both federal and provincial levels, and the paper ballot process is extremely secure and reasonably fast; a ballot box contains at most 450 ballots and is usually counted within an hour, with the result transmitted and compiled (my speed record was 10 seconds for 8 ballots in the box)...
Of course, a machine can be used to look at the paper ballots. I've seen it implemented in a pilot project about 30 years ago; the machine optically read big ballots and put them in a sealed box, and at the end of the day, it prints a tally seconds after the last ballot has been cast, leaving the paper ballots in case there needs to be a manual recount. But voting authorities have not been impressed, although some have stated recently that they intend to look into it.
No, paper ballots are essential to preserve voter secrecy!
skeptical (Score:2)
In my (East European) country I don't have the faith they would implement an electronic vote system that isn't rigged. But I am pretty sure they rig the current paper ballots too (there are a few known, documented ways to do it).