2000 and Bush Gore. They had three official recounts. The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots. The Supreme Court ended up appointing Bush and the nation's voting commissions learned an important lesson.
But like OP said, volunteers could see the process. The recounts were actually pretty damn close; it was just the election was way too close for that to be acceptable.
In general the US system, as crap as it is (first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems), the electoral and state-based rules do mean that election fraud isn't too big a deal. New York will likely always go Blue. Tennessee will always go Red. Even if there is same fraud there, it doesn't matter that much because of the way votes are allocated per state. It's not fair, but that's the system the US has.
Fraud matters greatly in states were elections are close (Florida, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) and it will get even worse thanks to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, if that gets triggered.
Potential fraud in swing states or NaPoVolIterCo are incredibly dangerous right now, because what we cannot have in America is loss of faith in the election system. That will be disastrous. We would not survive the 2000 Bush/Gore election today.
>The number was always different, but not by much .. but it was still higher than a 1% margin of error. The FL ballot was pretty garbage and since then, most states have avoided punch-out/butterfly ballots.
This shows that recount disputes almost always boil down to whether to accept a particular ballot one way or another. It's not fraud. You're just bound to run into ambiguity once or twice in a large election. It usually doesn't matter, but it can pop up when an election is really close.
> first past the post is garbage; no possibility for 3rd parties as with ranked or MMP systems
I'm guessing you watch a lot of CPG Grey. You should check out Cardinal Voting systems[0], specifically Approval[1] and STAR[2], as these better fix a lot of the problems. Fargo recently had great success with approval[3]
Whatever objections there may be to the (mostly) winner take-all system by state, one advantage is that it tends to contain disputed results/recounts to one or maybe two states which is generally a lot more manageable than if it were the whole country.
>You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote.
But that also means the guy with the big wrench can follow your vote and so see whether you voted the way he told you or not, and that allows him to decide whether to smash your kneecaps in.
I have seen systems that allow for a real vote as well as a masked vote - so you get verified votes but have a fake vote to show if you want or need.
But consider: at this very moment, right above you is a comment with a picture of ballot that was filled out improperly and lead to a tied election. If we can’t teach people to fill in a circle properly, how in the world do we expect them to use or understand a system that guarantees verifiability as well as anonymity.
A system that was used in some counties in California a few years ago used a paper ballot that was marked by the voter,
and then fed by the voter into an optical scanner (made by Eagle, IIRC) which either
successfully scanned the ballot, xor returned it to the voter
in cases like: extraneous marks, votes for too many candidates in a multi-seat poll (like 4 candidates marked
for 3 city council seats among 11 candidates) and similar.
The voter could exchange their improperly marked ballot
for a fresh blank ballot and start over. The net effect
was that all ballots scanned by the voter needed no further
inspection - an effect that is sadly lost in vote-by-mail.
Is the problem "people not filling in circles properly" or is the problem that there are other errors. If I'm not mistaken you're referring to the hanging chad issue. The reason it was an issue is because it is hard to see the chad. We're in tech, this should be unsurprising that machines don't work with 100% efficiency. If your machine (human or computer) is marking a ballot it would be unsurprising if the mark is transposed or warped or incomplete. Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner.
Teaching people to use and trust an insanely complex system is. I’ve yet to hear any proposal for an electronic voting system that offers any advantages over current systems AND doesn’t require a PhD in mathematics to grasp.
I'm still mixed on electronic voting, but I do think it should be further researched.
The simple answer I've seen is giving people a hash or code that can be used to verify their vote in a database. Obviously you have to trust the database, but you also have to trust the people counting. I do think there are enabling technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and locally differential privacy that do help with many of the problems, but my understanding is that neither of these is mature enough for use in voting, yet.
But as to general advantages, I think there's two major ones I see. 1) Electronic voting better enables access to voting since people can vote in the comfort of their homes (especially relevant in a situation live covid). 2) Enables better research about candidates. I live in a state with mail in voting and how I vote is with my ballot in front of me while I research all the candidates. In fact, I spend several days voting (sure, not everyone will do this but it makes it easier). Links to official campaign pages or voter guides (we have this in my state with the ballot) would be helpful (and encourage candidates to create them! Because often they don't even have a website, at least on local levels).
As a minor advantage I do see having the ability to perform different voting testing and better answer questions to things like ordinal and cardinal voting systems (by participation not forced A/B testing).
Just because enabling technologies aren't there yet doesn't mean we should shutdown the conversation about how to solve those technological challenges.
>Instead we should design a system that accounts for these errors in a clear and concise manner.
We already have these systems in deployment. My precinct uses optical-scan paper ballots where any mark inside the bubble is valid. You can fill, dot, cross, check, whatever---the machine will count it as a mark. If you have a stray mark that results in an overvote, the machine will reject your ballot, then prompt you to either correct the overvote or override the error. The scanner will also accept ballots fed in any orientation as long as it's not folded or wrinkled.
Looking at that ballot for Newport News doesn't seem at all ambiguous to me.
The instructions aren't just for those filling it out. The reader should only have interpreted the properly filled in circle. The ones with marks through them are a near universal indication of "Don't count this," everywhere I go. I've also been known to either annotate, leave an instruction to th He reader, or say screw it and ask for a new ballot.
Given the significant other was completely flummoxed though when asked cold, I see your point.
What do you consider "very very small?" Tabuation is done at the precinct level, and there are many many precincts involved in an election.
Also jurisdictions can do risk-limiting audits (RLA) to spot-check that the electronic counts are in line with the results. "Following your vote" is dangerous because it opens up the possibility of at-scale voter intimidation or vote-buying. "Receipt-freeness" is a desirable property because it eliminates this risk. RLAs allow for aggregate verification while maintaining receipt-freeness.
Receipts (paper records received after voting) are OK as long as they don't reveal who you voted for. Confusingly, sometimes this is called "receipt-free".
You cannot argue much with a public algorithm doing public tabulation, where you can literally follow your vote.