What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble?
I'm not trying to play Loki's Wager -- there really have been incredibly close elections where you have puzzle out just what the voter intended and it's just not clear. Nor can you make the boundary be "well if it's not clear throw it away," because you can't tell when it doesn't become clear. This isn't the most worst thing ever, but it's part of a legitimate design to want to limit this[1].
Computer-voting systems do have problems, but they don't have that one. And it at least gives the voter a chance to fix it if they are paying attention.
(Yes, I'm a fan of paper, but it's not strictly better than computer voting.)
To be clear, I was responding to your suggestion that a deliberately spoiled ballot with nonsense candidates written in would be somehow ambiguous - it's not, it will clearly be counted as spoiled (by a human counter at least). For accidentally spoiled ballots, the vote won't be counted if it is not clear - that should be decided by humans, it's more reliable than having machines do it, and frankly it probably only accounts for a very small percentage of votes; it's not a huge problem, and if it becomes statistically significant, the paper ballots can be recounted and verified later.
Your picture of a someone inspecting a punch-card is not relevant to most paper voting systems - punch cards are like touch screen machines, they are unreliable technology, and should not have been introduced when the previous system worked perfectly well but just required manpower for counting (which can be mostly volunteers). Even the counting could be automated on paper ballots, but you need humans involved for the ambiguous cases, and I'm not sure automated counting is necessary if you have enough volunteers.
Simple paper ballots with a mark inside a square or circle are a tested solution which works well, and leaves an indisputable paper trail in case of recounts. Anything else we've tried just doesn't work as well, though no doubt it has made some companies fabulously rich in suppling the necessary machinery and constantly updating it when it proves to be unreliable.
So I'd contend that paper ballots, as used in the UK for example, are better than the computer voting machines available at present. I'm sure one day we'll come up with better machines, but they'd have to be open source, secure, verifiable and incredibly reliable - the antithesis of the machine in the video.
>What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble?
Count it before the voter leaves, reject any ambiguous ballots with feedback about what's wrong and have the voter fix it before they leave. Repeat until it's accepted.
No, I believe they are advocating that the ballot be counted/approved or rejected in the presence of the voter. This way people will have an opportunity to fix any mistakes with the ballot itself. This wouldn't have anything to do with the votes, rather it would ensure that the intention of the voter was correctly captured.
This is the way it worked when I lived in Indiana. We had paper/optical ballots that were scanned immediately after we turned them in. We watched them get scanned, and could verify that the counter on the scanner incremented (not vote tallies, just a +1 for total ballots cast).
Exactly. Tally votes with an electronic scanner in real time allowing the voter to fix any issues discovered by the electronic system. This is already done in some municipalities.
One of the core principles of the US system is that no one knows how a specific individual voted. This system (if I understand you correctly) requires the voter to confirm his vote to another human, which breaks the anonymity.
I think you misunderstand. You have a machine that scans ballots, counts votes, and then stores the ballots for later hand-verification. The ballots are fed into this machine in front of the voter. That's how it's done presently in many places (including the polling place I visited today).
The suggestion is that, when the machine is scanning the ballot, if it finds something ambiguous it immediately rejects the ballot, returns it, and doesn't count anything, the voter gets it back, fixes the issue (or returns the ballot as spoiled and gets a fresh one they can mark correctly), and you repeat.
Nowhere in that does anyone else see the person's votes (except potentially on returning a spoiled ballot, but that's no more true under this system than the existing one if someone notices they mis-marked something, and they can always just mark more to obscure their original intent before handing it back).
You can tell when it does become unclear. If the machine reading the ballot cannot provide a single valid answer per each question based on what's in the ballot, then it should be thrown away.
How close elections are is orthogonal to this issue.
I'm not trying to play Loki's Wager -- there really have been incredibly close elections where you have puzzle out just what the voter intended and it's just not clear. Nor can you make the boundary be "well if it's not clear throw it away," because you can't tell when it doesn't become clear. This isn't the most worst thing ever, but it's part of a legitimate design to want to limit this[1].
Computer-voting systems do have problems, but they don't have that one. And it at least gives the voter a chance to fix it if they are paying attention.
(Yes, I'm a fan of paper, but it's not strictly better than computer voting.)
[1] http://blog.joeware.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hangingCh...