Voting machines are always going to be risky

Please someone shoot me down if this is a ridiculous suggestion, but wouldn't it be a cleaner and less corruptible approach to use machine readable cards/paper in the same way that a money teller or a multiple choice exam machine works?

If the machines fail, then so what? It can be manually counted and verified. It is impossible to verify something that doesn't physically exist on a semi-anonymous system.

Can you prove that the system hasn't voted for the people that didn't bother to turn up?

Stealing the vote

No surprise there. Machines that will cheat you out of a candy bar or soft drink are certainly not to be trusted with an election. These corrupt mechanisms even used to sell cigarettes to minors before an enraged organic population tore them into scrap.

Digital Graphite Technology

The only reliable, trustworthy mechanism involves pencil, paper and scrutineers.

The machines are flawed, posibly by design,

in every country where they have been implemented.

Why do you think they are designed behind closed doors, using closed source hardware and software? It is inexcusable for a voting machine to be closed source. With a paper ballot we know how they are counted and we should damn well know how the electronic ones work too. But we don't. We don't and it just so happens that every machine tested can be rigged half a dozen ways.

WHAT a surprise.

Reporting angle/Headlines

I have seen a few headlines on the net about this and finally got round to reading the story. So why was I surprised that he was arrested for having a stolen voting machine in his possession (Stolen becuase they are Govt property and they diddnt saction the release, or have very strong reason to suspect thats the case)?

Exposing vulnarabilities on websites is one thing, knicking kit to expose vulnerabillities is aosmething else (dont be surprised if you get nicked!)

Pencil and paper works just fine......

"who's making sure the counters are honest"

Having attended the last election count (i was a candidate) I can tell you that the candidates, and there agents, are watching the count and making sure that it is honest. Any vote can be disputed by the candidates or their agents, these are put into a pile to be adjudicated on later.

I doubt that any of us who actually work in IT would be prepared to entrust our votes to a machine.

title

Are there any 'religious focused' countries that aren't corrupt?

Stating the obvious, because it's needed.

Voting is supposed to be an open, transparent, and anonymous process, for obvious reasons. So, any voting commission that accepts voting machine manufacturer refusals to be open and transparent when asked is not doing their job. Further, any voting commission that refuses to be open and transparent or worse, as here, actively suppresses attempts at open voting process review, is entirely incompetent and needs to be gotten rid of and blackballed from government wholesale.

So, how open are our voting commissions really? The one in India is clearly unfit for service, for one.

Paper doesn't help

Paper trails don't really help.

If the machine prints out a receipt saying that you voted for Candidate A (which is in itself a bad thing; imagine this on a company notice board: "All employees who wish to take time out of work to go to vote must show a valid receipt showing that they for the factory owner's brother-in-law, under penalty of dismissal"), then nothing is stopping it from recording a vote for Candidate B.

In fact, it doesn't even matter what the machines record. A really corrupt election administration could just make up any numbers they wanted, and you'd have no way to verify it.

Suppose Candidate A receives 500 votes, B receives 390 and C receives 110. These are the *actual* votes, remember. The *announced* result, however, is: A 380, B 500, C 120. (Note that those figures are not so far out as to be utterly implausible. If they wanted to get a candidate elected in the face of very strong opposition, they might have to field a few extra candidates of their own just in order to split the vote.) You voted for A. You go with your receipt to the Town Hall to check how your vote was recorded, and are correctly told you voted for A. And that’s as far as you can take the matter.

Even if all 499 of the other people who voted for A go and check, they’ll be told — rightly — that their vote was for A. And because (1) they all go in one at a time to check their vote, and (2) there are also many B- and C-voters in there, not one single one of the A-voters will be the slightest bit the wiser that there are really 500 of them, as opposed to the 380 that was announced!

You could only ever determine that something was amiss if all those A-voters produced their receipts for Candidate A *at the same time*. And a lot of those receipts will have been lost or destroyed.

At least if the counting is done manually by the actual candidates themselves and their representatives, we can be sure that it's correct; because as long as none of them trust any of the others, the only result they can ever agree on is the truth.

@AJ Stiles

I don't think you understand how the paper trail works. Well, the way it's actually worked with voting machines in the US is a junky printer prints on a paper strip inside the machine, and then it jams up so there's not actually a paper trail. Using receipts like you suggest, voters wouldn't take the receipts with them -- they would drop them into a ballot box. Then, when voters start saying they think the voting results are bent, and demand a recount, people recount using the printed receipts. At this point, I do wonder "why even bother with the voting machine?" But *shrug* people like shiny machines.

ok, challenge time

For future Posterity, (in 50 years time someone will look at these archives and have a good laugh.)

How would you design an open-source, untamerable e-voteing system?

franc.