A revolutionary low-tech voting system

[StefanX]

People should vote on a plain piece of paper, drop the ballot in a transparent ballot box, and be allowed to stay and watch the box until there is a public hand count in the same room.

[William769]

1. I'm all for that.

[Land Shark]

2. the only objections will be CONVENIENCE but integrity of democracy is more

important than administrative convenience of any kind. And it's a myth that the public, having waited innumerable months for elections to occur, can not wait another few hours or a day.

[ladjf]

5. Words can't express how unimportant convenience is when we

are talking about the overthrow of the U.S. Government.

[StefanX]

8. People think computers provide "convenience"

But in the end, is it really convenient to spend millions on hardware, program the machine, test it, debug it, certify it, install it, and then deal with all the "glitches" on election day?

Computers might be fine for banking, travel reservations, medical records systems - where trillions of pieces of complex data have to be shuffled around the world every day.

But we're talking an election here. A precinct could publicly count its few thousand votes in a few hours, and then publish the total, and you're done.

[Carolab]

3. Brilliant! Did you get that idea from Spain?

Or from watching the History Channel?

Hell, yes, we should do it this way. We always did in the past.

The e-voting has corrupted the system.

But, "they" are not going to let us do this. So what do we do? We focus on the SECURITY issues by getting our legislatures to write laws protecting/safeguarding the procedures surrounding casting, counting, recording and reporting the votes.

Some more on this from Bob Fertik (who is partnered with David Lytel of Redefeat Bush):

(2) There is a strong case for non-automated voting systems, i.e. paper ballots. Much of the plan described above is focused on making the scanners tamper-proof; all of those elements are unnecessary with paper ballots. The principal objection to paper ballots is the time and tedium of counting them, especially when there are a large number of races to be counted. However, a typical precinct handles under 1,000 votes, so a team of volunteers can conduct the count fairly quickly. Everyone is too tired on Election Night to conduct a tedious count; but if elections were held on Saturdays, the counting could be done on Sundays. And if we built bi-partisan volunteer counts into our election system, we might change the whole "red-blue" adversarial climate into a "purple" climate of civic cooperation.

http://www.democrats.com/book/print/2571

Also, the Open Voting Consortium has a new system of voting that they have been demonstrating in California (as of June):

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0411/S00068.htm

GRANITE BAY, CALIFORNIA - The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) will introduce legislation state-by-state to ban paperless voting and require that computer source code (the instructions given to computers) used in elections be made public. OVC will also begin to make their low-cost secure public software available for use in public elections.

{snip}

The Open Voting Consortium is a Nonprofit California Corporation dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for use in public elections. OVC architecture will enable,

- An open and secure replacement of faulty election management software

- Electronic voting machine to generate a humanly readable optically scanable ballot

- Quick initial tabulation from precincts integrated with countywide and statewide systems

- A voter verified paper ballot that can be checked even by reading impaired voters

- Paper ballots checked against the electronic record

- The programs, hardware and all aspects of the OVC system are publicly available so that any system integrator can build voting systems, and provide maintenance or training.

- Vendors to compete based on services provided rather than proprietary hardware and software thus providing savings to taxpayers

Contact: Alan Dechert, [e-mail] 916-791-0456

**************
Check them out at:

www.openvotingconsortium.org

LONG BEACH, On June 23th Michelle Smith (pictured above) and other attendees of the Long Beach Open Voting Event tried out the open voting system demo. Michelle and other people at the event used a laptop to select the candidates they wanted to vote for. Attendees of the event also got to see how their printed paper ballot could be verified by scanning the bar code printed on the paper ballot and listening to their choices read back to them on the computer. They also got to try the Reading Impaired Interface, which allows people with reading impairments to vote without assistance. “What I saw was very user friendly and simple,” remarked Michelle Smith regarding the open voting demo. “It was motivating to know that people are working on this issue," Smith added, "After I saw the demo, I called the Secretary of State’s office and asked them to put in an open voting system for California.” The Long Beach demo was one of several live demos given by the Open Voting Consortium during the Southern California Open Voting Tour.

You can try a web demo version of the OVC software HERE.

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=5

[liberal N proud]

4. I like marbles

Everyone gets two marbles, one red, one blue.
You can drop one marble in the box.
each set of marbles could be numbered so they could (like number on each marble). You drop the color marble in the box relative to the candidate of your choice and take the other with you.
If the numbers on the counted marbles don't match the books, they vote is disqualified.

[bonito]

7. How about 1marble and 1 toad instead encase your color blind.

[liberal N proud]

10. A marble and a cube?

[Mr Rabble]

6. Would never happen. Far too simple and smart.

Also, there would be no way to involve contracters like ES&S, Diebold, etc...

[Lars39]

9. Link to SoCalDem's thread/idea...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4256264