2011-05-0416:39:26Z, “Jameson Quinn” <[email protected]>:
> Unfortunately, there is no task that you can manually ask the voters to
> do, which won't lead to unacceptably high levels of spoiled ballots. My
> ballot doesn't count because I didn't vote against Wingnut Moonbat? Or
> because I didn't count up my approvals correctly? Once I failed to win a
> competition because I incorrectly counted and self-reported my score. Since
> it was a math competition, perhaps that was just. But voting is not a math
> competition; spoiled votes should be avoided.
Since the ballots are both human/machine-readable, the voter should run
them through a ballotvalidator (an optical scanner). The ballotvalidator would
find errors such as:
[+] [-] Candidate P
And
[*] [*] Candidate W
And tell the voter. The voter would then fix the errors and revalidate
the ballot. If a voter spoils a ballot, it goes into a privacyenvelope and
goes into a locked transparent spoiled ballotbox. When the ballot is perfect,
it goes into an opaque privacyenvelope. The voter puts the ballot into a
transparent locked cast ballotbox:
The transparent locked cast ballotbox, as well as the spoiled locked
stransparent ballotbox, start off empty and is always keep viewable to the
public and on a live webcam. After the polls close, pollworkers unlock the
cast locked transparent ballotbox and count, at the precinct, count the votes
in front of anyone who wants to watch and on live webcam.
The pollworkers count the votes both manually and using optical scan.
If the totals differ, different humans and different optical scanners recount
the votes. The process iterates until both the humans and the optical scanners
arrive at the same total.
Because of the ballotvalidators, the locked transparent cast ballotbox
should have no spoiled ballots in it. A spoiled ballot in the locked cast
transparent ballotbox should lead to an immediate investigation into fraud.
The government should archive the cast ballots, the blank ballots, the
spoiled ballots, and the video from the webcams. That is how we should do it.
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