logoalt Hacker News

nemomarx • yesterday at 9:56 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

They do here in pennsylvania, even with an electronic touchscreen. The ballot is printed and you check that it recorded your stuff correctly and then immediately put into a lockbox for tabulation later.

This seems like a fair compromise as long as the actual ballot is on paper and human readable?


Replies

fhdkweig • today at 1:09 AM

This is the same method as Georgia using Dominion machines. The printed paper has human readable text including the candidate's name and party so it can be verified by the voter.

It also included a QR code that I couldn't read (phones not allowed in the voting area) and don't know what it is for. I'm hoping that it doesn't tie a voter's identity to the printed ballot (that would violate privacy of secret ballot). If it is just a machine-readable copy of the human-readable to make it easier for the computer to read the paper for a recount, it would have been better to just let the computer OCR from the human-readable text. That would make it verifiable by the voter that the machine-readable QR code matches what the voter actually intended. If the human readable text isn't what the recount uses, then it doesn't really help.

But I don't know if that is what the QR code was even about, which is why I really wish it wasn't present.

Johnny555 • yesterday at 10:10 PM

The hand-filled ballot seems safer, few people are going to check every single race to make sure the printed ballot matches -- my ballot had about 2 dozen races to vote in (it included a bunch of judges, school board positions, etc), that's a lot of double checking. Make the person fill it out by hand first, then read it by computer.

➕ show 1 reply