I hope every electronic voting machine across the nation reports that "Pikachu" has won every single position.

We'll get a redo election where maybe Bernie gets a 2nd bite at the apple. And, it will be hand counted paper ballots from now on.

:)

Dear Brad,
As an international ecology policy lawyer, I am deeply invested in the importance of effective democratic decision making (I can explain this connection later if necessary) and so I am indebted to you for your scrutiny of voting systems. I join you in considering this problem to be existential, not only for the future of democracy, but also for ecological sustainability. I have been listening to your discussions on voting systems and your desire for a system design that could somehow improve on the reliability and voter participation over what what we see now happening all over the world. A paper balloting system alone would maintain the status quo and is perhaps an acceptance of defeat, so I don't see that as a wise course. In reply to your plea for new ideas, I would like to point you to a system I designed in order to address these problems (summary of system). The real question for anyone looking at the problem of voting systems is this: can you handle direct democracy, or are you just pretending? Much of the opposition to modernized voting systems such as the one presented here, stems from two anti-democratic ideas rather than from an impossibility of improving on simple paper balloting: 1) that voting people are not capable of making wise decisions for themselves, or 2)a desire to make democracy fail for a number of political reasons that I won't go into here. I have heard your comments on the ineluctable hackability of all electronic voting systems and I suggest that there is a feasible method possible, as long as: 1) any voter can verify that their vote was properly recorded by the system, and 2) the voting data are verifiable at any time by any independent monitoring organization or individual with a computer who wishes to take the time to do so. In other words, the computerized data files must be verifiable by anyone and made publicly available. There are several other important features presented, but I wish only to mention here the possibility of fraud-proof electronic voting. Since you are obviously deeply engaged with this subject, I hope that you find these comments useful. Continued Luck With the Show, Adam

Adam D.C. Cherson @2 wrote:

A paper balloting system alone would maintain the status quo and is perhaps an acceptance of defeat

and:

I wish only to mention here the possibility of fraud-proof electronic voting

With all due respect the concept of "fraud-proof electronic voting" is an oxymoron. The critical problem is a lack of transparency in vote tabulation. It was the reason why, in 2009, Germany's highest court ruled that all forms of e-vote tabulation violated that nation's constitution which mandates a publicly observable count and precludes all systems that require specialized technical knowledge for citizens to monitor the count.

What Brad described in that article as "Democracy's Gold Standard" - hand-marked paper ballots publicly hand tallied at each precinct on election night --- is certainly not part of the status quo. While paper ballots are utilized in optical scan systems, almost all elections in the U.S. are decided without so much as a single ballot being counted by a single human being. Op-scan paper ballots are tallied electronically by easily hacked central tabulators.

A rare exception can be found in some New Hampshire towns that, applying Democracy's Gold Standard, most often complete their transparent counts more rapidly than their machine-counting counterparts.

Finally, I am curious as to why your "summary of system" includes a provision for biometric authentication of voter ID? You do realize that in-person voter fraud is a phantom menace that is about as scarce as hens' teeth --- that the GOP has used the "Big Lie" about in-person voter fraud in order to disenfranchise minority voters, do you not?

From Adam's paper:

PROPOSED VOTING SYSTEM FOR THE GLOBALIZED 21st CENTURY WORLD

4) voter places vote using an electronic system that can generate an instant paper copy of the vote...

This looks like a verification bottleneck to me. How can anyone know if what that machine generates has anything whatsoever to do with what the voter has input? This is the point!

Brad has stated an estimated ka-billion times that there is no substitute for hand-counted paper ballots which when counted can be overseen by the public.

Why, here's one example right here:

Democracy's Gold Standard
Hand-Marked, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, Publicly Tabulated at Every Polling Place in America...

Adam D.C. Cherson said @2:

I have been listening to your discussions on voting systems and your desire for a system design that could somehow improve on the reliability and voter participation over what what we see now happening all over the world.

For the record, I haven't called for "a system design" to help improve voter participation. I believe that's up to the candidates offering a reason for voters to want to vote.

A paper balloting system alone would maintain the status quo and is perhaps an acceptance of defeat, so I don't see that as a wise course.

No idea what you even mean by that. We don't have overseeable paper ballot tabulation in the vast majority of the U.S., so not sure how that would "maintain the status quo".

In reply to your plea for new ideas, I would like to point you to a system I designed in order to address these problems

I don't believe I made a "plea for new ideas".

The real question for anyone looking at the problem of voting systems is this: can you handle direct democracy, or are you just pretending?

I don't know that I've called for "direct democracy". I have called for overseeable voting and vote counting in support of the represenative democracy we currently have in this country. I'm open to discussions of direct democracy, I supposed, but I haven't discussed it of late to my knowledge.

As to the voting system you suggest, I read your link VERY quickly. (Trying to do a whole lot at once, so please forgive if you feel I missed something important or am too terse in my response.) I appreciate the thought you've put into it. I've seen other systems similarly suggested (though yours is the first I've seen with the "fake receipt" element) and find theirs, like yours, unnecessarily complex and reliant on even more computers than we have now. I see the opportuninty for a LOT of chaos to be introduced --- even one Denial of Service Attack can invalidate an entire election and/or disallow anybody from being able to cast a vote all --- all of which endangers an election. And needlessly so.

Seems like you're trying to find solutions to problems that don't exist. But, very quickly, a few more specific responses to a few of the items in your paper:

3) the voter is issued a voter serial number (the voter keeps a record of the number); a master list of voter name and serial numbers is kept, but only the numbers are to be made available to public via internet list

There should be no way to match voters to their votes. Not sure who you trust to have access to this "master list" or why you think it won't end up being released or in hands of bad actors. But, released or not, I don't care for the idea of the government (or any other entity) having access to how I voted. I prefer secret balloting. Secret means secret and unknowable after the vote is cast.

4) voter places vote using an electronic system that can generate an instant paper copy of the vote bearing a random non-sequential bar code but no individual identification of any kind; the first copy is printed at the polling station for voter confirmation (the voter keeps this copy for later post-election verification of his or her vote

Voters should never leave the polls with evidence of how they voted. Leads to vote buying/selling/intimidation (coercion). I prefer a secret ballot. That said, I appreciate your "fake receipt" idea, and that you speak to that concern in your scheme. But I don't see it as a solution and, in fact, could make the process even more chaotic and difficult for the public to oversee (how can we tell which one is fake and isn't? You speak to some of that in the Q&A section, but, again, a bad actor can throw off just one of the moving parts, and the entire scheme falls apart and the election is completely invalid.)

The system you suggest could be easily gamed in a number of ways, among them, by introducing confusing to ANY of the multiple entities where you ask that computers send the results (presumably by Internet? You actually think that's a good idea?!)

The system allows a VOTER to verify their own vote (sort of, no way to tell if it was actually recorded that way by the computers you seem to like a lot here), but does not allow THE PUBLIC to oversee ALL of the results for EVERYBODY. That's the key here. That's the problem with cybervoting, including the type of cyber/crypto voting you are suggesting.

The system then goes on to call for Range Voting --- sort of a separate issue --- which I do not like at all. We have trouble enough adding 1 + 1 + 1, without the complicated math of Range Voting. (Approval Voting, on the other hand, is something I might support, as it doesn't require difficult math, and could be tallied and easily overseeable very simply without computers --- Oh, yeah, your system relies on more computers than we already needlessly use now! Did I mention that?)

Hope any of that is useful. And, again, my apologies for the terseness, out of necessity!