As far back as 2002, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds was calling for paper ballots and he’s repeated that call over the past twenty years. Here’s part of what he wrote in 2002: events have shown him to be prescient, and the dangers he warned about have all come true.
As I write this, the voting hasn't even started. But I've already gotten an email telling me that there are dozens of lawyers waiting to file legal challenges to elections in my state, and I'm sure that the same is going on everywhere else.
As with Florida in 2000, charges of fraud and voter misinformation will fly. People will say that ballots were tampered with. People will say that voting machines were rigged, or confusing. People will complain about tabulation errors and "hanging chads" and outright fraud.
To these problems (well, most of them, anyway) I have a technological solution. The technology is good. It is easy to understand. It is surprisingly resistant to fraud. And it is inexpensive. It's the paper ballot.
Paper ballots are easy to understand - just put an "X" in the box next to the appropriate candidate's name. I don't find voting machines especially hard to understand, but I do always have to read the instructions on the ones I use, and I'm a law professor who works as a sound engineer on the side. So others may find them more confusing than I do. Everyone, on the other hand, can make an "X."
Paper ballots are surprisingly resistant to fraud. Actually, it shouldn't be that surprising. A paper ballot encodes lots of useful information besides the obvious. Not only is the information about the vote contained in the form, but also information about the voter. Different colors of ink, different styles of handwriting, etc., make each ballot different. Erasing the original votes is likely to leave a detectable residue. Creating all new ballots with fraudulent votes requires substantial variation among them or the fakery is much more obvious; that's hard work. And destroying the original ballots in order to replace them with fraudulent ones isn't that easy - there's a lot of paper to be disposed of, and shredding it, or burning it, or hiding it is comparatively easy to detect. (Protecting the ballots before counting doesn't require fancy encryption, either: just a steel box with a lock, a slot on the top, and a seal.) What's more, because people are familiar with paper documents, fraud is easy to understand when it occurs. Paper ballots are both robust (resistant to fraud) and transparent (easy to understand).
Compare this sophisticated voting technology to that of voting machines. A voting machine captures only the information regarding the vote. Once it has done so, one vote looks like another. There's no handwriting, no style, no ink, just a simple notation of which candidate was favored. Most voting machines store votes electronically, meaning that if they're changed, there's no troubling paper residue for fraud-perpetrators to dispose of. And because voting machines are complicated - and because their actual workings are unseen, and often kept secret - it's much harder for voters, members of the press, and others to identify or understand fraud. Electronic ballots, in other words, are neither robust nor transparent.
The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?
