But what is the motivation for the optical scanners? Why do away with a system that has proven to work and has known, mitigatable (is that a word?) downsides with one that is consistently found to have dangerous gaps in security and time and time again found extremely vulnerable?
Do they significantly improve accuracy? Do they save a significant amount of money? Do they increase the speed that things are tallied, and does that make a significant difference or improvement anywhere (because unless i'm missing something, getting results a few hours earlier is not a good reason to lessen the security of an election)?
I genuinely don't know, and I'd love to see more information if anyone has it on this.
Because to me, without knowing all of the details, it reads like "we trade some security to save costs by just not tallying some precincts at random".
If it's saving a significant amount of money, to the point where the state is much better off because of it, or if the usage of them somehow increases turnout by decreasing the time it takes to count votes, then I would agree with you. But without evidence like that, I'm sitting here wondering why these machines keep getting used.
Often times things that seem like they shouldn't be secure often are, and I'd love to be wrong about this one.
I don't have any specific data here, just a gut feel.
> Do they improve accuracy?
I think they pretty clearly would increase accuracy, modulo any potential tampering. Some of this is structural -- each ballot has multiple elections, some in which the same candidate can be featured multiple times under different party affiliations. Tallying this by hand seems intrinsically error-prone. It's arguable that simplifying the ballot could help both tallying and voting, but given the current design optical scanning seems like a huge increase in accuracy.
> do they save a significant amount of money?
Once again, I suspect yes -- tallying the votes by hand takes a lot of time and a lot of people. Poll workers aren't well-compensated by any means, but there's still a cost.
> Do they increase the speed that things are tallied, and does that make a significant difference or improvement anywhere (because unless i'm missing something, getting results a few hours earlier is not a good reason to lessen the security of an election)?
I think yes to the first and a matter of opinion on the second. I'm with you that speed of results is either a non-goal or an anti-goal -- states that release precinct-level results when voting is still open elsewhere in the country are implicitly engaging in electioneering in my mind, and should be explicitly forbidden from doing so.
An automated system combined with random manual tallies seems pretty good to me from a security standpoint. As an aside, in addition to the random tallies I believe there is a process where any party can request a certain number of explicit audits if they feel that the results seem questionable from a given precinct, and an additional layer of election supervisors who can make a non-partisan request if there are inconsistencies from previous election cycles) seems like
In New York I would prefer that the focus be on distributing voter information earlier and more widely would be a much better use of time than further changing the actual voting. When I lived in Washington state, you got a voter information guide with all the candidates and ballot measures, statements for and against, and an explicit statement as to what is being voted on, well in advance of the election. In New York, half the time I have to really dig to even find out what is going to be on my ballot, and finding the full text of ballot measures is an exercise in futility as you try to navigate through the NY Department of State to try to find the information. Third-party sources like local newspapers actually do a significantly better job than the state does here.
I'm not sure I agree that they increase accuracy to the point that it would be worth the downsides. A room full of people who all don't trust one another I feel can do a fairly good job of reducing the errors down to a minimum. Again, I could be wrong, and I'd love to see a study or some research in this area that proves me wrong! (after all, history shows us that a crowd of like-minded people are capable of some very shitty things without some kind of checks and balances)
And while I'm sure they save some money, is it worth it? I'd like to get an idea of the scale involved. Because saving a few hundred thousand dollars a year for a state would make it absolutely not worth it in my opinion, but a few hundred million might be.
And finding exact numbers is extremely hard (at least for me), combined with the fact that these companies basically never release that kind of information, and I know it's not the best idea to read into these things, but I can't help but think that they would release these numbers if they were significant and showed the company saving tons of money for the state.
But i completely agree that there are much better things we can do to improve voting overall (personally my vote is for changing to a "ranked voting" system), but these machines still feel like a giant red flag to me. There's not a lot that can be done to swing an election by just a few people, but put some kind of electronic or computerized system in the mix, and now there's one dock worker that has access to a large number of the machines as they get shipped, and now you have a single point of failure.
Do they significantly improve accuracy? Do they save a significant amount of money? Do they increase the speed that things are tallied, and does that make a significant difference or improvement anywhere (because unless i'm missing something, getting results a few hours earlier is not a good reason to lessen the security of an election)?
I genuinely don't know, and I'd love to see more information if anyone has it on this.
Because to me, without knowing all of the details, it reads like "we trade some security to save costs by just not tallying some precincts at random".
If it's saving a significant amount of money, to the point where the state is much better off because of it, or if the usage of them somehow increases turnout by decreasing the time it takes to count votes, then I would agree with you. But without evidence like that, I'm sitting here wondering why these machines keep getting used.
Often times things that seem like they shouldn't be secure often are, and I'd love to be wrong about this one.