[EM] Approval fraud prevention (was Re: A conversation with an English woman about IRV)

[⸘Ŭalabio‽]

	2011-05-0416:39:26Z, “Jameson Quinn” <Jameson.Quinn at Gmail.Com>:

> 	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.