Counting machines would in theory be more accurate, faster, and cheaper than human counting.

This is pragmatically important because the eVoting proponents will argue that their method saves money, and ultimately the method that saves money will be chosen even it is terrible. So counting machines have a place, but only backed up by verification and frequent hand counts.

But installing cameras everywhere is a good idea.

One, it gives people confidence in the system because they can watch and understand exactly what is going on, with no sophisticated knowledge needed. Unlike any machine-based vote counting system, that by its inherent nature is too fast to watch and understand in real-time. (If you slow down the machine to the point where live humans can understand what it’s doing, there is no advantage whatsoever to the machine.)

Two, it would be a highly effective deterrent to election fraud. A county that is suspected by the public to have a “vote counting problem” would attract a large number of people watching it like hawks. The ability for everyone to record what they see is trivial to implement, and is a check and balance against suspicions about the official recordings.

To this I would add: broadcast the entire chain of custody of ballots, from the moment they are placed in ballot boxes. This would also be easy to do. Every ballot box would have a tripod at the top with a camera looking down: so it has a constant view of every hand putting a ballot in the box, and any attempt to open the box. The cameras would also broadcast (via cellular uplink with GPS) as the ballot boxes are taken to the vote counting stations, where they would come under observation by the cameras at the vote counting stations. This would eliminate the problem of ballot boxes taking naughty side-trips before they were officially opened.

There is no need for computerized voting machines or vote-counting machines because humans can vote and count ballots accurately by hand. But the public can’t ordinarily watch the entire chain of custody of the ballot boxes, and can’t watch the vote count in person, so both of those are valid instances where technology serves a useful role that can’t be served any other way.

And before anyone raises an issue about the cost of all this: voting is the core of representative democracy, so it is worth investing the money to get it right. Anything less leaves doors open to election fraud, erodes public confidence in elections, and thereby erodes representative democracy itself.

I’m told that Canada uses printed ballots marked by hand and counted by hand, and has far fewer problems than we have here with our American obsession with putting computers in everything (what next, a computerized salt shaker?).

The place for computers in the process is this: manual counting of the paper ballots should be put on streaming video in every district, with permanent official recordings made.

Wide-view cameras would let people see that ballots were being handled properly. Close-up cameras would let people see that votes were being counted properly.

A running time stamp in a corner would enable any person to refer to any specific time in the process if they spotted an irregularity. There would be official recordings of the video and audio, and any person could also record it on their own device.

If it takes a Constitutional amendment to ensure that every citizen has a guaranteed right to vote (it is not presently an enumerated right) and that every vote must be recorded and counted accurately, so be it. That would be one heck of an interesting campaign.

Between now and then we can do it state by state, and we can publish findings about specific states and counties that have problems with their voting and vote-counting processes.

Though, I’ll differ with Brainstorms @ 1 about “capital offense.” Five years in federal prison for each offense, mandatory sentence upon conviction, would probably be sufficient as long as all cases were prosecuted. Per findings in criminology, the swiftness and certainty of conviction is a more effective deterrent than the harshness of the punishment.

Read ProPublica’s “Redistricting a Devil’s Dictionary” at
http://www.propublica.org/article/redistricting-a-devils-dictionary.