I'm glad my state doesn't go in for this bullshit. Paper ballot filled out by hand.

As someone not from the US I don't know why you need janky machines with dodgy UI and touchscreen calibration. Why not just a pencil, you get your slip, put an X in the box next to your candidate. Works fine everywhere else...

Note that every state can differ.

In my case, it is a pen and paper, scanned by machine.

I don't know if any state has gone full digital. That would preclude a manual recount, which I know is commonly a right of a candidate to request in a close result.

Note that the paper ballots generally don't take longer to count, they are generally digitally scanned in the same way the printouts from the touchscreen machines are.

It might speed up voting as a tap is a little faster than filling a bubble, but then again a wide tip marker would fix that, but then you might spoil more ballots when people aren't sure if they mismarked it.

Some places, all the places I've been, give you the option. The machines are typically for people with bad vision because it makes everything easier to see. At the end of the day the machine just prints to the bubble sheet anyway and then that sheet is read by another machine.

This has been happening ever since I can remember and I'm 40. Paper ballots need to be mandatory in all states and the vote counting software should be open source.

It's fucking insane that we allow private companies to hide their code from us.

They are doing that too. They don't care about discreetness.

Such as?

It was an excuse for state legislators to give out no-bid contracts to companies they own stock in. It's that simple. That's the only reason they exist.

Same, on a plane I saw a man become very frustrated trying to play essentially the airlines version of MapTap as everytime he'd touch somewhere on the map it would show that he selected Antarctica and give him 0 points. And that's because his thumb/lower hand would always hit the bottom of the screen first and he never figured it out.

It worked fine here too until people realized it was another avenue for crooked income. The machines I once worked on stored data to pcmcia media. They worked fine. They didn't need to replace them, but they did anyhow. Because money.

Getting banned from the politics community is just a right of passage on Lemmy.

I guess but we still have pencils and teams of humans counting. I agree its the safest and easiest to audit.

Swapping a pen or marker could spoil a box if some funky ink is introduced.

But then how do you compare and correct the result to the desired outcome?

It's still enough to have the wrong height / wrong angle for looking at the screen and you easily get the wrong option.

I would argue that maybe the design should have more space between options.

And yet it doesn't happen

That's the thing though- you can never prove that this "doesn't happen" since the premise is that it goes unreported due to fear and control. You can only really argue that there's no evidence indicating that it happens to a large enough degree to significantly influence the outcome of elections.

I'm all for balancing different concerns against each other. That's where I think your strong argument lies, and largely agree with your point here. I think downplaying the fact that coercion is a possibility only harms your argument, and that you would have an easier time convincing people if you rather recognised the possibility of it, and focused your argument around why you think mail-in voting is still a net positive.

Well I'm not too concerned about things we don't have any evidence of occurring on a large scale. If you're going to argue that this is a serious problem, it's on you to demonstrate why it is a problem. Lots of things are theoretically possible. Space aliens could come down from above and hack our elections; I'm not going to be too concerned with it unless someone produces some evidence for it.

For all this talk about what my strongest argument is, you're really not making one of your own.

Ah. We had one of those in Australia in my memory. All came down to a weird iconoclastic independent called Rod who finally announced his choice in a press conference where he famously took twenty minutes to actually announce his choice. Milked it right to the end.

Wasn't 40 days though. Only a bit over two weeks.

You seem to be misunderstanding my point (perhaps I'm not making it clearly enough).

I agree with you that there is little evidence pointing to this being a significant problem. My point is that the fact that it can be a problem needs to be recognised and accounted for when weighing the pros/cons of different voting setups. This isn't in the "aliens may invade earth tomorrow" category of unlikely, it's more like "this most likely happens every single election, just not on a large enough scale to have any impact".

Nobody benefits from this being brushed off with "and yet it doesn't happen". What we can benefit from is recognising that this likely (based on the evidence we have) happens on such a small scale that it doesn't impact the outcome of elections, and therefore it's an acceptable risk when weighed against the alternative, which is significantly lower accessibility to voting.