In November 2018 I got opinions on voting machines and vote-by-mail from 17 experts on election verification, who have experience running/observing/studying elections in 17 states.
On the acceptability of these in-the-polling-place voting technologies, in the context of U.S. elections:
The consensus is that Direct Recording Electronic voting machines are unacceptable, even with a VVPAT (“voter verified paper audit trail visible to the voter under glass”). Most experts are lukewarm to hand-counted paper ballots, presumably because they’re impractical for large elections with many contests on the ballot. Most experts prefer hand-marked optical scan ballots, and all of these experts find hand-marked optical scan acceptable. Most experts are willing to accept ballot marking devices (BMDs) that prepare “bubble ballots” to be scanned by optical scan machines, but only 17% find this preferable to hand-marked optical-scan ballots. Opinion is mixed on BMDs that prepare bar-code ballots (with human-readable summaries) for tabulation by optical scanners, with most finding this technology at least “barely acceptable.” Almost no one prefers all-in-one machines that combine ballot marking and ballot scanning (but at least the voter can hold the ballot in her hand while inspecting it), with about a 50/50 split between “acceptable” and “barely acceptable”.
Most experts don’t prefer ballot-marking devices (BMDs) for these reasons:
- If the paper jams, the power fails, or something else goes wrong with technology, voters using hand-marked paper ballots can still deposit their ballots in an emergency ballot for counting later; this is not an option with a BMD-only solution.
- BMDs are more susceptible to fraud: if a BMD wrongly marks a paper ballot, (studies have shown that) most voters won’t notice.
- BMDs cost $5000, pens cost 50c; it is expensive to supply enough BMDs for all voters, but it is feasible to supply BMDs sufficient for those voters unable to mark a paper ballot by hand.
A few experts (17%) prefer BMD-marked ballots to hand-marked ballots because (1) there’s no chance of ambiguous marks and (2) it’s easier to give voters feedback about undervotes/overvotes.
Regarding vote-by-mail: There is no consensus on whether vote-by-mail increases voter turnout. Almost all the experts agree that vote-by-mail seriously compromises the secret ballot, and that it still matters whether we have coercion-resistant secret balloting. Most experts are not confident that ballots are not interfered with between the time they leave the voters’ hands and the time they are counted, and are not confident the chain of custody for mail-in ballots could be made adequately secure. The experts agree that it is essential to have public observation of all the steps in handling mail-in ballots, but almost none of the experts believes that there is adequate public observation in their own jurisdictions.That is not to say that the experts are against vote-by-mail; it’s just that there are some issues that ought to be discussed and improved.