How you stop voter and election fraud completely. Part 2.
Part 1 was ending mail in voting.
In addition to no mail in voting, voter ID has to be iron clad and the counting system has to be redundant and verifiable. The cartoon below is from Branco at https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-trust-but-dont-verify/
On the ID side, a government issued photo ID is only part of the picture. At many if not all airports when you travel internationally, there is a step of scanning fingerprints. In many movies, you’ve seen a full hand scanner used for security checks. I assume that there are some security systems in business and government building where a full hand scan is used, and that’s exactly what we need as the 2nd step for verifying voter ID.
When a voter registers, he or she needs a photo ID and has his or her right hand scanned, including fingertips, in a fairly high resolution. That scanned information is then stored in a secure database along withe the voter’s other information. I would also back this process up a bit and require the hand scan to get a driver’s license or other government issued photo ID in the first place. I’m open to suggestions on how and when you first enter a hand scan for someone, and how you avoid problems or fraud in the stored images, but if you want to avoid 99.9+% of impersonations and/or people voting multiple times, you need something better than just a photo ID. (Although I agree that just requiring the photo ID that democrats want to abolish completely is very helpful at stopping fraud.)
So at the polling place, the voter first shows a photo ID with a magnetic strip or a chip, then that ID is scanned in just like passports are at airports. Then the voter’s right hand is scanned after their information is retrieved from the ID scan. If there is a match on the hand scan with the photo ID, the voter can then go to a screened booth and fill out a newly printed ballot that has encrypted information specific to them that uniquely identifies the ballot.
The ballot choices portion with the various candidates is exactly the same on all ballots for that precinct, but there are 2D encrypted barcodes printed on the ballot that uniquely identify that voter. Because the info is encrypted, it is more secure and more of a secret ballot than what you have now due to election personnel being able to review what you did with a mail in ballot or even sometimes at the voting booth. But ultimately the philosophy or ideal of a truly “secret ballot” does have to go in order to eliminate fraud. You can’t have the anonymous and untraceable ballots that we have now and stop all fraud.
When the voter is done filling in their uniquely identified ballot, that ballot gets scanned in multiple redundant systems with the voter watching the scanning process. At least one system would be the official government system, and at least two more could be funded by the major political parties. The official government system would be the final scan, and if all scans were successful the ballot would be retained in the official government system in a secure container of some type. Because each ballot would have a unique ID, any attempts to rescan the same ballot later would be caught immediately and flagged.
All software on all systems would be open source and fully reviewed by software developers from all political parties, and all ballot images would be retained in high resolution in all systems. In no event would any functions of the software in any of the systems be hidden or claimed to be private intellectual property. Even now there should be no private IP claims used to obscure how voting machines and their back end servers work. Any claims that having hidden source code and/or hardware can still result in secure and verifiable elections are a joke and completely false.
On each system, after scanning the voter would get a voting verification printout on a heavy paper that detailed their votes. The printouts would also include the encrypted barcodes containing their ID info, the date, time, location, and machine ID of the scanner used to read the ballot. The voter would then be required to carefully review the printouts to confirm that their votes were accurately counted on each system. All systems would be required to exactly duplicate everything on these printouts except for the info on the specific machine used.
After voting, the voter would be required by law to keep their printouts undamaged in a secure manner. Since those hard copy printouts would be critical to auditing results and other security checks, failure to retain them securely for at least 2 years could result in loss of voting privileges and/or fines.
In the event that any machine could not read the ballot, the voter would be required to correct the ballot himself/herself. As I said in part 1, voting is serious business and anyone voting MUST be fully capable of understanding the simple instructions and carrying out the tasks required. There would be NO “adjudication” or duplication of ballots by personnel at the polling places. If the voter desired, they could ask people working at the polling place to tell them what they were doing wrong in filling out the ballot. The failed scan images would also be retained in high resolution on the election servers for troubleshooting and other reviews at a later time.
With each scan of a ballot, each of the independent systems would store the voter’s choices AND store the unique ID information. With the hard copy printouts any voters who so desired could take those printouts to election offices at a later date to confirm that the official record matched their printout. There would be no wondering whether your vote was changed somehow after the fact. Any audit would also randomly request printouts from some percentage of voters (always at least 5% of votes in any area being audited) and those would then be scanned to verify that the official record matched what happened at the polling place.
Now of course having multiple redundant scanners and back end systems makes it much more difficult to cheat by doing anything after the fact with the electronic records of votes in the database. (Please remember from part 1 that NO electronic vote switching needed to happen to change the results of the 2020 election.) With multiple systems controlled by opposing parties, and with the results compared down to each individual vote, and having high resolution scans of every ballot that are public information, the chances are that you rarely need to resort to reviewing the hard copy verification printouts retained by each voter.
Yes this is more complex and more expensive at the polling place, but what was the total cost of mailing out and processing tens of millions more ballots in 2020? How much can be saved by eliminating mail in voting altogether? How much can be saved by disallowing private IP in software and hardware controlled primarily by one or two voting machines companies? And what is the value of truly secure elections???
By the way, there is a huge added bonus to uniquely identified votes called campaign promise accountability, which is the topic for a future post.