Reply #6: "Paper ballots are surprisingly resistant to fraud"

[FogerRox]

Paper Ballots
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds


People will say that voting machines were rigged, or confusing. People will complain about tabulation errors and hanging chads and outright fraud. To these problems (well, most of them, anyway) I have a technological solution. The technology is good. It is easy to understand. It is surprisingly resistant to fraud. And it is inexpensive. Its the paper ballot.

Paper ballots are easy to understand - just put an X in the box next to the appropriate candidates name. I dont find voting machines especially hard to understand, but I do always have to read the instructions on the ones I use, and Im a law professor who works as a sound engineer on the side. So others may find them more confusing than I do. Everyone, on the other hand, can make an X. Paper ballots are surprisingly resistant to fraud. Actually, it shouldnt be that surprising.

A paper ballot encodes lots of useful information besides the obvious. Not only is the information about the vote contained in the form, but also information about the voter. Different colors of ink, different styles of handwriting, etc., make each ballot different. Erasing the original votes is likely to leave a detectable residue. Creating all new ballots with fraudulent votes requires substantial variation among them or the fakery is much more obvious; thats hard work. And destroying the original ballots in order to replace them with fraudulent ones isnt that easy theres a lot of paper to be disposed of, and shredding it, or burning it, or hiding it is comparatively easy to detect. (Protecting the ballots before counting doesnt require fancy encryption, either: just a steel box with a lock, a slot on the top, and a seal.) Whats more, because people are familiar with paper documents, fraud is easy to understand when it occurs. Paper ballots are both robust (resistant to fraud) and transparent (easy to understand).

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