If an election isn't auditable then it isn't legitimate.
It is 2021, 2% of programmers could write the entire election system in a week. We have the bandwidth, the laws, the physical technology to do it easily. The only reason not to do it is corruption of some sort, either to cast doubt on the process or to change the outcome.
edit: i don't have an answer to your question, but my point is that tracking the fraud is just a distraction and doesn't really matter.
Vote count redundancy.
If we had like five scanners at all polling stations where all interested parties ran their own individual scanning systems it would be VERY hard to rig elections. All interested parties would have to be in on it and their individual systems synchronized / hacked (if even hackable).
I actually have a list of requirements:
- in-person with state issued id or notarized mail-in in very few cases like out of country.
- ballot is paper, filled out, and scanned.
- scan can be verified by voter on private screen
- scans are hashed and the hash is recorded
- voter verifies that the count increases
- ballot is placed in locked box where any number of people can add locks/tamper proof mech
- at some specific time the polling is closed
- all scans are released online
- official counting could not begin until scans are released
- if a scan is not online it does not count
- hash of all images are released for lower bandwidth verifications
If we did this any researchers could study the images and process them using ai or whatever. any discrepancies could be argued in public since everyone has the images. There could be no "2am drops" or any other shenanigans since counting wouldn't even begin until the images are released.
There could be things added to this, like a physical distribution of images via usb drives (or whatever) to people who are willing to go to polling place at close time.
scan can be verified by voter on private screen
Can say one thing but do another
voter verifies that the count increases
Same
ballot is placed in locked box where any number of people can add locks/tamper proof mech
They don’t care to maintain these
at some specific time the polling is closed
Important, no new ballots should be allowed to enter the room after a certain time. However this isn’t even really needed under my suggestion as the person providing the ballot has to be doing so in person, at the time it’s counted / scanned.
all scans are released online
If not done real time then it doesn’t matter. Even then if you’re trusting one single party to do this, which my suggestion explicitly forbids, then it doesn’t matter even if it’s real time.
official counting could not begin until scans are released
Doesn’t matter they’d have it precounted / corrected before officially starting.
if a scan is not online it does not count
In my suggestion at least one of the redundancy counter tables has to scan directly to the net real time.
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