Shafe said:

One point on the voting machine. You can’t give a receipt to voters showing how they cast their votes. Part of the reason for casting secret ballots is not just to protect the voter from retaliation for making the “wrong” vote, but to prevent the voter from being able to prove to a vote-buyer that he/she voted in a given way.

Here is a simplistic version of the argument, but the point is valid. If a politician wants to buy my vote, he can require me to show him my voter receipt as a condition of payment. To him, the value of paying for my vote is high, because he can be assured that he’s getting the vote he is paying for. If there are no voter receipts then I cannot prove to a politician that I actually voted for him. Thus, the value of a vote-buying effort is substantially reduced.

The current system with no receipts discourages direct vote-buying, because a politician can never know that he’s getting what he’s paying for.

That’s a good point. That one feature may be something that is not such a good idea. My thought on it was that it would prevent people (I was thinking mostly old people) from suddenly going nuts if they started to think that they might remember having pushed the wrong button.

So yeah, receipts might be out, although these days it’s not like there aren’t other potential ways of doing it. A person could video themselves voting with their cell phone or something.

Here is a simplistic version of the argument, but the point is valid. If a politician wants to buy my vote, he can require me to show him my voter receipt as a condition of payment. To him, the value of paying for my vote is high, because he can be assured that he’s getting the vote he is paying for. If there are no voter receipts then I cannot prove to a politician that I actually voted for him. Thus, the value of a vote-buying effort is substantially reduced.

The current system with no receipts discourages direct vote-buying, because a politician can never know that he’s getting what he’s paying for.

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No, you really can’t be “perfect” because as long as the electoral commission doesn’t allow each and every person to personally count the votes, there has to be some trust that the government isn’t completely conspiring to rig every machine and cover it up.

But it ends up working a lot better than the machines commonly used now. In my town, for example, a flick a switch in a booth which turns a cog on an old-fashioned numeric dial that is viewed when the machine is opened. There’s no way I can ever know if the person reading it is honest or if the machine has not malfunctioned.