Toddlers love stickers, whether from the doctor, barber, banker, or anyone.  However, when paying the doctor or barber, their parents don’t receive an “I PAID” sticker—they get a receipt.

Similarly, when adults make a bank deposit they don’t receive an “I DEPOSITED” sticker.  They do receive a bank receipt showing details such as the date, time, account number, teller, cash or check, and the amount deposited.  Before even leaving the bank, they can log into their account, see the deposit, and validate the new balance.  If the deposit was a check, they can see the scanned image.

This technology has been available for quite a while.  Yet when adults vote, they exit their voting location with an “I VOTED” sticker.  Then, like a proud child, they walk around displaying the performance of their civic duty.  Later that day, they may go online to the Secretary of State’s website to validate they voted.

Who would accept online banking if the only information provided were the words “DEPOSIT” and “WITHDRAWAL”?

In order to improve public trust in the election process, the citizenry must receive a receipt for their vote, all ballots must be available to the public for review online and free of charge, and the secret counting must stop. Every citizen must be able to validate that their vote was recorded correctly, and every citizen should be a potential vote counter and auditor of the election results.

The vote receipt should show, in plain English, all the selections made for offices and initiatives.  There is no need for a separate section of custom machine-readable information.  This is nonsense!  It’s 2024—machines can accurately read the same plain English text on the ballot that humans read.  If the voting machine can’t, then fire the vendors and get different machines.

At polling stations, even if machines are used to record votes, the machine must print two identical ballots.  This would work similar to a restaurant cash register, which records the transaction and generates two paper copy receipts—one for the establishment and one for the patron.  For voting, one printed ballot receipt would be kept by the state, and the other would be for the voter.  Essentially, this creates two sets of auditable paper records: one owned by the state and the other owned by the people.

Finally, there needs to be a unique barcode and Quick Response (QR) code on each ballot receipt.  This would allow voters to connect to the Secretary of State's website and view their specific ballot record, confirming not only that their vote was recorded, but that it was recorded correctly.

There are those who don’t like the thought of any votes being placed online and are strong believers in paper-only ballots. I agree paper ballots should have primacy over all other methods.  That’s why, even if a machine is used to assist and record the votes, the machine MUST also produce two identical paper ballots (again, just like a cash register).

As an example, I voted on Saturday.  I stood at a machine to record my votes, and when I finished, the machine printed a single ballot, which I inspected.  On the printed ballot, I could read all of my selections.  On the top of the ballot were black marks—gibberish that no human being could possibly read, and that was my actual vote.  I placed my ballot in an envelope, dropped it into a secure box in the voting area, and left with…nothing.

How hard is it to print a second copy of the ballot for the voter?

As every ballot is scanned and counted, the choices—the individual voting records—should be updated on the Secretary of State’s online database. Citizens should be able to download all the barcoded individual ballot records into a table format (e.g., CSV, XLSX), sort the votes by candidate, and determine for themselves who’s winning.  Citizens should also be able to view the actual scanned ballots.

It would also be possible for citizens to compare downloads with different timestamps.  These snapshots in time would make it nearly impossible to secretly flip any votes, since someone will catch it.  Meanwhile, if even one vote was reportedly changed, this would automatically require a review of that paper ballot and a notification to every citizen to go back online and re-validate that their vote was recorded properly.

With today’s technology, the fact that American citizens must wait for the state to count the votes in secret and then post only the rollup results is appallingly unnecessary.  In addition, because we have one major political party, the Democrat party, that insists on passing laws that reduce the security and integrity of our elections, incentivize cheating, and often refuses to prosecute their allies for breaking the law, it is absolutely essential that the people have the ability to count the votes themselves.

We have secret ballots for a reason: they protect the people that vote.  We also have secret counting for a reason: it protects the people counting the votes.  But the counters don’t need protection—they need oversight.

If the local polling stations still want to hand out stickers, that’s fine.  I’ll take some with Bluey on them for my three-year-old grandchild.  But only after receiving my vote receipt.

Charlie Rose recently retired after working over 30 years for the United States Army. He’s currently touring Great Britain.

Image: Public domain.