Will the paper trail ever go away?

[US71]

Paper ballots can be tampered with as well.

Let's say there's 6 different offices up for grabs in an election.  Voter takes his ballot, votes on 2 of them, and ignores the rest (happens all the time: rarely do the total votes add up to the same for all potential offices).  Someone can later take that ballot and "vote" for someone for those other offices. Ballot looks legit, and the actual voter has no proof he did or did not vote for all 6 offices.

Yes, undetectable tampering can happen with paper ballots, but even in that case, if there's a strong suspicion that one of the workers went and cocked up the ballots, it may even be possible to detect due to pens not being perfectly equal, filling-in patterns, or something. At the very least, a landslide for a downballot candidate that is only found on a recount (since they'd have to be filled in after the polling-place scanning) would be cause to declare the results invalid and redo the voting with more controls in place.

Now picture the same thing happening with electronic voting. How many checks are not available because of the lack of paper trail?

Didn't Diebold suggest a few years ago that they could manipulate their voting machines to create the outcome they wanted?

[Stephane Dumas]

You can't use the Ipad for everything, you still need the paper for one thing.

[Brandon]

You can't use the Ipad for everything, you still need the paper for one thing.

That's what the three shells are for. 

[riiga]

Probably not in the near future. Certain legally binding documents and stuff that needs archiving will want to stay on paper rather than go digital, since paper can stand the test of time much better than digital media.

Also, when voting having a paper trail is important. Despite talks of e-democracy and electronic voting we still do paper ballots here in Sweden, and all counting of votes, etc is done manually and open to the public. Personally I'm not a fan of electronic voting since it would be impossible to verify all hardware or software used, thus not guaranteeing my vote has been properly cast, as opposed to seeing my name being crossed off a list and my vote put in the ballot box which is visibly sealed.

[vdeane]

Let's take voting for example.  There is no reason a voting machine can't be made secure... but it would require several design/development changes from what we have now.  First, the firmware should be on a separate chip that cannot be written to for any reason; firmware updates would require replacing the chip.  Further, both the chip the memory for storing vote counts (where each vote should be read-only upon being cast) should be in a locked compartment within the machine.  Finally, the machine would not allow any form of user input beyond casting ballots.  Votes would be counted by inserting a card into the machine, after which it would either display the totals, or send the results to a centralized device via a custom-built network protocol that allows the machines to send the counts while receiving no incoming network packets of any kind (not even an IP address).  The counting machine would be similarly secured to only receive counts from genuine voting machines and display the totals.  Additionally, the software and hardware would undergo rigorous review and security audits from a non-partisan organization before being deployed.

There's still a single point of failure. With paper ballots, you can always go in after the fact and do a recount from the start. Destroying paper is likely enough to leave some sort of physical trace to make the assclowns think twice. With a computer, it may be difficult to cock up the vote, but it's still possible and would be much more likely to leave no trace.

I supposed you'd want to ensure that the chip/drive the data is one has a special connector so that it couldn't be plugged in to a general computer.  If the votes can be hardware-locked as read-only once written, even better.

I'm sure there's refinements to be made to my idea.  It's not like I spent more than 15 minutes on it.

Paper ballots can be tampered with as well.

Let's say there's 6 different offices up for grabs in an election.  Voter takes his ballot, votes on 2 of them, and ignores the rest (happens all the time: rarely do the total votes add up to the same for all potential offices).  Someone can later take that ballot and "vote" for someone for those other offices. Ballot looks legit, and the actual voter has no proof he did or did not vote for all 6 offices.

Yes, undetectable tampering can happen with paper ballots, but even in that case, if there's a strong suspicion that one of the workers went and cocked up the ballots, it may even be possible to detect due to pens not being perfectly equal, filling-in patterns, or something. At the very least, a landslide for a downballot candidate that is only found on a recount (since they'd have to be filled in after the polling-place scanning) would be cause to declare the results invalid and redo the voting with more controls in place.

Now picture the same thing happening with electronic voting. How many checks are not available because of the lack of paper trail?

Didn't Diebold suggest a few years ago that they could manipulate their voting machines to create the outcome they wanted?

I have no confidence that Diebold can design something truly secure.  Most companies probably can't.  The paradigms followed today are the inverse of what is needed.  In order to have security, you need to follow the UNIX paradigm - the device/software does only one thing, but it does it very well.  These days, we like to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, and then wonder why there a million ways for hackers to get in.

[NE2]

You can't use the Ipad for everything, you still need the paper for one thing.

That's what the three shells are for. 

Dumas doesn't know how to use the three seashells!

[triplemultiplex]

I can't wait to say 'good riddance' to pointless paper copies of stuff.  What a waste of energy.
There should be no need for me to scribble my name on a piece of paper after I pay for something 'electronically'.

[vdeane]

I can't wait to say 'good riddance' to pointless paper copies of stuff.  What a waste of energy.
There should be no need for me to scribble my name on a piece of paper after I pay for something 'electronically'.

+1000  I hate it was I have a paper copy that I don't need, especially if it's something that has personal information that needs to be shredded (I don't have a shredder, so I'd need to keep in on my desks for a couple months until my next family gathering, take it to the other side of the state, and put it in Mom's to-shred pile).

[Laura]

I can't wait to say 'good riddance' to pointless paper copies of stuff.  What a waste of energy.
There should be no need for me to scribble my name on a piece of paper after I pay for something 'electronically'.

+1000  I hate it was I have a paper copy that I don't need, especially if it's something that has personal information that needs to be shredded (I don't have a shredder, so I'd need to keep in on my desks for a couple months until my next family gathering, take it to the other side of the state, and put it in Mom's to-shred pile).

Yes! I wish places would stop giving me receipts for things as a default, especially for non-returnable products! I end up with tons of pointless receipts and I just want them to all go away (did anyone really think I would be returning that 20 oz coke?) Most places have my email anyway for their point reward programs - why not just automatically send me a receipt to that email address?

[Pete from Boston]

I find signing paper no worse than signing a touch-pad with a stylus.  I am comfortable declining a receipt if I don't want it.

Shredders are super cheap, btw, if tossing a piece of paper with 1/4 of your credit card number on it gets under your skin.

What would restaurants do without paper slips?  Require an investment in some kind of device for each server to carry?  Seems excessive for small businesses, just to appease the rare customer that's going to get upset over the burden of 18in² of paper.

Finally, what do you do about cash transactions?  Cash is not going away anytime soon, and it too often requires a record. 

[vdeane]

Pertinent to this thread: the NYSDOT annual Local Highway Inventory requires that the regions each mail packets to each county/municipality, which they then return to NYSDOT with a signed certification or any needed changes.  Each packet contains a cover letter, the directions, the "new or extended roads" template, the annual certification of local highway mileage sheet that needs to be signed, and the draft inventory for the county/municipality (which can range from one page for a rural village to more than 30 pages for even a small/medium sized city).  Region 1 is mailing out 164 of these this week.

I can't wait to say 'good riddance' to pointless paper copies of stuff.  What a waste of energy.
There should be no need for me to scribble my name on a piece of paper after I pay for something 'electronically'.

+1000  I hate it was I have a paper copy that I don't need, especially if it's something that has personal information that needs to be shredded (I don't have a shredder, so I'd need to keep in on my desks for a couple months until my next family gathering, take it to the other side of the state, and put it in Mom's to-shred pile).

Yes! I wish places would stop giving me receipts for things as a default, especially for non-returnable products! I end up with tons of pointless receipts and I just want them to all go away (did anyone really think I would be returning that 20 oz coke?) Most places have my email anyway for their point reward programs - why not just automatically send me a receipt to that email address?

I usually just throw out receipts.  But one time I paid something by check, and instead of filing it in the cash register, they scanned it to process electronically and handed it back to me  What's the point of paying by check if they're just going to hand it back to me to leave on my desk until the next time I'm near a shredder?  I was trying to get rid of checks, but now I just use my credit card there.

What's comical is that, in order to deposit or withdraw money from the bank, I have to fill out a slip, which the teller than types into the computer.  I don't know what they do with the slip; probably put it in a bin to be shredded.

Clarkson still does the housing lottery by forcing everyone to come down to the hockey arena, get called up by number (which has its own paper binder, since they call students in groups of 50 and then organize them into a line), and have the residence life staff record where they'll be living next year in their paper inventory, even though the computer can (and does) do everything; they literally have an entire electronic record whose only purpose is to let students see where they're be living on the intranet while they use the redundant paper record for everything.

I find signing paper no worse than signing a touch-pad with a stylus.  I am comfortable declining a receipt if I don't want it.

Shredders are super cheap, btw, if tossing a piece of paper with 1/4 of your credit card number on it gets under your skin.

What would restaurants do without paper slips?  Require an investment in some kind of device for each server to carry?  Seems excessive for small businesses, just to appease the rare customer that's going to get upset over the burden of 18in² of paper.

Finally, what do you do about cash transactions?  Cash is not going away anytime soon, and it too often requires a record. 

In places with chip-and-pin credit cards, the restaurant has you enter a tip percent into the payment machine (which is brought to the table when the people are ready to pay) when you swipe your card, so the paper isn't needed there.  Businesses do retain receipts even when the customer declines to take one.

I don't care about putting regular receipts in the recycle bin, but once in a blue moon I get something that I have no need to retain but needs to be shredded (like when Experian refused to send me an electronic copy of my credit report simply because they didn't have my current address and mailed on instead, even though I could then retrieve an electronic copy from their website once the paper one arrived - they could have just given me the report number (or whatever it's called) that was needed over the phone; or bank transaction receipts, which showed my full account number prior to First Niagara buying out the HSBC branches in NY).

[Pete from Boston]

In the past couple of years I've found many more cashiers giving a receipt only if I answer "yes" when they ask if I want one. 

I really wish this process applied to the FAR bigger nuisance, PLASTIC BAGS.  The 2x2x4 box of Advil is always in a CVS bag that can hold thirty of them before I look up from the pin pad, and half the times I say it's not necessary, they then throw the bag away!  I'd take six receipts at every transaction* if it meant doing away with this stupid giant waste.


* Which is sort of what happens at CVS already, now that I think about it.

[1995hoo]

Regarding receipts, one of our banks offers the option of having the ATM e-mail you a receipt, but the option isn't available if you want a receipt with an image of the check you just deposited. Since that's my most frequent transaction at that bank (I use the account there primarily to pay bills through online bill payment), I wind up getting paper receipts because I do want to have some evidence until the deposit has posted. I don't understand why it won't e-mail you the check image. The routing and account numbers are redacted even on the printed receipt, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Yes, I sometimes use mobile check deposit via my phone or iPad, but not always. Deposits at the ATM sometimes post faster, and if the check has garbled handwriting I'd rather just stick it in the ATM so if they want to verify it they already have it and the deposit will post sooner instead of making me go stick the check in an ATM anyway. Other thing is, I've found rebate checks often get rejected by the mobile deposit system, especially if the sender put my address on the back side. It confuses the system for some reason.

(I still wish more places would offer rebates via PayPal, like Staples does. Heck, for certain rebates I'd give bank account info to get a direct deposit. I'm waiting on a $1,025 rebate from Carrier on our new HVAC system right now. It's supposed to come on a debit card. I'd take a direct deposit instead in a heartbeat, especially because it'd eliminate the risk of it getting lost or stolen in the mail.)

[kkt]

I try to avoid stores where the only way to get sale prices is to sign up for spam, so no emailed receipts for me.

Having the image of the checks I deposit available on online banking would be nice, that would significantly reduce my recordkeeping time.

[DeaconG]

Trust me; Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon and Epson aren't going to see their printer businesses going away by any means for a long, long time.

Is that day coming? Eventually...but not any time soon.

[Duke87]

Also, when voting having a paper trail is important. Despite talks of e-democracy and electronic voting we still do paper ballots here in Sweden, and all counting of votes, etc is done manually and open to the public. Personally I'm not a fan of electronic voting since it would be impossible to verify all hardware or software used, thus not guaranteeing my vote has been properly cast, as opposed to seeing my name being crossed off a list and my vote put in the ballot box which is visibly sealed.

An interesting philosophy. The US has made a lot of efforts to use more modern technology in voting after the fiasco that punchcard paper ballots caused in our 2000 presidential election. Manual counting of ballots has been mostly done away with since the general opinion is that manual counting enables funny business or even simply mistakes where computers are impartial and more accurate. When I vote I fill out bubbles on a scantron sheet. I then personally feed the sheet into the machine that reads it, and my vote is counted by the scanner. It's a very smooth process.

Of course it also makes a difference that US elections are generally more cumbersome than those in other countries. In a parliamentary system, elections at various levels of government happen at different points in time, and with the party-oriented system generally you're really only casting one vote at a time. Elections in the US all happen on the same day, whenever I vote I might be voting for a dozen different people for a dozen different positions all on the same ballot. Counting that manually is complicated because you can't just sort ballot sheets into piles.

[vdeane]

Yeah, paper ballots don't necessarily eliminate fraud.  Anyone remember Florida in 2000?  Each side had a different position on what to count - allegedly to have "the most accurate count possible".  I suppose it's just a coincidence that the Democrats wanted to count anything that wasn't blank in the democratically leaning counties whereas the Republicans wanted to void anything that wasn't perfect.

[Pete from Boston]

Redundancy is one thing a paper trail creates–a backup.  Efficiency, it should be noted, isn't often the partner of democracy, but this has always been an understood tradeoff.

[PHLBOS]

Trust me; Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon and Epson aren't going to see their printer businesses going away by any means for a long, long time.

Is that day coming? Eventually...but not any time soon.

Many copiers/printers now have the capability to create scanned PDFs.

[Duke87]

Trust me; Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon and Epson aren't going to see their printer businesses going away by any means for a long, long time.

Is that day coming? Eventually...but not any time soon.

Many copiers/printers now have the capability to create scanned PDFs.

Indeed. We have a fax machine at my office which some customers still use. Anything that gets faxed to us gets scanned to pdf and then the paper copy is discarded. I've wondered why we can't just make the fax machine itself print directly to pdf. Would save time, paper, and ink.

[Roadrunner75]

Trust me; Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon and Epson aren't going to see their printer businesses going away by any means for a long, long time.

Is that day coming? Eventually...but not any time soon.

Many copiers/printers now have the capability to create scanned PDFs.

Indeed. We have a fax machine at my office which some customers still use. Anything that gets faxed to us gets scanned to pdf and then the paper copy is discarded. I've wondered why we can't just make the fax machine itself print directly to pdf. Would save time, paper, and ink.

Our company dropped the traditional fax machine altogether.  We signed up for an online fax service, where our fax number is now ported.  When a fax comes in (which is rare), the online service emails it as a PDF to our admin who distributes it accordingly.  For outgoing faxes (even rarer), we login to the fax site and upload it as a PDF. 

[Scott5114]

Most copiers these days are just a scanner that holds an image in memory while it prints it. That's why most office copiers also have scanner and printer functions.

Faxes are useless these days. Anything I need to fax for business purposes I ask if I can just scan and email and usually it's not a problem. The only place I could see myself being forced to fax to is a government office that doesn't care if you're happy with them or not.

[jeffandnicole]

I work in a government office, and we would all prefer scanning. It's actually the banks that require us to fax! And I'm not talking about bank branches, but rather the back offices that deal with government and institutional accounts. They claim scanning isn't secure unless it comes from a secured email account. Yet, most of the banks get scans and faxes the same way: via a program that displays it on their computer screen.

So next time you think government offices are decades behind everyone else (and yeah, some are), take a look at the banking systems. It's downright aggravating.

[vdeane]

The bank might have a point depending on what they need scanned.  Emails are sent in plain text with no encryption; anyone with the ability to sniff the traffic can read them.  That's how the NSA does it.  Perhaps someone should tell the bank about password-protected zip files.

Verizon once required me to fax them my social security number to set up my internet at my new address.  I was never able to figure out why they weren't able to query my credit report.

[Pete from Boston]

The bank might have a point depending on what they need scanned.  Emails are sent in plain text with no encryption; anyone with the ability to sniff the traffic can read them.  That's how the NSA does it.  Perhaps someone should tell the bank about password-protected zip files.

Verizon once required me to fax them my social security number to set up my internet at my new address.  I was never able to figure out why they weren't able to query my credit report.

I have had to send medical paperwork this way.  Perhaps it was for these reasons.