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Lawmakers reach across aisle to seek return to paper ballots
By Rachel Pittman | Nov 16, 2018
Voters in the 2018 midterm elections in South Carolina cast their ballots on machines that are nearly 15 years old, and many voters reported issues with the machinery.
In this year's midterm elections, many South Carolina voters reported issues with the state's nearly 15-year-old voting machines. A bipartisan group of state legislators is working to remedy the situation — and not by updating technology.
"Because this election had record turnout and there were some issues that happened in our major counties, that it's important that the voters have confidence and trust in our election process," Rep. Beth Bernstein, D-Richland, said. "Based upon my research and the opinions of national experts, it is recommended that we go to a paper ballot system."
Bernstein is one of four S.C. House and Senate legislators who are pre-filing bills next month that will suggest switching to paper or mail-in ballots to vote.
According to Ballotpedia, South Carolina is one of five states that uses only voting machines. With this system, the state lacks a paper trail for its voting operations.
"I would prefer a machine with a paper trail," Rokey Suleman, director of Richland County Voter Registration, said. "I would prefer a ballot that the voter marks themselves like our absentee ballots."
Proponents of the idea of returning to paper ballots also cite the simplicity of the system as one of its benefits.
With a paper ballot, all the voter needs is the ballot itself, a writing utensil and a private place to cast a vote. This system would also be an effective way to increase polling place capacity during times of larger voter turnout.
"If you have an extraordinary number of people coming to a poll you could actually set up stations," Bernstein said. "You could just get cardboard partitions. It could be easily done to accommodate a larger crowd."
While the S.C. Voter's Commission has requested $60 million from the state to replace the 13,000 voting machines that the state purchased in 2004, Bernstein and the other legislators advocating for paper ballots are planning to prepare a supplementary appropriations bill that would go to the Senate Finance or House Ways and Means committees for funding.
In the end, Bernstein, Suleman and others in the state feel that there is a need for an overhaul of the election process in South Carolina, either paper ballots or new machines.
"I'm not wedded to one method over another," Bernstein said. "But while we're not, thankfully, a Florida or a Georgia, we do need to recognize that we've got to update."
Rep. Beth Bernstein, D-Richland, is one of four legislators who believe a return to paper ballots could be a way to improve South Carolina's election process.
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Rachel Pittman
A native of Atlanta, Rachel Pittman has acted as arts editor for The Daily Gamecock, fiction editor for The Lettered Olive and arts contributor for the Free Times Columbia, covering local visual art and dance. She also worked as a reporting intern for Atlanta Magazine and the Forsyth County News. Additionally, she has held marketing roles with the Nickelodeon Theatre and Richland County School District One.


Given a set S of n d-dimensional points, the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) is the problem of quickly finding k points in S that are nearest to a query point q.
The k-nearest neighbors problem has applications in machine learning for classifications and regression and also in searching.
The secure version of kNN where either q or S are encrypted, has applications such as providing services over sensitive (such as medical or localization) data.
In this work we present a scalable and efficient algorithm for solving kNN with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
The efficiency stems from the fact that it is realized by a polynomial whose degree is independent of n, the number of points, or d the dimension.
We implemented our algorithm based on HELib implementation for the Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanthan's FHE scheme, and ran experiments on a standard server.
Our algorithm computes the set of k=13 nearest points to a query point q for databases with more than a thousand points in close to half an hour, compared to several hours via existing approaches.
Our result introduces a statistical coreset, which is a data summarization technique that allows sums such as moments to be efficiently and scalably approximated. As a central tool, we design a new coin toss technique which we use to build the coreset. This coin toss technique and computation of moments may be of independent interest.
Bio: Hayim Shaul is a postdoc in MIT working with Daniela Rus. His research interests are in building efficient secure systems. Prior to being a postdoc Hayim did his PhD in computational geometry in Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Micha Sharir.