The two halves of my “quote” not only appeared in different sentences in my post, they appeared in different PARAGRAPHS. Retract it or change it.
If a player is offering a draw every move, if he is waiving his hand over the board for a “handshake” while his opponent is on the move, if he is offering a draw multiple times on the SAME move, it is an intentional attempt to annoy the opponent which is against the rules. I have had all of these happen to me in a game.
The above essay is too strained for my tastes. Make the move, offer the draw, press the clock, and expect nothing that the rules don’t require. Get up and take a stretch and check out a nearby game if your sensibilities are so easily damaged. Anything else is fabricating an offense that likely doesn’t exist. I don’t regard it as rude for the player to say nothing when the offer is made. I’ve seen many players sit in total silence after an offer, looking at the board for 5, 10, 15 or more minutes before extending their hand in acceptance. In addition, if the player simply moves rather than “politely” declining the draw, I’m quite satisfied. We’ll play on. Tension results most often when we impose our loose and sloppy views of what’s right on someone else.
Finally, drawing a link between players who respond to a draw offer with silence, to those who let an hour run off their clock rather than resign, is the epitome of tenuous.
There’s one slight problem with that. It requires the player rejecting the draw to manipulate the chip. I think it is important to retain the ability to reject a draw by ignoring it and making a move.
This can be fixed by using two chips instead of one. Actually, lets make them cards, not chips–people are going to fiddle with chips. On side of the card is blank and the other side has words or symbols that indicate a draw offer. Each player has a card, which is normally kept on their side of the table in a place visible to both players, with the blank side face up.
To offer a draw, you turn your card over so that the draw offer side is facing up sometime before you hit the clock to end your turn. (If you turn it AFTER you hit the clock, the draw offer still stands, but this is discouraged since it introduces potential ambiguities. For instance, what if you turn the card just as your opponent moves? Then whether or not his move rejects your draw offer would depend on which came first–your flipping the card or him hitting the clock).
The opponent can accept the draw by any means currently allowed to accept a draw. The opponent can reject the draw by making a move and hitting his clock. If he wants to reject the draw before making his move for some reason, he can reach over and turn your draw card over so the blank side is up. No other forms of rejection are allowed.
If the opponent rejects the draw by moving, then it is your responsibility to turn your draw card so that the blank side is up. This is the only time you are allowed after the game starts to turn your own card from draw offer side up to blank side up. If you do not turn the card over, thus leaving the draw offer side up, the draw is offered again when you move.
Variant: the above could be implemented without the need of special cards. The scoresheets could be used instead. To offer a draw, you make your move on the board, record it on your scoresheet, and then you place the scoresheet on the opponent’s side of the table face up with the bottom toward the opponent (so it is in a position for him to sign), and you punch your clock.
To accept the draw, he stops the clock and signs your scoresheet and give you his to sign. To reject, he moves, and you retrieve your scoresheet.
I see now where all the unnecessary rule tampering comes from: people with too much time on their hands, overthinking situations.
A draw chip? That’s insane. 
I think that Mr. Smith’s idea runs foul of the idea of annoying the opponent. If I have K vs. K+Q then I am happy to accept a draw at any time. I would never bo so rude as to offer one every move, though.
Alex Relyea
Hey, draw chips or cards are not worse than having to play with a clock or other gadget with draw buttons on it! 
If you really want to complicate a system, ask and engineer! If you don’t want it to work well, then you ask a lawyer. 
Actually the draw chip with an = sign seems to be a pretty good idea. What I can’t imagine is getting an irate opponent to sign your scoresheet. I will have to review my new rulebook to see if this is a requirement for regular play these days. What is insane is the hostile attitudes some players bring to the table. Maybe the chip would help. After all it would solve whether the game ended in a draw or not. The player retains the chip until the director records the draw. The director recording draws? Yep…If chess is going to have so little honor why not go full-tilt. In fact, maybe an official wall chart marker could be tasked to record all the results. If no one reports…double forfeits!
It would be rude to offer a draw even once when you have K vs K+Q. Your opponent knows very well you would accept a draw. Don’t insult his intelligence by telling him so.
Most often, it is bad form for the lower-rated player in an even position, or a like-rated player in an inferior position, to offer a draw. In both of those cases, the player’s opponent is very aware that the player would accept a draw, and does not need to be told.
Bill Smythe
In FIDE play, signing the scoresheet is standard and required practice. From the competition rules segment of the Laws of Chess:
In a FIDE event, the player will sign the scoresheet, or s/he will face disciplinary action.
Oh, I completely agree, but there are many players who do not seem to know this, especially younger players. For example, in my play on ICCF, which allows engines, I was playing a two game match against one player who, in each game, offered me a draw when a piece down (no compensation).
An IM recently said to me “Don’t offer a draw unless you think there is a reasonable chance your opponent will accept.”
Alex Relyea
At least a button on the clock gets automatically cleared when the opponent presses the clock.
I agree, Bill, and I personally refrain from asking my higher rated opponent for the draw. I’d hate to see this as a rule, however.
Not even considering the amount of money it would cost an organizer, this draw card/chip deal is really silly. Please remind me, what’s wrong with simply following the current procedures?
People with utopian ideas should really get a life.
Oh, I just thought of a new one, how about a card/chip that offers a resignation to our opponent? Or one which allows the opponent to feel free to resign?
I’ve won games my opponents were sure I should have resigned. Having such an offer refuted would be extremely embarrassing.
He already rejected by moving, so the up draw card on your side is no longer a draw offer.
To make it clearer, though, the rule should be that if your opponent turns up his draw card and you wish to accept the offer before waiting to see his move, you must stop the clock.
Of course, that doesn’t prevent this:
However, that same hole exists in the current rules:
Unless there was a witness, it will be your word against his both the draw card scenario and under the current rules, unless he wrote down his move before changing his mind, or unless the TD trusts the move counter on the clock (and it was on and set properly).
The “card” or “chip” idea, like most utopian ideas, is half-baked. Bake it thoroughly by making it a clock feature.
Bill Smythe
To continue the bakery analogy, isn’t that a bit pie-in-the-sky? Unlike the situation with delay clocks where there already existed electronic clocks, no new buttons were required to implement delay and there was already at least some rudimentary idea of what the rules would be for delay clocks once they did exist, this would require probably two additional buttons and two additional LED’s. Plus there’s no consensus that it’s really needed, and no rules as to how it would be used. Who wants to spend their time thinking about rules governing the operation of a device which might never exist? (Yes, that’s rhetorical.)
Of course, my “chip” or another’s card idea was facetious. It was a response to the equally silly idea of wasting time, energy, and money on a clock with special bells and whistles to offer a draw. The present procedure for offering and/or accepting a draw is as streamlined as it is going to get.
As to who is allowed to offer a draw, how snobbish of some to think that a lower rated player may not offer a higher rated player a draw. Having had such offers being made to me, in the vast majority of cases, the player offering it was correct to do so as the positions had little life in them or were “book” draws. Trying to continue to grind out a win in the face of a simple defense, playing “hope chess” that the lower rated players will make a mistake, are mistakes that often lead to losses by the player rejecting the offer. More usual is the higher rated player who offers a draw when he knows he has a poor position and tries to use his rating as an intimidating device to get a draw. Players often jump at this chance to get the draw since they are not absolutely sure of their technique and will take the few rating points in hand rather than play for the win.
I do not make draw offers; most players wontI only offer draws under these conditions:
1 I sense that my oppomenet is as afraid of losing as I am.
2, it is really a dead draw
That would be ideal (on the assumption we need a non-verbal protocol, which I’m taking as given for the sake of discussion), but it would be a hard sell to the clock makers. Since it would require one or more new buttons on the clock, it is not just a matter of updating the clock firmware. It would require changing the physical design of the clock to accommodate the new buttons. There should also be something to indicate the presence of a draw offer and which player offered it. For designs like Chronos and ZmartFun, which just use standard seven segment displays, the draw indicators could probably just be new LEDs on top, which would be cheap. For the DGT clocks, and the other clocks with custom LCD displays, they would have to design new LCD panels. Although the marginal cost of the new panels would be the same as the marginal cost of their existing panels, there would be up front costs to set up manufacturing of the new layout.
I doubt any clock maker will do this unless some major federation makes it a requirement, or at least officially makes such a mechanism a legal option and specifies a standard way for it to work.
The idea with the card solution is that it could actually be done easily and cheaply, and would actually work reasonably well. Heck, a tournament might even be able to make it slightly profitable by selling ad space on the non-draw side of the card to local businesses.
As far as clocks go, yes, this is something that should eventually go into them, along with several other things, such as a standard way to set time controls from an external source (such as scanning a QR code), and a standard way for a TD to make corrections without having to be familiar with the particular clock or rely on the owner to do so.
To push clocks in this direction, I think the USCF should design a reference clock. Design it for Arduino hardware and make the schematics available, and make the firmware available for free under an open source license, so that any clock maker that wants to use it, either whole or just in part, can. No need to design the clock case or the lever hardware or an LCD panel–all that is up to anyone who wants to take the USCF reference and use it to build a real clock.