Slashdot Mirror

About 1-3% of all votes aren't counted. Given this election is around 0.15% different in the absolute vote totals - how can you say who got more votes?

From the link you supplied:

On average, 1-3 percent of mail ballots cast by California voters do not get counted. The top reasons why mail ballots are rejected are because they arrive too late, or the voter forgot to sign the mail ballot envelope, or the signature on the envelope did not sufficiently match the voter's signature on file. If you vote by mail be sure to return your ballot on time, and to sign the envelope the same way you registered to vote. If you registered online, check your driver's license signature as this is the one that will be used for verification.

All votes legally cast in California are counted, regardless of whether they were cast at the polling place or submitted through the vote by mail process. It may take a little longer to incorporate all of the vote-by-mail votes into the final election results, but they are all counted.

About 1-3% of all votes aren't counted. Given this election is around 0.15% different in the absolute vote totals - how can you say who got more votes?

Here's a table of what each county uses.
http://www.calvoter.org/issues/votingtech/currentd irectory.html

The Diebold Accuvote-OS is what I was talking about above (optical scanner): http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_os.htm

I agree with a lot of these ideas. This is what we did in San Diego county, CA, which I thought did a pretty good job (as opposed to the problems that we had with electronic voting machines in the march primary).

1) Optical scan ballots. Scantron style. Verifiable. The absentee ballots were identical to the normal ones, (is this normal?) and although very long, very very straightforward. We in california had about 60 things to vote on this year.

2) Although I cannot find reference for this, I was told that there is a 1% recount- 1% of all ballots are recounted manually to make sure that the machines agree with reality.

3) well, of course we still have the problems with provisional ballots, not a holiday,etc., but you can do early voting, and is quite easy to get an absentee ballot. In fact, some candidates mailed out a postpaid absentee ballot request form to you, that was already filled out with your name, address, etc. All you had to do was sign it, and drop it in the mail, then you got your absentee ballot. An excellent idea for a campaign.

3) Unfortunately, this situation is going to change- we're apparently going to go back to the pure electronic systems once they are "certified". However I like this system better. Hopefully other people will agree, now that they have used it.

4) Something interesting that happened in san diego specifically: The mayoral race became very interesting. In march, we had a primary, choosing between which of the 3, mid fifties, white moderate republicans that we wanted for mayor. Up until about 6 weeks ago, we had to choose between 2 of them, and they were splitting the vote nrealy 50-50. Neither of them was that popular, and there are currently a lot of scandals going on at city hall (i.e. we underfunded the pension system by 1.2 $Billion (with a B). So, a very popular city council member who had the lone vote in city council meetings to fix the pension system decided to run as write in. And it looks like she will win. One advantage of the optical ballot- you already have a pen and paper in your hand, with which to wrote someone in... The final vote: 35%, 34%, 31%. Note that the 35% is the total "write in"- they're still counting the ballots and are about halfway through.

Here's a pre-election article about the race. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/cities /20041018-9999-1m18mayor.html

Current results: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/cities /20041110-9999-6m10work.html
Another interesting website: http://calvoter.org/
The California Voter Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization promoting and applying the responsible use of technology to improve the democratic process.

Here's the Iowa policy, which tries to limit perimeter and to encourage existing borders rather than arbitrary ones. I'm sure there are arguments to be made against some of it, but the overall thrust seems very sensible. I used to live in the 33rd District in California in that little neck connecting the main, heavily-black part in the west with the Latino region on the east, and know what it's like to have your neighborhood simply not count.

Kim Alexander is actually a major opponent of e-voting without a paper trail. So, to give the League credit, they've invited a speaker who disagrees with their own position on this issue. Check out http://www.calvoter.org - Ben

I believe that Arnold was voted in before Diebold was introduced in March of this year. As I remember it was good old fashioned punch cards.

Here is the March 2004 voter's guide, which will show any of the votes that may have been affected.

It does NOT mean (necessitate) paper audit trails, and this goal is much more easily solved by a purely electronic system anyway.

The audit trail must be fixed in some media. Are you suggesting burning everyone a CD-ROM of their vote?

You slashdotters have this incredible tendency to latch onto an idea without bothering to express concrete reasoning behind it.

Many experts have explained their call for voter verified paper audit trails:

Currently, paper is the most widely used and understood medium for protecting valuable documents and verifying important transactions, such as those dealing with money, property and legal matters. If the permanent ballot record exists in an electronic, rather than paper format, the electronic record can be easily altered after it has been cast and therefore is not permanent. No audit medium is tamper-proof, but a paper audit trail is more permanent and transparent than a digital audit trail that depends on software not readily apparent or understandable to stakeholders, particularly voters.

Various technologies have been proposed to meet this requirement, but to date only one has been used in elections: a paper ballot marked with the voter's votes (including contests not voted), in plain language understandable to the voter. Unless and until a technology is developed that offers equal or superior security at an equal or superior price, CPSR strongly advocates that the votes of every voter be recorded in plain language on paper at the time that the vote is cast, and that the paper ballot be retained in ballot boxes and treated as an official elections document. All DREs should produce a paper ballot that may be inspected by the voter prior to completing the voting act.

* Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the voter can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated. Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result. There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system.

You have yet to explain your reasoning.

Do you work for Diebold or something?

Alameda and Plumas use the Diebold Accu-Vote Touch Screen system. Fresno, Humboldt, Lassen, Marin, Modoc, Placer, Plumas, San Luis Opisbo, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Siskiyou, Trinity, and Tulare use Diebold optical scanners.

Riverside and Shasta use a non-Diebold touch screen system.

7 counties (San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Solano, Sacremento, Sierra, and Mendocino) use punch card ballots.
Source

The security reason was that the ballots had been left unattended, and there was no guarantee that they were not infected by anthrax. No really! That was the excuse given by the election department head, personally appointed by the mayor, of course.

Whatever San Francisco may have been in the past, it is now a highly corrupt conservative little city of hate. Though I kinda like it here...

Actually, I agree with you that my post up there probably wasn't worthy of a 4. A 3, tops. I don't generally follow campaign finance - which is why I asked if there was a connection between any Ellison-funded PACs and the Davis campaign. I figured someone would point me in the right direction - thanks for finding the info. As you point out, Oracle/Ellison doesn't show up in the top 25.)

As for bias, sure, I'm biased. I believe that Davis views his time as Governor of California as nothing more than a fundraising venue for an upcoming Presidential bid. I believe that's wrong from the point of view of providing sound management to Californians.

I further believe that when a politician starts to blather about how "the rich" aren't paying "their fair share", that they're looking to jack up taxes on the middle class to spend on their own pet projects.

In 1999 we reached at the point, federally, where the bottom 50% of the income curve pays 4% of the taxes, yet can outvote the top 50% of the income curve footing the other 96% of the bill. I believe that to be a recipe for long-term disaster for prudent fiscal policy - regardless of the party in power.

Finally, I believe that Davis' track record of mismanagement (MTBE will save the environment, bring it in! No, MTBE is bad, take it out! Each time, gouging oil companies for campaign funds with threatened legislation. Big power companies are gouging you! Let's sign long-term contracts that'll bankrupt us! No, that'll bankrupt them! No, let's bail 'em out!) speaks for itself.

I admire and respect Davis' skills as a master fundraiser and shrewd politician. His attacks on Riordan in the Republican primaries have given him a much easier opponent, as he can characterize Simon as "a millionaire", which rings very strongly as "an evil person" with his voting base. I don't for an instant think Simon has a hope in hell of unseating him.

(Of course, I don't think Riordan would have won either. At least the Davis/Simon matchup will be fun to watch this fall. A Davis/Riordan battle would have put me to sleep. So I'm actually looking forward to the this fall, as the campaign promises to be a great old-fashioned slugfest of ideas. I'm stocking up on popcorn and potato chips as I speak :-)

Anyone in California knows that Davis is a master fundraiser - he probably spends more time raising campaign money than he does governing the state.
Does anyone know how much Gov. Davis got in campaign contributions from Larry Ellison and/or Oracle employees?

Then again, given Gov. Davis's views on whose money it is [latimes.com], the $95M in wasted funds doesn't surprise me even if Oracle isn't a big campaign donor.

calvoter.org

They do a great nonpartisan analysis of every ballot initiative. More importantly, they show you who the top 10 contributors for and against each initiative were.

So, for instance, in case you were shocked to find out that VC-guru Tim Draper had given $30MM to fight for school vouchers (prop 38), you can then find out the much-less-publicized-fact that the teachers unions are richer than he is, and have spent even more money to defeat it!