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Touch-Screen Voting Snags Continue
Not every electronic voting machine misstep comes from Diebold; reader zznate points out that the Virginia machines came from Advanced Voting Solutions (dcw3 butts in: "The slogan on their home page really gives you a warm fuzzy: 'Helping Shape American History for over one hundred years.'"), as well as that the EFF won a decision for an accelerated court date of November 17 in their attempt to stop Diebold from shutting down sites that make the infamous memos available. Let's all hope this is the first in a series of many wins for the EFF against the Diebold folks and crappy e-voting schemes in general. Have you donated lately?"
Reader meadowreach writes points out more trouble on the other coast: "From news.com: 'As voters in California go to the polls, the state is launching an investigation into alleged illegal tampering with electronic voting machines in a San Francisco Bay Area county.' Diebold upgrades software without letting the state know? How reassuring."
Generic Guy writes "CNN is running a story about California not certifying the Diebold voting machines and instead opening an investigation into the use of uncertified systems. Maybe there is still hope for democracy in the U.S."
And from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Peter Desnoyers writes "Cambridge uses an optical scanner system, where you fill out SAT-style ovals with a pen and the election officer feeds them into a scanning machine. From last night's preliminary results on the Cambridge website:
'In two precincts at 7:55 and 7:59pm the memory cards reached capacity. To ensure that every ballot was counted , the Election Commission has decided to rerun the ballots for 9-1, Lexington Avenue Fire House and 11-3, Churchill Avenue. We expect that it will take between one to two hours.'
I interpret this to mean that they took all the paper ballots out of the box and ran them back through the reader. (with a bigger memory card?) In the mean time, voters were able to continue voting and no votes were lost."
Scantron sheets for voting? That's NOT a good idea. I'm currently working for a company that deals with standardized tests, and those things are a PAIN to clean up in the database becaues NOBODY can fill the damn things out correctly. I'd say at least a good 5% of them have messed up bubbles in the user/test-ID field ALONE. The answer fields usually fare much worse.
These aren't just 2nd graders, either. High school tests are usually WORSE in this aspect.
... made by Diebold, it should be noted. They are the AccuVote OS models. This is not indicated in the article summary, however it is the case. I voted in Cambridge last night, and noted with mixed emotions the little Diebold logo as I slid my ballot in, and then the machine rejected it. (It worked on the second try)
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
While you could theoretically build a cryptographic system to do something similar, I'd rather not have a theoretic democracy!
(Petitions are linked to at the bottom of VerifiedVoting.org.)
Keep the freedom to vote.
This raises serious questions about the accuracy of the count, no matter how many machines had to be fixed. One machine or twenty machines, if you've got to take one away for repair & then bring it back, the accuracy of the data must immediately be called into question.
If someone has to physically remove a machine, then something must be seriously wrong with it. What if they accidentally erased the data & then, in an effort to cover their mistakes, 'fudged' the votes?
On top of that, election officials made a stupid error -- a preventable error. [Some] memory cards were full before the close of the polls.
Election officials know exactly how many people are registered to vote in a given precinct. Therefore, they have the ability to determine the amount of memory they'd need on the machines. They should have asked the software folks, "how much memory will I need for each registered voter?"
Instead, voters are left to fend for themselves as inept voting officials stumble their way through technology.
This is completely absurd & inexcusable!
from the AVN web site
These things are wireless.
All those that think this is a BAD idea raise your hands...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
One factor is that ballots in the United States tend to be quite long, due to our multiple levels of government and the fact that elected officials serve set terms (with terms at the various levels being synchronized). In the general election next year, for example, I'll be voting for three federal office (President, Representative, Senator), a state equivalent of a Representative, city council positions, a county council representative, various other boards (e.g. school board), probably a dozen statewide referendums and maybe one or two local (city- or county-wide) referendums. And it generally takes a month to certify an election, even with an automated counting process (which is why Arnold Schwarzenneger hasn't been sworn in as governor of California yet).
What's it like in Canada? Does a general election include anything other than federal MP? Do you have separate elections for sepearate offices?
I voted in the State/county election in question Fairafx Virginia and I can tell you these things really troubled me.
We have been using a combination computer mechanical system for years which I felt very comfortable with. Yesterday we walked in to find the new "WinVote" machines. They offered no privacy and were actually slowing down peoples vote entry by quite a bit (I saw most people take over 10 minutes to vote compared to one or two I would normally see).
The officials were telling me about how one machine stopped working and couldn't be revived. The others they had apparently been able to reboot multiple times to keep going. They of course didn't know how the vote count was protected in these cases. I have a guess though.
Before each person votes, an official inserts a smart card. The application restarts, displays some statistics and proceeds to allow me to vote. My guess is that the results are copied to the smart cards. In that case the state of the machine isn't really in question so long as the tally increases as the voter voted.
What worries me is the use of smart cards. Now these tend to hold a handful of memory (8K to 64K in general), and can run some code internally. My question is, if a machine crashes then could it alter the contents of the smart card? A write only smart card would not have enough room for a busy polling location. A card where a count is updated would be vulnerable to coding or transfer errors.
Like the user who asks for a database when they need a filing cabinet, I think this may be an idea to early for its time.
I'm not an expert but it seems reasonable. These machines are standalone units, not networked; they have hardcoded (machine-language) software on their chips, with no facility for modifying it or running an external program. To tamper with them you'd have to replace the motherboard with your own, on which you've embedded your own program, and even then it probably won't work since the machine has various safeguards for tampering. And these machines are extremely rugged and sturdy, and easy to use (I've handled them) and inexpensive (around $100 each).
Sometimes antique push-button technology is better than the latest cutting-edge stuff (anyway, who needs touchscreens, what's wrong with buttons?)
Why not? Because they're nearly different companies... That is, Diebold bought the firm that makes the voting machines, and I doubt that Diebold the ATM guys made any sweeping changes to the new Diebold Election guys (DESI), especially since they made the purchase in January 2002..... yahoo .com link for more info