E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes

nick_davison writes "The Indianapolis Star is reporting the latest case of 'interesting' E-voting results. Tuesday's Boone County election, using MicroVote software returned 144,000 votes from 19,000 registered voters. After much panicking and tracking down the bug, the actual number of votes turned out as 5,352. With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"

Comments

check out BlackBoxVoting

[phooka.de]

Check out BlackBoxVoting. They even have the entire book for free as PDF. Very interesting read.

Personally I like the bit about vote-counting in France. Sounds a lot more advanced (read: secure) than the US way of doing it.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[gunga]

1) We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes. If its not computerized, someone has to count them all up. When there's around 100 million votes for president, that's a lot of minimum wage hours right there!

Are you serious? Are the people who count the votes not volunteers in the US?

At least it wasn't 250 extra votes...

[mev]

Having an extra 100,000+ votes clearly stands out as an error. I would have been more concerned if it was a small enough number not to be detected, but a big enough number to affect close races.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[Wudbaer]

Your objections are certainly justified; on the other hand Germany where I am living is doing all of its voting the traditionall pen-and-paper-ballot way, and we get first projections minutes after the voting closes, more and more reliable projections shortly after and very accurate (usually 0,x % to the official final results) inofficial final results the same evening (usually our voting booths close at 6 pm). The official results are available IIRC about 2-3 days after the vote.

The people staffing the voting booths and counting the votes are usually volunteers who get a small payment for their troubles. All in all our systems
seems to work quite well.

And even if Germany is far smaller than the US it has still a not too small voting population.

Re:What is wrong with an "X"??

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a hard core political junky.

There is a extremely large amount of vote fraud going on now with the paper ballots, mostly for local elections. (nobody in the big parties talk about it because it would cause too much trouble)

One of the big ideas of computer voting is you remove the ability to add, replace or destroy ballots in the time gap between voting and being tallied.

Open, closed, I'm the guy with the gun.

[Asprin]

Open-sourcing the voting software is important, but in my opinion, not as important as maintaining separate systems for ballot printing and ballot tabulation.

I wrote about it in this journal entry.

I give up

[ThisIsFred]

So far, I have either read about, or heard about the following problems with these electronic voting systems:

Machines crashing while the polls were open

Central collection point jammed with call-in traffic (understandable)

Machine inflates count almost 30 times the actual figure.

Alright, I give up. Let us at least try to put a positive spin on this issue. Were there any elections that didn't have problems when using the new electronic voting systems? And what was the ratio of non-problematic electronic voting to problematic electronic voting? I'd say that if more than half of the electronic voting machines had problems, the manufacturer should be sued. I'd advocate a lawsuit to get out from under any contracts that may exist for the installation and maintenance of this equipment.

An aside: Does anyone know whether or not computer scientists had any input at all on the design of these beasts? If not, then what a terrible waste of good talent. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong there, because I still think an electronic voting machine wouldn't be very complicated to design.