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Touch Screen Voting Trouble in Florida
usn2fsu03 writes "Here we go again with
another election controversy in South Florida. Touch screen voting was used in a State House election that was won by twelve votes. Unfortunately, there were 134 people who went through the process of checking in to vote, but either did not vote or cast a vote that was not counted. Without a paper trail it is anyone's guess as to what those voters' intentions were. Obviously, there is work to be done in the Election Supervisor's office before November comes around."
In the case of Florida, it's a matter of law that the intent of the voter is to be honored. The intent stipulation arises out of an acknoledgement that all recording systems are subject to innacuracies, and that the noblest thing to do is to honor the will of the voter, rather than the output of the machine.
This is obviously an extreme example, but it should be illustrative:
Imagine a ballot-punching machine where a peg for one of the candidates breaks an hour before the polls close. Noone notices this and the voters go on pressing the button for that candidate until closing time, assuming they voted for him or her.
In the end, the vote count is wrong, underrepresenting that candidate's support. In this case, the intent of the voters was not registered even though they acted in good faith and without making any mistakes.
It is this type of scenario that the intent law is intended to remedy. The will of the voters is paramount to the output of a machine that can be tampered with, broken, or buggy.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
What sources have you read? As previously noted (in the NYT, et al. - there have been multiple references/links to it on /.) Bush lost 6 of the 9 recounts - Gore won most by 1000 votes. The Gore-conditioned recounts gave Bush the victory, while Bush's desired methods gave the vote to Gore. I think Gore also won in a few other vote counting variants. That doesn't seem like "all the other independent investigations prove that Bush did win in Florida". Of course, it could also be that having the person running Bush's campaign in FL also in charge of the vote counting in FL, two SC justices having immediate family working for the Bush campaign, or Bush's brother running the state with contested recounts might give an impression of impropriety...
Regardless, what's so hard for people to figure out? Having two paper copies (one so the person knows what they voted, another as a backup to the electronic vote, treated as the paper votes are now, both containing numeric impersonal codes for each vote) and a computer copy is neither difficult to implement nor expensive. It provides the ability to verify election results (although considering FL, I can see why you wouldn't want THAT). It would allow for the rapid count advantages of computer polls and have a secure backup in case of (or when) problems happen. Instead, the emphasis is on all-electronic voting with security holes one could drive a truck through. Irrelevant of the (supposed) stupidity of some FL voters, this doesn't seem like a hard concept to grasp.
They even tally the votes the same way, through counters that are read off periodically throughout the day.
One of the selections in every category is "I am not casting a vote." I recall that at the top there is an option to cast a completely blank ballot. (The party lever has been removed, thankfully.)
Sure it's low-tech. But I like it.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Vote-counting systems (in the big sense of end-to-end counting and certification, not just talking about balloting hardware) in Florida must honor the intent of the voter as a matter of law.
The law is designed to address the array of things that can go wrong with the voting process and equipment, and ensure that the intent of the voter is paramount to any vagueries introduced by the equipment or counting procedures. How anyone could think this is a bad thing (unless they were in the process of exploiting such vagueries) is beyond me...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Belive it or not, in Germany we draw crosses with a pen on the ballots and votes are counted by hand and the prelimiary results are usually available about six hours after the polling stations are closed.
The above statement is not 100% accurate, but here's an excerpt from an article published November 12, 2001:
Consider the differences found in two counties-Leon and Gadsden-separated by the Ochlockonee River and the two broadest extremes of how votes are counted. In both counties voters use a pencil to fill in ovals on the ballot.
But if a voter in Leon County, which includes the state capital, Tallahassee, made a mistake on a ballot, the counting machine in the polling place automatically spit out the ballot back into the voter's hand. A second or and even a third chance was allowed. to vote properly.
This voting system had an error rate of less than 1 percent.
In Gadsden County, the only predominantly black Florida county, no second chance was given because officials said they couldn't afford counting machines in every polling place. The highest percentage of discarded ballots in any Florida county occurred here, with 12.4 percent of the ballots invalidated.