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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."
-Voter walks into booth
-Voter touches appropriate button on screen
-Voting machine records the vote electronically and also prints the vote on paper (maybe in like a scantron type format so it can be easily recounted)
Done?
If you don't press vote, you didn't vote. You have to live with this. The instructions are available, so if you don't complete the transaction, you really can't complain. (and I'm sure your local poll worker will help if you have trouble reading the instructions.)
In the UK, the loser would have the right to go to court and ask for (and probably get) a new election. It happend in Winchester in 1997.
I'm sorry, but since when was any vote-counting system designed to interpret what a voter's intent was, beyond correctly-cast votes?
If people don't/can't vote correctly using even the simplest methods, then perhaps even they did not know what their intent was.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
All the groups calling for voting reform can point there and say "Electronic voting without proper auditing tools is worse than hanging chads."
The Canadians will just keep laughing, as more people ask why their pencil and paper system works more smoothly, and in many cases faster, than ours.
I don't care if we have a fancy electronic system with proper audit trails, or if we go to a pencil & paper system with proper audit trails. I just care that we get there quickly.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Can someone please explain to me when this became a land where we had to determine what a voter intended and not what he actualy voted for (or in this case didn't vote for). Ballots are fairly simple things, and most of us learned about them in 4th grade. If you are unable to comprehend how to work a ballot, by law, polling places are supposed to have someone there to explain and assist you. If you don't take advantage of it, that was your choice. Vote right, or don't vote at all, but don't be bitching when your incorrect ballot isn't counted.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You're missing the point.
It's not whether those individuals voted or not.. it's that there's no way to go back and check whether they did or not. There's no way for people doing a recount to go and look for the equivalent of "hanging chads" and such.
The article even addresses that, it's fine if someone doesn't want to vote. It is NOT fine that there is no way to go back and identify the voter's intent.
Without any audit it is impossible to tell if the problem was their stupidity. I have no problem expecting people to be smart enough to do this, but for all we know those votes could have been lost through any number of technical errors, there's absolutely no means to check this with no audit trail and secretive software practices. The only available audit, tallying people showing up vs casting votes shows a significant discrepancy. That is cause for concern, and indicates the need for a better audit trail. Something that is simply being ignored and denied at every request.
If you acheive the first goal, but fail to address the second, you create an increasingly angry and restless population, and that's unhealthy for any democracy. A lesson many politicians seem to have taken from the Florida debacle is that most people will "get over it", and go back to driving their SUVs and watching TV. So far they've been right about this. Unfortunately, that only works if we're talking about an isolated incident; if people begin to develop even the impression that they're being repeatedly screwed, our society will suffer.
I think we need to face some facts.
Some people just will NOT vote correctly. They will NOT follow instructions. They just won't.
While a paper trail is absolutely necessary to see WHERE the problem lies, it certainly doesn't address that some people are either careless, lazy or just plain dumb.
Hows the recount going to be fair if they can't recount the individual votes? About all they can do is tabulate the total from each voting machine again.
As many people have already stated, this is exactly an audit trail is necessary with electronic voting.
It's not keeping more of your own income; it's continuing to accept the services you formerly paid for with taxes (in fact taking more services), but now paying for them with a cash advance from a multitrillion dollar credit card. You're still going to pay it all back one day with money from your income, but with interest.
In the black areas the exact same voting machines were programmed to silently eat up the ballot and ignore the vote.
Can you please explain why the Democratic election officials in Democratic wards would do something that would impact their core voters? This question should be posed to the County election boards in the recount counties which, by the way, were majority democrat.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
I disagree
Voting should be so easy and so simple to do that it is hard to screw up.
A key part of a fair election is that if someone makes the effort to cast a vote, the system should record that vote.
Making it unnecessarily difficult risks making it an unfair election.
According to your logic, you wouldn't need an amendment. If the person is that dumb, then they are UNABLE to cast a vote in the first place.
Also, who determines the definition of "basic intelligence"? It sounds to me like you want to go back to the days where people had to take a test in order to be able to vote.
I have a pol. sci. professor who's smart, and sat on some committees to decide voting machine laws here in Indiana. She admitted that she didn't understand some of the machines that were put before her - not because of her lack of intelligence - but instead because of poor UI design.
How does a voting machine proceed to the next voter if the previous one didn't push the "vote" button? That's what I don't understand. The company that made the machines in the Broward County case - I don't remember the name right now - said that a possibility is that the voters didn't push "vote" on the review screen. I did this recently, too, when I registered for my spring classes. I didn't confirm becasue I thought the review page was a confirmation page, so the classes didn't get recorded. It's a good thing I could go back and change it because I had a paper printout. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm not a moron as your theory would suggest.
...by attaching a *printer* to the voting machine.
So, how is this better than a paper ballot with a stub you detach as proof of voting?
It gives the machine makers millions that should have gone to public schools.
Hooray for demcracy.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.
Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.
All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.
In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.
Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.
The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.
We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporate flack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.