Slashdot Mirror
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."
They just touched the screen with their whole palm, and expected it to sense who they wanted to vote for :)
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
If they can't figure out to push the VOTE button to count their selection, maybe they shouldn't be voting anyway...
Florida is not allowed to vote in the next federal election. Bad Florida! Bad! Go to your room!
-moitz-
Screw 'em...who cares what anyone thinks.
-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.
It seem quite possible that 1% of the people that went in to the booth just decide that they didn't like any of the voters? It seems like the the moderators on /. are just trying to find problems where none exist. Let's see what happens if a "none of the above" button is added to the UI before we go crying about the inequities of touch screen voting.
If so, whats wrong with the normal voting system. Its not like its ever been that insecure.
In a way you could call this the eroding of freedom to having your right to vote. I know its a bit of a lame idea though. I have never read the American constitution (as im not American) but im guessing there is no mention of the right to vote in a certain media.
But, if because you wished to vote using older methods you were denied because using the new method is compulsory is that being denied your right to vote?
just have 2 thing printed out...a computer punch card ballot that is punched out and has the names so people can see that the punch is taken out, and a receipt printed so that the person has a record of their vote?
it is a high tech interface with mechanical precision for the punch.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Right. Uh-huh. We never saw *this* coming. No sireeee. Electronic voting is *reliable*, *safe*, and *fun for the whole family*, and anything else is against the word of the Fuehre...er, I mean, is Anti-American.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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
-122
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
I know it's scary that we can tell there's something wrong but there's no way to know the right result -
But the worse scenario is one where there's no way to tell anything's wrong. No reason to request a manual count, no reason for trusting fools to question the results.
Most people, it seems, have an "I haven't verified this system, therefore it must be secure" mindset. But don't worry; this particular problem will be fixed and people can go back to assuming everything works until the next time something is obvious wrong.
Remember - it can't be a problem if nobody knows about it.
Democracy in inaction...
Still, USA is not a democracy. Its a republic. People seem to forget that...
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
As a loyal slashbot, I don't know what position to take on this yet. Tonight, I will go through and get all my opinions from the +5 moderated comments in this thread, and will laugh derisively at the unmoderated and downmodded opinions, as they are clearly foolish and wrong.
I kind of get this kooky conspiracy theory feeling where say every 3 votes for the "wrong" candidate is excluded and it's a part of the closed program code. You kind of get that feeling when you see stuff like this: Bogdanoff had a ready explanation for the mystery. She theorized that some of the people who cast nonvotes were among the county's true-blue Democrats who were appalled to find a ballot with only Republicans. Did this really happen?
I'm otherwise (still) surprised that paper receipts were never given in the beginning, but it's a very good idea for the future. If anything, it should be a requirement.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
She theorized that some of the people who cast nonvotes were among the county's true-blue Democrats who were appalled to find a ballot with only Republicans.
How hard is it to have "None of the above" as an option?
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
is to provide a copy of Voting for Dummies at each voting booth. Or they could just use a machine the prints a final, easy to read, ballot. Imagine that.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
And I suppose you want to count those votes by hand, too? I can just see it...
... 102,605 ... 102,6. Uh? Crap!!! ... 2 ... 3 ..."
"102,604
1
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
For an interesting exercise in direct democracy, check out the Bush in 30 Seconds finalists. These have been winnowed down from some 1500 submitted ads.
All created by volunteers. Registered users get to vote on which ads they like the best, and the winners will be run on TV this election season.
Just to be fair and balanced, here's a similar conservative ad. No voting though.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
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.
What would you like to do?
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.
It has been verified that faulty citizen failure has resulted in at least one contested Florida election. It's no surprise. Some of these citizens have been around since the '20s! They cost a fortune to maintain. Clearly we can do better than this.
I recommend replacing them. Shiny new electronic voters would reduce the problem of incorrect vote selection, as well as ambiguous ballots, or the inability to understand clear, spoken or written English. Computers are far better at binary selection than senior citizens, so they should have no problem.
Because hopefully it will bring attention to how important a voter audited paper trail is. Hopefully this will gain widespread attention, so that before a more important election (say a national congress seat or presidential election) the people who administer elections will get it right.
This has been said before on /. and elsewhere but is worth repeating:
Paper receipts that stay at the polling place = good. Allows parellel count of small sample to check machine accuracy; allows recount in the event of a problem.
Paper receipts that go home with you = bad. Potential for intimidation and vote buying.
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.
In the UK any ballot that is considered "spoiled" - left blank, more than one vote, incorrect or badly placed marks - is counted, and the total number of spoilt ballots is recorded and reported.
At the moment this is the only way to legitimately record a vote for "none of the above" and have it reported. Simply not voting is dismissed as "voter apathy".
So when I'm not happy with any of the candidates I turn up and spoil my ballot. I suggest that more people do the same, until there is a valid "none of the above" option on all ballot papers.
Perhaps some of the failed votes were simply people's attempts to "spoil" their touchscreen ballots for this reason.
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.
I live in one of the counties in Florida where 1) the touch screens were piloted and 2) where I have voted with them in two elections.
There is a print out that is produced as a running record as each person votes, which is the "backup" of data stored in the voting machine.
The voters that "did not vote" or "voted but it was not counted" should be able to be located and queried regarding that happened at the polling place. Unless there is no way to determine, from this paper printout, which exact registered and present to vote cvoters did not vote or had a problem voting, for some reason.
Most of these people are old enough to have voted in the old voting booths with hundreds of little levers. Rows and rows of them. And then there was the big red lever that commited your vote.
These people could operate that system, but can't touch a button on a screen? Bullshit. They didn't vote, or the software is fsck'ed. But we'll never know, because there's no hard copy.
Why are we having this system pushed on us instead of the no.2 pencil and ovals? That system is electronic, it's verfiable, it's an established technology.
Despite the tin foil beenie cap conspiracy freeks who think tri-lateralists are behind all of this, I think we are seeing an example of government contracting abuse. Florida has paid for a bunch of machines and now finds they don't work.
And yes, a verifiable paper trial sure would help in situations where there are questions like this -- of course the paper receipt would have to be printed for and indicate nonvotes.
Make the voting booths a bit more substantial, like the "man-traps" that are in some banks now.
Voter enters the booth, booth closes and locks. The booth will not re-open until the person has voted properly or if they page a pollworker to let them out. If the latter occurs, the pollworker can give them additional instructions or let them out and note the incident for any subsequent legal challenges to the election.
Of course, in all fairness a "none of the above" entry should be made for any one-party election.
I vote in all local and national elections and my local incumbent "representative" is not of my political party. My party (or any other party for that matter) does not even have a candidate on the ballot! In those cases, I leave the entry blank if I cannot vote "NO" to abstain. Since in the Florida election all the candidate choices were Republicans, I would think that some voters seeing their party was not represented at all on the ballot would abstain in a similar fashion.
So there's nothing to see here.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
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.
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
You are guilty of common problem amongst computer types - blame the user when the machine is at fault.
The cause of large number of Florida vote counting errors in 2000 was purely machine errors. A crease or smudge or even a speck of dust could be interpreted as a vote causing the whole ballot to be rejected.
In the white, republican voting areas the voting machines were programmed to buzz and alert the workers to the fact that there was a problem and the ballot would be put through again or the voter got a fresh ballot.
In the black areas the exact same voting machines were programmed to silently eat up the ballot and ignore the vote.
It had nothing to do with the users, it was purely the way the machines were configured.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"Is it any coincidence that a Republican won the election?"
It's not a coincidence: There were only Republicans on the ballot. The surprising thing is that election officials seem to think that it's more appropriate for a Democrat to vote for a Republican than to not vote at all. (The really surprising thing is that the nonvotes were only one percent or so, meaning a whole lot of straight-ticket Democrats DID vote for a Republican when that was the only choice.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It amazes me how confident people are about their ability to vote. Especially since they have received no validation of this.
For instance, I know who I intended to vote for in 2000, but I have no proof that my vote was counted that way.
I assume that I voted correctly, just as all the people who accidentally voted for Buchanan instead of Gore believed they voted correctly.
The problem, and challenge is providing the voter with some verification that does not lead to corruption(vote selling)
My other sig is extremely clever...
''We always pray for large margins,'' said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore.
Keep using unverifiable voting machines and you'll get your wish. G W will win by a landslide this time.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
If the number of absentee ballots is significantly smaller than the margin of victory in the regular election, there really isn't any need to count them. It's the same reason baseball teams don't play the bottom of the ninth inning if the home team is ahead: there's no point.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
...is ill-fated on many levels. If you have the time please, PLEASE listen to "The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice" audio found here. Just do a search for "The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice" in the search window in the left column. It fills many gaps as far as understanding the fundamental "problems" with e-voting, and it's quite an eye opener.
Good luck.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Thank you for your vote for the Democratic Party.
(Before people start flaming, that was a J-O-K-E.)
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.
What is it with people? Be they educated or uneducated in terms of schooling, politics, or their chosen occupation.
It continues to amaze me that people with NO COMMON SENSE get put into high ranking positions. Yes they may be book smart, but when it comes to actually thinking about something (aka thinking outside the box) they just can't do it.
These are the people more likely to make snap decisions without wieghing the pros and cons and actually thinking about the impact of their decision might be. Most of them never even do any research about the decisions they are making. Hell whenever I buy a new car, computer, home product, I spend my time looking around to see if the item is any good at all. Will it last, are there better products out there, are the items that will accomplish the intended goal better than others.
Obviously the people who decide to implement crap like these voting machines without doing their research are going to get what they deserve.
Hell look at all the problems with these machines. Has there been one test of these machines yet that has actually yielded correct or even close to correct results yet. If so I would like to hear about 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.
There is a simple reason you won't see a "None of the above" option in an election.
There are 2 ways you can implement a NOTA - non-binding and binding.
For the sake of discusson, assume an election is held with Larry, Moe, and Curly as candidates, and the results are:
Larry: 10%
Moe: 10%
Curly: 10%
None of the above: 70%
The Non-Binding form works like this:
Since NOTA won, run a new election with the same bunch. Remember the definition of insanity - doing the same thing, and expecting different results? The only way things change is if the people decide that Larry is better than elections ad infinitum.
The Binding form works like this:
Since NOTA won, Larry, Moe, and Curly are out - here's your years supply of Rice-O-Roni and your copy of the home game, bu-bye, mind the door.
OK, now we have to pick a completely new slate of candidates, and have another round of campagning, and another election.
Now, Binding NOTA scares the hell out of the big parties, as it gives the smaller parties a real chance to win - during the first campaign, don't have your guy in the election, and run attack ads against the big boys. If you get the people to vote NOTA, THEN run your guy in the new election.
Since Binding NOTA would force the big 2 parties to be more responsive to the people, you can rest assured it will happen shortly after water freezes on a hot stove.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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*!
"No.. no.. you don't want to pick *him* he's the wrong candidate." ;-)
It's so bad in Florida now I think the only way to make it work again is to give voter's a crayon so they can circle a picture of the person they like with the name below the picture.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
It was largely a joke, but personally I feel that humans are inherently more error-prone than computers are. Heck, computers are error-prone only because humans are.
There are simply more efficient methods of tabulating results than having 100 people sit down and count stacks of ballots one at a time. For instance, here in Arizona, we use the "connect the lines with a black marker" method of voting. It's simple and easy for the voter to see how they voted after the fact. The voter then inserts the ballot into a machine that reads or rejects the ballot immediately. This integrates the best of both worlds. It automates the counting process while maintaining an easy-to-read paper ballot that can be counted by hand if necessary.
I remember seeing all those poor sods hand-counting punch cards in Florida three years ago wondering to myself what the error rate was using that method. I do agree with many here that touch-screen voting without a paper trail is a horrible idea rife with opportunity for mischief.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
That's why we should amend the Constitution to allow only people of, at least, basic intelligence to vote.
This has already been tried
Since you apparently didn't know about this, then, by your own definition, maybe you wouldn't be qualified to cast your vote.
Those who do not remember the past shall be condemned to repeat it.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Vote Republican, hope to cash in on the ripoff of everybody "else", deny any personal responsibility when confronted, and get screwed with practically all "the rest of us" when the politico gets power, and doesn't need you anymore within your delusional event horizon. Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?
--
make install -not war
82 Million vs California's 35 Million.
What's not scalable about how they do the voting? If you have more ballots to count, you just get more people to count it.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
NOTA gives voters the opportunity to actively state that they don't like any of the candidates. With a binding NOTA, if the majority of votes go to NOTA, no one is elected and the process begins again. In a non-binding NOTA, the populace get to express their opinion, but the candidate with the most votes still wins.
Nevada has had non-binding NOTA on the books since 1976. This past summer, Massachusetts passed the first binding NOTA. It goes into effect in 2005.
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.
You are guilty of common problem amongst computer types - blame the user when the machine is at fault.
You are guilty of a common problem amongts Democrat types - blame the Republicans for everything no matter what.
If the ballot machines in Black, Democratic voting areas were programmed to silently ead up the ballot and ignore the vote, the blame rests soley on the elected officials in the Black, Democratic voting areas (which usually happen to be Black, and are most likely Democrats). Blaming the republicans in the white, Republican areas for apparently configuring their machines correctly makes absolutely no sense, especially considering that they had no control over the other areas voting setup.
Lord, it seems so simple. The touch screen prints out a paper ballot, similar to those fill in the dot scan tron sheets. The voter can verify their votes..and put the paper ballot in a box there for recounts in case of computer malfunction. You get paper trail this way...still anonymous, and quick vote tabulation.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You've been reading way too much of the Weekly World News and other supermarket tabloids if you're ignorant enough to believe that machines were programmed to cheat black voters in this way. There is ZERO evidence to support this crazy notion, unless you're part of the left-wing equivalent of the black helicopter crowd.
LOCAL officials control these things, not some centralized state official who might have the power to do as you claim. To the extent that the machines in predominantly black areas were technologically inferior (a point which I'm not necessarily conceding), it is a reflection of decisions made by the local election officials. In the black areas, those officials are Democrats. In order to believe your crackpot idea, you have to believe that the Democrat election officials in those counties were trying to rig the system to give votes to Republicans.
I'm rarely dismissive about someone's intelligence just from such a short post, but your acceptance of this makes me question your ability to reason and to gather relevant facts.
That's not quite the same sport, let alone in the same ballpark.
You'll probably not be surprised that I disagree.
- Group A (racist whites) decides that there is a group B (blacks) whom they would rather not be allowed to participate in the voting process, even though they are citizens and will have to be governed by the winner of the election. Group A creates a litmus (literacy test) to filter group B from the polls.
- Group A (elitist ranting Slashdotters) decides that there is a group B (people who they arrogantly assume to be of lower intelligence) whom they would rather not be allowed to participate in the voting process, even though they are citizens and will have to be governed by the winner of the election. Group A creates a litmus (intelligence test) to filter group B from the polls.
What makes you guys think that you're qualified to tell people that they won't be allowed to select their representatives in a democratic government? I can see your intelligence test now:1) How did Bill Gates acquire DOS?
God, you're stupid! Give me that damn registration card!
I would imaging that if Eskimos created an intelligence test that you would fail it quite dramatically. It's not your, nor anyone else's right to be able to tell another citizen of the USA whether they are qualified to vote or not. Do you not realize how that makes you sound like a fascist?
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
The Students' Union here implements this to elect officers (there's an extra "candidate" called RON, for "Re-open Nominations"). If Ron wins (rarely happens), nominations for candidates have to be reopened.
(People sometimes even campaign on Ron's behalf, when they realise the only candidate is someone who would do the job badly, and they want nominations reopened so they can stand for it themselves...)
Actually I believe the press did a hand count and they concluded that Bush really one. So I guess even though Gore one the "paaaaahhhhpular vote," he didn't win the one that really matters.
And the electoral vote does matter to equally represent people otherwise canidates would only campaign in large cities and those bumpkins in the midwest and the south would never been considered or cared about.
Jeez. Maybe we should stop trying to sell "Democracy" to other nations until WE can get it right. This is getting just a bit absurd...
FUCK BLAIR!!! and I'm not talking about the fat girl (which one?) from 'Facts of Life'...
I won't ask you to prove your assertion. We're not necessarily after an accurate count, but we must have a count we can agree on. That's not a joke: read on...
If a group of people sit down and all agree that candidate A got so many votes and candidate B got so many, that becomes the result regardless of whether we're talking about X's in boxes, holes in punch cards, or readouts from some MS database. And even if we make a 2+2=5 mistake, it doesn't matter so long as you (or the delegate representing your interests in the vote counting process) fails to catch the error along with everyone else.
The appropriate Sneakers quote is: "The world is not governed by reality, but by the perception of reality."
If one of the group disagrees with the result, the "paper trail ballot" type systems allow us to narrow the scope of the disagreement from the "I don't trust the vote count from that State, let's recount..." down through the "I don't trust the vote count from that precinct, let's recount..." all the way to "I don't think this particular punch card was read properly, let's re-examine it". Through a process of "do we all agree that this ballot represents a vote for candidate A? [Yes] or [Disputed]" questioning, we can get the number of disputed ballots down to a number less than the margin of difference. Of if we can't, the whole election get's thrown out.
To wit, the clear problem with electronic voting machines is that they allow reasonable people to disagree with the result in a way that cannot be discounted. Think about it: if you, as a reasonably well educated Slashdotter, show up for the vote count and assert that the electronic voting machine changed your vote, how can the election officials prove, to the reasonable man standard that you're wrong?
If I were in charge of selecting a voting system, I would be running scared away from any system which doesn't provide me with a way to prove Joe Slashdotter voted the way Joe Slashdotter perceives himself to have voted. As noted in the article, vote counters don't like close races, because it raises the percentage of votes where an undisputed result must be agreed upon before they get any peace. Electronic voting systems allow people to get machines, precincts, and even entire state-wide mandated voting systems thrown out. We could be headed for this first ever Presidential Election in 2004 that gets thrown out because of the number of disputed votes, no matter who is the apparent winner.
A voting system without a paper trail changes the equation from one of "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for this (blank checkbox, hanging chad, or otherwise disputed) ballot into "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for these (electronic only, no paper trail, disputed) thirty thousand some odd ballots...
If you live in a district where there isn't a paper trail, just call your local election board, tell them you want to witness the vote counting for your next election, then after they've approved, tell them you will disagree with any electronic-only result. I'll bet they add a paper trail just to avoid the headaches.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
The machines were identical, the configuration was not. These are
Pallister has done a bunch of research as has the civil rights commission. See my sig for details. The GOP flacks on slashdot have been making the standard ad-hominem attacks to try to avoid dealing with the substance of his claims.
Note also that the guy the GOP dredged up to dispute the civil rights commission report is the same right wing crank that was caught peddling bogus statistics about gun safety recently.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
You should go here and read about the over 100 separate cases where electronic voting has had problems, and in many cases those problems led to election reversals. (There's links on the right side to the chapters of the book they wrote; chapter 2 has quite a number of examples in it.)
The point is, it's not just Florida. Florida just got the attention in 2000 because the entire state's electoral votes were delivered to Bush instead of Gore due to voting hijinks (or so the theory goes). The handful of companies that supply the bulk of electronic voting machines for the U.S. have a terrible track record. Plus, the machines' inner workings are kept secret, meaning that there's absolutely no way for voters to be sure that the elections are being carried out fairly.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Here is a reminder of what happened to you last time you tried to bring this up. Some Democrats never learn....
Here is what the inquiry acually found:
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities.