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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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*!
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?"
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.
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!
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.