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Orange County: More E-Ballots Cast Than Voters
"David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system, said it would be impossible to identify which voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts because of steps the company had taken to ensure voter secrecy. For this reason, an exact account of miscast ballots is impossible. The good news, if the folks there can be believed, is that there is no evidence yet that any result is in jeopardy. In a masterpiece of understatement, elections system analyst Kim Alexander is quoted as saying, "Certainly this kind of problem that's occurred in Orange County doesn't do anything to contribute to greater confidence in electronic voting systems." Steve Rodermund, Orange County's registrar of voters, is quoted as saying that despite the problems, he is satisfied with the performance of Orange County's new electronic voting system."
how hard is it to have a system that when person A votes for Candidate X, increments X's vote-count by 1? How can something as simple as basic counting fail. How bad are the programmers for this e-voting stuff?
Why are there no comments? Looks like we need independent auditors for Slashcode!
Wow. Less than 10 posts on this when the one above it has 200 some odd. This must be some kind of record for the least-cared about story to ever hit the front page.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I'm gonna reply because I feel bad for this story's lack of popularity.
something seems buggy here
and Slashdot users feel they've said all they need to on a subject, so no point repeating themselves....nah. there's probably a better chance that it's a glitch in the Matrix.
-- If you can't laugh at yourself, someone else will do it for you.
Maybe every comment was modded down so heavily that they simply ceased to exist...
In Canada, for a federal election we record something like 15 million hand-written votes in a few hours.
Why can't the torch-bearer of democracy even remotely get this right? Is it because there is no federal standard, or do Amercians really not care that much?
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
/puts flame shield on /removes flame shield
This seems to be, though the very idea may anger many on Slashdot, a situation where the application of technology is bad because we are trying to fix something that is not broken. Regardless of your personal party affiliation, what happened in Florida was at least mitigated by the availability of some kind of paper trail for the votes - once the electrons flow from the voting machine switch, there is no positive record that they ever existed. Also, it is important to remember the fact that people too stupid to manipulate a paper ballot probably will also have trouble with E-voting (reference recent Slashdot story "Fixing your parents PC").
Coincidence? I think. Maybe there are actually only 80% of us replying to this.
-- the only good thing the French ever did was two chicks at one time
"I...I must have gotten a decimal point in the wrong place! I always mess up some mundane detail like that!"
What's life? Life's easy. A quirk of matter. Nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
This is just a complete indication on how lazy people have become. I don't know about you, but I enjoy going out to vote, and I find it fun! There are some tedious tasks out there, like banking, that are better suited to the web, but voting? It just seems too dangerous to me, not to mention the laziness factor.
Above 100%? Ugh. I guess their system could have benefited from some good, old-fashioned testing.
It seems pretty open & shut. They have no clue what the real results should be.
Maybe they can call in some UN observers (or Haitian officials) to supervise the next round of elections.
I have a feeling that either Oliver or Marissa's mom had something to do with this.
So 5,500 people didnt know where they live? I thought that voters had to know something.
Who runs elections volenteers... maybe its time to START PAYING FOR SOMETHING. ( no not beer...)
Once again a post appears which completely misleads /.ers. This time, despite the long post, the poster failed to mention that the reason for the vote discrepancies is that workers gave voters the wrong codes, and therefore, people were voting in the wrong precincts. Most likely, the 1st precinct on the list got vote from other precint voters, resulting in a larger than %100 turnout. Simple case of garbage in-garbageout. There was no machine cracking or even machine errors that anyone has mentioned.
Vote for Pedro
I think this story is kind of misleading. There was no error in the electronic voting machines, there was no programming error, no hacked results. As far as I can tell, it seems like the problems came entirely from the people running the polling booths, who hadn't recieved adquate training/instruction. This kind of screw-up could have happened regardless of the method being used to tally the votes! The REAL problem is not that the electronic voting machines are unreliable, it's that humans are, and without the paper trail that normal procedures generate, there's no way to go back and fix mistakes. If people want to implement electronic voting on a wider basis, I think traceability is a key issue. (Provided, of course, that voter anonymity is preserved, but this shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than it is with paper ballots.)
Why does this have to be up to the candidates? Clearly by the mere fact that incorrect ballots were being shown, the people were not properly given the ability to vote for the candidate of their choice. Their choice may have not even been on the ballot, since many people were shown ballots for other precincts. Shouldn't this automatically trigger a "do-over"?
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Don't forget, folks, when you develop a system, you have to take into account every element of the system - especially one populated by well-meaning, underpaid people. This reminds me of the way my internet banking transfers from Singapore to my credit card in NZ kept getting fouled up because my bank would print them and mail them to the clearing house, where the clerks would MANUALLY RETYPE THEM, occasionally correcting a card number that seemed wrong ... Singapore Amex cards start 3773, while NZ ones start 3774, so the clerks would change 3774 to 3773 because obviously I had made a mistake. Hell's teeth.
for those who prefer not to RFTA
"David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system, said it would be impossible to identify which voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts because of steps the company had taken to ensure voter secrecy. For this reason, an exact account of miscast ballots is impossible."
cleetus
...sponsored by Diebold voting systems.
Steve Rodermund: Complete idiot.
How do they think over 100% turnout won't skew the results? And what is this Rodermund moron saying? This is like saying the guy caught on camera stabbing someone obviously isn't the perp! Give me a break!
Not neccessarily. I think it may be because they're giving us the wrong access code or something. At least, all of my posts in this thread so far have shown up under an adjacent story which is posted on the same web site.
I swear, these electronic messaging systems are just too unreliable.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. And darn it, why can't I get a simple paper reciept when I post?!
I live north of orange county, surprised I havent heard anything about this on the local news yet.
another example of how e-voting can screw up or be fixed.
just go with good 'ol pen and paper
or find a better way to ensure a "hanging chad"*coughbullshit* problem doesnt occur again..
This is also very much the same reason we shouldnt be entrusting our cars with computer chips, computers have yet to be accurate in critical situations like driving or voting.
instead of putting an experimental technology out as an official technology, where we have to depend on it, like at my school where they've made it mandatory to pass highschool using this new experimental math program, which sucks.. because it basically says "you missed an assignment! you fail the entire course!" or "you missed a question! you get a 0 on the paper! you fail the course!" crap like that.
bottom line, we shouldnt be using this crap yet.
Not every problem can be resolved by adding technology.
-and-
Not every situation is a "problem" in need of new technology.
Paper voting seems to work just fine in most cases. If there is a suspected problem, then the specifics of that (those?) problem(s) need to be discussed.
Does anyone know of any "problems" that are supposed to be addressed by electronic voting?
I live in California, and have experienced this situation first hand. When i went to vote (luckily right down the street from my house) I was surprised to see how secure the system was.
(besides seeing that it was manned by a bunch of old ladies who wouldn't know how to operate the machines themselves)
The machines use no internet connection, in fact the number of cards, steps, and the size of the voting system makes it "almost" impossible to hack.
Brief description for those of you who have not come into contact or heard of the system yet:
You walk in and provide them with your name, they hand you a card with a smart chip (flash memory) and you walk over to the tablet-computer-like voting machines to cast your vote. At this point your name is on the flash memory, and when you insert the card you can begin the voting process. the only cord leading away from the unit was a power cord and I didn't pick up any WiFi signals with my ears.
You continue your voting, and the selections you made on the screen are put onto the card when you finish. Then your card is ejected back into your sweaty little palms.
you hand said unmarked card to the attendant and she puts it safely with the others. I've also heard the cards are kept for a manual tally back at the voting offices.
What is so great about this you ask? Well considering that the machines are not biased and that the people who built or were contracted to build them did not tamper with them, there is very little chance for a misread vote, or a "purposefully changed" vote. On the other hand from the information I've gathered the system is also open to a more wide spread hack or foul play because of it's final form: mass data statistics. one file or even multiple files holding numbers...MUCH easier to change as opposed to 6 million ballots, but at the same time much harder unless you have the knowledge or skill set which is (I suppose) very steep, deep, and wide.
Weighing all of the factors, I believe that the system is just about as secure as before, but it still needs a lot of work. (it could be ten times better, easily .
The article clearly states that there was no intentional misconduct here, just that voters were given ballots for the wrong precinct. So, some precinct showed more tallied votes than registered voters, but its not like anyone voted more than once.
Of course you wouldn't know it by reading the headline...
Were voters walking into the election so blindly that they didn't even notice THE WRONG PEOPLE on the ballot?!?! I know it's probably on the difference in something like "Sanitation Commisioner" or some crap, but come on! No wonder the school boards here in South Carolina are filled with people who have last names beginning with a letter before M. They're alphabetically the first people on the ballot!
I was a poll watcher last spring at a polling place for a local election, as part of an assignment for my Political Science class. For the most part, it was very boring, but, like a true geek, I passed the time by recording demographics for my own notes: approx age, gender, couples, singles, kids, who had problems, etc. I also watched the actual poll workers a great deal. In a district where thousands and thousands of potential voters live, turn-out was in the low hundreds. The vast, vast, vast majority of these were elderly citizens.
All of the poll workers were retired. The people who are running our elections at the local level are the ones who a) were thoroughly taught pride in our nation's democratic process and b) have enough time to register to vote, decide who to vote for, and then actually get up off their butts and go vote. It is not surprising in the least that the mostly elderly population of poll watches has trouble doing anything more than the simplest tasks on a completely foreign computer application.
After seeing the way the supposedly 'trained' poll workers at my polling location were left clueless when anything even slightly out of the ordinary happened, it's obvious that some reform is needed in this area (our city used pen+paper voting, counted by machine).
Unfortunately, until more people start to care about elections, poll workers will consist of whoever is willing to sign their name for the job, regardless of whether they are truly able to do what's required.
Uhhh, if the voting machines don't boot up, I'd have to say there's a problem with electronic voting...
I don't have to boot up a pencil or a piece of paper. Hell, I can vote by candlelight if I have to.
realdddave posting anonymously:
In re-reading, I may come off as age-discriminatory, but that's not my intent. In my experience, older people have less interest in trying to learn about new computer systems. Obviously, a flood of 18-22yo pollworkers, or any other age, is not the answer. What is needed is a larger number of citizens who are voters who are interested and proud of the democratic process to the point that they would be enthusiastic pollworkers. If this were to exist, then there would be more qualified people to choose from.
You could also approach it with training: If the pollworkers were more enthusiastic, then more/better training may be possible, which would also help a lot of these problems.
And, voters are stupid: At least 5% of the people who walked in the door were not at the correct polling place for their district. They all swore up and down that they had voted here ever year since they moved in, which is not possible.
If you loose an entire precinct of voters, wouldn't that be a significant fraction of a local race? I know that through redistricting, the results are all guaranteed anyways, but for crying out loud!!!
I do not live in Orange County and did not get to use their new electronic voting machines, but it seems to me that if each person slides a state-issued ID card or driver's license, the machines could identify the person, make sure they are eligible to vote, and display the proper ballot. The system should check the person's name in a master database for having already voted.
<rant> Take 10 stations or however many you have, toss some wireless networking between them, one base station has the dial-up Internet connection for those polling places that don't have the Internet yet, secure the traffic and you're done! If we can securely have millions of ATM and credit card transactions floating around in cyberspace for banks, surely we can have votes safely cast. From the $1200 units I've seen demonstrated that my county purchased, you could buy a freakin' eMac with Airport. While I'm at it, print a God damn paper receipt for when the thing goes haywire!!! And make it open source! </rant >
You would think that the chairman wouldn't have made such bumbling comments regarding the situation. Just hire a PR/Speechwriter person. These days every business needs one. What have we come to!?
More people voted than 100% of those registered?
Shocked! I am appalled.
Sincerely,
Chicago
the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed - w. gibson
We were getting it right before this. We had minor problems here and there, but nothing that drastic. Then, Florida. Because it was the deciding state, the vote was extremely close, and it had no uniform standards for what counted as a 'vote,' it became a battle to the death that had to be settled by the courts finally. And because of inherent "flaws" that hadn't caused any big problems up to then, the ACLU sued everyone who was using the punch bllot and forced them to go to new methods which produced (surprise) chaos the first time out. My city had clueless poll workers who couldn't even boot their machines for hours at the beginning, turning away hundreds or thousands (no one is sure even now) of voters. Even scarier, the poll workers were getting assisted by walk-in voters who had technical knowledge and were helping them to fix the problems. I heard one guy on the radio talking about how he'd poked around in the OS (WIndows CE, no less) on the Diebold machine, looking for the missing application. A number of poll workers took the manines home after they were trained and stored them in their garages until voting day. The 'seal' was a sticker that could be easily removed and reapplied without detection. Not exactly what you'd call secure. Tell me this is better than what we had, I dare you. Thanks, ACLU!
This seems like a flaw in the technology itself. The old way, you'd have to assert your name and address to a human poll worker, who then gave you the specific ballot.
The method described in the article is equivalent to the poll worker giving you a stack of ballots, one for each district, and just accepting whichever one you decide to give back to hir.
Even with paper ballots, the poll workers could have given out the wrong ballot to the voters. It wouldn't have made a difference in the results. It's still the wrong ballot, whether it's paper or bits.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well, here's my comment: Uh, gee...I guess I already said it in the subject line. Doh!
You have to realize that there are over 3000 counties in the United States. In each county, it is divided up into small pieces. There are literally thousands upon thousands of polling places for a state. Electronic voting is very new - this is just a trial run so to speak, the primaries. Most people don't vote in the primaries anyhow, especially now since their vote doesn't matter. The candidates have had it locked up for at least a week now. Unfortunately they often overlook other local races - like Senator (if they are up for election this time) and Represenative races. Perfectly good oportunity to get some buttheads out of office and they blow it. Guys that have been fooling their own people for decades.
On the flip side, we have cast millions of votes so far without a problem. Even in Maryland where a bunch of lefties predicted it would be a fiasco because of the Diabold machines. Somehow they seemed convinced the Republican's controlled them. Then again, they probably believe in the tooth fairy too.... They looked secure to me.
However if you mean that a lot of people don't care enough to vote you are right, unfortunately. Lots of people like to bitch, few actually do something about it. I understand in Australia they will send you a $40 ticket for not voting. They should do that here. Use the money to buy Electronic voting machines (-:
Elections cost real money. Why pay for a second election if it isn't going to change the results? It is also a needless inconvenience for the people and organizations that provide the polling places.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
where they say that recounts aren't needed due to the wide margins of victory. Did these braniacs ever consider that maybe the reason for the wide margins IS THAT MORE PEOPLE VOTED THAN REGISTERED.
Poll worker incompetence aside, the only real alternative to this is to start over. I don't care what they think the margin of error is, due to the number of blatantly screwed up ballots, as soon as there's ANY QUESTION, you THROW THE VOTE OUT AND START OVER. This may not be economically feasable; I'm unfamiliar with the frequency of these kinds of problems.
If you've caught this many misvotes that actually hit the system, how many did you miss?
Ya, I go to UCI here in Orange County and I know that only 3 (myself, my gf, and my roomie) of the 20 people I know who even care to register, voted. My friends and I saw some scandalous result like this coming a mile away what with other "success" like this having occured in tests and other area around the nation. How could we not see this coming? Just think about it: 1)Needless, expensive upgrade to a faulty, lesser secure technology 2)OLD poll-workers who still believe computers are the internet teaching younger and older voters alike how to use he polls if the voters are to lazy to watch the video. 3)The majority of active voters are people of the same demographic. 4)The interface is user-UNfriendly. Watch the video. Access codes, wheels instead of arrows, and a physical end-all-and-submit-ballot-whether-or-not-your-actu ally-done button. It was either doomed from the beginning or planned to fail.
To the best of my knowledge, electronic voting has been used in Brazil with great confidence, near perfectly reflecting the final ballot count (manual count). In the recent Lula election, specifically, I remember being quite impressed with the speediness of the system in determining the candidates of the run-off.
So what are the Brazilians doing that we aren't? How is it different, and how can we make it the same?
Or maybe I'm totally wrong about the quality of their system?
Rather than waste my 1 vote on an independant candidate with regular voting. I can now waste my 6x10^9 votes on an independant candidate with Evoting.
>Thanks, ACLU
This is bullshit. The ACLU and NAACP wanted shorter lines and a felon list that included only, you know, felons.
In fact the debacle in Florida showed us we WEREN'T getting it right and we needed a federal standard, like most western nations, but the states were sold on the 'digital voting' snake-oil and here we are. And make no mistake about it, they were sold on this knowing full well how easily these machines can be manipulated.
'Tis politics as usual.
I never realized how unstable the US voting system was until the Florida incident. How do you know that votes are tabulated correctly in Canada and/or the UK? Maybe your Labour vote was really given to the Tory (or whatever).
Obviously, the problem *in this case* is twofold:
1. They didn't test these systems enough.
2. They have no way of fixing the problem, since they have no audit trail.
Another point is that the problem that arose is not a technological one per se. They could have made the same mistake in previous elections. If people are sent to the wrong voting booth or given the wrong ballot, you have the same effect. This is exacerbated by the fact that this is the first Presidential election since redistricting (in 2000, people may have voted in a different place). Further, the new electronic machines probably increased turnout.
Again, I say: "How do you know that your ballots are counted correctly?" How do you know that you (and everyone else) filled out the correct ballot (the actual problem here)? How do you know that the way you (and everyone else) filled out the ballot is the way that the ballot is meant to be filled out (the problem in Florida)?
Are you really so sure of your system that you can say absolutely that it is working? On what do you base this? Lack of complaints?
So the election officials panic at the problems in 2000 and run out and the newest, slickest gadgets they can find. Somebody should give them some valium, have them count to ten, and show them how NASA does procurement.
You don't use untested technology for something this important. The perception is that all the old voting systems are inadaquate. What a load of bunk. In the Twin Cities, we use optical scanners, which are fast, easy to use, and hard to screw up. The scanning machine can even complain instantly if you do something silly like vote for two condidates in the same race. I'll stop rambling now.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
I don't know, with one precinct reporting a record 290% turnout, it seems like this e-voting stuff is just what we need to get more people involved in their government.
Although the neighboring precinct only had a 9% turnout, so I guess there are just some places where apathy is incurable.
and when I saw the electronic voting terminals I asked the guy giving out instructions if there was an alternative to voting electronically and he said no. I told him how horrible electronic voting is and he said, "Oh they're not so bad" to which I replied, "yeah, if you don't care about security." Now that my county has "improved" itself to have electronic voting, I'll be forced to cast the rest of my votes through absentee ballots.
I mean...really...put your brain in drive if you're going to bash people based on generalities!
Blar.
Sounds to me like they've solved that old problem about people who won't vote... :^)
and I live in one of the precincts in question. *sigh* bring on the "haha your state sucks in voting" jokes now please...time to move I guess....
...in bed
Some voters noticed the problem and were able to get workers to give them access codes for the proper ballots. But many voters did not. The result was that turnout figures in some precincts were pushed artificially -- even impossibly -- high, while turnout figures for neighboring precincts that voted at the same polling place were artificially low.
This is the part that really makes me wonder. The problem isn't that some precincts were artifically high, this is really secondary. From how this is worded, I don't know what percentage of people couldn't figure it out, but I bet it is rather high. It is one thing for the people who don't vote to not know who is running, but if more than 50% of those who did vote couldn't understand that they had the wrong ballet, well, that just shows how well the candidates made them selves known.
I shouldn't be too surprised at this though, I mean, you are dealing with the land of the implants, and you are still in the disUnited States, but really, if you don't know who is running in the primaries, should you even be voting?
Of course, it isn't only just for candidates. "I didn't know we needed a new sewer system for the skate rink... oh well."
My other sig is just as lame
So this isn't about Orange County? I did the "read a few words to get the gist of the article" and got all excited that J.B. made it onto /.
if they added the dead voters and illegal immigrant voters it would add up to 100.
The more I know about computers, the less I trust them
SCUBA diving is a hobby of mine. I was once on a dive boat with a large and diverse group of divers and on the way to the dive site a discussion occured regarding dive computers and old fashioned mechanical guages and timers that indicate depth, amount of air in the tank, and time under water. All of which are critical pieces of information. At the end of the discussion someone asked who the programmers and engineers were. These techies were overwhelmingly in the mechanical guages camp. The doctors, lawyers, CPAs and such had the dive computers. Everyone had a good laugh over that.
Or malfeasance.
2001 sound files
Was it Al Capone who first said this immortal phase?
So 5,500 people didnt know where they live?
No. Multiple precincts had their polling places in the same building. Voters had no idea this was happening. They were only told this building has your polling place. A friend had this happen to him. After following the helpful signs, which also did not indicate their were multiple precincts in the building, he was disturbed to find out he was not on the list of registered voters. He checked his sample ballot, yep, same building its always in, and then some worker said "you must be in the other precinct, go two doors down". He was on the list in that other room and successfully voted. Well, he thinks he did. Who can tell?
I am interested in setting up a panel in NYC (New York, New York, USA) somewhere between July 9 and July 11.
:
Some topics that color my view of e-voting systems briefly follow
My concern is that any system be appropriately thought out, formally and precisely defined, using rigidly designed systems (not necessarily off-the-shelf), made to precisely and verifiably conduct voting tansactions, without being able to disclose, leak, or bleed any information that is not supposed to escape the system.
The Johns Hopkins study is an excellent reference and resource on the issues that have to be addressed.
I am personally interested in setting up a panel in New York in Mid-July (not much - just about an hour to an hour and-a-half), but at an interesting venue. I am not offering funding, but there could be some visibility.
I would welcome hearing from anyone who is doing interesting work in this area - in the US or overseas, that would be interested in participating on such a panel, to include related topics on technology-and-democracy.
Thank you,
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
Why where codes given out on a per veter basis ? Why were the machines not set up according to location to begin with ? IE when the systems are set up the proper disctric code is entered and used the entire time that machine is at that location ?????
Even if the poll workers are giving out the right codes this now allows fat finger voters to enter the wrong district code.
ACK !!!!!!!
Repeat after me... NEVER TRUST THE USER.
In this case you must trust whoever sets up the machine so HAVE THEM ENTER THE DISTRICT CODES !!
SHEESH
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Unless a system can at least equal that in accuracy, ease of use and cost, and demonstate a definite advantage in at least one, it should be dismissed out of hand.
>>>>truth; beauty; unix.<<<<
1) I will use the preview button.
2) I will use the preview button.
3) I will use the preview button.
.
.
.
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1,000,000) I will use the preview button.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Hell, the fact that America has only two respected political parties (indistinguishable from each other, no less) should be cause enough for concern. Gerrymandering, voting systems that can't be audited, and a complete disrespect for the American Constitution by both parties; it's a wonder Americans can sleep at night.
If Bush and his crooks try to Florida us, you bet we'll riot.
California's had Republican governors before, such as Pete Wilson who preceded Gray Davis. Most problems during Davis' term were leftovers from Wilson's fascist-leaning policies, in fact.
But when's the last time Cali went for a Republican president? (I have no idea.) It would be extremely suspicious, as we know what frauds GWB is capable of!
If the margin of victory is larger than your margin of error, recounts are unnecessary. If you take the statistically improbable stance that all of mistakes favored the winner, and, after correcting for the error, the winner is still the winner, the error is insignificant.
Which is an interesting point that was never really dealt with in 2000 in Florida. The margin of victory in Florida was never greater that the historical margin for error... it was never actually determined who had more votes.
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
Since I live in one of the areas affected, here's a rundown: You go into the voting area, and tell the volunteers your address. They create your card, and send you to one of your voting booths - the voting booths are separated by precinct. They create your card by entering some data on an orange box (literally an orange box, not the phreaking kind) and running the card through. You go to your machine, then slip your card in and vote on the touch screen. The problem is that the voting machines are grouped by precinct - the data for what precinct you are in is not on the card. When I went to vote, I got my card, then asked for a voter registration form for my wife. The fifteen seconds that it took was enough for the volunteers to forget what precinct I was in. Then it became obvious to me that they were also confused as to the layout of the voting machines. The only reason this didn't turn into a very large fiasco was that the victory margins in Orange and Riverside counties were exceptional this go round. It's crazy to me how poorly thought out these systems are.
The hanging chad/no hanging chad issue hid the larger issue in Florida: the punch ballot was designed badly and offered no way for the voter to truly verify that they got the result that they wanted. Due to the design, voters who thought they were voting for Gore *actually* voted for Buchanan. This was the real tragedy of that election.
Uniform standards for throwing out votes (and that is what the standard determined, the number of *legitimate* but badly indicated votes to throw out) would not have fixed this. The problem would have remained that Gore was not getting votes that were intended for him. If Bush had faced the same issue, then no big deal; mistakes cancel out. However, he did not. The place to vote for Bush was clearly indicated. The place to vote for Gore was not (Buchanan's slot was where Gore's would reasonably be: second after Bush).
Note: the problem did affect both parties, just not in that election. In general, the ballots were designed such that the major party to which the governor did not belong was the one that got screwed. In 1996, Dole got screwed by the same effect. No one complained then because it didn't affect the election: Dole would have lost both nationally (even with Florida's votes) and in Florida regardless. I'm rather glad that we at least notice when this happens in unimportant (i.e. not close enough that it made a difference) elections now.
The minor question of whether or not to count ballots that tried to correct this vote for Buchanan by also punching out the hole for Gore is almost irrelevant. The fact that so many people made that mistake (which was understandable given the horrid design of the Florida ballots) and did not correct it properly (I think that they were supposed to request a fresh blank ballot rather than try to adjust the one they had) was the immediate problem. The real problem is that the system did not enforce this.
A proper voting method should include the following characteristics:
1. Voters should know how their votes are going to be counted (i.e. to what candidates) prior to final submission.
2. Voters should be able to change their votes to reflect their true desires if miscast. The revised votes should then be reverified (see 1).
3. There should be a paper trail that is also verified (see 1) and reviseable in case of mistake (see 2). This paper (or whatever substance) trail can be used to recreate all the votes in case of a recount. It should be in human readable form, so that the voters may check their votes to see how they will be cast. In case of mistake (rather than changing one's mind), the voter should be able to reject/void that entry and replace it with a corrected version. This should not happen, but the ability should exist -- just in case.
4. Show voters their residence info (i.e. address). This info should not be recorded for privacy reasons, but it should indicate to the voters where the voting machine thinks that they live. If the residence is wrong, then the voter should get the card reprogrammed. This verifies that the voter is at the right place.
At best, it seems that these new machines provide 2 and maybe 1. Of course, 2 is not very difficult. 1 is rather useless without 3 (how do we know that the machine isn't just giving all the votes to one candidate). Combining all four is certainly technologically feasible. In fact, the mechanical voting booths which I have always used handle 1 and 2 (certainly better than Florida); the lack is in having a human readable paper trail.
I guess that it is back to the drawing board. I wonder if the ACLU, et. al. will sue the makers of the new machines to get a working system to replace them.
When all of the requirements of a complete, fair, trustworthy, straightforward-to-use voting system are taken together, they become extremely complex systems; systems that include all of the people and operation plans, not just the box. Anyone who has followed Peter G. Neumann's Risks Forum for the last few decades, if they aren't hopelessly depressed by the sheer number, scope and seeming endlessness of mistakes out there, at least understands how easy it is to get systems like this wrong. And how much attention to detail, and not just programming detail, it takes to get it right. In this case, there are competitive pressures to do a quick but superficial job, political pressures to appear to be fixing the 2000 election problems, and potential criminal pressures to control the outcome (among other things). Unfortunately, as with many of the cases that make it into the risks forum, it appears that the affected population needs to experience an actual, live failure before they will believe or admit that a failure is possible. The only solution is continued vigilance and action.
David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system
Wow. Riceboys get their own votingmachine company now? Do they come with racingstripes and a spoiler?
As a voter in Orange County, I can honestly say that this was an "operator error" condition. As much as I distrust electronic voting without accountability, I can truly say that the voting around here was conducted by people who were as unexpecting, untrained, and unquilified as can be.
My experience started with arguing with the person who checked my name. For some reason (he couldn't tell me why), my signature line requested ID - most didn't. As he pointed to another name, and asked me to sign, I told him I couldn't sign at that line - I had to sign the line corresponding with my name. I swear it took over a minute to get him to move his pointing finger off of my line, so I could sign and get on with the vote.
After this, I got a paper card from another poll-worker. I don't know how this was matched with me, but it was prefixed with LIB (I'm a registered Libertarian), so I assumed was as OK as possible. I moved on to yet another person, handing out the slips of paper with the four-digit code. It took me a while to get this, as he struggled with the machine. I finally got what I hope was the correct code, and made my votes.
Afterwards, as I tried to find someone to talk to about getting a printout of my vote, I found that no one would even make eye contact with me! They were like McDonald's employees in this regard... it's not they were doing anything better - there were no other voters at that exact moment. They all just stood around talking about their neighbors, wives, turtles, etc.
All in all, I liked the interface of the voting machines, but felt a bit unsure, since there's no way it can be proven I voted for who I did. The biggest problem, it seems to me, was callous volunteers, who didn't understand, nor want to, the current voting system to any degree.
Either way, I'll continue to be biased against electronic voting machines.
The guys voted in the wrong precinct.
:
Now it doesnt makes a difference if I have some bytes telling me
"In precinct 1 : 12345 people voted for X and 6789 people voted for Y"
or if I have
12345 paper ballots for X and 6789 paper ballots for Y.
In both cases, I am complety unable to verify which of the 19134 votes were cast by voters from precinct 2. So a paper trail wouldnt have helped in this case.
Paper ballots would still have prevented the problem as 2 different piles of paper ballots (preferable in different colors) are far more obvious to everyone than a long list on a computer screen with every possible precinct/affilation-combi.
So the problem really is bad interface combined with insuffisent training.
(Scrolling through a list of ALL precint/affilation combinations? Give me a break, a handout with the few access codes relevant to the voting booth would have been far more appropriated. Or at least, filter the list.)
That being said, I'm still ABSOLUTLY for a paper trail, as it is obligatory to prevent other problems, the most serious being manipulation.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
grrr ... I somewhat proofread my comments, I should start proofreading my subjects too :(
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Unless you provide some evidence, I can only conclude that you're making things up.
... these machines are hugely successfull and these kind of incidents are rare.
The reason is that machines here are EXTREMELY simple. No 'enter 10 digit code to vote' bullsh*t. Every candidate has got a dedicated button on panel where his party's logo, his photo and name are prominantly displayed. An officer verifies your name from list and presses a 'companion' button... only after that you can press a button inside the voting box (only once!).
Thus its a simple electronic 'interlock' mechanism. At the end of the day, officers can push a button and can read individual vote count on the display. No complex logic in software... and no 'practical' "intentional" bugs causing bias, because the machines come only with a panel with LARGE number of unlabelled buttons... these buttons gets labelled with stickers of candidates party logo, photo and name only after its assigned to a particular constituency. Given that assignment is random and voting happens in multiple phases, the same machine can be used in multiple locations... with completely 'unpredictable' labelling (eg. BJP's candidate may get 10th button in one area and 50th in other)... so the programmers can't introduce intentional bias bugs.
Following the KISS principle sometimes really helps.
- mritunjai
So do we KNOW for a FACT that some/most/all of the skewed results are not due to hacking!? Maybe some smart 14 year old was just playing with the numbers!
Sweet zombie Jesus!
It's time to open source the touch screen voting systems, NOW! And we need PAPER RECEIPTS of our votes!
I know there's probably something I'm not thinking of that would disqualify this idea, but why not just use a simple carbon paper ballot with, say, the original and 2 copies being generated, then the poll worker runs it (over? through? across?) an optical reader that sends the count over normal phone lines, to a central tabulation center, where the results can be quickly evaluated, then verified against the paper copies. There should be a workable model similar to this that could be implemented, and could avoid many of the pitfalls this experiment has revealed.
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Why not just "Put an X here" voting?
// TOP SECURITY CODE WRITEN IN INDIA^H^H^H^H^HCUBA^H^H^H^HCHINA
:)
In Canada, all Federal and Provintial elections are done this way. Everyone understands it. Anyone can very it.
It look like in the US, the system might be as follows,
if( strcmp( candidate, "My Big Joe" ) == 0 )
tally[1] += random( 1, 10 );
else
rally[2]++;
With closed source voting booths, everyone looses their vote. With paper, everyone can verify the code
I think that US might need to redefine "democracy" next.
That isn't a new problem or one unique to electronic voting machines. The Daleys of Chicago have been arranging more votes than voters for Democrats since 1960...
Depending where you vote, the machine will likely be hooked into another machine at the end of the night and all of the data collected. At the end of the night, whichever machine the data was congregated on, will dial into a statewide server and upload the results.
in fact the number of cards, steps, and the size of the voting system makes it "almost" impossible to hack.
Every step in the system is another opportunity to compromise it. That is the biggest problem with securing complex systems. To properly phrase your statement:
the only cord leading away from the unit was a power cord and I didn't pick up any WiFi signals with my ears.
Some voting machines do indeed have a wireless card to transfer voting results to a central server.
You continue your voting, and the selections you made on the screen are put onto the card when you finish.
Beep! Wrong. The card is used to keep you from voting twice. That is its only purpose. Your vote is (hopefully) recorded on the machine.
you hand said unmarked card to the attendant and she puts it safely with the others. I've also heard the cards are kept for a manual tally back at the voting offices.
Beep! Wrong. The cards are cleared, recycled, and used later in the day.
Well considering that the machines are not biased and that the people who built or were contracted to build them did not tamper with them, there is very little chance for a misread vote, or a "purposefully changed" vote.
I seem to recall one of the big electronic voting machine manufactures was run by a man convicted of felony fraud. Several key employees were also convicted felons. These companies will draw crooked people like honey attracts flies.
Even if the people who built the machines did not tamper with them (a very foolish assumption), other people involved in the voting process have plenty of opporunities to tamper with the machines.
There site is www.decash.com , but there is very little information on the site right now.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
In other words, no one can tell if it was a fix or not!
What is this about party affiliation? Is that talking about political parties? The way that I read that is that the ticket issued by the worker somehow contains information about the political party that the voter is (presumably) disposed to vote for. If that is true then it is anything but a secret ballot.
I suspect (and hope) that I have misunderstood something here -- can someone please explain.
You know, if I were worried about flames and such, I'd put my flame shield on right at the end of the post ;)
this is not a conspiracy... just a problem with method. Think about it for a few minutes. New system, new users, new admins. Problems with UI are inevitable.
As an OC citizen I found the system to be flawless, given that I was in fact given the correct ballot number/ID.
Question is, how many times has this happened when there was no auditing system in place? Surely an electronic version doesn't change logistical problems?
more later....
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The recent rebellion? That began with the government refusing to hold election to replace members whose terms had expired.
As an election officer for Fairfax County, Virginia, this sounds much more like a training issue than a problem with the machines.
I can't speak for Orange County, but in Fairfax County we have fairly a sophisticated training program that allows our officers to have time with the machine.
We learn to set it up, activate the machine, give voters access, close the polls, and generate the final results.
I don't know about Orange County's machines, but ours are preprogrammed with all the ballots for the precincts and the initialization of the machine with our precinct location smartcard determines that we have the correct ballot.
Our instructions even instruct us to check the ballot against what we were given in our kits to verify that the machine is correct.
It's possible if these machine work in similar fashion that the Orange County Registrar sent out the wrong precinct location cards, and that resulted in the numbers getting skewed.
In all honesty, any voting machine will work properly, but training deficiencies are where the problems arise. You don't need a paper trail, you don't need old fashioned paper ballots, but you do need poll workers that have been trained and familiarized with the equipment and contingencies for when things go wrong.
Fairfax County has been working without a paper trail for years now. Our old Shouptronic 1242 machines recorded the results in a large memory cartridge and only printed out a final tape at the end of polling.
Even the old lever action mechnical machines didn't create a paper trail. I think many in the slashdot crowd are a little deluded in thinking that a paper chit will solve all of voter ills.
In Flordia, one report I read pointed out that the chad trays filled up and prevented the punch from fully extending through the machine. Emptying the chad tray would have solved the issue. But that goes back to training for the poll workers and election officers.
But this last election was only a primary, and as such was a good testing area for the general election coming up. Most jurisdictions know what is at stake, and I'm positive they will be ironing out procedural bugs which will be the correct way to solve the issue.
But regardless, everyone needs to realize that there are always going to be a percentage of spoiled ballots in any system, whether it's written, circle filled, butterfly or electronic. Yes, you can minimize the chance, but in the end it comes down to how your set up your methods and procedures.
But as I can personally attest, I've seen people successfuly use and have trouble with the touch screen voting systems, and it doesn't matter if you 18 or 80. Some people get it, some will be confused. Training and procedures are what get you over that hurdle.
-Crolis
This animation is really funny..
Pax Christi USA to bring International Election Monitos
Popular Science did a piece recently on what would happen if Southern California (with all its high tech weaponry and military bases) tried to seceed, and it claimed the feds would win within days.
The big problem here IMO is that once the voter commits his ballot, there is no way to tie the ballot back to the voter, and thus to the ballot's precinct. This problem also existed in the old mechanical "lever-machines" used in many jurisdictions on the East Coast (at least they used to be - not sure if they still are today). In those machines the voters indicates his choice with dials or buttons, and commits it with a lever-arm (much like that on a slot machine, which should tell you something about the process :) ). The machine increments its counters mechanically and resets itself for the next voter. If the machine is set for the wrong precinct, and thus the wrong set of contests, well then the votes are invalid. It's interesting to note that many of the same complaints made about touchscreen voting also applied to mechanical voting machine: no audit trail, no indication to the voter that his vote was counted correctly, and no ability to hold a recount.
Of course there is a good reason not to tie the ballot back to the voter: secrecy of the ballot. This is handled easily with paper or punchcard ballots - after voting the ballot is dropped in a ballot box and mixed in with other ballots. In an electronic voting machine it seems that the ballot is essentially destroyed after being counted. This preserves secrecy, but if the voter was placed in the wrong precinct, his votes on some contests may be lost. Some touchscreen machines do allow "provisional" voting for voters whose identity or residence cannot be established at the time they vote - these ballots are set aside and counted when election officials have cleared them. So the capability to tie a voter to a ballot is present in some systems.
I've worked the "back room" operation for many elections with punchcard ballots, and find similar problems where ballots end up in the wrong precincts. Sometimes the election officials send ballots to the wrong precinct. In other cases the election workers use ballots from the wrong precinct when a polling place has more than one precinct assigned to it. However with punchcard or paper ballots we can detect these problems and move the ballots into the correct precincts for the official count. It should be noted that moving a ballot from one precinct to another does not affect the outcome of the election unless the destination precinct votes on non-compatible contests, and even then, only contests which do not appear in both precincts would be affected. So for example if the entire jurisdiction votes for President, but some precincts vote for local offices by district, only the local offices are affected.
Making changes to how a ballot is counted after it is cast is obviously a touchy subject. The makers of the current generation of touchscreen machines seem to have decided that they are better off removing this capability. This may be their own design philosophy, or it may be due to the requirements of the election jurisdictions, who are their customers. Leaving the capability in place could open up the system to potential manipulation - for instance, moving ballots from precincts with votes for a certain candidate into a precinct where that candidate's office does not exist, or worse yet, where his ballot position would count for another candidate.
Elections are a lot more complicated than most voters realize. As with any information system, voting systems must satisfy many criteria that force design decisions. Building in the capability to recount ballots raises other important issues of privacy and potential fraud.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Please use a better voting system
Here in Cook County, Illinois, it happens all the time - if by "voters" one means only the living.
[this
Actually, under the electoral college system your single vote is more likely to sway the election in the event of a close vote than it would be in a direct majority count, and is therefore, theoretically, _more_ important.
Under the electoral college system, if you wind up casting the deciding vote in your district that buys the elector for that district for essentially one vote. Never mind that the district next door voted for the other guy by a landslide -- they only got one elector as well, at a cost of hundreds of votes that would otherwise have counted against you in a direct election....
Got mead?
There are real problems with electronic voting. Unfortunately those who scream the loudest are using the issue to discredit ALL voting that does not result in Democrats being elected.This should be a non-partisan issue.Whenever you see something on electronic voting that is largely Bush-bashing conspiracy theory you know the agenda is not fair and accurate elections but an attempt to discredit and undermine the democratic process.
Isn't this problem about the level of a Freshman Programming Assignment?
What the hell is this world coming to when this is really such a problem? If it's not the programming (and it shouldn't be!!!), there's something wrong with our election monitoring process that's allowing people to vote more than once.
Assignment 1 - Week 1
1. Create an array of variables to hold election counters for each candidate.
2. Create an array of text strings to hold election choices. Use a multidimensional array so that rows may indicate offices of election and columns can indicate names.
3. Display Election choices on the screen
4. Increment array from step 1 as choices are made. Allow only one choice for each row.
Extra Credit: Allow write-ins.
Wooohoooo!
http://web.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/electio
You gotta vote for mayor, district attorney, sheriff, and 14 -- count 'em, 14 referendum-style questions! So their system is vastly more complicated than ours; we only vote for one thing at a time, but that ballot there is effectively 17 elections in one. Now imagine how much worse it'll be this November, when you've got President, Senator, Congressman, plus state houses, governorships, local state questions, all on one ballot.
Because you now have thousands of bits of paper you can look at and say. "Look they gave out the wrong ballot papers, they shouldn't be in this box".
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Call me a cynic, but politicians have got us stitched up like kippers. They're professionals, not fuelled by beliefs but by cash. They make gestures to the people, which we lap up, and everyone's happy for a couple of months. Then, when people start to think, they make another gesture. It keeps happening. It's classic misdirection, just like the technique used by magicians.
People, we gots to stand up for ourselves! They're directors, not politicians. Presidents are CEOs. They don't represent us, but their shareholders. We're the unwitting fools that bankroll them and their buddies.
Every stance Bush has taken, on almost every issue, has been centered around profit. Kyoto? Screw it! It costs too much to comply! Iraq? Screw it! George and Dick can make a killing giving our money to their buddies to clean up the mess they made us pay for. Oh, then they can sell the oil they steal from Iraq, and make even more money.
Don't take my word for it, think about it.
... but we polititians are too lazy to drive ourselves to the rat fuck. Thank goodness we can just login and win the election from those Liberal bleeding heart homos.
;D
Heh heh, just a joke.
Dude, just cause there was a human error doesn't mean there also wasn't a bunch of programming errors. Or a hack. Or hacks.
You're entirely too trusting for me to trust you with voting machines!
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Why the FUCK do you have more than one precinct assigned to one polling place? That is just asking for trouble.
In Pennsylvania each polling precinct is broken down into wards. Each ward has one, and ONLY one, polling place to vote at for that particular voting area. If you show up at the wrong polling place it is recognized very quickly since your name is not in the book you must sign in order to vote. The book has a copy of your signature so the two can be compared.
No wonder Florida has such a difficult time running a fair election, their system is designed to sow confusion and obfuscation.
There is no legitimate reason to have a polling place service more than one voting area no matter how many safeguards are put in place. That's just being lazy.
This proves my theory, if they would make voting easier then more people would vote, see how good it worked. More than everybody voted which you can't argue with is much better than a measly 40% turnout.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Perfect example of why printed receipts are needed.
Here we have an election where the results were obviously wrong, yet no recount is possible.
The fact that the fraud is not alleged and that election was not close enough for the error to matter is irrelevant. What happens when the election is close?
There has to be a way to check the results.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
which was understandable given the horrid design of the Florida ballots
Actually, I'd like to point out that those horrid ballots were only used in a single Florida county, Palm Beach county. A large number of counties here in Florida use optical scan ballots. These ballots, at least in the form we use where i live (Orange County) easily satisfy 1, 2 and 3 on your list above. And the poll workers easily satisfy 4.
1. Each candidate's name has a broken arrow next to it. You use a special marker to connect the two parts of the arrow next to the candidate you want to vote for.
2. After completeing your ballot you put it into a machine that scans it right there in the precinct. If you have marked your ballot in an invalid way (ie voting for two candidates for the same office) the machine spits the ballot back out and the poll workers will destory it and issue you a new ballot. I believe the law gives you 4 or 5 trys to get it right. Not that anyone should need more than one try with this ballot.
3. Since the ballot is collected, and has the candidates names on it right next to the place where people mark there vote, the ballots are in human readable form. And if you accidently mark the wrong candidate, you can ask the poll worker to destroy your ballot and give you another one, and again you have those same 4 or 5 trys to get it right. Not that any person should even need a second try, but it's there just in case.
4. While the ballot itself doesnt verify that people are in the right place, the poll workers do. They have a list of every voter in their precinct. When you come into vote, they ask for photo id, and if you use some id other than your driver's license they ask for your address. They then locate your name on the roll and verify your address, and have you sign the roll.
You know, as I scanned the list of stories on Slashdot, I saw this one and one on hacking your hard drive to get more storage, and I was about to read the hard drive story instead of this one, but my consience tugged at me and said "you care more about getting some hacked bytes out of your hard drive than about the future of democracy in America?". And I grudgingly read this story instead. If technically educated people like us can't be bothered with these problems, what hope is there for the voting system in this country?
It's not how bad the programmers are, it's how much money the politicians are paying them to cheat at election time. Black Box Voting Until electronic voting is gone, there wont be one election we can trust. What's the problem with hiring people to count them? It gives the economy more jobs!
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
The founding fathers were in fact called 'terrorists', & most of those who signed the declaration of independence were killed (by which I mean hung - along with their families) in the resulting war.
The people who are most quietly passionate about freedom in this country are in now or were in the military. If it came to a revolution you can bet more than a few tanks would be rolling in favor of the opposition. Picking a side is practically a time honored tradition in the military and I believe still taught as a moral imperative at West Point. Which means precisely that if there were any real form of revolution in the US, a decent chunk of the US military would already be on your side.
The worst case scenarios you hear of (where the US forces crush any attempt at rebellion) assume that the military and intelligence and all of the civil defense authorities do exactly what politicians tell them to without question, up to and including blowing up orphanages. Fortunately, reality is a lot more brutal.
Even more fortunate, no matter how bad the system gets in America the foundation still allows the forces of rebellion to take over legally without ever picking up an assault rifle. That's why we have elections - if you had enough people to start a rebellion you could just get elected. If you didn't have enough people on your side, you're keenly aware that the majority of the people don't want you in charge. And if you ever lose your right to vote, you and all your neighbors (and most members of the military) have that rifle handy to remove the minority that stole your right to vote.
This is a fantastic example of why the source code of any voting system needs to be open, so that all 'bugs' such as these will be transparent. In this case, it's too bad the people are so starry-eyed by the fact that they can vote electronically (look ma, no ballot!) that they have been lulled into trusting the system outright.
/. analysis team would be on it and already have the problem diagnosed and solved.
If the source were open, the
What we need to be asking is this:
Who fought to get these systems installed?
Why?
A detailed analysis of the source code, along with an investigation of why these 'errors' occur, may help answer those questions.
By any chance, did they hire some people from Florida for this election ? :-)
They should just outsource the election to a company from India...
I never understood the hanging chads problem. I've got a paper punch here at the office and it never fails to cleanly punch a hole.
So if I understand things correctly, some people seem to think that it's easier to replace paper ballots with an electronic system versus getting a better paper punch?!
Not like Clinton or anything.He makes Bush look moderate in comparison.
Californians may be a little flaky but like most of the country they will go for Bush in 2004.
Anybody that left will vote for Nader.
Bush will win CA this time for sure.
In regards to 4, they had that here. Then they messed it up. What you are talking about is the initial decision. What I am talking about is *verifying* that initial decision. If they put you in the wrong machine, give you the wrong ballot, or miscode your smart card, then something needs to be done at that point to verify and catch the error. Note that this happens *after* you sign the roll (i.e. the mistake is made after correctly identifying the precinct).
Note: a simple verification method is to just have all voting districts in separate locations. Then you don't have the problem of miscoded smart cards or incorrect machines. I suppose that they could issue incorrect ballots, but not by mixing them.
How hard would it be to print out a receipt for the voter that states how they voted - so they could verify what they are indeed voting for before they hit the 'vote' switch. Similarly, how hard would it be to keep a paper printout inside of the voting machines that records each ballot without the personal information? The printout could be used to troubleshoot inconsistencies like this and determine where the problem lays.
Also - allowing a user or a poll worker to punch in the access number that says which precinct that ballot is tallied against is a bad thing. That is just asking for errors.
Each machine needs to be hard configured by the election board for its specific precinct location - so that users or poll workers can not tamper with it (this would be equivalent to a lock on the ballot box as we have with paper ballots).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
You must be American. Obviously you have no idea what a real armed revolt looks like.
... why, going on right now. These histories amply demonstrate that your concept of overwhelming force is a fantasy.
... for who could stand against their endless lines of redcoats in the field? Answer: American militia shooting them from behind trees and walls of field stone.
... and they dare not leave that base during the night, due to all the snipers.
Your sentiment is lost in the histories of WWII Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, as well as your beloved government's military actions in the Middle East
Firstly, an armed populace a la the US Constitution should have whatever weapons the military has -- because the population WAS THE MILITARY. The modern Western forms of military (essentially degraded into mercenary forces) have broken with that. But, to an important degree, if the citizen solider can get his hands on an assault rifle, he can match the standard issue of the mercenary soldier (i.e. those "serving" in the US military today).
Secondly, if your concept of overwhelming force really functioned in Reality, then Vietnam would be America's 51st state, and Iraq would have been the 52nd by 1993. Those didn't happen, and that's because even the best equipped solider in the world can be shot in the neck at dusk in a mountain pass. Firebombing hardly dictates the outcome of a campaign.
Overwhelming force is the Big Lie that brought the British Empire their defeats in America
The right to keep and bear arms is still fundamental to a free citizenry. And they can still use it to prosecute war against their own government, should it come to that. The gov can issue forth the tanks, planes and helicopters, but will find themselves torching houses with no inhabitants, while they get picked off by rifle and bazooka fire as they make their way back to base
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
This just shows that people are not paying attention to anything other than 'big ticket issues' (Guilty as charged). We are bombarded for months before an election with information on Propositions, and major office candidates. All because they have MONEY to feed the media machine. What kind of info do we get about, school board posts, judgeships, commisioners? Uhh...I saw the name on a telephone pole somewhere. Do people read the election info packets they are sent in the mail? Probably not, and I admit I am not perfect in this regard, but I sure don't try to make a decision by reading the ballot when I vote. But before I get to far off, I think electronic voting is a bad idea. Technology seems to be put forward as a panacea for what ails everything. And whats the freakin' hurry to find out who won. Let's go for accuracy and leave the speed to places where it would be more useful and less contentious (like getting my drive thru order at Jack in The Box processed)!
Actually, under the electoral college system your single vote is more likely to sway the election in the event of a close vote than it would be in a direct majority count, and is therefore, theoretically, _more_ important.
Only "in theory" and only if you're in a state that divies votes proportionally, rather than via winnter-take-all. I live in a Red State so my vote for Kerry wont count. And "supposedly" votes in small states count more than votes in large states - but then how do you explain that each presidential candidate will stop in California at least 20 times, but in small states you're lucky to get a vice presidential candidate for a single visit.
one cannot ignore the fact that the volunteer pollster printed this data and handed IT to us. the error is at the data base input level; WHY!?
something else got my attention at the poles. i'm use to showing my drivers licence. but this time around the volunter said that they couldn't verify who we were. talk about furtal ground for voter fruad.
"vote, and often" -- mayor daily
- $_ = '' if $province =~
/Quebec/i || $lang =~ /(?:french|franc|frog);
Quebec: making the French look resolute by comparison since June 22, 1940.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
They did it in 2000, with convention means of just not letting folks who disagreed with them vote. This year, they'll be able to do it by simply changing the numbers. Does this article not strike fear into any patriotic heart?
I sig, therefore I am.
Vote absentee to get a paper ballot. I do this in Alameda County, California.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Many voters did not notice that they were marking the wrong ballot.
... gave voters codes for the wrong precincts, causing the wrong ballots to appear on their screens. Some voters noticed the problem and were able to get workers to give them access codes for the proper ballots. But many voters did not."
Ergo, these voters voted either at random or along party lines even though they didn't recognize the candidate.
Great.
"Several workers
Yakavetta: I'm having a shitty day. I'm depressed. Tell me a funny joke.
Rocco: Uh, OK. There's these three guys walking on the beach, a spic, a white guy, and a black guy.
Yakavetta: Nigger!
Rocco: Yeah, right. So they find this pot, rub it, and a genie comes out. The genie says you can wish for whatever you want. So he asks the Mexican what he wants, and he says "I want all my people in America to be happy and free, and in Mexico." So the genie goes poof! It's done. Then he says to the black guy --
Vincenzo Lipazzi: Nigger.
Rocco: Yeah, right, he says to the nigger "What do you want?" And the nigger says "I want all my nigger brothers to be back in Africa, and happy and free and everything." So the genie goes poof! And they're all back in Africa. So... I'm not funny today, really, this joke sucks, I know...
Yakavetta: Continue the joke.
Rocco: Uh, so he says to the white guy, "What's your one wish?" And the white guy says, "Wait, you mean to tell me that all the spics and niggers are out of America?" The genie goes yeah, and the white guy says, uh, "I'll have a Coke, then."
Boondock Saints is one awesome movie. =)
Oh, and re: parent, if people didn't assume that every black person they met was a criminal and likely to rob/kill them, I suspect that fewer black people would become criminals to fulfill society's expectation of them. Or if popular black actors and artists stopped glamorizing violence, maybe fewer black people would consider that a valid path.
I know lots of black people, some who are criminals and some who are not, and the only difference I can see is that some of them bought into what society told them they should do. Sending everybody with a high level of melanin in their skin pigmentation to a different country isn't going to solve anything.
Simple system for accountable electronic voting:
Every voter gets a paper slip with a number on it that is part unique id (counter) and part chosen by the voter (let's call this the password part). The unique id was shown to the voter before he voted and before he entered his password. After the election every vote is made public with that number and its vote. Result:
1) Everyone has the power to check his or her vote AND check the outcome of the voting with a simple script and the public data.
2) The individual vote is not traceable to the voter (provided no voting booth organiser has the ability to find out the unique id a voter got).
3) Because of the chosen part no two voters can be given the same 'unique' id to "merge" their votes into one.
Ok, did I overlook anything? I can think of tricks that would work with 95 out of 100 people (like changing the id on the printout when the tampered machine finds a voter with the same 'password' and vote) in this scenario, but that's not good enough to avoid being found out by the 5% that are observant.
The state has changed over the years. Saying California is just as likely to go Republican as Democrat is saying the same thing about the south because the Dems picked up so many seats there in the past.
If California goes Republican, it'll be such a national crushing defeat of Kerry that Bush won't need California's electoral votes. It'll be a redux of Carter/Mondale/Dukakis.
No one who knows what they're talking about thinks taking California is realistic for the Bush. It's about the same odds as Kerry taking Texas.
No. You should be able to SEE your results before they go into the ballot box, but you should not be able to TOUCH the ballot.
That might allow you to remove it from the polling place and do $DEITY-knows-what with it.
It should pass from beneath a transparent panel to the ballot box when you hit the Cast Your Vote button.
Bev Harris writes knowledgeably about this.
Cringely has an even wiser suggestions: KISS.
The Canadians use a marker-and-paper-only system with "scrutineers". It works very reliably.
gewg_
>I did hear one of the volunteers saying that your couldn't back up a page in case you made a mistake >but I didn't test that.
I did test it. You can.
The part I don't like is that you can't double-punch or un-vote in a category.
Since we don't have a binding "None of the above" choice for each and every category,
if you want to double-punch to negate the vote
(and show that you don't like any of the chumps and that you didn't accidntly skip over a category)
or if you accidently make an entry into e.g. the President column
(when you feel that none of the candidates is even qualified for Dogcatcher),
you can't go back and remove the mark;
all you can do is change the vote to another unqualified jerk.
gewg_
I guess DanglingChad-v1.5 is now in the works.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Someone just modded the parent post "flamebait," and I'm mystified as to why.
I'm pretty sure that if a post is relevant to the discussion and true, and politely phrased, it isn't "flamebait". Admittedly I did state my personal opinion as to the motivations in the conclusion, but that seems pretty reasonable.
Or was the moderator objecting to the "This is bullshit" that I quoted from the message I replied to? I'll just point out that the first two paragraphs are quoting the message I replied to so that readers would have context.
Just curious. Whoever moderated that post as flamebait, I'd love to know why...
(OK, mod me offtopic now. But I don't know how/where else to ask the question, since moderation is anonymous).
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
The founding fathers were not terrorists because terrorism is a relatively new concept which involves the indiscriminate targeting of CIVILIANS. That's the key difference between revolutionaries and terrorists.
That is an interesting and excellent article you linked. It may show how to provides a solution to permitting a user to take home a verifiable ballot receipt.
However ... the other part of my objection is how to keep your vote secret from the government. The article said, "Either one you take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except with numeric keys divided among computers run by election officials)." If the government has a ballot anywhere that can be traced back to you with a record of how you voted -- one that they can decrypt -- then the concept of the secret ballot is violated.
Also, an encrypted reciept also destroys confidence in the integrity of the voting procedure because we end up just trusting that the government's tech is all honest and correct. Shakrai's post nailed it quite well when he said, "I don't trust any balloting scheme that can't be recounted by my 85 year old Grandmother who volunteers for election day -- and neither should you."
I have no argument that absentee ballots can be and perhaps are being abused. We may need to fix that problem also.