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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?
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").
Maybe this is a reflection of society's attitude in general. I sense that a new level of apathy has developed over the last decade or so. Our politicians have stooped to such lows that they have no credibility left at all, and by association neither does the whole political system. We assume that politicians are lying and impotent, but we don't react with horror any more, because we just take it for granted. We assume that the election system is hopelessly broken and probably blatantly rigged, but we don't care anymore. What's the good of worrying about it if we feel there's nothing we can do?
Politicians know this about us too. They know they can rack up a rediculous deficit without getting thrown out of office, because we don't care. They know they can get away with starting a war on false pretenses if they feel like, because we don't care. I sometimes wonder what an elected official would have to do in order to get thrown out in protest. Is there any limit to what they can just shrug off?
Somewhere along the line, whatever systems we used to have in place that gave some power to individual citizens have failed us or disappeared. There used to be checks and balances in the system to stop governments doing rediculous things. Voters used to think they had some power through the ballot box. Individuals used to be able to run for public office and make a difference.
It's a sad thing indeed when a whole society loses faith in an important part of what makes it a functional community.
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!
(Provided, of course, that voter anonymity is preserved, but this shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than it is with paper ballots.)
Of course, the natural response to this is to simply USE PAPER BALLOTS. Any form of electronic record stored in RAM or on magnetic media can be tampered with. And any two CD-Rs look alike... It's a hell of a lot harder to swap two big boxes full of ballots than a single CD...
The two major objections that are usually posted here are that paper ballots take too long to count, and that paper ballots are a real bitch to deal with when you're voting for lots of things at once (California, anyone?). There's nothing wronge with machine-readable paper ballots (like the ubiquitous Scantron) for speed. As for multiple issues, it'd be easy to issue multiple pieces of paper. Vote for governor on the red one, proposition X on the blue one, etc. Then sort by colour and count by hand (or machine).
The only reason to implement wholly-electronic elections is to fix the results. Nothing else that is of any use to anyone can come from it.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
You mean, an organization that has pledged to defend civil rights shouldn't use the legal tools at their disposal to fight defective voting systems...because the system that comes next might be worse?
That's a great democracy we've got here.
~Idarubicin
The ACLU is supposed to be looking out for our voting rights. They didn't CAUSE the problems in Florida, or elsewhere, they just pointed them out. Hell, I've been downright disgusted with how poorly run our polls are here in Massachusetts - imagine my surprise when I voted for the first time at the age of 20 only to discover that you walk up to a table manned by two half-blind 70 year olds who have all the names of residents in the district here taped out onto the table, sorted by address. And they ask you "What's your address?" whereupon they find it listed and then ask you "what's your name?" and then they check you off on the list.
You could literally come in at the end of the day and claim to be fucking anybody. No ID required, no nothing. I mean, I know my vote for president (and in the democratic primaries this year) doesn't count for shit thanks to the electoral college system, but couldn't we at least pretend that it does?
The insecurity I'm most worried about is the kind that comes from INSIDE the company that provided the machines. When voting, EVERYTHING about the process MUST be open to public scrutiny, and I mean EVERYTHING. Voting is too important to hide the mechanism behind NDAs and patents. If the software counting the votes is secret (and it is), as most corporate software is, then it's not a trustable vote. Companies wanting to keep their methods secret is perfectly acceptable when they are trying to make money off of a trade secret. It's NOT acceptable, however, when they are trying to make money by convincing the government that their system is a safe system that won't disenfranchise any citizenry.
I want to KNOW that my vote is being counted dammit. I want confirmation, and I want an undisputable record that is NOT alterable by the software on the machine. Putting all the trust in one company is BAD, BAD, BAD. There is no other way to put it. There's no way to overstate the danger of allowing the country's vote to be handled by a single company that insists their methods of counting are a trade secret.
If you want electronic voting, fine. But then I insist that we be allowed to see the code, and have a way to guarantee that the code you show me is the same as the code that's on the machine's. This isn't rocket science. It's really quite easy to do. Unfortunately none of the people involved in the decision making process for the adoptation of these machines is actually a computer scientist. The fact that all the complaints are coming FROM the computer science community, and not from any particular party affiliation, should be telling you something.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The thing about compulsory voting is that I am really split over it. I know it is my democratic right not to vote, yet I also know that making people vote gives you a much better outcome as everyone is represented.
Remember that you don't have to vote, you just have to turn up. The nice thing about compulsory voting is that if you want to exercise your democratic right not to vote, you have to make an effort. Which is as it should be.