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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!
something seems buggy here
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").
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.
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.)
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.
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 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 .
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!
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!
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
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.
>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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
/. article where some educated person posited this inane theory. Yes, it does in fact amplify the power of groups of small groups of voters thus allowing them to effect the larger election in ways their raw numbers would not. There are a couple reasons why the electoral college is still bad.
Ah yes, I remember the first
First, it assumes that having the chance for one vote to sway the entire election is a positive thing, or the best measure of the importance of your vote. I don't really want my vote to be the one that decides the election; I want it to be the votes of myself and everyone who has similar views, wherever they may be.
Second, as you said: your vote can only turn the election if the race is very close in your county/state. Thus only votes in contested districts are theoretically more important. Votes in uncontested districts are instead nullified. They are less important. In fact they are completely irrelevant. So to give individual voters in highly contested districts more power, you remove power from individuals in uncontested districts entriely.
This is not a good tradeoff. You disenfranchise political minorities so that a voting machine... er, I mean voter in Florida can turn the entire election.
Let me put it this way: I live in Texas. I'm not going to vote for Bush. Tell me again how the Electoral College makes my vote more important?
The enemies of Democracy are