Orange County: More E-Ballots Cast Than Voters

Nofsck Ingcloo writes "Orange County, California has discovered the joys of electronic voting. The story originated in the LA Times, which requires registration to view it. Yahoo News has a copy here. Problems occurred in races throughout the county. Among the symptoms of the problem were turnouts exceeding 100%." Read on for more.

"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."

Comments

I don't get it

[skifreak87]

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?

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are there no comments? Looks like we need independent auditors for Slashcode!

Re:WTF?

[YetAnotherLogin]

I think that's because all the initial comments on this story got attached to other adjacent stories. :)

Voter Secrecy

[Anonymous Coward]

/puts flame shield on
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"). /removes flame shield

Re:Why can't America get this right?

[woverly]

We're not so much the "torch-bearer of democracy" anymore as we are a mob with torches. And proud of it!

Actually, we were not getting it right

[gad_zuki!]

>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.

Re:lack of insecurity,

[DunbarTheInept]

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.