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San Diego Diebold Poll Worker's Report Posted
James Renken writes "I was a poll worker in San Diego for this year's primary election. It was the county's first using Diebold voting machines, and as you may have heard, we ran into some problems! My full report of the goings-on can be found at Live from the Nuke Free Zone. Enjoy!"
"I think that current electronic voting systems are better than the traditional systems in terms of security, and also in terms of usability for most people."
But how are those Diebold machines at allowing a recount? Do they finally create a paper trail, or is it still "faith-based voting"?
Wouldn't the loser be more likely to complain?
It seems like these Diebold systems have all sorts of features like smart cards and locks that make them look secure, but when you actually kick the tires you realize things are not as secure as they should be.
We'd be much better off with a system that produces prints a human readable and machine readable piece of paper, and then put those pieces of paper into a ballot box. At least, when the security of a box in plain sight gets compromised we know that something happened... the worst case here is swearing in a losing candidate.
So, I'm going to argue against the seemingly overwhelming majority of people out there about voting machines.
:)
Yes, there are issues. Are the issues any worse than what can/has been done in the past with non-electronic voting? Probably not. I think that Florida proved that you can tamper with the old system just as well as an electronic one.
Eventually what voting comes down to is trusting that the people who run the system are honest. If you have dishonest people anywhere in the chain; you're going to get bogus results. The only solution that I can see to this issue is that the process must become more open.
1) Diebold needs to modify the machines to produce a printed slip that shows the party X voted for. X is then responsible for ensuring that the slip makes it into the collection basket. Bar codes can be used to correlate votes in the machine and votes on paper, and verify that they match. Because the electronic vote must match the paper vote, and because the user can verify the paper vote themselves, it becomes harder to cheat.
2) Make the vote counting process open. If anyone wants to, let them watch votes being counted. Canada does this, why not? Votes are counted to verify election results. In the event of a discrepancy, the paper votes would be used. The electronic tallies would be used for "quick" results.
Well, it's an idea, anyways
What, me worry?
And then you'll have a paper trail
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
This never seems to be addressed, but cost.
If these machines are more difficult to operate and more expensive to maintain, and require the hiring of additional personnel to administer, why are they being used?
Paper ballots seem exponentially cheaper in all respects, and I haven't seen a piece of oaktag crash in many years.
The central problem with electronic voting lies not with bugs, hardware failures, or security, but rather than with our modern concept of democracy and where we see ourselves going as citizens of a common nation.
It is clear that present electronic voting efforts are the first step in a general program of transforming voting as we know it into an online, decentralized process, with the final goal being a system where voting is an activity as simple and hassle-free as ordering a pizza or sufing to a website.
Therein lies the problem. As citizens of a common nation, our involvement in the democratic process should be something that brings us together, together with people we would not ordinarily encounter, for what can only be called our sacred ritual of casting votes. A ballot should not be a screen with virtual buttons floating in hyperspace, it should be a hefty card, symbolizing the hefty decision that lies with each voter, it shows our seriousness that decision needs is embodied in the real physical ballots that are carefully tallied and counted and not simply disseminated into electronic bits.
The process of voting should be a little inconveniencing, with voters having to drive to the polling station, stand in line, and punch a ballot. It reinforces our sense of civic pride to have to make a bit of an effort to vote. It demeans the democratic system for the voting process to be allowed to atrophy into a simple matter of point-and-click, no need to get out of your chair. Choosing the laws and leadership of a nation should be an act more involved than switching channels.
When the once-proud rituals of democracy are reduced to a set of simple gestures, once the paricipants in the voting process are reduced to a mass of isolated individuals typing on keyboards or pushing buttons on PDAs, a sense of togetherness is lost. The insiduous decentralization of the voting system that is the end result of electronic voting can only lead to the erosion of our sense of citizenship, of being equal paricipants in something larger than ourselves. Could the erosion of democracy itself be far behind? It seems the dystopian corporate-run societies of so-called "cyberpunk" "fiction" more than just sci-fi.
I don't remember "civil disobedience" as practiced by Ghandi or MLK including breaking things... it was generally a peaceful type of thing. Maybe a sit-in, demonstrating outside the machines and explaining to the people who come in to vote what's wrong with them, or disobedience like this - but not wrecking the machine. Anyway, these machines seem to do a good enough job of breaking themselves - why go to all the trouble?
True. They were much, much worse. Reread your post, please!
I started poking around the root filesystem looking for a link to the executable.
What are they thinking giving every clerk everywhere root?
I finally found the actual location of the executable--it seemed to be on a datacard of some sort--and started it for them.
Other posters have noted that you have no way of verifying that this is the correct excutable. What if it was a testing version, or something else uncertified by the state?
We had one voting maching give a blank page to someone when it was in large print high contrast mode, but we just hit next and it was fine.
And this is the sort of thing that can be horribly troublesome. People with poor eyesight are mostly (though not exclusively) the elderly--a group that are not known for their comfort (in general) with computers. And here they are with a blank screen.
One of our machines failed to print -- it just cut off in the middle and wouldn't reprint (some paper trail, eh?).
How many people voted at that machine? A hundred? Five hundred? How many votes are now either irretrievable at worst or highly suspect at best? Even though it couldn't print the totals, you expect it to submit electronically the correct tally?
The worst part was that the voting stations give a total number of votes cast onscreen and a total on the printed tape, and on all of our machines but one, these did not match. They were all off by one vote.
How is this problem not very, very serious? First, you lose whatever thin reassurance the total provided. The system now is without an effective check on number of ballots cast. Second, if there was an error--if it was randomly distributed then it's unlikely (though not impossible) for it to affect an election. If it was systematic (deliberately, or just a programming error that inadvertantly doesn't count the first vote for the first candidate, or something like that) then this could be very serious. If five hundred people use each machine, and you lose one of every five hundred votes for a candidate, that's an error of 2000 votes per million ballots. That's appalling--and larger than the margins in a number of states in the last Presidential election.
~Idarubicin