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!"

Comments

Recount?

[MooseByte]

"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"?

Re:Recount?

[LostCluster]

There's no recount possible. If you doubt the number's they're outputting, there's no way to challenge the number for validity.

No hanging chad problems... but no pieces of paper at all to count wasn't the solution we were looking for.

Re:Recount?

[k_head]

Unless the machine is actually printing out a receipt for each and every vote that the voter can look at and confirm then the process is suspect.

Many things can go wrong. For example.

1) The machines could be programmed to favor one party or another. No matter who the voter selects the machine one out of a thousand times switches the vote. If only one out of a thousand voters notice the discrepency the party gains power and grants more govt contracts to diebold.

2) the machines could skew the results enough to beat the margin for a recount. If the politician A wins by more then 5% then no recount will be triggered and nobody is wiser for it.

As long as commercial companies are making these machines and as long as those companies are allowed to lobby and bribe politicians the process is suspect. The software should be open source period. The machines should be imaged at secure locations under tight surveillance and should be accounted for 100% of the time they are in use.

elections are too important to trust to corporations with political agendas. The profit motive is just too great not the mess with things.

Re:Election

[Froggert]

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 :)

Go Absentee

[myownkidney]

And then you'll have a paper trail

Re:Go Absentee

[kst]

I voted on a Diebold machine in San Diego this month, just so I could see how the system works. The user interface was actually very nice, but I don't trust the system or the company that makes it. I intend to use an absentee ballot from now on, until and unless we switch to human-readable paper ballots. I'll fill out my absentee ballot and drop it off at my local polling place on election day. I may not be particularly quiet about it.

Using an absentee ballot will make it possible to recount my vote if necessary, but that doesn't do much good if everybody else's votes are miscounted.

Don't be fooled by talk of "paper receipts". What we need are paper ballots. If they're machine-generated, that's fine; it avoids problems with incorrectly marked ballots. If they're machine-readable, that's fine too -- as long as they're also human-readable.

The Digital Commons

[flopsy mopsalon]

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.