Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Uncle Diebold's Clubhouse
On March 2nd, I was a poll worker for this year's California primary election. More specifically, I was a Systems Inspector in San Diego county, whose problems with voting machines and procedures received some coverage in the national media.
First, a summary of my personal opinion: 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. However, I share the opinion of many bloggers that major security issues remain in the new machines and implementations, and that these issues should already have been fixed.
More details below...
This was San Diego's first election using electronic voting machines - specifically, Diebold AccuVote-TSx stations. Previous elections in the county used punch cards. The county failed to make the mandated upgrade prior to the last election, and a federal court ordered that it be done for this primary.
Previously, precinct boards in the county were made up of an Inspector, an Assistant Inspector, and clerks. As of this election, a Systems Inspector and an Assistant Systems Inspector have been added at each precinct. According to the Registrar of Voters, this is because a four-hour training session would have been required in order for Inspectors to learn both the general procedures and how to operate the machines. Instead, most of the technical details are left to the Systems Inspectors.
I was contacted and assigned as a Standby Systems Inspector, meaning that if necessary, I would stand in for a missing Systems Inspector or Assistant Systems Inspector in my part of the county. The standby system is apparently not used very much; they forgot to handle some details, like sending me a copy of the poll worker's manual, or notifying me that the location for the mandatory training had changed. Fortunately, I'm fairly resourceful, and the classes were running late anyway.
In the class, we were introduced to how the system works. Along with the usual paperwork and supplies, each precinct has:
* A Precinct Control Model (PCM).
* A number of voting stations (either four, six, or eight).
* Two Voter Access Cards (VACs) per station, plus one or two extras.
* Two Supervisor Cards.
A poll worker (usually the Systems Inspector) sits in front of the PCM. One poll worker has each voter sign the roster, while another checks the voter's address on another list. That second worker points to the appropriate line on the address list, and the PCM operator sees which party to program a ballot for - with the party name never said aloud.
The PCM operator then selects the party on the PCM's touchscreen, and inserts any one of the Voter Access Cards (VACs) for programming. The VAC is then given to the voter, who inserts the VAC into any one of the stations, and is then presented with the ballot for their party. After casting their ballot, the voter's VAC is ejected, and the voter is instructed to give it back to the poll staff. The VAC itself is not a ballot at all - it just authorizes a voting station to bring one up, and tells it which party's ballot to display. After a ballot has been cast using a VAC, it must be reprogrammed on the PCM prior to being used again.
We were warned that some voters might try to cheat by claiming that they received the wrong party's ballot. We were advised that, should this happen, we should insert the card in a station to make sure that it had not been used to cast a ballot already; then, add one to the tally sheet of programmed but uncast ballots, and reprogram the VAC after checking the voter's registered party on the street address list.
That was about it. We were shown the startup and shutdown procedures for the machines, and cast a few sample ballots with them. The regular poll workers were noted on a list, and some paperwork or other was handled. I asked about getting ahold of a poll worker's manual, and was promptly given one from a large box that was sit
"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 much for progress through IT!
Like Bill Maher said: "Voting with computers used to sound cool and futuristic, back in 1969. Today we know that computers are just big fuck-up machines."
I didn't think so.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Or the Duke Nukem Zone, which will never amount to anything. Like politics.
--
Latest deals from all the major deal sites.
Wouldn't it be your fingers working faster than your brain?
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
Videos and photos of one of Diebold's ATM machines at Carnegie Mellon playing Beethoven today might amuse you.
All the places where he said
"It appeared to have recorded all of the votes properly, but I can't be 100% certain" or apparently.
With 1,000,000 people voting, an error 1/1000 is enough to change the results of election for the whole state. We need paper ballots.
It is even scarier, because he was a poll worker and did't realize this.
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?
I just ran into my Assembly Rep., Marc Pocan, who informs me his bill to require a paper trail on electronic voting machines passed the Assembly unanimously. No word on whether it will be taken up in the Senate, as the session is about to wind up. Sorry, no links yet.
We're already safe for this November, as the State Elections Board has not certified Diebold machines, or their competitors.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Here are some photos of a crashed Diebold ATM from National City bank. Yep, that's the windows desktop and the college kids who took the photos were controling the machine. Be afraid.
Remember, Americans: Bring your voter registration card, and a sledgehammer for Diebold. They are stealing our freedom to vote, the very democracy over which so much blood has been spilled, and the corrupted political process is encouraging it via awarded contracts and almost silent acquiescence.
This crosses political affiliations and affects all Americans. I strongly believe that this must be stopped it by all means necessary or we will lose the ability to collectively affect the policies of our country, no matter how small your individual voice might be. This is zealous, without a doubt, but not all zealotry is bad. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
Live free or die.Does the Diebold do anything to to correct the traditionally crappy choice in candidates? Maybe if it let you create your own cadidate, position by position. Two parts "Simone", a dash of Hal, hmmmm....
Clitmap.com: A better adult search engine
And then you'll have a paper trail
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
I may be paranoid here of just ignorant of how the final process works, but my biggest fear from these things involves the transfer of the data from the precinct machines back to its central point.
After the machines are dropped off and loaded into the "rented truck" some tech has to extract and accumlate the count data. How easy would it be to alter the counts before the data is transmitted to the central site? Suppose a non tech centric deputy was to oversee the final tally. It might be possible for the tech to alter the counts in plain sight of the deputy without him knowing specifically what's going on.
It's really hard for me to believe with the amount of tin foil programming/tech talent available that these systems have gone into use without something as simple as a printed ballot. There too much black box magic going on in these things for me to trust them...
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.
Ok, I admit Diebold's systems are flawed. No Paper Ballot(tm), no trust. I agree.
/.ers are so frequently decrying "Method Patents" if we cannot fathom the creation of a *fair* automated tallying system (something more 'complex' than paper), why not question what the system itself is?
Diebold and its advocates are bent and determined to use them in elections. OK, lets do that.
The Comprimise(TM): Change the voting Method.*
If your country is split so close, so narrowly through the center, that the *POSSIBILITY* of tampering is not 100% obvious (that causes those riots in the streets...) why not look to garner a better concensus? Why not consider altering the *structure* of the debate? Why not consider the method?
We
If your public discourse is incapable of discussing *that* issue -- Real Reform of Government (like, I dont know, maybe more than a Democracy of the Republicrat Party). If your paperless ballot system was meant to build concensus, you wouldnt have this debate in the first place.
NO LARGE GROUP WOULD BE UNHAPPY WITH THE RESULTS. Maybe the "one person one vote, winner take all" system is just a little dated? Lets start communicating. Lets focus enough to discuss our governance...if we cant, why build all these "communication tools?".....oh, look, a shiny thing...
*Woha, woha, woha. Before you go flaming me, or modding me down, I am not delivering a flippant "this is the solution" answer, im suggesting a place to start thinking. I am not for, or against, *that particular method*. There are many, how about PR? (Use Google))
I was pissed off to have to use the new machines. I was considering voting absentee on election day (as I read that this would involve a paper ballot), or else making a stink at the voting booth and demanding a paper ballot, but I was really busy, and knew that my votes weren't likely to be critical in this election, so I let it slide.
In a word, the system sucks. From a voter's perspective, here is what happens:
1) Walk in, they ask you for your address and name. No ID requested.
2) Sign your name IN PENCIL.
3) They ask for your party affiliation ("Green" oh that's cute!)
4) They hand you a smartcard.
5) Go to the machine, insert the card, and use the touch-screen to vote.
6) The interface is terrible: Looks like a demo I that someone wrote on the plane ride over to California. Fonts are hard to read, the layout is busy, etc. etc. Other interface bugs I noticed: If you hit the "Next page" button twice, it would blink the button twice, even though only one page was turned. Just crappy UI overall.
7) I was VERY tempted to write in my own name on the "Write in" section for one of the offices. My thinking was that write-in candidates must be public info, right? So I could use this as a sort-of checksum to make sure my ballot was really cast. Make up a fake write-in candidate for an office that I didn't care about, then check the election results later. But I chickened out.
8) The end of the process is the worst: You eject your card from the machine, take it back to the poll worker, who then throws it into the pile of used cards. I was struck by this: was my vote on the card that he had just threw back into the stack? Upon further reflection, I realized my vote was on the voting machine, but the appearance was that my vote had just been thrown away.
Now to be fair, steps (1) and (2) have always been that way. No ID required (for good reason), but why sign your name in pencil?
But the rest of the system did not inspire confidence. It felt very, very sketchy.
I did a search on Money in Politics Database and found 27 records of DIEBOLD employees donating to political campaigns, and 16 of which to the Bush-Cheny 04 Campaign.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
As other people have posted here are pictures of a Diebold ATM crashed here on campus that dropped to the Windows XP display. We poked around at it for a while because the monitor was a touch screen (and a very, very crappy one that that). Interesting things:
- Windows media player was installed (as seen in the pictures)
- It's a P4 2GHz with 512mb of ram (wtf?! why on earth does it need that)
- There's a CD-RW installed
- There are two partitions and C: can't be accessed
- There's the standard crap that comes in My Documents (like the Beethoven playing)
- The printer is an Epson USB printer
- There was a device listed for ATM Driver or something, I presume what actually feeds cash.
- We never were able to get the network up, but there's an Intel network card in there.
- For some reason there are speakers so we could hear the Beethoven.
- It's running XP Embedded, didn't catch what version or what patches it had.
- There was some sort of Text-to-Speech (or maybe S-to-T) program
- As you can see Acrobat is installed
- Remote Desktop was enabled! (might have been turned on by one of us though)
That's what I remember from the 5 minutes before running to class.
Hmm... maybe we should check those facts.
I don't like the guy either, but this Florida crap has to stop. Complain about his policy in Iraq, in Afghanistan, domestically, whatever - there's plenty of good fodder for criticism - but sour grapes won't win you any minds.
If you don't trust Diebold, request an absentee ballot. In California, at least, these are still old fashion recountable paper.
The cake is a pie
I was an assitant systems inspector. We had problems as well, but they were not as bad as the article describes. Our PCM didn't boot into the software, but it was an easy fix -- someone else fixed it before I showed up. I actually ended up driving over to the next precinct over to rescue them -- they didn't have any teenagers working there so no one knew how to use a computer. I started poking around the root filesystem looking for a link to the executable. I noticed a directory called "autoexec" so I checked it out only to find that it contained neither the executable nor a link thereto. I finally found the actual location of the executable--it seemed to be on a datacard of some sort--and started it for them. 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. The worst problem we had was this: At the end of the day we log into the machines with the admin access card and print a report of the vote totals. One of our machines failed to print -- it just cut off in the middle and wouldn't reprint (some paper trail, eh?). In fact, during the training session, I saw one machine print a line of gibberish when instructed to print. Maybe there's a buffer overflow in the print system somewhere. 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. I got reports of the same behavior from other poll workers at different precincts. I cancelled one ballot that day, so that might explain the one machine with matching totals. Perhaps the total shown onscreen counts the admin login as a vote. At any rate, it's a stupid error. So, that's my story. Now I just gotta wait for the government to send my check...
Diebolds voting technology was actually put to the test by some security experts this year who found that:
- It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times.
- They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count.
- And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location.
"Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively."
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.
Does anyone else find it weird that the maker of the horribly insecure "paperless" Diebold voting machines is a massive Bush Campaign contributor?
In Ohio [he] told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
[Link to the story quoted above]
Well, these voting machines are the wrong tool to fix this problem. The electronic voting machine like Diebold's are meant to totally erase the paper trail which is very bad thing, IMO. What they should make is basically a ballot booth that prints punchcards. You stand at the machine and it asks you:Then the machine punches the ballot for you, so there won't be any confusion as to who you're voting for. You can also run an independant tally in the electronic machine, then check it against the punch cards by feeding them back in to a reader, if everything meets up, then few people can contest the results.
My speculation is that it caches the bloated application(s) into a RAM disk. Makes things quicker. RAM is cheap.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
A Q/A transcribed (by me) from the scanned manuals distributed to poll workers:
"what about the issue of Open Source Code?"
Diebold's ballot tabulation source code is checked extensively by an independent testing authority which tests according to voting software standards developed by the Federal Election Commission. Once this test process is successfully completed, the source code is placed in an escrow facility.
Source Code is not open to the public to protect not only the companies intellectual property, but also to prevent the possibility of tampering or other fraudulent manipulation of the tabulation program.
in Georgia, the Secretary of State challenged a citizen to try to tamper with the ballot tabulation program after this citizen made claims about the program's vulnerability. When the citizen learned the source code was not available, she abandoned the effort to tamper with the program.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
OK, now my reaction to that Q/A:
The FEC hasn't published any real testing standards, so it's not terribly useful to say that the code was testing against the FEC standards. Also, it's not useful to say that the code is in excrow, or audited, unless the code in production is built from the code in escrow and audited, because otherwise you haven't proven anything other than that the same company that produced the voting system you're running also produced some code that passed your audit and went into escrow. That is, there's no reason to believe that it's the same code, so the audit doesn't prove anything about the code in production.
And, of course, we all know after the last few decades that "security through obscurity" doesn't work as well as "security through peer revew".
And I don't know what the Secretary of State's ability to intimidate one critic proves, since several other security audits of proprietary voting systems have revealed massive security flaws.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
If you SHOW, to EVERYONE, that the system has problems then that would say something to those in power.
That's good in theory, but in practice, the mainstream media, which is currently the most effective way of disseminating information, has been anything but objective in its selection of what is and isn't worthy of covering. It's worth noting that the media has found an interesting method of injecting its bias by selectively deciding what is and isn't worth covering, which in many cases, is more effective than spinning something in their favor. Either way, the media is becoming progressively more aggressive in employing both methods.
The Internet couldn't have come at a better time in terms of giving more people, more sources of information, but its ability to influence or educate the populace is trivial compared to the major media conglomorates. Notwithstanding the constant quips by the mainstream media designed to undermine the Internet as an alternative source of valid news.
As a result, I don't believe that something like civil disobedience is effective any more. A good example of this can be found in the network coverage of the WTO meetings (in Seattle for example) where thousands protested, and it was covered by the major media, but little more was conveyed than the idea that a bunch of freakazoids smashed some stuff. The agenda of the majority of the protesters, the issues they raised, were all but ignored in favor of 10-second video clips of cars burning and fringe characters acting unruly.
So the current battle isn't to find the truth, it's to figure out how to get the truth to the people through a web of entities which not only will oppose your efforts, but dilligently work to undermine you at every aspect. If your methods involve anything illegal, this gives the media powers that oppose you the evidence they need to dismiss you, and destroy you without any discussion or second thought.
It has to be collected and retained like an old fashioned paper ballot. In which case, electronic voting offers nothing.
Say it prints out the vote. The tally still says what CEO "I am committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to G.W. Bush" wants the tally to say.
Canada counts paper ballots under the watchful eye of partisans, and gets it done in a few hours. How many ballots can you count in an hour? Hire enough counters and let the parties watch. Done fsking deal.
I was in the odd position of being called a luddite by a computer science academic. He was Russian, and figured electronic vote rigging was not such a new thing. I have a little more of a security background, and I think the challenges of securing the system end-end are insurmountable. As the systems are now, they are laughably easy to corrupt. And is there any greater incentive to cheat than political power?
Do you think they've got a room full of sweatshop workers chained to desks counting them by hand? No. They count them with a punch card reader. Okay, so I've never used one (I'm not _that_ old), but I really doubt that they're impossible to compromise.
I doubt that they are *impossible* to compromise, too. But, you're omitting a few relevant details:
- These machines work on technology that has been essentially unchanged for many, many years. The code is simple, and likely is public domain, since the government probably developed it. The process is mostly mechanical.
- Access to those machines is very limited. The people who use them are all employees of the election system, which doesn't put them above scrutiny, but does make them far more accountable than Joe Voter. You don't have the punch-card readers out on public display for literally every registered citizen to be able to walk up and stick a smartcard into.
- When there's a question about the results, a *hand* recount can be and is done. This happened in Florida... hundreds of people *did* sit there and go through those cards by hand, tabulating votes.
Obviously, the issues are far from parallel, and there are methods of dealing with them in the case of the old punch cards. Here, there's simply no voter-verifiable record... so no recounts possible.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I don't get it, are you saying anyone can go and vote at any polling place if they know the name and address of someone who lives in the allotted area? What am I missing?
Then the dirt began to surface. Internal emails. Party affiliations. Conflicts of interest. Bad code.
This stuff has been laid bare. The world has been alerted. Very Smart People(tm) have given their dour warnings.
At one point I was even getting a little optimistic. I posted something here to the effect of, "Well, this is the test! Everybody now knows and agrees that electronic voting is a Bad Idea, and now we'll get to see how proactive Americans are going to be. The choice has been placed before them. I can't imagine that nothing will be done about this!"
Foolish, foolish Fantastic Lad!
Americans are not just asleep; they are tied down! Too tired after their long work days to do anything. Too brain-wiped by their cell phones, drugged food, anti-depressants, television and social conditioning to be able to gather the brain cells required to elicit anything more than a vague, "Aw nuts" response. And the media is owned by the wrong people. Man, back in Superman's day, the headlines would have shouted, "CORRUPTION!" and there would have been public outcry, riots, Bushmen hauled from office and run out of town on good ol' American rails!
But instead, people choose to sleep.
Man. Some days I wish I was an American living in that once bold nation just so I could shotgun some asshole politico or Diebold rep and be hauled away with a raised fist while American housewives whimpered and their stout husbands shook their heads, "Well, something had to be done! It's a shame it came to this, but Americans simply don't lie down for this sort of thing!"
Well, perhaps at one time this might have been true. There was a time when hanging a corrupt politician would have been considered a reasonable response. But now the people are so controled, that their rage can be directed with pin-point accuracy at whatever target the corrupt politicos want destroyed. "Just blow up a building or two and blame the people we want to see take a fall! That ALWAYS works!"
Pathetic.
-FL
Killed in a car accident, head of a company that was trying to push for a different system with a paper trail of votes.
Suspicious?
And, in other news, stock prices of Alcoa and other large aluminium concerns were up today.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
What is wrong with paper ballots ? Maybe someone can enlighten me. I live in a 80M poeple nation where paper ballots seem to work without any problem. We have elections, some of them rather complicated, and usually you have to vote on something every 1-2 years. We always get speedy and dependable results - even with national elections that are way mor complicated than a US presidential elections we usually have a stable estimation before midnight on voting day, ad a provisorical result sometime next day. There never was any problem with vote fraud worth mentioning (though occasionally a politician gets in trouble with the finer points of anti-vote-fraud laws) and basically the perception is that this just works.
Why can't yopu make that work in the US ?
An MIT/Caltech study of voting technology found that paper ballots are the most accurate.
The 2004 Democratic primary had a turnout pattern of primary-specific apathy (lower than expected votes) and caucus-specific inspiration (high and record high votes). Why did the New York primary record a 20-year low turnout on the same day that the Minnesota caucus recorded a 33-year high turnout?
South Carolina's state Dem party fought pressure from the national Dems to institute a loyalty oath for voters, which would have torpedoed Edwards. State officials chose to hand count paper ballots for security, even though machines were available. South Carolina was one of the few 2004 primaries to report record turnout and the only state where Edwards won.
Hand counted paper ballots are the gold standard of voting. Cheaper and faster are neither necessary nor desirable properties of biennial elections.
yes, that is correct. In order to provide anonymous voting to all registered voters, you are not required to have ID. The only thing keeping you from using someone elses name is the possibility that they will show up later (or have already shown up). In fact, this seems like a fabulous way to invalidate _all_ results at a polling place which is not likely to vote in your favor. Simply show up early with a couple of dozen people who claim to be local residents. When the real people show up later there will be no way to determine which votes were valid and which weren't.