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More E-voting Problems in California
thefultonhow writes "Wired News is running a story about Napa County, CA's problems with their new E-voting system. Not only did an optical scanning machine fail to record absentee ballots properly, necessitating a recount of 13,000 ballots, but now Registrar of Voters John Tuteur is saying that the machine used in precincts failed to count 6,692 votes. The incumbent Napa County Supervisor had originally lost his bid for reelection by only 50 votes (the recount of absentee ballots bumped that up to 107 votes), so with nearly 7,000 votes gone AWOL, this is a big deal." The first Wired link above shows that the discovery of the problem was apparently mostly chance: if none of the 10 (ten!) ballots picked for rescanning had exhibited the problem, they might not have figured it out. It also suggests a new strategy for rigging the vote: pass out pens of a certain type in districts unfavorable to your candidate, then calibrate the machine not to read that type of ink.
I don't recall seeing something that extensively mentions what all testing procedures were done before this was put in place? Seeing statements about at least some of these errors being caught almost purely by chance is very disconcerting. I know that poor testing procedures is a definite trend in development unfortunately. Could someone who is in the know post information that is permissible on some of the testing procedures of this system or systems like this?
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
It also suggests a new strategy for rigging the vote: pass out pens of a certain type in districts unfavorable to your candidate, then calibrate the machine not to read that type of ink.
Welcome to the party!
Paranoia is fun!
The fact that the ballots are 'counted' by a machine doesn't make this an "e-voting" story.
This problem has been around for YEARS! Nothing to see here, folks. Take off your tinfoil hats and move along.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Now that voting problems have actually had a big enough affect on an election to probably change the outcome, maybe some more attention will be paid in the press and the courts to ensuring that the voting methods used actually create easily auditable results.
The past problems have tended to be of the "well, it really didn't affect any final outcomes, so no big deal" type, which makes it all seem like a minor issue.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So now I understand the Arnold governor thing.
Headline in Slashdot 2012:
"More E-voting Problems Everywhere"
I don't see these e-voting problems going away until geeks start running these kinds of companies.
And if you want to bring it into the new millenium, then put a touch screen kiosk in there with a 'printer' which after you make your selections, it punches the holes for you and spits the ballot out. You then review it, put it in the privacy sleeve and walk it to the ballot box. Or you feed it back into the 'printer', where it's destroyed and you try again.
Why is this concept so hard?
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Up until the recent primary, my home state (Maryland) had used a pretty foolproof ballot system -- basically you connected two dots next to the name of the candidate you wanted to vote for. The completed ballots were put into an electronic scanner which gave counts, making it efficient, but there was an indisputable hardcopy record to go back to if you needed to do a recount.
Come on, pen and paper has lasted for 5000+ years as a way of recording information. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the simplest one.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Shouldn't the end of the blurb read:
"It also suggests a new strategy for rigging the vote: pass out pens of a certain type in districts FAVORABLE to your candidate, then calibrate the machine not to read that type of ink"?
If not, I'd hate to be the campaign manager who came up with that idea.
I can get a receipt when I pump gas, buy groceries, even when I go to the ATM just to get some money. Yet voting for what is unarguably the most important position in the entire world doesn't rate enough to have a hard copy printout of my registered vote? Something smells fishy around here. Hmm...maybe the fact that Diebold pumped huge amounts of money into the Republican party has something to do with it. Naaaah....
I don't understand why there is so much resistance to voting machines that print receipts for each voter. Combining this with a simple mechanism for correcting votes that were recorded inaccurately would provide all the necessary feedback and correction required to ensure that a vote was at least correctly cast and counted by the polling machine. Is this a privacy issue of some kind?
Another potential benefit of this simple mechanism would be more accurate exit polls. If the voter isn't willing to show the exit poller their receipt, then they aren't counted in the exit poll. This would eliminate the common practice of voters lying to exit pollers.
http://www.pimall.com/nais/dispen.html
Like a few others, I can't see where the win is with electronic voting.
Keep it simple: paper and marker pen. Used in many countries, simple to understand, no real hardware required, biggest equipment failure is a pen not working, no hanging chads.
In the New Zealand elections I've voted in it's really easy - a check mark next to the local candidate and another next to the party use. Simple. Results are known a few hours after polling closes. Easy to do recounts, even without any fancy technology, scales easily too.
If speed is the real issue, then vote using the paper and pen, then count them electronically. Count them twice using two different machines, and if the amounts are out by some pre-determined margin, then hand-count. That way you get quick results, while having no reliance on any complicated, error prone bit of technology. You can still recount manually if required.
I'll be the first to criticize the unauditability of purely e-voting machines, but this story is not about that.
"If the problem had occurred with their electronic ballots or with the tabulation software (that sits on the county server) they would have been hard pressed to reconstruct their election," she said. "Or they might not have ever known there was a problem at all. If they were doing the manual count on the electronic ballots there would be no record to look at to determine what the accurate vote count should be."
In this case they could audit the results because there was a direct physical record of the vote, if this were a story about e-voting, then the author would only be speculating that votes weren't counted because there would be no record of the votes anyplace. This is a story which affirms that having a paper trail is a good thing.
Regardless of which US Presidential candidate you favor for 2004, don't you want your vote to be counted?
Anyone who opposes full auditable paper trails from e-voting machines has something devious in mind. There are ZERO drawbacks and limitless benefits. If price were a factor, they wouldn't have upgraded from their old voting machines in the first place.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Is this really E-Voting? Seriously - it's about a vote-card reader not reading ink from gel pens, not about some form of computer voting system.... (All of my most hated terms in geek-slang are E-******)
Damnit, now they're really going to outlaw Sharpies... first CDs now ballots.
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Well said. I think the problem here though is that Diebold et al are trying *so* hard to come up with a technological solution to something that (for the most part) already works, and works well, probably in an attempt to make a lot of money and justify their own existence in this new market/monopoly. A solution such as the one you've suggested would still allow for early tallying to be used instead of exit polls (via the kiosks) thereby keeping people happy by giving them a speedy, more reliable estimation, yet providing a paper trail that is counted to allot the actual result (i.e. rely on the physical user-authenticated evidence rather than the ephemeral one). Sounds good to me!
The New Jersey standard to set aside an election is simply for it to be "rendered doubtful" (see In re Hunt). I'm not sure of the standard here, but I'm sure it's something similar. With these electronic voting machines, I cannot see how any close election could not be "rendered doubtful" - since there is very little physical evidence to actually look at, or recount.
Don't be surprised if the set-aside elections are then resolved with the old tried and true paper ballots of lever machines. I think a lot of e-voting is going to turn into re-voting.
Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
There should be a test vote answer, which for which the voter is required to vote, for their ballot to be valid.
This would check that the machine is properly calibrated, because if it didn't read a check mark in the test vote, reject the ballot right then and there, so the voter can fill in the box(es) such that the machine reads it.
...would be one requiring that all electronic voting systems be open source to ensure accountability. Let Diebold sell the equipment, and let us write the software.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Look every system has a margin of error. Even asking people who they just voted for is pron to some margin of error. Voting laws should take statistical ties into account. If the tally is within the margin of error, it is a tie. It should be treated a such.
Everyone knows that miscounted votes are more political than technical or even malicious. If the public demanded a machine to vote with that was 100% accurate than there isn't a machine that can do it in terms of politics. Technically we can produce checksums that stream over the internet billions of bits and very few get corrupted or cause bad downloads.
Checksums could be incorporated in some kind of punch card/electronic tally machine but you can never stop a registered voter from smoking banana peels and hitting the wrong keys.
Which is almost exactly the system used in that county in Florida. Dimples, hanging chads, etc.
The optical system works perfectly fine *if* you have voters do a test score with standard settings after voting. Then they know how their ballots will be scored by the system. If this does not match their intended choices, they can fix it.
At least here the votes are still recorded. Much better than the electronic systems, which have no way of knowing if they lost info or not. As someone already posted, this is not an e-voting problem. E-voting (with paper trail) only gets mentioned as a better alternative to what they did. Of course, that misses the point that in this case, the paper trail exists (the actual ballots may be recounted).
The missing part is that voters need to be able to check how their ballot will be scored prior to final submission. Then the ballot could be destroyed and redone if errors exist. A visual inspection is not enough, as it leaves open the possibility of the machine scoring differently than the voter thought it would. The check/verification needs to be done with a machine with identical settings to those used in the actual count--preferably by the exact same machine.
"Or you feed it back into the 'printer', where it's destroyed and you try again."
The printout would need advanced and numerous forgery protection measures (like the ones in modern bank notes). Otherwise, what's to stop someone voting, getting their printout and then feeding a slip of paper of the same size back in so they can vote again without destroying their original.
Decode these
The problem is not that the machine got some things wrong. Missing ballots is bad, not counting the abesntee ballots is bad, but every kind of machine will make mistakes. Is this any worse than the various chad issues we learned about in Florida and elsewhere? No.
The problem is that these issues are so uncatchable. In the older systems, we would know that there was a problem, and have some way to address it. The real problem here is that it's so damn hard to even figure out that there is a problem. One was found serendipitously this time, but how many are out there that nobody noticed?
That's the issue. And it's going to require a fundamental change in the thinking of the people in charge of these machines, both the makers of the machines, but also the consumers of them.
All of which means... contact your politician, and make yourself heard. It's how these things get changed.
([ASIDE] To be fair (though why I should, I don't know!), I believe their ATM division is a purchased company.)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
how about paper and rubber stamp? you'd only have to deal with one sort of ink
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
I would demand a recount!
Oh, wait. Thanks to e-voting, theres nothing to recount.
Oops...
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
If I thought that an election was in the bag for a candidate, it would make me *more* likely to vote for a third party candidate. If it is a close election, then I will restrict my voting to the two major candidates. If I don't know if the race is close, then I stick with the two major candidates. Thus, only when an exit poll tells me that one of the major party candidates is going to win handily will I consider voting for a third party candidate.
There are a lot of reasons why the 2 party system is entrenched, but exit polls are not even a small part of this.
Texas Safe Voting has a video on their site of election workers talking to a Diebold sales rep. It shows just how bad off we are with current evoting initatives. My favorite quote is "I just want to make sure this machine can add. Remember, we've had machines recently that didn't add."
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
This is just too much votes, you see, the last election in Brazil had just 0.2% of problems with out electronic voting machines, most of them where replace by backup-machines, and we aren't a advance tech country like USA. Maybe simply there is something wrong with the concept here, if the house foundation is bad...
The optical scanning works just fine. In this instance the problem was in their process. If the votes tallied doesn't match the number of ballots handed out, there is a problem that needs investigating. And since the ballots only need to be rescanned to be recounted, the paper trail is there and everyone is happy.
BTW, something that politicians seem clueless about. Our polling place uses 1 (ONE!!!!) optical scanner. An article I read yesterday said they used 6 touch screen voting machines plus a controller just for one small precinct.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
If you had actually RTFA, you would have seen that these 10! ballots were 10 out of 60 ballots they had looked at, out of the 1% of precincts that they actually audited as a matter of their normal, pre-existing processes to verify votes. Now 1% of 468,000 is 4,680 ballots to count, which amounts to a better than 2% error rate when evaluating those 4,680 ballots. That means that the problem would have to occur potentially only 1% of the time for them to miss it, and that's pretty unlikely when they're reviewing almost 5,000 ballots.
So michael, your statistically unsound, competely biased "journalism" is noted, and I'm seriously considering blocking any future stories posted by you. Your yellow journalism is really pathetic and transparent. Just stop. You can hate Seth Finkelstein all you want, but I think he's right: you suck.
Ah well... I made the same comment to the Wired journalistas well...
Here in Canada our federal elections are um... simple... there are upto a half dozen candiates per riding, each on their own line of the ballot. You just mark an X beside the one you want to vote for.
No paper chads, dimples, etc... A fucking X people!!!
Seems American business ethics [re: shortcuts, lies, ignorance] is catching up with them. Muahahahahahaha!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Voting issues have been becoming more and more prevalent in the past decade. In the past election (2000), many issues came into the open about voter registration fraud that for one reason or another the current administration has snuffed. Florida removing people from the ballots was a huge one. When watching the flow of money with these issues, they tend to resolve to the same small group of elites, thought not necessarily the same person, company or political alignment.
Now, I don't want to say they are trying to rig elections, but they all seem to be benefitting from the same shoddy practices. It does tend to make the paranoid in one come out, but I like to believe that net profit is the real reason behind the issues. It is cheaper up front to do less testing and coding. It is cheaper up front to not make certain that all things work as they should, or to not spend to much time thinking about the issues. Then again, maybe I am experiencing optimistic ignorance. ;-)
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Good ole papper ballets are best, as in 'tick the box' next to the candidate of your choice (or 'number the boxes in order of preferance', in regards preferential elections).
Then one just orginises for the election to occure on Saturday so thousands of public servents & teachers are available all weekend to get some good penalty rate dosh counting votes. Ontop of which it means thousand of party voluenteers are also available to hand scrutineer the count (IOW, in regards the US, each hand counter has a democrat & GOP scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders)
This is the way it's done in most countries, without any problems, including Australia, & there's no reason it shouldn't scale up to the US. Afterall scale wise a US election would be no different than Oz, New Zealand, Canada, the UK & half a dozen other European countries all having their general elections together on the same day.
Here in Oz it's rare for us not to know who's won by Saturday night, or the end of the weekend at the latest. Usraelly the number of seats that are undecided by monday can be counted on one hand.
Fact is the only reason the US uses their boody stupid machines is because they vote on Tuesday for some stupid reason & it's cheaper, but they just arn't as good.
Especially when every 2nd county or state uses different types of bloody machines, meaning a almost infinit variety of weird ballot styles & machine interfaces.
It's almost as if the US govt wants having about the lowest voter turnout in the western world. Get rid of the machines & replace them with simple hand counted 'tick the box' paper ballots & I bet the turnout increases at least 10%, then change the vote to saturday & I bet turnout increases at least another 10%.
I think many people have missed a very important point. For voting systems, there are really two fundamental requirements:
1. The voting system must be fair and accurate.
2. The voting system must be seen to be fair and accurate.
Meeting the first of those two requirements might eventually be possible by purely electronic means. (We aren't there, yet. Maybe, using formal methods, we might eventually be able to produce such a system.)
But, the second requirement means that the results of every election must be verifiable by an extremely low-tech means -- like manually recounting the paper ballots. Such audits, observed by all interested persons, are essential so that ordinary people can have confidence that elections are not rigged.
Better yet, this is a good case for simple paper, mark your 'X' in the big circle, and votes are counted by hand.
These things cause more problems and have more holes than they fix, even machine scanned punchcards showed their flaws in the last US general election.
This is not a sig.
What really worries me is the attitude of the election commisioners who put these systems in place. I wrote the following letter to the local supervisor of elections:
Dear Mr. Galey,
I am writing to you as I am concerned about the recent suggestions by the Florida Secretary of State to institute the use of electronic touch-screen voting machines statewide. I do not know whether it is planned to use these machines in Brevard County, however, their use in any county has the potential to alter any statewide election. I do not believe these devices in their current form, as provided by the current vendors in the US market (such as ES&S and Diebold), are ready for use in a real election. I believe that this view is supported by the various anomalies and questionable election results which have occurred in many places where these machines have been used. I am comfortable with the scanned paper methods which I have used voting in precinct 32 in Indian Harbour Beach. My main objection to the use of these touch-screen devices has to do with the lack of independent verification methods for their results. I work for a company whose primary products are independent verification systems for cancer treatment irradiation. Whether the right amount of radiation has been delivered to a patient can be a matter of life or death. I feel that elections are also very important, and deserve similar verification.
The lack of an audit trail allowing independent verification of the systems results means that if there is a mistake, we would never know. The Florida Secretary of State believes that it is ok to proceed with the use of touch-screen devices in the November elections without attaching printers, as she opined in her recent editorial in Florida Today. I believe that this basically boils down to rushing things and hoping for the best. I do not think that the best way to avoid a reoccurrence of the voting fiasco which happened during the 2000 recount is to make it impossible to have a recount at all. Hiding a problem does not make it go away.
I do not have a problem with making elections easier and quicker using electronic systems. In fact, I am strongly for it. However, I would prefer an older, slower system which I have faith in to a new, fast one in which I do not. Until electronic touch-screen voting systems can supply a voter verified independent audit trail, I and many other voters will not trust their output.
If you have any questions, or wish to allay my fears, please feel to contact me.
This was his response:
You should have no fear, the systems are secure and well managed. Do not believe the scare tactics. FRED
Somehow, that doesn't make me feel any better. Instead of answering my objections to the unrecountability of these systems, I got a little pat on the head and a "don't worry". I realize that he's a busy guy, but when I ask why I shouldn't worry, and am told, "just don't worry about it", I worry more.
I have now written my state and federal representatives about this. I suggest you do the same. Until people like Mr. Galey realize that lots of people are actually worried, they can get away with patting a few of us on the head and sending us on our way.
I want to know who the programmers are in each of these e-voting "scandals". How are is it to program a computer to count?
--Bahamlabs
I understand that the electronic voting system has its flaws...but so do humans!
When there are more than a couple hundred votes to be counted, it is very unlikely to avoid an occurence of human error. I wonder how many elections in the 'old days' could have been turned around because of human error?
**human error meaning benevolent vote counters that inadvertently make a mistake. NOT humans making 'accidents' on purpose.
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It seems like every second week we read of some precinct that discovers some troubling issue associated with their electronic vote tallying. The sinister mind might think that there is a hidden agenda and that election results are being rigged. The more generous interpretation is that the technology and procedures for using it are just not debugged. Unfortunately, for the citizen, the result is the same: They have no confidence that their vote is being counted.
It has long been argued that a physical paper audit trail must accompany all elections, as it is the only way to guarantee a fair and audit-able result. Sure, politicians and the supplier companies will argue about the cost, but given the dismal results so far, perhaps the proponents of e-voting should bear the costs of the paper audit trails themselves, at least until the systems are proven accurate in a large number of elections. It's particularly disturbing to see the e-voting supplier companies, such as Diebold, expending so much effort trying to hide problems and frustrate transparency.
Without proper safeguards, the citizen's most basic right, namely that of deciding who represents them in government, is going to be forfeit to buggy technology. This is particularly important in the US in 2004, as it is a presidential election year there, and based on the 2000 fiasco, problematic vote counting has the potential to ruin the US elections (again).
It's interesting to note that California, home of high-tech silicon is one of a few if not the only state that requires a hand count. I guess they know technology is not infallible.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
We've use E-voting for the last few years in Belgium.
The process is simple:
* First you get to wait a long time in a long line. (unless you spend the night in a disco, come home around 7h30 and then leave immediatly for voting. The line is a lot shorter then and you make a good impression on the elder people who think you got up early)
* Then you hand your ID card to one of the victims of democracy (citizens who get the "honor" of spending a whole sunday working for free in a voting office) and you receive a bank-card-like electronic card (a boring plain white one, but it has a big black arrow on it).
* Then you get to vote on a computer with a light pen (not even a touch screen, the cheap bastards). Insert the card in it, vote and then get it back. (You can check its honesty by re-inserting the card)
* Then you put the card in some sort of card receiving machine and get your ID card back.
* Afterwards you can either spend the rest of the day watching polls on TV (Who ever tought that a show about which city has counted how much % of the votes, would be intresting enough to spend a whole sunday evening on it?), or find something better to do.
True. Verification after the fact is good.
But even without a verification system the fiasco in Florida could have been avoided.
How?
If the law had been clear about what was a vote. IIRC, an official in Ohio (where I live) noted if a at least two corners are punched it is a vote, if not it isn't. Granted not all votes will be counted, but at least you have a clear procedure.
Florida had (has?) no such clearly written law.
We (politicians, public) seem to be missing the fact that most problems are procedural and not technological.
Shiny new machines are just going to give us shiny new problems if we don't think long and hard about all the potential problems....
it wasn't just to have the machine scan your punchcard, the idea is to have the machine punch it for you. Then you can look it over and submit it, at which point it'll be scanned & tallied. ya dig?
having elections on saturday would prohibit shomer shabbos jews from voting, which is about as prohibitive of the 1st amendment as you can get.
This 'un here talks about a county in Pennsylvania that is going to be retesting due to problems.
To go back to voting with "Aye" or "Nay" and whichever side says it louder wins.
If we could only find a stadium big enough to fit every voting citizen of the United States...
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The printout would need advanced and numerous forgery protection measures (like the ones in modern bank notes).
No it wouldn't.
Otherwise, what's to stop someone voting, getting their printout and then feeding a slip of paper of the same size back in so they can vote again without destroying their original.
Err, how about a barcode? You know, unique, random, generated when the ballot is printed, scanned and verified if the user wishes to destroy the ballot and start again...
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
As we look at the problems with e-voting (which are legion and significant), let's not diminish our case by bringing into play issues that aren't related to e-voting.
A poor optical scanner pick-up isn't an e-voting issue. Significant, yes? E-voting related, no!
That said, I believe the e-voting issues are shinning a light on some of the significant QA problems we have in our voting system. I would like to see an audit from top to bottom, with strong QA processes put into place.
create new voting system --> make it easy to cheat --> hey, make it digital so an idiot can cheat --> call it 'progress' --> election is stolen.
;p
Easier than putting all the Floridian black folk in jail then getting your pals on the Supreme Court to vote you in. Besides, the 'chads' didn't pan out last time.
In an e-voting system the paper absentee ballots would be thrown away after being entered into the system.
"If the problem had occurred with their electronic ballots or with the tabulation software (that sits on the county server) they would have been hard pressed to reconstruct their election," she said. "Or they might not have ever known there was a problem at all. If they were doing the manual count on the electronic ballots there would be no record to look at to determine what the accurate vote count should be."
"I don't see these e-voting problems going away until geeks start running these kinds of companies.
At which point Natalie Portman, Yoda and the cast of Farscape will unexpectedly sweep the national elections.
A little paranoia can go a long way. Decent/different passwords, shredding bills/receipts you don't keep for taxes, Encrypting your WiFi, using more than 2 types of lock on all the diebold e-voting machines... It doesn't matter who writes the software if *everyone* can check to see if its secure. Information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to be correct. (Unless you work at the Whitehouse, in which case your information is secret and even that isn't always correct)
How the Bush stole the Next Election, aka, "I Know What You're Going To Do in November".
First: Bush can't win. His popularity is on a steady slide downwards. As more and more of extreme negative criticisms filter through the monopoly state press of our fine country, more and more people are going to wake up to the unjustified war that cost us 550 American lives, 10,000 Iraqi lives, and $500 million (that we know about), PLUS the huge defecit, PLUS the weakened dollar, PLUS the 8 Million jobs lost under bush, PLUS the BSE in Beef and Mercury in Fish, etc, etc. He can't win, not against Kerry, not even against Kucinich. He's been a horrible, lying distrustful manipulative irresponsible asshole who was asleep at the wheel on 9/11, and failed in his duty to protect the country, and by enacting the Patriot Act, took a whiz on the Constitution to boot.
Second: Since Bush has strong friends in the mass media industry, he can hide these problems, so that people actually believe that he still has a 50-60% approval rating. As this slides further, he will produce bin Laden, who was captured at least two months ago.
Third: This will be timed to come either in September, as an anniversary special, or so close to the election that it will convince all the ignorant masses that Bush is good for security (lookie, it only took me three years to find him)
Fourth: These e-voting machines, without audit path are sent to districts "too close to call",
Fifth: Bush wins by a slim majority, turning his apparent "almost loss" into "slight win".
This was tested first in CA, where Anrie turned an "almost win" into a landslide.
But getting back to the purpose of this post, is that if the exit polls are truly representative and Bush is trailing further behind Kerry than the rigged approval polls suggest (sponsered by Faux News and CBS, names you can trust), it might be the only evidence that will demonstrate that Bush manipulated yet another election.
HELP US JEEBUS!
Describing a voting system based on cellulose-derived foil, produced by the processing of arboreal mass, that allows to cast one's vote by imprinting a graphite track on a specific part of the foil.
The said part will be made clearly distinguishable from others by a permanent imprint of organic, chromatically-emitting chemical compounds, which, by using technology covered by previous patents, will convey a stream of information to a biological signal decoder, called eye(tm). While eye(tm)'s come in pairs, this advanced system requires only one, possibly none with minor modifications.
The counting process will be carried out through biological, neural-network-based intelligences, result of a genetic algorithm that has proceeded for exactly 1,048,134,239 years as of April 1, 2004 (Pangea patent no. 00000000000001). A particularity of this process is the ability of computing results maintaining a record of raw data, that is stored in the graphite-marked cellulose foils at all times.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
That's exactly what the Open Voting Consortium's system does. Check out http://evm2003.sf.net for the software. They've even got an online demo of the system so that you can see what the ballot looks like.
The process is:
- Use a touchscreen (or audio for blind voters) station to enter your votes. This prints out a human readable ballot.
- If you want, take your ballot to a verification station that will read your ballot back to you. This is a stand-alone system, so it can't "cheat" coordinating with the voting station.
- Bring your ballot to a poll worker, who will scan it, and store your ballot in a locked box.
For an audit, you can count the physical ballots and match them against the electronic vote tallies, and of course the physical ballot "wins" if there's any discrepancy.
And, of course, since the software is open source, anyone can read the code, or set up their own test system.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
There is a campaign underway to address the issue of paper trails for computerized voting machines. Check it out: The Computer Ate My Vote
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Dudes, it's pen & ink. There have been machines to automate vote counting in use for decades. This is not new, it is a problem, but what it illustrates (yet again) is that no system is perfect. Even traditional voting systems are subject to error and counting problems and an e-voting system, even one with flaws may still be better than the existing systems in use today.
"Seeing statements about at least some of these errors being caught almost purely by chance is very disconcerting."
Seeing statistical sampling characterized as "found the errors purely by chance" in order to create FUD is more than disconcerting. It's appalling. And it's a prime example of "how to lie with statistics".
Yes, it's technically accurate, since chance was carefully DESIGNED INto the procedure. But the characterization uses a different meaning of "chance" to imply that the discovery of the errors was a lucky accident.
This is using a pun to tell a lie. In fact the procedure did EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO DO - discover that there was a problem, and drive further investigation to characterize the problem and correct it, both in this and in future elections.
This event:
- Shows one reason a paper trail is needed. (It doesn't directly address deliberate software or database tampering.)
- Provides a counter-argument to claims that optically-scanned paper ballots are an acceptable substitute for machine-printed paper trail ballots. (An optically-marked ballot may look just fine but scan incorrectly.)
Touch-screen machines that print a voter-readable paper trail currently appear to be the most reliable solution for error-resistant and cheat-resistant elections.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This happens because the idiots making the ballots do not add none of the above option to each question. If they did, the machine could spit out ballots that have no selections for certain questions
The Governator was also ahead in all the polls.
Actually, Austraila is moving toward e-voting for exactly the same reasons that the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and others are--election administrators see advantages to these systems.
As I post below, these advantages usually don't have to do with speed of reporting, but rather long run cost, accessibility, and "second chance" voting.
(disclaimer for the humor impared: This was a joke). Suggested mod: +1.9999999443523564 (oops, I still run a Pentium).
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
On the flip side, this wouldn't jive with Diebold, because the CEO has already promised the next election to His Favorite Candidate. And, before the Rabid Right flames me for being pissed at the CEO of Diebold, remember -- I'm mad because it's a conflict of interest, not because he's a Republican. I'd be screaming murder if the Democrats, who I don't like much either, tried to pull the same crap.
I agree with you completely except for one thing: I think it makes a difference that he's a Republican.
My perception of the members of the parties is that the Republicans tend to be rule-bound and the Democrats to be "whatever works". So the Republicans are likely to react to a perception of error in the voting process by trying to fix it, while the Democrats have little incentive to do so in the districts they control (since it's still electing them, so who cares?)
But the perception that the system might be rigged by the Republicans gives a BIG incentive to the Democrats to work toward fixing it. (Or at least to make it possible to check whether the Republicans have rigged it. B-) ) Republicans, on the other hand, are likely to ALSO react by trying to fix it, both because of the rule-bound thing and because it makes them look bad and they care about that.
So with a Republican activist in control of the major e-voting machine manufacturer I expect BOTH parties to be trying to get it fixed ASAP. If it were a Democratic activist I'd expect the Democrats to let it ride.
(And maybe even the Republicans would let it ride, rather than raise a stink - much as Nixon resigned rather than further muddy the Presidential office, but Clinton fought regardless of the consequences.)
My objective is to get the elections as accurate as possible. So this makes the head of Diebold being a Republican a GOOD thing, IMHO. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
>>Why is this concept so hard?
Because the average voter is dumber than a box of rocks and twice as lazy. The only voting process that would not be considered a 'hard concept' would be one that involved a telepathic interface.
You are asking quite a bit from voters (actually check their ballot) in this day an age of microwave popcorn taking too long to prepare.
It's almost as if the US govt wants having about the lowest voter turnout in the western world. Get rid of the machines & replace them with simple hand counted 'tick the box' paper ballots & I bet the turnout increases at least 10%,
or do anything else to increase the perceived accuracy
then change the vote to saturday & I bet turnout increases at least another 10%.
IMHO the real cause of the low voter turnout is apathy and resignation. When the choice is voting for the puppet on the left and the puppet on the right, there's really little point in bothering, because both puppets are being controlled by the same people.
Whether it's tweedledum/tweedledumber choices, a perception that the election is rigged, or a perception that the district is so lopsided that the outcome is predtermined, it amounts to a feeling that the vote doesn't matter - so why bother. And all three of those are bad.
But there's a fourth reason for not voting - or at least not voting on a particular candidate or issue: If the voter doesn't really care which way it comes out. THEN he shouldn't vote. (To make a random choice, or worse - a systematic choice along with other voters - corrupts the process.)
This is because the purpose of an election is NOT to count "all the people's opinions". It is to head off civil war by figuring out in advance which side would win - effectively, to hold the civil war without getting a lot of people hurt or killed.
As such, people should not be voting unless the matter is important enough to them that they would actually put some effort into DOing something about it.
The election process WAS a reasonably good model: Time off from other pursuits to register and vote - about as much for the rank-and-file electorate as going down to a recruiting office. More for the people running the election - the noncoms of the army. Still more for the party functionaries (commissioned officers) and candidates (the general and general staff). Elegibility to vote going specifically to groups that have historically proven their ability and will to organize mass violence.
Trying to get people to vote just to get a high participation level, or anything that reduces the perceived accuracy of the count, creates the risk that the losing side might think they can reverse it by force. This tends to destabilize the society.
(Also: It doesn't model assassination or asymmetric warfare {terrorism}. So those are still with us from time to time.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Gosh. This is exactly the kind of e-voting system I (and anyone else with an IQ over 90) could have thought up. Sounds simple and tamper proof. So why couldn't Diebold come up with a system like this? Oh, yes. It's simple and tamper proof. Really makes you think that the only reason they implemented their system the way they did is specifically to cheat.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
getting their printout and then feeding a slip of paper of the same size back in so they can vote again without destroying their original.
By counting the number of sheets turned in by the user. If someone tries to stuff 10 sheets into their little privacy envelope, you smack them around and undo their excess votes.
Or better yet, use equipment that can both read and write and verify that the machine is going to destroy the paper it just made?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
And, no, I'm not being sarcastic.
Without commenting on the rest of your thread, I can personally attest to the fact that "it's been happening for years" - we've used these "scantron" type ballots in my precinct for as long as I've voted here, which amounts to more than three years, and included several national, local, and primary elections.
Sean
How hard is this? In our Municipal elections (Toronto), we used bubble in ballots read by a machine. The machine was programmed to reject the ballot if no votes were detected. We could then ask the voter if they really meant to cast a "none of the above" ballot. If yes, the ballot would be re-entered, and you could press a button to tell the machine it was not spoiled, and it would tabulate it correctly. This system would certainly pick up if the pen was not the correct type!
3rd party exit polls are GOOD. They serve as a check of honesty/accuracy of the real polls. If the results from the exit poll don't jibe with the results from the real poll, then it is a good bet that there is something fishy with the real poll.
Strangely enough, the only nationwide exit polling system, "Voter News Service," had technical difficulties during the 2000 presidential election. Consequently, there were NO accurate nationwide exit polls. This was clearly a problem as it was partially responsible for Gore's early concession (based on incomplete data) and that there was NO widescale sanity check on the tabulated voting results that day.
Since the machine scans the ballot when it's fed into the machine, why doesn't it reject the ballot on the spot? There's always an election supervisor standing by the machine anyway, at least around here (WA), it would be pretty simple to rip the ballot up and give out another one. Then the person voting has a chance to fill out another ballot and actually get their vote counted.
Problems Exist Between Chair and Keyboard.
I recently worked for the Diebold corporation in several precincts in GA. We had our share of media coverage, and minor problems. For the most part though, I noticed how things Could Have gone wrong, but if the admin goes over all the data, and takes a little time to train the attendants at the precincts there shouldn't be any problems.
I took a day and a half to catch up on some reading.
> Otherwise, what's to stop someone voting, getting their printout and then feeding a slip of paper of the same size back in so they can vote again without destroying their original.
First, there's a human watching the equipment. Individual funny business might stand, organized would have to be, well, organized.
Secondly, simple sequence numbers ought to suffice. Scantron sheets have those already (what do you think all those little black bars on the side are)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
It wouldn't look cool enough. The design that Diebold is using seems to have been driven by marketing to look high-tech. There may also have been a mistaken belief that a solid-state system would be more reliable than one that depending on printing and reading paper (a paper jam could take out a terminal for the day since election workers can't be seen to tamper with them). In practice the Diebold terminals seem to be amazingly unreliable despite only printing totals.
- Faith-based edumacation
- Faith-based missile defense
- Faith-based economic policy
- Faith-based intelligence gathering
- Faith-based corporate accounting
- Faith-based voting
TRUST US.If in fact they did only reselect 10 ballots to test, then it is a *lucky* chance. It's a small population indeed that 10 individuals can provide an accurate representation of.
What's the acceptable error rate? Most people might throw out a number like one in a million where voting is concerned. I can't say I'm inclined to disagree.
A nice place to visit but PLEASE don't stay.
Ok, I am going to start by saying that anyone that thinks e-polling/e-voting or any other kind of electronic voting system is accurate....you are an ignorant bastard. Politicians cheated in elections ever since the beginning of politics, all e-voting does is make it even easier to cheat. How many of you computer programmers wouldn't take a million dollars to move a decimal place over a few places? Having people count ballots is not as bad as people think it is...wouldn't you do it for a paycheck? It does not hurt anyone to have a paper ballot and people counting every single one just like they used to have to do. I have shared this website with you before, but here it is again: Black Box Voting .
I have donated money to this lady on more than one occasion. She has evidence of about seven or eight states that have FOR A FACT cheated or purposely screwed with the results and she is raising money to take every person responsible for it to court. She is what some (including me) may call a patriot. She is fighting a war that is just beginning between this power hungry government of ours and the people. There will be a new civil war some day soon, I just hope the people are on the right side and see all the facts. I bid you all good day....peace
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
The only way a computer ballot system will ever work is if the system is all open source so every single person in the country can examine the code and make sure their vote isn't just being thrown away. We also need to have a judge overseeing every election...not just the computer programmers. Until both of these steps are completed please fight against these machines...if the people cannot see who the people are voting for then the people don't want the damn machines.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
evoting = real ebad
You think telepathy is easy? I've been trying for *years* to control things (animate and inanimate) with my mind alone, and the only things that respond are teh things that are already hard-wired to my brain to begin with. Sometimes even those appendages don't behave exactly right...
You obviously do not understand genetics, do you?
I understand genetics pretty well. I know, for instance, that random breeding between populations does not alter allele frequencies in the resulting population, just phenotypes.
Here's an example: fruit flies. Winglessness in fruit flies is a recessive trait. Take a bunch of wingless female flies, mate them with a bunch of winged male flies. Yes, all the flies in the resulting generation will be winged. It certainly seems as though winglessness has been 'bred out' of the population.
But really what's happened is that each of the resulting new flies has one winged gene, and one wingless gene. So in the second generation, the trait of winglessness, which had apparently 'disappeared' before, suddenly makes a triumphant reappearance.
The ability of recessive genes to skip generations in this manner is the reason many diseases caused by recessive genes persist in our population; notables examples include sickle-cell anemia and certain asthsma-related diseases.
This is why the argument of the post to which I replied, which suggested that recessive traits associated with Caucasians would be bred out of the population simply because they were recessive, is utter garbage.
(I know I'm replying to a troll, but hey, I got time and karma to burn.)
I received this post on the SuSE OT list. Seems Diebold is not just incompetent at making voting software - I'd worry if my banks ATM said "DIEBOLD" on it, and here's why:
? folder_id=3 334
/
Original post:
A Diebold ATM in Baker hall just crashed, and dropped to a Windows XP
desktop.
Several intrepid students started Windows Media player, and it was playing
a variety of music with a nice visualizer.
So much for security...
Photos:
http://www.coed.org/photodb/folder.tcl
Movies (with audio):
http://yogi.pdl.cmu.edu/~cgeisser/photos
But on the bright side you can listen to some nice music.
How do these guys stay in business?
You just have a seperate ballot for each seperate election issue that are different colours & one just sticks them in the box which matches the colour.
That's how its done here when one has to vote on both the house of reps, the senate & a constitutional referendum (3 seperate ballots)
Too late. We're committed. We are going to infect Oregon with our strange California customs and crazy California beliefs.
Break Laws: Shoot a candidate. Bug the opposition communications. Sabotage a candidate for the opposition party. Hire call girls to get close to key workers for the opposition. Spread lies about the opposition.
Pass Laws: Only whites can vote. Only males can vote. Only adults can vote. Only non-felons can vote; and VICES THEY LIKE ARE MADE FELONIES (stock market manipulation versus drugs for example). Only the able may vote. Only the literate may vote. Poll tax so if you are poor its not worth it to you.
Control the process: Own the company that makes the machines that counts the votes. Write the code that counts the votes. Staff key positions with partisans (Supreme Court decisions based on party are especially nice).
Dominate spin: Control headlines with wars, arrests, fear mongering. Get right thinking people jobs as pundits in radio and television and newspapers. Lie your ass off.
Are the white vote cards one-time use cards and are they saved by the election officials? If so, this sounds like a pretty good system that allows recounts. Ballot stuffing would be difficult since the poll should have the same number of cards at the end of the day that they had at the beginning of the day. There would be a fairly high cost to buy the cards in the first place, but if they are blanked and re-used in the next election it would be a very economical in the long run.
It was thoughtful of the officials to put that big black arrow on the card to make voting easy for all the inebriated partyers.
what makes you think the open nature should end at the software? hardware introduces security problems too
GrimRC
I don't think they are saved. I guess they are reused. There weren't any large stacks of cards anywhere near.
Like urban sprawl, gated communities, and a strong desire to undo the land use planning that makes Oregon a nice place to live. Or moving into second growth tiber stands and wondering why your house burns down.
Or how about removing the vote by mail system and replacing it with something from Diebold?
It not the infection of crazy ideas, it's the race to the bottom.
None of your wacky ideas apply to the California community I live in. But thanks for the wonderful tips; I'll share them with my new Oregon neighbors. We'll pave the state. It will be beautiful.
Lol, if you live in California I'm not complaining about you am I?
Anyway just becasue you live in a nice part of Califonia says nothing about what I am talking about. Esp since Nothern and SoCal are about as different as two parts of one state can be.
Tell me do you live behind the Orange curtain or in Humbolt county? Live in Humbolt and you have far more in common with Oregon than you do with LA. Also if you live in a nice community I can't see your nieghbors fleeing to Oregon, so what are you talking aobut anyway?
I'm talking about instituting a statewide sales tax. I will tell my new Oregon brothers and sisters that we need the tax to brace our schools against state funding cuts. "It's for the children," I'll say. Once I have that door open, I'll have you suckers paying 10% on every dollar by the end of the decade. Mouahahahahaha!
I've long felt that something was lost when we went to secret ballots. It was a necessary step, but it eliminated a lot of the discourse and participation that's essential to a healthy democracy.