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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.
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.
As far as I'm concerned, any form of voting where I have to trust somebody else's electronic black box to behave itself is subject to the same concerns.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Just because it's "been happening for years" (which I'm uncertain of as you didn't cite any sources) doesn't mean we should ignore it, or that unscrupulous people might exploit it to further their political agenda. This is another flaw in Diebold's supposedly "secure" voting technology that needs to be publicized and fixed.
http://www.questionablecontent.net
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"?
MOD PARENT UP UP UP!!
E-voting and the optical scanning of traditionally cast ballots are not the same thing. Isn't this similar to a machine being unable to determine if a window in a punched card is punched or not.
The story is still significant
cL0h
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.
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.
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.
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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!
It is quite different: If there is a vote on paper you can always have the original paper recounted by humans. Touchscreens can't be recounted.
...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.
"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.
I would demand a recount!
Oh, wait. Thanks to e-voting, theres nothing to recount.
Oops...
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
I'd say that the implications for e-voting have more to do with the procedures with which we select and certify voting equipment. The problem in Napa County was discovered through a state mandated manual recount.
1) Many paperless e-voting machines in CA currently don't allow for this sort of legally required manual recount.
2) Other states don't require manual recount that can uncover technical problems that lead to missed votes.
Your point is well taken though that the tinfoil hatters are distracting from a legitimate discussion of how to select, develop and audit election technology.
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%.
"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
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.
Make the machine idiot proof
no, stop using machines that can be rigged for such important matters such as votes...
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