Slashdot Mirror
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"?
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.
$8.95/mo web hosting
...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.
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.
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