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.

Comments

Keep it simple

[twinpot]

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.

Re:Maybe some attention

[subjectstorm]

in the vein of easily auditable results -

one thing that's always bothered me about these machines is that, if they can't make a vote out (can't even see the ink maybe?), they tend to simply discard it. in this case, there were nearly 7K ballots that were not counted (if i understand the article).

why couldn't the database on the back end be configured to flag any ballots that seemed irregular for inspection? for instance, if the counting machine recorded ballot #41768 as being entirely blank, this could be flagged and brought to the attention of poll workers, who would then read the ballot and adjust the results accordingly (under intense supervision, with data noting who did the changes, and a saved copy of the original results).

this requires a paper-based ballot system. but totally electronic voting with no hard copies is a really bad idea in the first place