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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.
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?
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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.
Is that black-hat geeks?
or white-hat geeks?
Or tinfoil-hat geeks?
Or will the geeks that run e-voting machines wear different colour hats at home and work?
Will these be the same geeks that write spamming software?
How will you know?
It's all about trust, and right now someone else is making the decision about who we can trust.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.
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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.
Your approach would mean that the votes in the favourable district would not be counted because the ink used on the ballots would not be readable (i.e. they would show up as blank).
The original approach is correct.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
...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.
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...
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%.
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 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.
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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"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.
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!
"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
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