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Evoting in the News
key45 writes "Just a few days after California rejects Diebold E-Voting machines, and Ireland bans e-voting too, the Information Technology Association of America (which represents election equipment makers and other technology companies) released a poll showing that the majority of Americans trust those machines. The war for public opinion is on!" Reader theRG writes "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission held hearings on May 5 about the pros and cons of electronic voting machines. They debated whether or not machines should have paper trails, and what standards should be set. Meanwhile, NPR reports on California's recent decertification of Diebold machines and on one Ohio county's switch from punchcards to electronic voting." And finally, our own OSDN has a report from the election commission meeting: Joe Barr writes "Thom Wysong has a report at NewsForge this morning on the first public meeting of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Questions like whether or not a voter verifiable audit trail and open source should be mandated for e-voting solutions were the order of the day."
More than half think that Saddam and Al-Qaeda worked together!
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
...please, PLEASE let there be a CowboyNeal option...
These sigs are more interesting tha
Do remember that Diebold is waging a 500k/month PR war and they're no doubt buying off whoever can be bought.
OTOH, I wonder how the results would have skewed if the poll question was preceded by "Who is Diebold?" and the question had to be answered correctly. Americans (of which I'm one) are uniformly ignorant of anything that doesn't happen on Survivor XXXVIII. It's easy to give a yes or no answer when you don't have to prove that you know anything about the subject!
What I find amazing is that in the face of arguably questionable performance, security, and auditing issues with e-voting machines, the vast majority of elections officials still want to move full steam rather than wait until a solid solution is developed. Remember, these are the same people that will be developing the ulcers on election night when their systems start shitting out garbage. They have to realize that they will be under extreme scrutiny. Why put yourself and your staff through this? Makes me think of payola, but that's not really realistic. Maybe the executive elections staff training is in Bermuda or Hawaii?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
released a poll showing that the majority of Americans trust those machines.
If we based everything off what the majority of Americans trusted, we would get someone like George Bush for President.
Oh wait, Damn!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Why is that at all relevant? Either the machines are reliable and trustworthy, or they aren't. This can't be altered by the opinions of a bunch of people who know nothing about it.
If the machines are not rigorously trustworthy, and provably so, they should not be used. End of story. What Americans think is irrelevant.
If the machines are totally secure and reliable, but most Americans don't trust them, they still shouldn't be used. The voting system not only has to be trustworthy, but has to be seen to be trustworthy. If machines are more reliable, faster and more secure than paper, then election authorities should try to persuade the public that they are reliable, but until the public so believes, they should not be used to determine the result of an election.
Well, This may be a bit inflammatory, but I think your comment demands some, umm, comment.
First, I'm going to ask for clarification. Is voting a game of big numbers or is voting a game of small numbers? Your comment supports the first then instantly switches to the opposite point. My one vote doesn't count, then, suddenly, we have a close race and it counts. Which is it?
I'll reveal my personal stance on the voting machines. Big, Bad Idea. The darling old ladies who serve as ballot judges in my local precinct have eyes like hawks, but they can't see potential voter fraud on a purely electronic platform. This is a clear case of a manufacturer using its superior resources to push an agenda against the public interest.
Plus, I insist that my vote does matter. It's not all presidential politics. Local referenda on city and county issues can directly affect my quality of life. In a race where voter turn-out is maybe 3,000 folks, my vote definitely counts. Heck, a guy of meager income like me can even swing an election through personal effort alone.
Time to quit bitching and get off the apathy wagon, kids.
If you're in Maryland and want to help out, come join us at www.truevotemd.org. We have a lawsuit going to force the state to decertify the Diebold machines, and we're also planning a number of other public actions to raise awareness and put pressure on our elected and appointed officials. Linda Schade, one of the co-directors, was a speaker at the press conference that MoveOn held outside the EAC hearing.
--Paul Suh
Can anybody enlighten me on why it is so difficult to insist that voters approve their ballot on paper? I guess some think that since it is a computer, it wont make a mistake and computers are here to rid us of paper anyway. It just confuses (and scares) me.
Ireland didn't ban e-voting. We merely postponed it. We've already had e-voting machines used in an election two years ago (in a few consituencies on a trial basis). This summer, the Irish government tried to introduce e-voting in every county, and was met with protests. It was taken completely by surprise, and set up a commission to look into the matter and report back with a recommendation. I'm pretty sure that this commission was just set up to reassure the "Luddite" public, and tell them that everything was ok.
To everyone's surprise, the commission said that there wasn't enough time to guarantee the accuracy and security of the machines, and that their introduction should be postponed until such things could be guaranteed.
So, it hasn't been banned, just postponed.
-l
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With the British presses high journalistic standards, I trust that The Telegraph on their own found the conclusive proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden. I also believe in Sasquatch.
Personally, I spent Tuesday (local election) passing out the following flyer:
Will Your Vote Be Counted?
Diebold
Direct Recording Electronic "DRE" Machines
Though Diebold has gotten bad press lately, (it's costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign "contributions" to stay in business), their competitors are no better. Any DRE machine would be just as vulnerable to error, tampering, and fraud. Because they do not produce a permanent record of each vote, modern computerized systems are no better than the huge mechanical lever machines of 1890. Because there is no reliable way to even detect errors, the results of any election using these machines is open to question.
Voter-Verifiable Audit Receipt
For at least ten years, security experts around the country have recommended the use of a Voter-Verifiable Audit, or "VVA," to guard against these problems. If passed, Voters Confidence and Increased Accuracy Act would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper printout of each vote. This "VVA Receipt" must be made available for each voter to check before being securely deposited into a sealed container. The paper ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic tallies in case of doubt.
Urge your Senator and Representative to support the Voters Confidence Act, also known as H.R.2239 (in the House), and S.1980 (in the Senate.)
How to Buy an Election
There are literally hundreds of ways to tamper with the vote when computers are doing the counting. Here are just some of the possibilities: Hire a programmer to create a "back door" program in the voting software which can alter the vote count on demand. In Fairfax County, Virginia, during the 2003 elections, voters in three precincts complained that the machines changed their votes. Testing showed that a machine seemed to subtract a vote in about "one of a hundred tries." At least two close races may have hinged on that one percent "error." Replace the vote-counting software through last-minute technical "service upgrades." Most recently in California, thousands of election computers were "upgraded" just before the election, replacing the certified software with newer, un-certified versions. Monopolize some criticThe Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
You vote at the poll on the machine. The machine records the vote locally (and later to the poll team and later to the central office). The machine prints out a scantron. You check the bubbles are right for your vote and put it in the box.
The machine vote is the main vote, the scantron is just a backup. The backup will later be used to check the machine vote. Due to printing errors, there will be statistical anomalies taken into account and some will be checked by hand.
Hackers would have to fool two separate, complementary systems: machine and optical scan.
You would NOT have the ability to verify your vote over the Internet or ex post facto as this breaks secret balloting.
-l
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John82's point that elections officials don't want to be the next ridiculed Florida Elections Commission is appropriate also, but a big factor is that the Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration wanted to be perceived as "Doing Something" to fix the big embarassment that they came into office with. (Oh, and also the Diebold folks were big Republican contributors, so they of course wanted to help out their friends.)
One big advantage of competently designed electronic voting machines is accessibility for blind people, which is a real problem with most voting systems. This lets the election officials help out blind people, and others with limited sight or hand-eye coordination (e.g. old people.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
E-voting won't increase voter turnout. Voting can't get any easier than it already is.
Truth be told, I'm not so concerned about increasing voter turnout as I am informing voters. I'd rather the people who can't be bothered to vote stayed home and left the decisions to people who care. Increasing voter turnout simply increases the number of uninformed voters. Make people care, and they'll find their way to the polls all by themselves.
Action is the only thing that's going to fix the system, cuz it aint fixing itself. Regardless of the philosophical constraints in our systems, concerted action is the only thing that makes things happen.
I agree, but sometimes the system is so fouled up that you can't fix it from within the system. In the election process, the only people who have the power to change it are in power because of it. They have no desire to change it because they will likely suffer from the change. The system has no way to change the system, so the change has to be made from outside.
There are arguments for changing the voting process itself, but I think the main reason people have lost faith is because of the end result. Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil, and voting for an independent, or worse, writing in a candidate, has little to no chance of doing any more than not voting at all.
The election process is a paralysing feedback loop all of its own. If everyone voted, regardless of their feelings about why voting doesn't matter, how would we know there was a problem? Say what you like about "voter apathy", but it's at least got us talking about how to fix the problem rather than not knowing there is one.
Personally, I think we need to fix what our choices are before we fix how we make them.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.