How To Lose An Election

smooth wombat writes "CNN has posted a story to their site about electronic votes from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines that were lost due to a computer crash.: 'The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.' Other groups are challenging a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them." Reader fatwater adds a link to the New York Times' coverage.

Comments

Re:verification

[garcia]

Why is there no verification or personal audit trail available for elections?

So that you cannot be held personally responsible by a repressive regime when they find out who you voted for.

Correction

[travdaddy]

Other groups are challenging a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them.

The rule exempts not prevents the machines from conducting manual recounts (from paper receipts). Slight difference.

The most important thing...

[Al Dimond]

This article is over a year old, but...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065 .htm

Shows some of the security problems with the voting machines. Even if the article is over a year old, it's still troubling: storing results in MS Access databases, introducing the ability to "correct" vote tallies and erase the trail. If voting machines are going to be computer systems, they need to be designed from the ground up for security, not just "secure enough right now". And not having any backup as in this story? Sounds like these machines were made by amateurs.

In Riverside County

[Anonymous Coward]

This incident in Riverside County, described in Paul Krugman's latest NYT column, is even scarier:

• It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
  
  When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
  
  This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent.

See also a reprint of the Independent UK article and a longer LA City Beat article on the event.

Call your Rep to support HR2239!

[hethatishere]

Call and get your Local Reps to Co-sponsor the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" or HR2239.

For more information go here: http://verifiedvoting.org/resources/hr2239_volunte ers/hr2239_effort.asp/

Or to read the bill in full: http://www.theorator.com/bills108/hr2239.html

Let's get this passed so we don't have to worry about anyone monkeying around in quite possibly one of the most important elections this country has seen in decades-with two very divergent paths for the American people.

Re:Cat got your tongue Florida?

[alphaseven]

Banks screw things up all the time, but at least you have receipts and records to help sort things out, they don't have the burden of keeping everything anonymous.

You can go doublecheck what you deposited last week but you can't (and shouldn't be able to) go back and doublecheck how you voted last week.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[Rei]

To clarify, push polling is the act of calling up people with an intent not to poll, but to establish a concept in a voter's mind. For example, a push poll might ask some basic poll questions, and in the middle ask "Would you be less likely to vote for Candidate A if they were convicted of child molestation"?

Probably the most famous real-world case of push poling was what Bush's campaign did to McCain in South Carolina. His campaign asked: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?". McCain was campaining with his adopted Bangladeshi daughter - having semi-dark skin, this helped convince people that the question on the poll was, in fact, an illegitimate black child.

Another Recent Article I Read

[Master of Transhuman]

says that immigrants being granted citizenship in Florida were handed forms to indicate their voting preferences when they registered to vote.

All the preferences were prechecked "Republican"!

Some of the immigrants complained to the Democratic Party officials in Florida and the Federal Elections Commission is investigating.

It doesn't get more obvious than this.

Why Florida is still part of the United States instead of Germany - or maybe North Korea - is a mystery to me.