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

This is why there need to be reform

[SiliconJesus]

Is it all that hard to add a 'print reciept' option to all of these voting machines? Honestly, if they had a ream of paper coming out of the back of the machine, and the option for Voters to print off a copy for their own records (and to verify their vote was recorded as they expected) a lot of the problems with the electronic voting machines would be alleviated. Votes could be recounted by going back over the paper trail, and there would be immediate response for vote tallies.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[Steve B]

the option for voters to print off a copy for their own records

Absolutely, positively NOT. Permitting a voter to walk away from the polls with hard evidence of how he voted is an open invitation to corruption and coercion.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yep, that's the solution. It is mind-bogglingly simple and obvious to anyone who has any interest in fair elections. It follows, therefore, that the voting machine companies, which usually answer such demands with bullshit excuses like "the printer would jam" (that gem comes from Diebold, which also makes ATM's which surely print out many more receipts than any voting machine would be likely to, and do so day after day) do not have such an interest.

One quibble: the voters should not keep their receipts. Voter-held receipts are useless in the event of a recount -- how do you know that the receipt the voter brings in is actually the one he got on Election Day? -- and are actively dangerous, in that they provide a means for influencing elections through threat or bribery. ("Vote for candidate X or I'll break your kneecaps" / "Vote for candidate Y and I'll give you a raise"). The best sequence of events is to get the receipt, look it over to verify that it says what you want it to say -- and there's no reason receipts couldn't be printed in Braille for blind voters; some ATM receipts already are -- and deposit it in a ballot box.

For those who say, "But ballot boxes can be stuffed or stolen!" -- yes, this is true, and no election method yet devised is foolproof. But this would be a hell of a lot better than what we've got now.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[0x0d0a]

Honestly, if they had a ream of paper coming out of the back of the machine, and the option for Voters to print off a copy for their own records (and to verify their vote was recorded as they expected) a lot of the problems with the electronic voting machines would be alleviated.

Absolutely.

Now how, exactly, do you propose to provide a mechanism in which it is guaranteed to the voter that their recorded vote is the same as that which is on their receipt, without throwing away any of the anonymity characteristics that are also crucial to voting?

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[sphealey]

Now how, exactly, do you propose to provide a mechanism in which it is guaranteed to the voter that their recorded vote is the same as that which is on their receipt, without throwing away any of the anonymity characteristics that are also crucial to voting?

Voter reviews receipt and verifies correct. Voter places receipt in traditional ballot box. Random sample of ballot boxes counted and matched against electronic machine.

Admittedly this is a facile answer to a complex problem, but people like Peter Neumann have thought deeply about the problem for more than 30 years and have developed some solutions - none of which Diebold uses.

sPh

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[TopShelf]

The problem is that someone could be coerced to vote a certain way, and would be required to show proof. Currently, that is impossible.

"Show me your receipt showing a vote for XXX or else..."

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[squiggleslash]

Not to mention something along the lines of "Vote for Bush and get a free Taco! Just bring your reciept at any of our chain of restaurants and..."

Doubtless the usual bunch of rednecks will protest that this is perfectly ok, after all, if someone is so stupid they're willing to base their vote on an such an offer, that's up to them, but the effect of this ultimately is on me and you and those of us who taking voting seriously. Sometimes laws need to be made not to protect people from their own stupidity, but to protect the rest of us from group stupidity.

We want everyone, regardless of what we think about them, to vote: no law has moral legitimacy if it is passed by a body where the people subject to that law had no say in its make-up. To achieve this, we need to protect the integrity of the decision making process. The US has been very lax in this for decades, with absurdly poor voter turn-outs and with many people - ironically too idiotic to understand the concept of representative democracy - keen on putting up as many roadblocks to voting as possible to limit the practice, in general, to only those they see as "appropriate". This isn't right, but improved turn-outs also have to come with sane controls that ensure that voting is easy, that voters are as informed as they can be, and that voters are - by and large - affected as little as possible by illegitimate influences.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[misleb]

Yep, that's the solution. It is mind-bogglingly simple and obvious to anyone who has any interest in fair elections. It follows, therefore, that the voting machine companies, which usually answer such demands with bullshit excuses like "the printer would jam" (that gem comes from Diebold, which also makes ATM's which surely print out many more receipts than any voting machine would be likely to, and do so day after day) do not have such an interest.

Another thing that make this a BS excuse is that a jammed printer only means one lost printed receipt and a sign that says "Voting machine out of order" rather than thousands of votes mysteriously lost to a computer crash. People understand printer jams and can deal with them (assuming it would happen, even if rarely).

-matthew

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[elmegil]

The bottom line is you need a manual recount method that works and is secure. Having a voter walk off with the receipt is NOT secure. Forgery after the fact to try to change the outcome of the election is just one obvious possibility.

The whole idea of print a receipt, verify it says what you want, and deposit it into a secured ballot box makes good sense to most people, and seems the logical way to handle this--and it even uses the same backup technologies that we've been using for decades, so it's not a huge additional burden on the system.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[hazem]

It's really simple. One machine has a touch screen with audio prompts, brail readers, etc. All it does is help you generate a ballot that indicates your actual voting desires. It doesn't count anything. It helps you generate a ballot and that's all.

You then take this printed ballot that is both human and machine readable (maybe using a font like you find on the numbers of your checks) and put it in a box. These ballots are now counted by another machine.

Now you have solved the problems that people were so concerned about in Florida:
1) confusing ballot forms are elminated
2) antiquated systems with chads and ballots that can degrade during a recount are eliminated

It's better than touch screen voting with a database because the process of creating the ballot and counting it are seperated. There is a paper ballot, and nobody has to trust the voting machine. The voter can look at the ballot and see if it says what they want it to. There is a "paper trail" of real ballots that can be manually counted.

If someone prints a ballot and doesn't put it in the box, it doesn't count... it's not a vote.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[Umrick]

Agreed that no record of voting should ever leave with the voter.

That said, I absolutely disagree with the "we want everyone to vote" bit. If you (as a voter) are unwilling or unable to understand the issues, and can't even take enough interest to know who is running in the major offices of an election, you should not vote. I'd also add in that if you (in the general) are receiving federal handouts you should not be able to vote.

Government should always be what is needed, not what can I get out of it.

Can't work a voting machine? Sure, we'll dumb that right down for ya! Here's your rock, drop it on the candidate's foot you want to win...

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[Tassach]

its a small price to pay for the knowledge that a free election has infact taken place

As if our Republican overlords and their corporate buddies have any interest whatsoever in free elections.

I wouldn't trust a Diebold voting machine any further than I could throw it. Until the auditing and security requirements for electronic voting machines are stricter than those required for electronic gambling machines, they have no place whatsoever in the polling place.

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[royalblue_tom]

Nothing - that is the whole point of having the paper trail. Your question should be - "what are you going to do if you want a recount, and you don't have a hard copy?"

The idea of having a paper copy to backup the computer means that eventually, only a few random recounts will be needed as people come to trust the initial computer count. Also, the computer print out may make manual recounts easier due to clear format, etc.

People trust ATMs, because they can always check their statement later - would you like the banks to stop sending you a statement, and just trust their computers to correctly handle their money with no recourse if it gets it wrong?

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[maxpublic]

As if our Republican overlords and their corporate buddies have any interest whatsoever in free elections.

Neither do our Democratic overlords and their corporate buddies, when the Democrats are in charge.

It's all football. The only thing that changes is the color of the jerseys.

Max

Re:This is why there need to be reform

[SuperBigGulp]

Dude, who votes in your world?

Not people who work on goverment contracts, since the money comes from the government.

People who work for the government probably could not vote, since they take money from government. This category is rather large and would seem to include civil servants, elected officials, police officers, firefighters, and members of the armed forces.

People who get tax refunds couldn't vote, and people on welfare and/or social security obviously couldn't vote. Getting old or going on the dole is just a ploy to throw the election anyway.

Anyone covered by Medicaid or Medicare couldn't vote, since thats just another form of government handout. Damn those people with end-stage renal disease for taking a handout.

Likewise, employees of NASA, Amtrak and the post office couldn't vote. Hey everybody has choices to make, like: vote or explore space.

Native Americans probably couldn't vote, what with the reservations and all.

So, let us know when you find the cave-dwelling hermit who is eligible to vote in your world. He'll probably vote for Nader, who will win in a 1 vote to nothing landslide.

Election Observers

[Lucky_Norseman]

Maybe UN observers wouldn't be such a bad thing?

What about a crash during an election?

[rstewart]

The question that no one in this article has asked is what do you do if the voting machine has a hard drive crash during an election so you literally lose all of the votes cast on the machine before it can even report what votes were cast that day.

Multiply the number of machines in use across the country and eventually this will happen.

Do you ask all the voters who used that machine to come back and vote again ? Probably not.

Re:What about a crash during an election?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Millions -- tens or hundreds of millions? billions? -- of financial transactions are conducted electronically every day. These transactions are stored on RAID and other redundant error-correcting systems that are as near to foolproof as any data storage system ever devised by hand of man, and yes, that includes handwritten paper records. Very, very few of these transactions fail, and when they do, there are some pretty serious laws about what has to be done to correct them. Most of these transactions are conducted by businesses that have far fewer resources to throw at the problem than does the US government, or even any state government.

It is entirely possible to produce a reliable e-voting system ... just not if that system is produced by the current crop of voting machine companies. I'm a big fan of "never attribute to malice what can properly be attributed to incompetence," but in this case, malice -- i.e., a desire to produce insecure, unreliable machines that can easily be rigged to produce the "right" electoral outcome -- really is the simplest explanation.

Cat got your tongue Florida?

[garcia]

``Our concern is voter confidence,'' Howard Simon, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, told the court. ``There is no way to know if a vote isn't counted by one of these machines.''

Joining the ACLU in Judge Susan B. Kirkland's courtroom were several other organizations that cited evidence in recent elections in Florida and Virginia that recorded abnormal numbers of blank votes or computer glitches that resulted in incorrect vote tallies.

Under questioning by the groups' attorneys, Division of Elections official Paul Craft said, ``All machines experience problems,'' but he did not know of any problem that had resulted in an inaccurate vote tally in Florida.

George Waas, of the state attorney general's office, told Kirkland that the advocates were suffering from ``the sky- is-falling syndrome.''

Sorry, but due to issues that happened in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida I would certainly be "suffering" from the "sky-is-falling syndrome" too.

Why the fuck can they not manually recount votes? I honestly believe that when we elect someone to office we should be 100% certain that they were elected fair and square. None of this pre-election bullshit of skimming out legal voters through third parties, none of this "tough, the machines are right" shit, and certainly allow a recount.

Cheating is going to run rampant if there is no manual backup mechanism available. Why the hell was this written into law?

The sky-is-falling isn't exactly the way to describe this. The sky-has-fallen might be better.

Re:Cat got your tongue Florida?

[nharmon]

Absolutely not. I have cut any ties whatsoever to the ACLU and the NAACP. They have simply become puppets of the Democratic party, and no longer serve their original purposes.

When you have the NAACP endorsing a white democrat over a black republican, what is going on here?

When you have the ACLU arguing against the outlawing of child pornography, yet agreeing with Reno that gun ownership is not an individual human right, what is going on here?

No thank you. I have decided that such organizations are not worth my time, and that other organizations are far more worthy of my money.

Re:Cat got your tongue Florida?

[Kombat]

no counting of 60 million objects is ever going to be perfect or precise. Every time you recount you will get a different answer.

Really? Banks seem to have no problem counting millions, and even billions. Think people complain when their vote goes missing? Try seeing what they do when their paycheck goes missing.

Maybe we should be getting the banks to handle the elections?

Re:Cat got your tongue Florida?

[micromoog]

When you have the NAACP endorsing a white democrat over a black republican, what is going on here?

If that candidate's policies are better for African Americans overall, the NAACP's action was right. Blindly endorsing a candidate solely based on the color of his skin would be silly.

verification

[spoonyfork]

if you are a US citizen of voting age...

Who did you vote for in the last election that you participated in? Can you prove it? Can they prove it? Why can't I verify if my vote was even counted let alone who they recorded it for? Why is there no verification or personal audit trail available for elections?

why electronic?

[night_flyer]

what is wrong with a good old paper ballot and a pen to mark your choice(s)?

Re:why electronic?

[R.Caley]

The biggest problem with pen ballots is that it takes a long time to count.

UK elections are done with pen and paper and the results are in overnight. Since the number of people available to do the counting is more or less proportional to the number of people who need to vote, I see no reason why a US national election run with pen and paper ballots would take any longer to count.

No big surprise

[b-baggins]

This is always what happens when you let hysteria and demagoguery drive your decisions.

Punch card balloting is an extremely accurate and economical way to tally votes.

Instead of being men and telling voters to read the damn ballot and punch the card completely next time, we get all boo-hooey over a few idiots who don't do either, and let ourselves get whipped up into making stupid decisions by political opportunists exploiting said idiots.

Re:No recounts in districts with touchscreen votin

[aborchers]

What Republican got that law passed?

That would be the Republican majority in the Florida state congress.

Why Allow Recounts for "Voter Intent"

[VeriTea]

According to the article, recounts are only allowed under state law to determine "voter intent". I am completely against the 'no paper trail' voting machine monster that is pushed so heavily, but I agree with the judge when he says that determining "voter intent" is impossible. As a voter, I would be very upset if the election officials started looking through my votes and decided that I voted Republican for 4 offices and Democrate for 1, therefore my true intent was to vote Republican for all 5 offices, or more likely, my true intent was to vote Democrate for all 5 and my first 4 were mistakes :)

Whoops, the Cat's Eaten It!

[MooseByte]

Does anyone else feel that the November 2004 elections are shaping up to be some twisted Monty Python skit?

And no I'm NOT aiming for +2 Funny. :-/

Seriously, we've got just over three months to go and the system is not only unimproved since the November 2000 disaster, it's actually worse. Now someone can just change the results in critical swing districts without a trace.

Add that with the Florida "Felons Who Can't Vote" rolls that were only released after a court fight, and then immediately abandoned by Florida election officials when it was revealed to be terribly flawed. But only after a court order to make them public, of course.

Maybe we can call in the U.N. to observe the elections for us. This is out of control. Cradle of Democracy my ass. We're heading to be the laughing stock of Democracy. And we're the punchline.

Voter confidence is the key or lack thereof

[FunWithHeadlines]

Voting officials or voting machine manufacturers who respond to these allegations ususally say those who argue for a voting trail are introducing voter confusion, or underminding confidence in the voting process, or some other Orwellian doubletalk. In fact, what underminds voter confidence is the knowledge that there will be no way to recount votes and verify what happened.

We are talking about electing people to positions of power. If you remove the voting trail, you remove accountability. Power without accountability...saaaay, that's the way to instill voter confidence, huh?

Verification? What about anonymous voting??

[goldspider]

You forget that an election is supposed to be 100% anonymous. While ideally we would have voting systems that were reliable, a paper trail identifying who voted for what candidate would fundamentally damage the concept of anonymous voting.

I'd rather take the chance that my vote may not be counted due to machine/process flaws than potentially letting politicians, corporations, and political activist groups knowing who I voted for.

Re:No recounts in districts with touchscreen votin

[sc2_ct]

Actually, the election board is controlled pretty overwhelmingly by democrats in the affected areas.

If no paper trail for voting, no paper trail. . .

[smooth wombat]

for purchases.

As the submitter for this story (thanks Timothy) I always chuckle when I hear the excuses from Diebold et al for not putting in a paper trail for electronic voting machines. The usual excuse is that computers don't make mistakes.

If that is the opinion of those producing these machines and their backers then they wouldn't mind not getting a receipt when they go grocery or car shopping. In both instances computers are used to calculate the total bill including tax (if any).

By their logic since computers are used to perform this calculation, and, according to them, computers don't make mistakes, then there is no need for a receipt to show how much each item costs. Instead, they're just told how much they owe.

I'm sure grocers and others would love this. A few cents here, a few cents there. By the time the bill is rung up you could end up paying several dollars more than you should.

For all the protestations we make about other countries not having open and fair elections, there are certain parts of this country which aren't too far behind.

This is what we need....

[jjh37997]

Here's what we need...

A touch screen voting booth that lets voters select the canidates they want.

After the voter casts their vote the booth prints out a ballot that's machine readable yet understandable to the naked eye.

The voter checks to make sure that the canidates they selected are recorded on the ballot and then feeds it into a reader. It's this machine that actually records the voter's vote.

With this sysetm even if all the computer records are erased the paper ballots can either be re-scanned or counted by hand.

Re:Time to call for international monitors?

[rdsmith4]

You would call on the UN to solve "rampant corruption?" Sounds like a paradox to me.

It's teh correct decision.

[raehl]

Actually, the decision makes 100% perfect technical sense.

The votes are stored in a database. The question is, if there is a "recount", do the election workers have to print copies of each screen and count them by hand to make sure the machine counted right?

Obviously, that would be a waste of time - humans counting printouts of what's in the database will be less accurate than just taking the total from the database. Since it's a printout, any vote for a particular candidate looks identical to any other vote, so there's nothing there (like a hanging chad) to recount in the first place.

The *REAL* problem is that there are no paper coies of the ballot printed at the time of the vote in the first place. But that wasn't the question the election board was answering - the queston was 'I've got a computer here with a vote tally in it. Can I just look at the total votes, or do I have to print a piece of paper for each vote and count those?"

Re:It's teh correct decision.

[Soong]

Congratulations, you have found that they made the correct solution to the wrong problem. Everyone knows that the real problem is the lack of paper ballot as the primary recording medium.

Created Equal

[Steve B]

The "equality" guaranteed by American law is equality of opportunity (e.g. everybody has a chance to vote using a consistent set of standards) not equality of result (e.g. if you screw it up through your own fault and fail to cast a valid vote, too bad).

No no no, there won't be an election

[ScooterBill]

Unfortunately, a series of terrorist events will cause the government to indefinitely "postpone" the election. Of course, martial law will follow and anything that doesn't tote the party line (slashdotters lookout) will be summarily seized and thrown into a black hole. That's the good news.

We will all live happily ever after...

Okay.

[Chris Burke]

Bullshit. Is that the game we are playing? Prove it. Offer more information or hell, even a resource for your quote. Otherwise your allegation is outlandish and your reasoning false.

Okay, I'll save you the five seconds it would take to google for "Diebold deliver electoral votes", with an article from the ol' KZoo Gazette: Here ya go..

Come on. This is hardly new, nor is it a fact that is under dispute. The CEO of Diebold said he is committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to the president. Their machines have demonstrably failed in real elections. They have been caught violating regulations by installing uncertified software on deployed voting machines in California. Voters have been disenfranchised by them, a fact they do not dispute.

If you would like more information, my signature should provide one-click access to plenty of information.

The only reason you have to call "bullshit" is 1) ignorance and 2) a predisposition to believe that it couldn't be true, that a rich CEO of a powerful corporation couldn't possibly be trying to subvert democracy. Sadly the first is quite common, and the second unjustified by any analysis of history.

Our computer crashed so we lost the votes.

[eadint]

This happens after someone requests an opportunity to review the voting records.
Cmmon this is slashdot, how about the real questions.

1. Where are the Backup Tapes
2. Can the necessary data be recovered from the hard drive
3. Can the data be restored from backup
4. What is your disaster recovery plan
5. Why were you working on live data without a backup
   
6. why does your software crash and delete valuable data
7. why did this happen now and not before the results were posted
   

I think that the answer will be a little be scarier than we would like

1. The data was not lost in a crash
   
2. The data was deliberately destroyed to hide tampering
3. the blame was put on a computer crash as a technical scapegoat.
4. when people hear about things that involve computers they automatically assume just about any damn thing is possible.

In my 10 years of working with computers i have never lost any critical data due to a crash or a computer failure. there are too many ways to prevent accidental data loss and to recover data from a completely hosed hard drive. this data was probably not lost in a computer crash it was deliberately destroyed. call me paranoid but i challenge anyone on this board with more than 5 years field experience to site a single case where data was lost due to a crash (not including incoming data during downtime) and not recoverable. if you do post a case than you shouldn't be in this business.