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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.
I TOLD YOU SO
For decades the USA has called for international monitors to elections in most 3rd world countries. It is sad to see that the USA's election system seems to be one of the most 3rd-worldish out there, with rampant corruption. Time for the UN to call for international monitors!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
A few comments, in order of increasing concern... Why do they need to back these up daily now - I mean, how often do the votes change. They didn't mention OS, so I wont either, though we've seen stories on these before. Most importantly, how long is it before the 'current' administration (a current administration) declairs voting in-public too risky (e.g. terrorist bait), and declair we all have to vote on-line? Never mind browser/OS requirements (yes, there are those that go to the point of requiring OS). What would a recount look like then, presuming it could even be determined that one was needed?
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen
Yep, that caught my eye too. Obviously they do not have proper policies and procedures in place for data backup and retension. I wonder if the new State Technology Office is in charge of those systems, or if the elections dept. gets to do their own thing? I used to work at FDLE (FL Dept of Law Enforcement) HQ in Tallahassee; it was a mess too, and I'm not at all surprised that a Florida State agency lost some data.
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I've got to ask, for something as important as an election, what's wrong with paper and pencil and manual counting?
I wish I thought this was a silly idea. Aside from the fact that it may make Birchers go bugfuck ... er, more bugfuck ... it might be a good idea. An official request has been made; I haven't heard whether there's been an official response.
"Several members of the [US] House of Representatives have requested the United Nations to send observers to monitor the November 2 US presidential election to avoid a contentious vote like in 2000, when the outcome was decided by Florida." Link.
(Fair Warning: This is a link to an unabashedly progressive website, and therefore may not be suitable for work.)
After the voter casts their vote the booth prints out a ballot that's machine readable yet understandable to the naked eye.
...
You mean something like a punch card or optical mark card. Hmmm
Ohio in the most recent election was still using punch cards. I always check my punchcard (the punch fields are numbered) against the column #'s on the ballot, and (since 2000) also check for 'chad'. It takes a few seconds to do so. Then I place the card in the locked voting bin. For all the bad press punchcards have gotten, I trust them more than an untested and potentially unsecure proprietary touch screen system.
[Insert pithy quote here]
That is true, however they have no jurisdiction since it is the state supervisor of elections and the republican majority that is precluding the use of a paper trail of touchscreen voting machines.
So the systematic purging of likely Democratic voters from the 2000 Florida roles was an accident?
The attempt to repeat this same action in 2004 was also an accident?
When the same accident happens over and over, I get suspicious.
BlackBoxVoting.org has discussed this several times, although that site has its own partisan spin. It isn't something that is discussed much though.
sPh
I would prefer a hard copy to confirm the vote. I don't think that the voter should take that hard copy home. The hard copy should be put in a ballot box after the voter has confirmed that indeed that was their vote. Similar as is done with normal ballots. If the results of a polling place are called into question, then we head to the ballot box and do a manual recount. So yes the individual voters shouldn't have hard evidence of they way they voted, but I want hard evidence for auditing purposes.
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
Why not use nice, big touch screen computers, and then have them print ballots with both words and a BAR CODE which stores your vote? Then, your vote is simply scanned into a computer, and any discrepency would be obvious to the counters (hey Bob, this guys paper says, Nader but the scanners reading it as GW?) and verifiable to the humans. I for one feel a lot better putting a physical piece of paper into a box. Preseumably, I can follow that box all the way to the counting agency, and watch as the ballots are pulled out and read by hand. This is not true with a computer. Ideally such a system would be simple, verifiable and accurate, with no hanging chads. Bar codes are used sucessfully by people who check out our purchases at stores, it shouldn't be hard for politicians. Also, the counting would go pretty damn fast. To me this makes sense, unless, of course, the point of computerized voting is to make the system decidedly not accurate and verifiable.
It was the Republican senate. But if you look at it, it makes sense. it says a "manual recount may not be conducted of undervotes on touch-screen machines".
You cannot recount undervotes with a computer system, even if you print out receipts. An undervote is when the total number of votes for a race are less than the number of ballots cast. In punch card or other manual voting methods, the electronic system can miss a mark or a punch that is obviously a vote to a human eye.
However, there is no way for a human to look for an uncounted vote. If they user pressed the button on the computer it will be recorded. If they do not, it will warn them that they have not voted for races that they did not pick a candidate for. If it prints out a paper, the paper will not have the vote either. No stray marks, no hanging chads.
What does have a paper trail is the precinct by precinct totals. So each ballot location prints a summary from their machines which they verify and turn in. The summaries can be compared to the electronic totals.
I would promote a receipt system for the voter. The voter should be able to take a small receipt with some type of unidentifiable hash result on it. If there is an accusation of tampering or lost votes it could be compared to the records in the database to make sure it was counted appropriately. In order to prevent people from being held accountable by nefarious entities for their voting decisions, it should not be able to be reversed into a proof of voting.
In fact they could get one and leave one in a box for auditing of the computer system. Technically this is not a recount. When you check a manual count against a computer record, it is an audit, since there was no "counting" done in the first place.
I don't think it would be all that difficult to employ without corruption. Actually, it's a great idea for a double-check:
Joe Sixpack presses onscreen button for Candidate X and gets a printed receipt of his vote. He reads it, makes sure that it says Candidate X and not Candidate W (not so subtle, I know). Then presses the, "Yes, that is my final answer" button and then he deposits his receipt (e.g. via a mechanism similar to check deposits) back into the machine. That way you have the e-votes PLUS the paper trail.
Uhhh, do you perhaps mean 1984?
Though, granted, the 1930s were a scary time in history.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ever hear of push polling? Large groups have been influenced using it. And for those wondering, it is public record (not just the pols) to see if person X has voted, but whom they voted for is not public record. Put push polling and the public voting record together you don't need to know who the person voted for, just that they vote. Push poll the people that vote and you can influence an election. Why would you ever need to record on a receipt who the person voted for? Systems that record an audit history have been around for a while, now. Plus, when there is a recount the entire voting population doesn't come back to polling place and show proof that they voted. Receipts are useless. System design is everything.
If you want to use it for validation, the last time I used electronic systems it had a validation screen for my votes. That worked just as well for validation purposes.
The validation is a) for the voter and b) in the case of a manual recount. Now a) can certainly be done equally onscreen or in paper. The paper is for validation b). Printing a bogus receipt (one that matches the voter's choices but not what's tallied) would be revealed if the manual recount of the ballots came out. Granted, the idea of direct and purposeful e-tampering is on the outer rim of plausibility. I seriously doubt that's an issue, but the massive rise in identity theft forces me to accept that computerizing anything makes life (and therefore fraud) more efficient and therefore more attractive.
Now let's talk about a much more present concern with electronic voting. Am I comfortable with even a remote possibiilty of this system crashing in the middle of registering my vote? A 0.1% chance of failure to register is frighteningly high; that's 160,000 votes lost if the entire US were voting electronically. Poking a hole in a punchcard can only fail if I screw it up. After 2000, I guarantee you everyone's going to make sure they're poking the proper hole and poking it clean through.
Personally, I'm not going anywhere near an electronic voting system. Dismiss me, call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but Reynold's Wrap's stock is up 50% since we went to war in Iraq.
Me? I'm requesting an absentee ballot and mailing it in. Certified Mail.
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
"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."
I don't think that's the case, rather, it's companies like Diebold knowing the governments of American have _billions_ to spend on this and are fighting every requirement in order to extract as much as possible before competition sets in.
Of course, it's worthy to that Democrats recently gave away free beer if you registered to vote at their booth.
Q J4_news.shtml
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/news/0618SM4K
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Here in England we have an organisation called the Football Association (FA). For Football read Soccer if your Uncle is called Sam. Stick with me, I'm going somewhere with this. Many years ago, the FA mandated that if a player was to be replaced during the game, a match official would hold up two bits of paper (well, card really) one with the number of the player to be taken off and the other with the number of the player to be put on. This worked very well. The numbers were large and could be read clearly in all except the darkest of situations. They don't play football in the dark so this didn't matter. The paper was cheap, worked every time, and never showed anything other than what was intended. Then, the FA went all techno. They replaced the paper with a digital thingy. A big heavy plastic box with LEDs on it. The official would now press buttons on this thing and the LEDs light up to show the numbers. These things cost a lot more than paper, often didn't show any numbers, sometimes showed the wrong numbers, broke down and most significantly could be seen very clearly in the dark but not at all in strong sunlight. They often play football in strong sunlight so this did matter. So, a cheap, trusty, proven, solution with one irrelevant drawback has been replaced with an expensive, unreliable solution with one major drawback. Luckily the FA look after football and nothing more important that that. I find the parallels here to be interesting however. Punch cards caused problems so we replace them with an even more techno solution. Why not go back to holding up a card with a number on it?
I followed some of the threads and noted some attitudes and opinions that should be hilighted.
The first opinion that seems to stand out is that e-voting seems to be a Republican (read that as "right wing") conspiracy to harness elections. If these folks do their homework, they'd note a preponderance of e-voting initiatives are being pushed in majority Democratic districts.
The second, almost universal, view seems to contain the idea that e-voting is OK and the only problems exist in the margins. The major details seemed to be accepted. The "gee whiz" glitz seems to have misplaced general intelligence.
Considering this medium draws a lot of people in various technology fields, I'd think the overwhelming opinion would be a complete distrust of e-voting based on the potential abuses of the technology and the means to manipulate the outcome of an election.
The basic logic points should produce an overwhelming distrust for this form of individual duty and trust.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
Leftie had a good list. He did leave out a string of corrupt dictators the U.S. proped up in South Vietnam during the war. A key reason South Vietnam fell was because the governments the U.S. was propping up were so corrupt and so unpopular they served to fuel the Viet Cong's success.
As for Mao its noteworthy that he is dead. But his party still runs China, but for some reason you didn't list Jiang Zemin or Wen Jiabao. They've moderated since Mao but they are still basically the same party and a repressive dictatorship for all practical purposes. The only thing thats changed is they now allow private ownership of capital and a lot of rich American business men and multinationals are making a pretty penny there so right wingers don't bad mouth them anymore.
I think Muammar is the best friends of the Bush administration now, since he turned over his WMD's, WMD's I wager he bought some just so he could turn them over and get the sanctions lifted. They like him because they can claim him as proof their "get tough" policy in Iraq worked though that is a dubious claim. I'm pretty sure Cheney/Halliburton and the rest of the U.S. oil and gas industry are chomping at the bit to do business with Muammar and get back in to his oil fields. Again as long as there is money to be made the U.S. LOVES dictators.
Hugo Chavez is democratically elected. He is a socialist and the Republican's hate him with a passion, he hates them too, but he was still elected. The Bush administration has tried to overthrow him at least once, and if they succeed that would probably lead to a dictatorship, but Venezuala isn't under one now.
Khomeini, well that one is interesting. He came to power because the U.S. toppled the elected government of Iran when they nationalized their oil fields taking control of them from their former colonial masters the British, who were taking the lions share of the profits. The U.S. installed the Shah of Iran who was a brutal repressive dictator. The Iranians turned to Khomeni because they hated the Shah more, and hate the U.S. to this day for inflicting him on them.
@de_machina
We prefer to arrest people AFTER THEY HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME. I know, it's all new fangled, and hard to wrap your head around, but it is the way we do things 'round here. Y'all got that?
Arrested by who? The guy who just stole the election?
Prosecuted by who? The D.A. who was just installed by a corrupt political machine?
At least the judge, who was _surely_ elected in a fair and reasonable manner, will give him a fair trial...
Do the math. When you have voting corruption, it's no longer reasonable to assume that people will be arrested and prosecuted for crimes they commit. Especially when their crimes benefit the corrupt powers.
normal(adj)- people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots [DECS]
I find it really scary that they reported *completely losing the results of an election* when it was desired to reanalyze it. Whether it is the case or not, in a state as hotly disputed as Florida, it reaks of partisan tampering.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
Remove the computer, give the voter a felt tip pen and have them check the appropriate box (on a machine readable form) and you have the same system without the computer costs or failures.
In fact, I live in MN and thats how I've been voting for the last 7 years. The machines that read the ballot are even smart enough to detect common mistakes like two votes in the area and spit the ballot back out to be destoyed. The nice elderly person manageing the machine examines the old ballot, tells you what you did wrong, gives you a new ballot and sends you back to start again. The old ballot is shredded into another locked box.
This is not rocket science people, there is no need to use a computer to make a small mark on a piece of paper. What was Ockums Razor again? The simple solution tends to be correct.
Apple free since 1990!
"We prefer to arrest people AFTER THEY HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME. I know, it's all new fangled, and hard to wrap your head around, but it is the way we do things 'round here. Y'all got that"
I must of missed something. Have they arrested anyone in the White House for exposing the identity of a CIA agent. That was a felony, there are a few people in the White House who know who did it and in fact no on has been arrested "AFTER THEY COMMITTED A CRIME", a felony punishable by I think 10 years in the federal pen.
Sorry but in this country we only arrest some people who commit crimes, others get off scot free especially if they have money or connections. We often frame people for crimes they didn't commit, especially if they are poor minorities, for example the governor of Illinois had to take everyone off death row after it became apparent Illinois police and DA's were time after time framing poor minorities for crimes they didn't commit and the frames were falling apart thanks to DNA testing.
All in all the U.S. isn't the bastion of perfection in "Freedom and Deomcracy" you seem to think it is.
The other obvious problem with relying on local police to enforce election law is its not uncommon for the police to be involved in the election rigging. Mayor's and elected county sherrifs have in the past frequently been involved in vote rigging. There were accusations police in Florida were obstructing access to polls in poor black areas in the 2000 elections.
Another tangential example, a number of people in Afghanistan have been killed recently because they were carrying papers showing they had registered to vote. The remnants of the Taliban and local war lords who are opposed to the elections are killing people for registering. All in all, voters carrying around slips of paper is not a good idea. I see today Doctors Without Borders has decided Afghanistan is so dangerous today they are pulling out after 24 years. Kind of undercuts the Bush administration of what a showcase of success the new Afghanistan is.
@de_machina
This actually happened in my hometown (Jacksonville) at my university (UNF). *shivers*
It was reported in the folio weekly. Unfortunately they don't have an online version.
An interesting note in the story was the lady that discovered it and went to the Democratic Party headquarters in town was a republican. Who would have guessed?
The moral of the story is... ... When you walk up to a Republican registration table, don't be surprised that the forms are pre-checked Republican.
On a more serious note, considering the problems that Floriduh voters had in general during the last Presidential cycle, information like this should be taken with a grain of salt (and then throw that over your shoulder!).
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.