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

To err is human...

[Anonymous Coward]

To really fuck something up, that takes a computer.

-- Anonymous

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

[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

[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

[TheLetterPsy]

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.

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

[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.

Election Observers

[Lucky_Norseman]

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

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?

[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?

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.

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.

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: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.

Re:Time to call for international monitors?

[rdsmith4]

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

Re:No recounts in districts with touchscreen votin

[yderf]

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.

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.

Re:No recounts in districts with touchscreen votin

[CelloJake]

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.

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.

Re:Bad argument.

[wildwood]

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.