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Florida Ruling May Lead To E-voting Paper Trail
dorkus123 points out this Palm Beach Post story which begins "An administrative law judge over-ruled an administrative decision Friday that the 15 counties that use touch-screen voting systems must be able to perform manual recounts in extremely close elections." Prior to this, counties using touch-screen voting were exempt from a requirement requiring that certified voting machines be amenable to manual recounts. wierzpio adds a link to the AP's similar story.
doing this with inkjet printers.
But a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood said, "This ruling takes Florida back to 2000," of course a paper trail takes us back to 2000 where we could actually recount the votes...
what we want is a system different than 2000, where we can steal the election without anyone knowing.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
It's about time!
The point is simple, you either trust the system to work properly or you don't. Requiring a paper output does not meant that this paper is true and in principle paper means nothing. Just look at the farce that happened in 2000 with Bush in Florida.
You can't handle the truth.
The deputy elections supervisor in Broward County is quoted as saying a manual recount would take a week. Why? Plenty of countries use paper ballots and manage to count and recount in a day.
Why would it be so damn hard for the e-voting machines to print out a receipt after a person votes - a receipt that is retained by the states? The whole point of e-voting is ease of use - maybe even cheaper deployment. But why would it be so hard to implement such a system...or is it all politics & big business?
A blog like any other.
Where people get turned away from voting stations by police, disenfranchised because they share the same name as people who were previously convicted of crimes in other US states, have to put up with butterfly ballot papers (only in the poorest districts though) and where chads reign supreme.
What makes anyone think that Florida will get in right this time?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
An administrative law judge over-ruled an administrative decision Friday. The 15 counties that use touch-screen voting systems must be able to perform manual recounts in extremely close elections.
They can use the same machines, and just hook a printer to the back of them. That is all it would take to fix this whole situation. Why are they so stubborn? Maybe I am paranoid, but considering how easy it would be to just add printers to each machine, I think they consciously want to make a recount impossible.
Looks like W just lost Florida!
Give paper ballot to voter.
Voter makes mark next to chosen candidate.
Voter places ballot in ballot box.
Count ballots in the presense of the candidates.
Here in the UK this system has worked without incident for several hundred years. Any other way opens up the system to irregularities, be they accidental or malicious.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Then it scrolls out of view for the next voter.
Everything would be on one continuous numbered roll. With each vote accounted for in the same manner as those numbered voting slips they give us now.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
If it doesn't take effect by November 2nd 2004, it's just posturing.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Never, never, never, should you leave the polling area with "proof" of how you voted - it will lead to cooersion and intimidation and all sorts of other shifty dealings. There is a reason that your vote is private.
For those who are still not getting it: Guido will wait outside the polling area, if you don't have the "proper" vote, your kneecaps are fucked. Or your family, or your dog. Whatever. This is a silly example, but i figured i'd share with you why paper proof in your hand is NEVER a good idea. Yes, private paper trails for recounts, blah, blah, blah - that's not what i'm talking about here.
And what's the problem if it does take a week to make sure that we have a fairly counted election? It seems like the "need" for the television networks to have instant results has made us lose sight of fairness and accuracy.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Palm Beach FL is a solidly Democratic county. The voting supervisors are Democrats.
Yet they chose electronic voting for their county.... WHY?
Also: **Beats head against wall** Don't they realize that this defeats the entire point of the paper trail?! It needs to print as the vote is cast, so that the voter can verify it. By the time they print it out afterwards, it can already be changed!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Hehe, yea, that's more like it.
That was such a poorly worded quote that you couldn't tell whether he over-ruled the paper trail, or that they are NOW required to have a paper trail.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
An election is a measurement. When you take a measurement, you always end up dealing with the S/N ratio. Mostly the punch cards were fine, we got a good enough measurement to be confident of the results. The last election was close enough in Florida that the measurement was down in the noise, and it was hard to get an accurate reading.
I guess part of the problem is the "winner-take-all" Electoral College system, which has done a lot do disenfranchise a lot of voters.
Take me for instance. I am from a state that -always- goes for one of the parties. So the minority in that state never gets represented. If I happen to not agree with the majority of people in my state, I effectively don't have a vote.
It does free me up to (cynically) vote for a third party, FWIW...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
They'll be debating about electronic hanging chads.
What will happen when the printers accidentally print in the wrong box, like my printer does so frequently, it will go in the Bush box when the e-trail says it was Kerry (or visa versa) who do they believe..... Printers are inherently flawed, and that's life and there will be problems with these printers at some point in time and that's why you need to pick one standard and not support two.
Sincerely,
Andrew Allen
Is it only me, who chokes when you hear all these attempts how politicians, judges try to load the dice during elections in the U.S.A. - which is supposedly the World #1 Democracy?
Maybe messing with election results should finally be a crime, with mandatory capital punishment, for a while. Until the Bush clan is finished, at least.
Can someone bring this up at the Republican Convention, please?
I though it just didn't *occur* to anyone in charge that a computer system without a paper trail wouldn't allow for any meaningful recount. You're telling me a judge actually went out and said, nah, that recount thing is old fashioned, we don't really need it?
...
For some reason Florida still manages to shock me
The articles both argue over the reliabililty of computer ballot counts, paper trails, and the fiction of "hanging chads" and error-proned human counts.
This is the corporate media version of what happened in Florida. It deliberately misses the big picture.
What about the fact that Jeb Bush deliberately removed tens of thousands of "supposed" felons (who were 90%+ Democratic voters; he's trying it again this year but is meeting more criticism)? What about the counting of absentee military ballots which violated Florida law? What about the findings by the federal gov't that there was deliberate denials of voting rights to many Flordians? This included false information about voting places/times, closing roads, excessive police presence at selected voting precints.
I'm all for a paper ballot trail and audited code for voting machines and a clear oversight process. But the sham election in 2000 (see link below) was far more deliberate than just an issue of "hanging chads" -- and those issues are completely ignored.
Without the Hardcopy you have no proof of existence. As a matter of fact there isn't even an external electronic copy the Activator Cards used to vote only select your ballet (Rep, Dem, Ind, etc.) no vote data is stored and the cards are discreetly reused to quell any misconception that votes are being erased.
This is an excellent decision that goes against a lot of political and corporate pressure.
You misquoted the first line in your post. I was confused at first on how can it be good that a decision to require paper trails was "overruled"? The word was meant to be "ruled".
Florida has had nearly the same machines spitting out the same paper lottery ticket, keeping the same journal, uploading each set of digits scanned from the same "blacken in the circle" forms for nearly * 15 FUCKING YEARS *
Change the firmware, repurpose some hardware, and give us a goddamned voting system with some EQUALLY STRINGENT ACCOUNTING
This process has been carried out billions of times by now, and you'd think that they'd try to utilize some of the expertise accumulated through so many, many, many, many, many drawings (like mini-elections themselves.)This is important: -------------------
Why do they make it hard? So it is possible for them to cheat the system. Electronic voting is subject to much easier manipulation than paper ballots. Period. Anyone that has half a clue knows this. Primarly since it is difficult to prove that those little electrons on the disk are the very same ones that the person in the voting booth intended. This is worse than the "hanging chad" fiasco.
The whole issue would pretty much go away if they just implemented a paper audit trail. Of course if you are doing that then you don't really need a fancy electronic system to record it. Just issue a felt tip marker. Much less expensive and fewer issues. But then the group pushing the expensive error prone electronic systems would lose money, and since they have purchased a few politicians that won't be allowed to happen. And the politicians have a desire to manipulate the results so they are not going do anything out of self interest.
What I find so funny is that the most vocal people on this topic seem to feel that the very same people that vote for them can't seem to understand how to do it correctly. So they have to "interpet" the ballots to guess how that person intended to vote.
Make it simple. Use a ballot that has the voter mark it with a marker. If they mark it wrong they can ask for a replacment ballot. If they deposit the ballot and it is marked incorrectly, either for the wrong candidate or marked such that it is unclear, then that ballot is voided and is not counted. Period, end of vote. This may get some cry baby liberals complaining that there is some issue with people not getting their vote counted. But if they are so stupid that they can not mark a simple paper ballot correctly then they should not have their vote counted!
The fact that most of the people having trouble understanding the ballots happen to be Democrats is either a fluke or an indication that like minds flock together.
If you're going to guote the very first paragraph of a cited story, please do it correctly. What you have in quotes directly contradicts the headline.
Diebold's core business is ATMs!!! So, no, it *wouldn't* be that hard for them to design a machine that spits out a receipt. Of course, then the election couldn't be stolen quite as easily...and isn't that the point of creating touchscreen voting without a paper trail???
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Let's see, is there a link between democrats and felons as you suggest? Sounds like a good reason to eliminate those votes, not to mention that felons are federally prohibited from voting. Military absentee votes must count, federal law and state can't superceed that. False information about voting places and times? Why wouldn't this have affected republican voters equally? The whole "hanging chad" thing statistically could have happened to just as many republicans as democrats, it was mechanically a poorly designed system (yes, I've seen and used one). Be part of the solution, not part of the problem).
receipt idea, so we would have a receipt to
show how we voted, so we could get back to
selling our votes directly, cutting out
the media middlemen who soak up all this
money lying to us. We could lie to ourselves
and get paid for it, like the good ole days.
Well, since the Palm Beach Post is my local newspaper (yay!) and I have seen the butterfly ballots and touch-screen voting, I find all of this confusing! If you "evote" and only certain counties use paper trail, will the rest be "oh well, nevermind the votes, just make em all for Bush!"? Why is it only in Florida? I think it's the old people here (who drive at 10mph on all roads)!
mysql>SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 Rows Returned
Can anyone explain to me why all the e-voting solutions are based on the Von Neumann architecture? This architecture is specifies reusable multi purpose computers. We could simply enough increase the security of voting machines if we built a computing solution specifically for the task, one whose logic could be implemented at the board level, one whose tallying would not be so dependent on easily modified and rewriteable memory.
Administrative Law Judge Susan Kirkland agreed, writing state law clearly contemplates "that manual recounts will be done on each certified voting system, including the touchscreen voting systems."
With a primary election Tuesday and more than one-half the state's voters in counties that use touchscreens, it is not clear what those counties will do.
[Dons tinfoil helmet...] And wasn't an underling of the current pResident investigating the possibility of postponing the election? So here's the fix: "Sorry! We had to postpone it. You guys made us do it by insisting on printed receipts! Nothing we can do about it now..."
"There might be legal precedent! Of course, Landsnatching . . . land, land, Land, see Snatch. Ah, Hailie vs. United Sates. Hailie: 7, United States: nothing. You see, it can be done!"
"Democracy." It's just a slogan.
Now if there's any problems we can just have a recount of Florida's votes. Nothing bad can possibly come of it!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
>If I ever meet you I'll take great pleasure in killing you.
;-P
Bring it on! I can be found at 1600 Pensylvainia Avenus, District of Columbia! Be there, and we'll duel to the death! (bring a big fucking gun, and scream until I come out and fight)
H.A.N.D.
As the article notes, Moore's sources for his information are quite solid -- mainstream newspapers and the BBC.
"This included false information about voting places/times, closing roads, excessive police presence at selected voting precints."
Could you post a link to any actual report of such a thing? I've only heard vague charges, as far as I know the police presence / roadblock stories were discredited. If you have a link around you could post, I'd be grateful.
Let's see, is there a link between democrats and felons as you suggest? Sounds like a good reason to eliminate those votes, not to mention that felons are federally prohibited from voting.
State law determines whether a felon can vote or not; some states allow felons to vote (though Florida does not). As discovered and reported by the BBC (since confirmed by others) Jeb Bush used "felon lists" to keep people from voting.
Originally about 170,000 people were kept from voting this way in Florida. Of that number, more than 90,000 people were not felons, and they were perfectly legal to vote. 90% of the 90K+ kept from voting were Democrats.
Nothing fishy there, right?!
Military absentee votes must count, federal law and state can't superceed that.
That's just wrong. State law determines voting procedures and practices. The states are fully in control of how the electors get selected
And remember, it is the Electoral College's electors that choose the president -- the popular vote is just a "democratic" illusion. Some states say that if one candidate gets 50%-plus-one-vote of the popular vote, they get all of the state's electors; other states rougly proportion their electors to the popular vote -- it's all up to the state.
During the 2000 vote just the absentee military ballot issue itself would have thrown the election to Gore. Kathrine Harris -- simultaneously the FL Sec. of State who was responsible for a fair FL election and Bush's FL campaign chair (no conflict of interest there, right?!) -- broke FL law by allowing enough bogus military absentee ballots to throw the election to Bush. The New York Times also confirmed this -- post election, of course.
You have to hand it to the Republicans on this issue though; James Baker and other false-patriots created great media propaganda about Gore wanting to "deny" our GIs their vote. The media sucked that up and Gore was definitely put on the defensive on this issue.
False information about voting places and times? Why wouldn't this have affected republican voters equally?
No. Election rigging is more of a science.
By determining which precincts you want to rig, you can ensure that while you might lose a few Republican votes, the overwhelming votes lost would be Democrat.
For example, Blacks in Florida voted about 90% for Gore, following the national trend. It's a no-brainer to this in black neighborhoods and too leave suburbia alone -- that will definitely skew the vote and that is one of the instances cited by the federal investigation after the election.
The federal gov'ts report which was done after the 2000 election found many cases of such dirty tricks -- but of course, that was months after the election.
The whole "hanging chad" thing statistically could have happened to just as many republicans as democrats, it was mechanically a poorly designed system (yes, I've seen and used one).
Yes, quite true. But the hanging chad issue was settled fairly -- with a Republican and Democrat looking over an election official's shoulder and having to agree with the official for the vote to count (see earlier posts of this article).
The election was not rigged as a result of hanging chads -- that was a red herring.
The election was rigged as a result of processes noted above.
If you have a link around you could post, I'd be grateful.
One link I can find quickly is to the report of Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election.
IMHO, the gov't reports are typical bureaucratic-speak which tries too hard to be non-judgemental and non-offensive (remember, this report was being written when the authors knew that Bush would be in office for 4 years -- thus, the political price of taking a strong position would be substantial). Combining the gov't analysis with reports from even the mainstream corporate media (LA/NY Times, etc.) gives a much more thorough picture. If you add in coverage from British or other "friendly" overseas media, it's becomes far more clear what happened.
How did America get to the point where the fear of rigged elections (normally something reserved for so called "rogue states") is so real that many feel the neat to bring in overseers from abroad? Is it really ture that you always become what you hate?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Forget about paper trails. What good is a paper trail if it's never checked. Does anyone believe that after a 'perfect flawless computer count' the winner/biggest briber will allow the vote to be counted by a system that e-voting was supposed to replace.
Black box voting is going to be tampered with. Think about it. Lets say you take all the votes in the entire country, then taken six guys, put them behind closed doors with the votes, and they come out with the result a few hours later. Does this sound crazy to you? Six guys counting ALL the votes, behind closed doors! And yet this is EXACTLY what is being proposed. Six guys, roughly, count the votes by proxy, using the software they wrote. All the votes!
And government inspection? Would a few officials locked in the room with the guys make everyone feel better?
It's crazy. Most people I know are in favour of the idea. Probobly because they consider it more modern and sophisticated. Some tech heads I know even want to see voting over the internet! And these are supposedly educated people!
Instead of electronic voting, what about votes counted electronically. Paper votes are punched/marked very clearly and taken to an OPEN counting areana. The voted are then scanned by cameras, in front of onlookers, and the tally is updated in real time. This has the advantage of being open, secure and more accuate than present systems. In fact, you could set this up with a Linux, webcam, MySQL the approprate software. Could be a project.
At least people could see what is going on in real time rather than crowding around a box that proclaims the winner mysteriously after a sudden count.
May the Maths Be with you!
Someone enlighten me: do ATMs leave paper trails?
Seems to me that ATMs work flawlessly. Perhaps we should be inspired by the simple but powerful ATM.
If an ATM screws up, someone is probably out a lot of money.
If eVoting screws up, we get the wrong idiot in the Whitehouse, a erroneous war, and taxpayers are out a lot of money.
The same care that went into designing ATMS should be utilized in designing touch screen voting. Our voting systems should probably be built from the ground up with only one purpose in mind. Basing your software on a fallible OS (*cough* Windows *cough*) is foolhardy.
Our current voting machines and ATMs had to stand up to scrutiny before they were implemented. Rushing to implement a new system by an arbitrary deadline is asking for trouble. Let these machines prove themselves, then legislate their implementation.
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
...like Maryland. E-voting without a paper trail is total crap.
And closed source e-voting is even stupider. Public systems that are the basis of our freakin' democracy (or constitution-based federal republic; strong democratic tradition; whatever you want to call it) should be available for everyone to see.
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
You would have been closer to the truth!
Seriously. I dont suppose you could drop your disdain for others that think different than you. It doesnt make them stupid, or unpatriotic or any other bad thing. There is room for differences without assuming ill intent.
But for the record, it *was*, as I understand it, a republican in charge of diebold (sp?) that "promised" ( yes, it is likely he was misunderstood, but Republicans have deliberatly "misunderstood" their share of things, so knock it off or dont complain ) the election to Bush.
emt 377 emt 4
Money.
emt 377 emt 4
When the politicians and the voting-machine makers start on their spiel about no paper trails, I think we need to ask them one question:
"Why exactly are you so dead-set against being able to verify the results without having to assume the results are right?"
Without an audit trail that's exactly what they're asking. We ought to be holding their feet to the fire on that question, making them answer it every time they try to say we don't need an audit trail.
"No fair! You changed the result by observing it!"
Seriously though, they do appear to be stupid enough to think that a 'recount' means you just print out the votes FROM THE DATABASE and count them. They don't seem to realise that the FRIGGING PROBLEM IS WITH HOW THE VOTES ARE GETTING INTO THE DATABASE! FU--K!!!!!!!
It makes me so angry I think I might explode...
Read Pynchon.
I couldn't figure out any way to parse it that said a paper trail was now required.
The quote in the summary is no longer the lede of the article on the Palm Beach Post. I don't know if that's because it was a misquote, or because PBP screwed up, corrected, and didn't bother leaving an indication that they corrected. The current text at PBP is An administrative law judge ruled Friday that the 15 counties that use touch-screen voting systems must be able to perform manual recounts in extremely close elections.
I don't want the Republicans to have anything to bitch about.
I don't want either side to have anything to bitch about afterwards.
But I doubt that will stop them, somehow... it sure never has before.
All the focus on paper trails and receipts for your vote creates a false sense of security, and obscures the basic problem.
Anyone who can write a "Hello World" hack can write a hack to record random false votes biased toward a given candidate, while printing a bogus paper verification showing whatever the voter actually chose.
The ONLY way to insure accuracy in electronic voting is to have open, auditable voting software. Verification by the software/voting machine company is not acceptable or safe. That's true even if the company were totally honest and unbiased. And we know that ain't so, folks.
I think even the sheeple here in Florida sense this, even if they can't articulate. Maybe that explains why already there are four times the absentee ballots issued here in Florida than in 2000! BTW, the Broward County elections supervisor is doing her absolute best to keep the count accurate this time, despite the BS.
Best,
Mal the Elder
Is there a difference between a corrupt election with a margin of one or a corrupt election with a margin of one thousand?
No. We should be just as suspicious of the land slide victory as the close one.
- Nolanhttp://www.semanticgap.com/people/sneakin/
Of course, injecting political slander into the need to audit the voting process doesn't help.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In Minnesota an administrative law judge ruled against Mary Kiffmeyer, (R) Secretary of State,
who changed election rules to get rid of new voters by comparing election names, driver license number,
etc to Dept. of Public Safety databases. If there was not an exact match on all data, i.e. "Joseph X Blow" vs "Joseph Xavier Blow" then the registration would be dropped. Done with no hearings or public comment.
Well, the rule just gets rewritten. The change was that the county officials could examine the dropped registrations and re-add them within 10
days. But no time limit for the Sec of State to get the challenges to the county in a timely manner. In a big county that could mean checking
thousands of registrations in just a day before the election lists freeze for the election.
So there is a good chance that the county cannot
do the job in the large urban (code for Democrat)
counties. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
The continuous roll paper makes it simple to determine how each elector voted. There is a record of who voted in what order (signatures on a ledger, for example) and the paper record is in the same order. Line them up, and all traitors to the party can be identified and scheduled for "re-education".
North Carolina seems to have the best ballots in all of America. Next to each candidates name, is an arrow (looks like the 'one way' signs.) The arrow is broken in the middle. If you wish to vote for that candidate, you connect the 2 halves.
Before
John Doe <----- ----
After:
John Doe <----==----
Absentee ballots are the same as the regular ones. When you vote on election day, it feeds all the ballots into an optical reader. There, done, recounts are as easy as pie.
All the paper versions of ballots are *so* complicated, and touch screen is easier... so could someone tell me how we never hear of problems with the state lottery, which has paper ballots, er, tickets, that you can mark with a pencil, and hand to a clerk....
mark "who counts the ballots, and how?"
PS Thanks, [Ll]ibertarians, for helping bring the would-be one party state to power.
The US started out as an uncomfortable collection of sovereign states which had even fought armed conflicts with each other, and which were jealous of their privileges.
Thus you have states awarding their entire Electoral College delegation to a single candidate, because that makes the state more powerful. For the same reason there's the oddity that a state with a population of three people will have three electoral votes (the guaranteed minimum 1 member of the House plus the 2 senators every state has).
Benefit? Well, it made the country possible, and it was a lot less toxic than the compromises over slavery that blew up in our face a lifetime later.
You may already know about him, given your mention of the BBC, but he's one of the many bloodhounds that aided substantially in ferreting out the irregularities that helped install Bush. Well worth a look for anyone disillusioned with the major corporate media outlets of the US.
www.gregpalast.com
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"Sorry to interrupt you, Alex, but the contestant was actually correct!"
In all seriousness, though, your very cropped quote is quite disingenuous, given the important omission of the following:
So no, the observers are not going to be present simply as a matter of course: they were specifically requested to attend and oversee election proceedings.Furthermore, I see no political slander anywhere, neither in the grandparent post nor in the article itself. I assume what you must be talking about would be this:
However, given the considerable issues that have come to light regarding the 2000 elections (some of which I touched upon earlier in this thread) and regarding touch-screen voting companies (ties to political parties, missing votes, negative vote counts, etc etc), there seems to be considerable reason to bring in the international monitors.If we as a nation truly have nothing to hide, this will be a nice vindication of our way of doing things. On the other hand, if there are real issues, best to find them and deal with them.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."