Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
But the point is that with a paper trail, you have some sort of solid record. Each person hands in one receipt when they finish voting; without one, an unliminted number of votes could be cast, and thus, we'd be in a worse situation. Florida-type situations are not prevented, but further problems of uncast votes would take place.
A blog like any other.
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.
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
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.
The paper trail is not best implemented as a "Receipt" for voting, as that denies anonymity and allows coercion.
The right way for paper-backed electronic voting to take place is to have the electronic system present an easy-to-use interface, which can be adapted on-the-fly for various limitations in voters (deaf, blind, unable to grasp objects, etc.). Have that interface be the way to vote. Then print the ballot out on a strip of paper and give that paper to the voter. The voter then walks to the ballot box and places the ballot in, just like we do now.
This eliminates ambiguity in deciding whether a particular ballot is valid or invalid, since the ballot would have a clear indication of the voters' intents.
Sure you can also get a quick, accurate count from the aper-ballot-printing machines, but if you want to do a "Recount", then there aren't any ballots for corrupt or inept voting officials to declare as invalid.
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
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.
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.
How is a laser printed reciept placed in a secure box any different than a punched card or marked paper slip placed in a secure box?
In theory, it should be impossible to create an invalid paper receipt.
Compare to hanging chads or someone who checked more than a check only one box.
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.
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.
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!
...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
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.