Florida Electronic Voting Machines Crash

crash24601 writes "For a dose of one of our favorite topics, abcnews.com is carrying the story of a tabulation machine for electronic voting crashing during testing. Naturally, this happened in Florida. They are also carrying the article Is E-Voting Fundamentally Flawed? Though mostly a lightweight rehash of issues brought up before, it is good to see it published from a mainstream source."

Comments

Called on account of rain...

[lynx_user_abroad]

From the article:

She said she suspected Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September, may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more and possibly causing the crash. The storm wiped out power to nearly 1.3 million homes and businesses throughout Florida.

So, this election may be postponed on account of rain?

Well...

[Edax Rarem]

...According to Rumsfeld, four fifths of a country voting is ok.
Isn't that enough?

"He said an election could perhaps be held in "three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great"."

Well...

[Jesrad]

Mr Feces, meet Mr Fan. Fan, this is Feces.

its funny

[Anonymous Coward]

that Americans think that by pressing a button on a machine (that they have no idea of how it works) is democracy, digital makes the potential for corruption so easy its just too tempting an opportunity to let go

paper voting is still used all over the world because it is the EASIEST and SAFEST
sure it might take a week to count the votes by hand but are you in a rush ?
its far harder to lose 2 tons of paper ballots than press a secret key combo on a computer and poof all those votes have gone without trace or record

but hey you carry on, its a great show watching what was a free and democratic society turn into a totalitarian corrupt theocracy, perhaps when the riots start you might ask where you went wrong

Re:its funny

[Astro-pilot]

The reason paper ballots are still used in most democratic countries is that the technology there has not advanced sufficiently, not because it is the easiest and the safest. The exception that proves the rule is that India recently completed its general elections which resulted in a transfer of power. India used a fully electronic voting system,- no paper ballots for a voting population of over 1 billion people. Not even the United States has dared to attempt this. Not only that, the e-voting system used in India is much more secure than the system being proposed in the USA.

Re:its funny

[roystgnr]

Paper doesn't scale well.

Paper scales great since the invention of the optical scanner. Nobody's objecting to the use of electronic assistance in the voting process, we just think that the record of votes needs to be relatively tamperproof paper rather than invisibly alterable RAM.

Take any existing e-voting system, have it print out a paper ballot with the voter's selections, and let those ballots be the final judge of what the vote tally is, and you'll satisfy 90% of people's complaints. Make sure every precinct has enough extra voting machines, printers, paper and ink to handle breakdowns, and you'll satisfy another 9% of the complainers.

Re:its funny

[Sylver Dragon]

Why not? you just need more people to count, as the population gets bigger the pool of people to get voluteers from gets larger proportionally. Plus, there is no reason that we have to have the results in the next morning. Most measures don't go into effect until the beginning of the next year (calander of fiscal, depending), elected seats don't change until the next calander year; basically, we have a couple of months to sort things out, if one is used counting votes, who cares? At the very least paper ballots leave a readily verifiable audit trail, and they also tend to leave evidence in the event of tampering.
Paper scales just fine, but the US is just too caught up in the idea that electronic voting will magically fix all of the issues we had in 2000. It won't it will simply change them. Besides which, I tend to think that a punch card ballot is a good intellegence test for voting, if you're too stupid to figure out how to punch a card correctly, and you are too lazy to learn, I don't want you to be deciding the direction of this country's leadership.

Hurricane?

[RealProgrammer]

Not to be insensitive to natural disasters, but:

She said she suspected Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September, may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more and possibly causing the crash.

Why do I get the feeling that everything that's gone wrong in the state of Florida for the last two months was ultimately caused by bad weather?

A computer "stored" in a hot room shouldn't be damaged. These must really be delicate devices.

The voting machine didn't crash!

[PatHMV]

It was the machine which tabulates the votes that crashed. The actual were still safely recorded, untouched, on the counter keys (basically removable memory units) from the voting machines themselves.

How hard is it?

[panda]

As someone who writes software for a living, I have to ask just how hard is it to count votes?

What kind of monster math could these things be doing that could cause a machine to crash?

Could bush.voteCount++ have caused an overflow as the the algorithm ratcheted the count over 4 billion?

I mean, c'mon. This has to be the simplest programming task in the world: increment a variable every time someone votes for a given candidate on a ballot. The only part of this that seems remotely hard would be the handwriting recognition on write-ins.

Security and verifiability? No problem. Simply log every transaction as it happens and print a receipt that can be checked by hand if necessary. Additionally, make the source open and public. Let people see what the program does.

Frankly, I believe this is what you get from companies like Diebold or other large vendors doing this. They have an interest in making this stuff more complicated than it needs to be in order to make more money.

Open Source it!

[hoggoth]

This is a perfect example of a urgently needed technology that an Open Source solution would be great for.

<wild-accusations>Electronic voting will *NEVER* work right as long as it is being done by companies like Diebold that are on one party or another's secret payroll.</wild-accusations>

An open source solution would accomplish a few things:

1) Provide a verifiably secure solution to electronic voting that would be resistant to tampering. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say the possibility of tampering with elections could degrade freedom in this country.

2) Give Open Source's strengths the kind of publicity that reaches far beyond the current Microsoft/Linux squabbles. The majority of the public and news media has no idea what Open Source is about; But if Bill O'Reilly, John Stewart, GW Bush, and John Kerry are talking about it you can bet that tremendous numbers of people will be introduced to the ideas.

3) Give some impressive visibility to the developers on the project. Visibility usually leads to marketability, jobs, projects, etc.

Of course, visibility won't be great when the Diebold hitmen show up...

Australia has some well made electronic voting running on Linux which can serve as a proof-of-concept for us Americans.

So who's game?!