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Computer Problems Already Affecting Florida Voters
TAGmclaren writes "The Sun-Sentinel is reporting on computer glitches already affecting the election in - you guessed it - Florida. Of the 14 early voting sites that opened in Broward County on Monday morning, 9 were reporting problems. In Orlando County, the touch screens crashed. More generally, SFgate.com is keeping track of all voting issues across the country - including lawsuits and other ballot problems." Update: 10/19 03:38 GMT by T : Thanks to reader Dale J. Russell for pointing out that "there is no Orlando County. The city of Orlando, Florida resides in Orange County."
Orlando is in Orange county.
The problem from the article has to do with the poll workers being able to connect to a database housing registration lists. While it might slow things down, it's not really a significant problem. The paper lists always seem to work fine and didn't slow things down much, not sure why they can't use those. Plus you could verify the signature on the spot.
What?
The first time I read it.
(link)
Greg Palast was one of the first to look into voter fraud in Florida, and reported it on the BBC.
The New York Times is echoing the sentiment in an op ed by Paul Krugman.
Ummm....
The founding fathers were also concerned that every region had a say in the running of the country. This means that a citizen living in a sparsely populated part of the country such as Utah has more voting power in the House Of Representatives than a citizen in a densely populated state like New Jersey.
I think you mean Senate, Not the House.
You could assign senators by state population the way the house works, but then the senate would keep expanding.
And here the founding fathers gave set the Senators at two per state to specifically insure that the large states could not overule the smaller states. They were worried about the "Tyrany of the Majority". Thats why every state has the same number of votes in the senate and why the House is assigned by population.
And next time write something yourself instead of copying it off of some website whos facts are wrong.
http://mindprod.com/election.html
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
From the article:
"All 14 of the branch offices had problems with the database connection. Many of the sites had numerous voters lined up to cast their ballots.
A work-around was created by calling in each voter's name to the main Election's Office in Fort Lauderdale. Two office workers were assigned to each phone, Salas said, for a slowed verification process. The workers would plug into the database, and verify that the voter in one of the branch sites was indeed registered to vote."
Incredible that something was so poorly validated and still made it into the field. My precinct gets voter validation printed out from Motor Voter records. The DMV uses a pretty solid, fully computerized system (IBM) that has worked well for more than five years. Total time to verify I am registered? About a minute. I never wait (and I live in a densely urbanized area), step with up to the lever voting machine and my vote is recorded and verifiable.
How did places like FL fall for this sham? Being a beta user for software that was released before it was ready is one thing when it is a text document, but for VOTING? Jeezoz H. Keerist.
I've also done work in a Federal government office with purchasing power. I can see how cluster f$%^s like this can happen, because there is no ultimate responsibility and accountability for incompetence. If the sales pitch looks good and the vendor "demonstrates" the reliability of the product, no public "servant" will be held accountable. The vendor also likely got paid upon delivery and there is no recourse for going after them. The vendor, rather than getting blacklisted by the contracting office, will get to explain what when wrong and why it was God's Will or somebody else's fault.
[i] An eighteen-year-old convicted of a single drug offense can never vote no matter how exemplary her subsequent life.[/i] I don't know where you get your information, but most of the people I know who have been arrested for drug offenses in Florida, either received simple citations or misdemeanors. You either have to have intent to distribute or a SHITLOAD of drugs to face felony charges in Florida, or most states for that matter. Shit, if you get caught on federal property with marijuana, it's a federal misdemeanor until the weight reaches about 5 pounds I believe, at which point federal prosecutors have the option to pursue felony charges. I agree that laws banning felons to vote have been taken a bit too far, but don't try to scare people with false information.
I'd like to suggest that a certified open source voting system - completely minimal, based on some kind of well secured version of the OS, vetted by independent auditors, distributed as a CD with a known checksum, might be a useful thing to have done after the last election, but I don't know of any such project.
I think you're talking largely about the MIT/Caltech Voting Project.
As I understand it they're developing standards and a reference implementation. Many implementations is the goal. Yours is a good idea - a LiveCD could be run on the computers in the schools' computer labs where voting is most often held.
Now, it'll probably take some work to get the Federal Elections Commission to mandate the use of the developed XML standards. Fortunately labels like "MIT" and "Caltech" might help. Probably depends on how good Diebold's lawyers are.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are no touch screens in Orange County. We use optical scanners.
I think the local news said that the database server for verifying if a voter is registered went down.
Actually, if you don't draw the line properly, the scanner can fail to read your vote. If you actually go to the polling place, the machine will validate the ballot and spit it back out if it can't read something. Absentee, it probably goes right into the trash.
Before anyone says that e-voting is needed because the United States presidential elections are too big to process and count manually using pen and paper, please don't forget about the recent 2004 European Parliament election, when 343,657,800 people were eligible to vote, the second-largest democratic electorate in the world after India. It was the biggest transnational direct election in history and ten new member states elected MEPs for the very first time. With total turnout 45.5% it means 156,364,299 people have voted, 48% more than in the 2000 US presidential election.
What I mean is that we all talk about e-voting essentially taking it for granted. But has anyone ever answered what is wrong with pen and paper? Is e-voting better because it is high tech? Because it is supposedly faster? Is it? Even if it is, does it justify much less transparency and security? Could anything justify any unreliability in the very process of election, the most essential fundament of democracy?
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens? I quote those numbers to menonstrate that simple pen and paper can scale enormously. I don't think that Americans are less skilled than Europeans and cannot count paper ballots in an election on much lower scale such as the US presidential election.
These are all very important questions to answer before we start to talk about improvements to the e-voting status quo. The first question we need to ask is not "how" but "why."
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What if there is a printing error on the scantron sheet itself leaving a mark in one of the bubbles, what if the printer runs low on ink, or clogs, or the linear motor becomes loose, or you have a paper jam
Then you can always take the unmarked ballots out of the paper tray in the voting machine (the trays could be lockable with the poll workers holding the keys), give people sharpie pens, and have them manually mark them. My point was that the paper trail from the touch screen vote machine, combined with the separately locked ballot box, which never leaves the poll worker's sight, is the best of both worlds. The choices can be made sequentially on a very large and crisp digital screen that even the oldsters can read and it cuts down on errors. Of course, no system is perfect but this system combines the best aspects of computer and paper voting into one system and minimizes the chance of fraud or errors.
The machines aren't too fancy -- certainly not fancy enough to run bloatware like Windows. However, they follow a simple low-tech protocol that works and shut down if tampered with. And, as with all things India, they cost $200 a pop, compared to $3000 per machines in the U.S.
The U.S. election authorities can learn a lot from India's last election. Read all about it here.
On a serious note, it's perhaps a very good thing that Florida DOES have early voting. They've got a few days leeway to fix problems, although it does mean that they have absolutely no f*ing clue whether the data they have is any good or not. It also means that, since voting is anonymous, the voters have no f*ing clue as to whether any of their votes have meant anything.
(Florida doesn't do printouts, so they can't exactly compare the computer data with hardcopy.)
If they can fix the problems quickly (yeah, right!) their best bet might be to null all the votes that have been cast so far and start over. AFAICT, that might be the only way they can be sure of getting anything useful.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
[blockquote]See, in America, we are the first democracy to function continuously for 200 years. Not even Greece or Rome could do that.[/blockquote] This is actually plain and simply wrong. Rome's Republic was born in -509 and ran continuously until Caius Octavus became the first Emperor in... -27 Athena was roughly the same case, but i don't have the dates
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
All right, I've had it with these comments.
Look, the job of running a precinct is pretty complex. I do it. Once, twice, maybe three times a year. That's not often enough to feel completely confident about what you're doing, especially when law makers change the rules once or twice a year and you have to adjust.
Most poll officials are very civic minded and try to do the best they can. Most are also over 65. They are not apathetic, they are overwhelmed. Quit yer bitchin' and do it yourself. Our democratic process needs younger people doing this job. Take a day off of work. Trust me, the world will be better off if you skip writing a few hundred lines of code and insure the accuracy of a few hundred or a few thousand votes instead.
Just to give you an idea what's required, I go to 2-3 hrs of training before elections. That covers maybe 20% of what I need to know about how you handle all the different types of voters who show up in the wrong place to vote. I get a 50 page manual that covers maybe 90% of it. It is a lot of work; I have about 20-30 different pieces of paper that each have to end up in a designated folder, etc. in order to ensure everything is done "correctly."
Local election officials (the ones paid fulltime) work day and night to try to assure that everything goes well. They manage a team of (up to) thousands of near-volunteers (I get $125 for the day, which sure isn't why I do it) and have to try to figure out who the 2% who don't do their job are. They also have to provide clear instructions, in plain English, to their workers based on election law (not in plain English) that constantly changes.
I have to deal with failsafe voters, provisional voters, write in ballots, paper ballots, voter assistance forms, challenges to the right to vote. The list goes on. I'm 33, have umpteen years of education, and run a small precinct. I still find this a challenge.
Think this is an easy job, let me quote myself: Quit yer bitchin' and do it yourself.
Hey all,
Orange County, Florida - Orlando and some of its suburbs - doesn't use touchscreen systems. We use optical ballot readers, just like we've done since 1992. What happened on Monday morning (right when the early voting polls opened) was that the system used by poll volunteers to keep track of ballot issuings crashed for about twenty minutes. The downtown server that crashed was a Sun machine running an Oracle database, and the local machines were laptops running W2K and a custom-written app.
As the woman said, it was almost certainly a network problem. And no, it's not on the public Internet.. it's on the county intranet. The people doing this in Orange County (one of the counties *not* to have problems in 2000) aren't stupid, though spokespeople may not be up to speed on their networking terminology.
The ballots themselves are paper, marked with pen, read by 15-year-old optical readers, and physically dropped into big blue bins by poll volunteers. Associated Press got it wrong calling it touch screen, and other news agencies picked it up.
I know because I was one of the people who *installed* the system, and one of those who dealt with the problem (not to mention the lawyers and the voters). Aside from that twenty-minute hangup when we brought the systems up, the rest of the day was busy and smooth.
If anyone cares to verify, a quick call to the Supervisor of Elections office in Orange County will confirm everything I'm saying here.
http://www.ocfelections.com
-R.