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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."
A bit of self fufilling prophecy. We've had 4 years to sit around wringing our hands and worrying, of course we're gonna have problems.
And we'll have the inevitable lawsuits, recounts and when someones declared the winner, the losers will yell about how it was stolen.
why was the touch screen system connected to the internet?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I am trying to think of what the arguments will be...
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Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
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Is it me or does anyone else find it hard to believe that all of the so called voting irregularities suddenly started in 2000?
I realize that it's popular these days to point out that these irregularities contributed to the last election outcome, but isn't also somewhat obvious that those same irregularities (or similar ones) have existed since the dawn of voting itself, I mean those punch machines of yore were around quite a while before 2000.
If we are complaining about them now, mabye we should have started when Jimmy Carter was elected. When are we going to stop the madness and realize that the only ones profiting here are lawyers not people. There isn't and will never be a perfect system for everyone.
This makes me seriously concerned for a number of reasons.
First, these computer problems were blamed on the Internet connection used to access the registered-voter database. No voting system, even if it uses a VPN, should be connected to the Internet. If remote data is necessary, do it over a telephone connection. That's worked for credit card companies for many, many years.
Second, the article references the general apathy of workers running the poll stations. It seems that democracy may end in this country, or at least in Florida, from this more than from any of our elected leaders.
Third, and most speculatively, what happens if a more serious error occurs on Election Day and a large portion of ballots get lost? Four years ago, we could go back and read hanging chads. What will the courts decide this year if an entire state's ballots go missing?
By all accounts, this election could be more dangerous to the future of the nation than 2000.
It's not the touch screen crashing that is the problem. It's what happens underneath that is the big concern.
These systems have been made so complex and closed source that there is no audit trail.
I get these images of a huge casino with electronic slot machines - whoever put them in did so with a view to making profit out of them. If you're the end user, you have no idea what they're doing under that screen - but you can be well assured you can't take them at face value. So if casino machines can statistically determine when or if they should pay out depending on the bank balance of the casino, what the heck are these voting machines doing?
In Australia we mark numbers on sheets of watermarked paper.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
These problems have been known for a long time, and the apathy about them in the news media is simply astounding. A brief web search will give you an idea how widespread the problems are, and how well known they are, yet little has been done. Why do you think that is? Well, elections are run by the states, particularly by each state's Secretary of State. That's an elected position. Guess which party the Secretary of State in most of the problem states is a member of?
If I were you I would write a letter to someone at the local news station and explain to them that the reporter made a baseless claim that is contrary to the truth.
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"as secure as they could be made" is not good enough. Not nearly good enough.
"more secure than paper ballots" would be a start. *ONLY* a start, mind you, as it doesn't begin to justify the additional expense, but it'd be a start. I'm not advocating a Chicken Little approach by any means, but sticking your head in the sand and singing "it'll all be OK because the person presiding over this mess said so" stopped being a viable response about when the war in Iraq 'ended'.
We know software that's as bulletproof as our democracy deserves can be written - it runs on mainframes day in and day out for years and years. Then the only reasons why the election hardware/software is so buggy is incompetence or malice, and either way we shouldn't be using it.
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Maybe it just guarantees that all voting machines will be obsolete by the next election, forcing an upgrade path that Diebold hopes they will have the contract for. But, then again, maybe I'm just getting too cynical in my old age.
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The point is, there are software practices than can be used to ensure the damn stuff is reliable enough to be used in something as vital as voting. Like writing multiple versions of the code and making sure the results are identical. Like not putting it on top of an overcomplicated OS. Like extreme peer review, including open sourcing the stuff. Any case where voting software goes into production with a line of code which someone has 'forgotten to comment out' is a case where the voting software is not up to standard by a long long way.
Efficient? By which you mean faster? Cheaper? Is it cheaper and faster? Even if it is, does it justify the lack of reliability? Does it justify the lack of transparency? Could anything justify it?
We are talking about democracy. The transparency and reliability of democratic election is something infinitely more important than any kind of efficiency could ever be, for without transparent and reliable election there can be no democracy.
Besides, what exactly is inefficient in using pen and paper? Please read my other post before you reply.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Conflict of interest? Or merely unqualified to "make sure"?
You know what, I have. Many times. Here's the thing, the real kicker here: when my code fails, nothing bad happens. When *my* code fails, no one's pacemaker stops. When my code fails, nobody's automatic medication overdoses them. When my code fails, planes don't fall from the sky.
When the code on a voting machine fails, democracy fails. The instant that a mistake is made there, in one of the most important systems in the world, catastrophy strikes. It is not exagerating in any way to say that forgetting to uncomment a line of code could result in the deaths of millions, as the minority's leader drives us into a war we don't want.
I don't bet the fate of the world (and don't tell me that electing the wrong official wouldn't affect everybody) on my 'honest mistake'. When that comes up, I expect more. I expect a lot more testing, a lot more review. We know how to write reliable software. It's a crime to surrender our nation by not doing so.
Buggy as compared to the chads?
.MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
What are you talking about? The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access
I think I agree with the gist of your post, and I also agree with the gist of the GP's post; you both make good points.
I would just like to go off on a tangent here for a moment and address a commonly repeated fallacy regarding communism and democracy.
Communism and democracy have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Democracy is a political system, and Communism is an economic system. They are not mutually exclusive or even related, at least not in a causal way.
Unfortunately, during the Truman years, the USA was greatly concerned about rising Soviet influence over the "Third World". I'm using this term in its original (cold war) context: those nations which did not belong to the capitalist west but were not allied with the Soviets, either. The term Third World as used today is mostly pejorative and I favor its retirement, but I digress.
Anyway, throughout the cold war, much effort was made to slander communism as a system. It was therefore decried as being authoritarian in nature, but this was deliberate propaganda. A socialist "welfare" state is not authoritarian by definition, it just so happened that the USSR was.
Communism is a system (which probably can never truly exist, but that's a seperate matter) in which the workers own the means of production. It says nothing whatsoever about authoritarian rule, and doesn't require it -- in fact, Marx in his utopian viewpoint saw a large government as being antithetical to the communist ideal and hoped (unrealistically) that after the worker's revolution the leader of the movement would assume a temporary "benign" dictatorship. To place in this in American terms, it was his hope that a man like George Washington -- heroic and respected -- would be the one to lead the revolution, and then voluntarily step down once the necessary infrastructure were in place. Of course, as has often been noted by American historians, this quality is uncommon and George Washington is one of the few political leaders in history who could have been king but chose not to be in favor of the system.
Anyway, to get back to the point, socialism, the interim economic system which Marx theorized would "bridge" capitalism and communism, does not mandate a dictatorship. Many socialist states (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) are in fact very libertarian in nature. They pay very high taxes and have an extremely high standard of living -- Norway's is the highest in the world, in fact.
Similarly, there are many authoritarian capitalist states. Singapore is an example I frequently use, but it is hardly the only one. The People's Republic of China is increasingly becoming market capitalist -- very little of its communist infrastructure remains -- and yet it remains authoritarian. The US, in its campaign to secure access to Latin American resources, installed a number of capitalist governments that amounted to little more than dictatorships (in some cases against the wishes of the majority, as measured by socialist candidates elected).
Now, while I am politically left leaning, I am socially libertarian -- by this I mean that freedom from oppression and censorship is very important to me. The idea that socialism (and communism, which probably can never exist) is by necessity an authoritarian system is 1950s era propaganda. The USSR was undeniably authoritarian, but this was a result of the decisions of its leaders (especially after Lenin), not a result of its economic system. I do not deny that the rise of soviet-style authoritarian communism was a bad thing for pretty much anyone concerned.
However, I think that now that the cold war is over, and we can look back in a more objective way, we should try not to present communism and democracy as opposites, because they in fact have nothing to do with each other. Civil liberties are perhaps encouraged by a free market, because a free market functions better with little government intervention, but civil liberties are by no means guaranteed by one. Consider the PRC
I'm confused by this flip flop mantra that republicans keep chanting. Surely changing your position on an issue in the face of new evidence is a "Good Thing". It implies an open mind and critical thinking, whereas sticking doggedly to a position that has since been shown to be wrong is just stupid.
For example, on the Iraq war vote, Kerry voted for the war on the basis of the evidence made available by Bush. We now know that the evidence for war was wrong, incomplete and selectively chosen by a broken system. If you believed the evidence that was presented at the time then voting for war was the only option (as it happens I didn't believe the evidence, but that is a freedom a popularly elected official doesn't really have if he wants to be re-elected). In the light of new evidence it appears that the case for war was not based in fact, but speculation (if you're feeling generous towards Bush), or greed (if you're being less generous). Faced with the new information I would be deeply concerned if someone did not change their point of view. It is a deeply valid thing to do.
Making a decision on the best available information is a good thing. Making a decision on ideological grounds and the selecting evidence to support your position is not a good thing.
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Unless your brother happens to be the governor of a key state and the person certifying the election used to work for you...