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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.
Was that I was watching the local news (Washington, DC) and they were discussing electronic voting machines and some of the concerns surrounding them. Then, the reporter ends his report basically blowing the concerns off and saying it was just people were afraid of computers raising a fuss. What? It seems to me that the more people know about computers and know about the systems, the more concerned they are. It's not people afraid of computers and to be dismissed like that simply blows my mind.
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?
In Orlando County, the touch screens crashed.
Well, at least we know the red and green phosphors are safe!
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNew s/1098121671320_93530871/?hub=World
"And in Orange County, voting ground to a halt after the touch-screen voting system crashed for about 10 minutes.
A senior deputy elections supervisor could not explain the brief outage, but speculated a faulty Internet connection may have been to blame."
Yeeeehaw! Let the games begin.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"Of the 14 early voting sites that opened in Broward County on Monday morning, 9 were reporting problems."
Upon contacting their support center, the issue was resolved shortly after the operators were instructed to turn the power ON.
Aliens must look down at the US electoral process, and regard it in a similar way as the US has regarded other countries electoral systems - IE; Broken and unsatisafactory.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
I am trying to think of what the arguments will be...
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
There is a simple solution to Florida's dilemma about how to determine which ex-felons are permitted to vote: get rid of the state's shameful felony disenfranchisement laws.
It is more than ironic that as the United States ostensibly seeks to promote democracy overseas, hundreds of thousands of tax-paying Florida residents are forced to stand mute on election day.
Florida is one of only 7 states that permanently deny all ex-offenders access to the voting booth. The consequences there are stark: some 600,000 Floridians are unable to vote, including more than 17 percent of the state's black male adults.
Some legislators raise bogus arguments about virtue being a prerequisite to voting--as though all those who have the franchise have led blemish-free lives. Underneath such pious sentiments are calculated partisan politics. Simply put, Republicans fear Democrats would benefit if Florida became a state that honored the fundamental precept of a free nation: the right to vote.
Five years ago, Human Rights Watch documented the outrageous consequences nationwide of felony disenfranchisement laws, including those in Florida. At the time, few Americans were even aware that nearly one and a half million ex-felons in this country were denied voting rights even long after they completed their criminal sentences. Somewhat naively perhaps, we assumed that once this fact became known, legislators across the country would promptly step up to make the necessary legislative fix.
There has been some progress--but not in Florida. Despite legislative debates and lawsuits, Florida stubbornly retains the law denying ex-felons the vote for life. An eighteen-year-old convicted of a single drug offense can never vote no matter how exemplary her subsequent life. The only option is to navigate the frustrating and cumbersome process of seeking a pardon or restoration of civil rights from the governor--and this is not much of an option. The current backlog of people seeking to have the vote restored is estimated to be more than 40,000.
The right to vote is a fundamental human right. It can be frustrated by hanging chads and butterfly ballots.
But Florida's felony disenfranchisement laws keep far more Florida residents from choosing their elected officials than these infamous--but not legislatively mandated--problems.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
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.
If you look at the history of presidential elections, I think you'll find that this recent unpleasantness (VERY close percentages) has not characterized past elections. Reagan won all but 1 (yes, that's right, ONE) state's electoral votes when he was up for re-election.
Don't take my word for it. BBCNews has a nice little applet which lets you look at all of the past electoral college breakdowns for our past elections.
Now, the election counting definitely worries me, and I agree with a past poster that the more you know about computers, the more you worry that they control the receipt, storage, and counting of our votes. If you ask me, democracy is already easy enough to steal with money. Why we're making it easier to steal with simple computer hacking is beyond me. At least we all know politicians are dishonest. Until now, we probably had SOME faith in the voting system, as such.
Both sides cheat (so why monitor or hold elections at all? Put 5 representatives from each party in a room with 10,000 ballots and see who comes out on top
International observers will influence our elections (the truth is not afraid of scrutiny...it is still the truth. If we want to play nation builder and be an example of democracy for the world, what have we to fear by observation?
Its just sour grapes (Regardless of your take on 2000, it did highlight many things that needed to be fixed. Were they? Somewhat, sometimes, some places...but many problems persist.)
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
(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
Why anyone sane would use e-voting in the first place is just beyond me. I just cannot understand why people are so obsessed with e-everything. Could anyone please tell me what is wrong with pen and paper? I have been asking this question since this stupid idea of e-voting was first introduced and I have got absolutely no serious answers. This is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Sorry folks, the issues in 2000 weren't technical.
To have a democracy, you need a critical mass of basically decent people. People who are prepared to lose, if need be. People who are prepared to agree to rules before the election, and stick with them, not swirl around in post-modern uncertainty.
Absent that, forget it. Why bother? If you're going to demand a perfection that is not of this world, you will never get it. And you'll obsess about the supposed illegitimacy of your opponents when they win. And you'll work yourself into a froth and decide that anything goes to oppose them.
Forget trying to "fix" elections with technology. Just reclaim decency. Stop assuming that your opponents are three-headed monsters that eat babies for breakfast. Stop accusing everybody of cheating. Just work hard and persuade lots of people to agree with you. Win by a big enough margin that none of this crap matters. And accept that it might not work, and that you might lose.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."
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."
I don't understand some days. Software can be written great. It can be written flawlessly. And how fucking hard is it to say 1+1 = 2? Ok so you may have to keep track of each vote. Thats where a database comes in. But seriously people, how fucking hard is it to write a piece of software with a touch screen that breaks? Ok... lets see touch screen passes point on screen to software. Software translates point into multiple different regions representing the intended vote. Software then confirms vote with voter. Voter leaves booth. Voter enters booth, voter touches screen a few times, voter leaves booth. I mean no shit, I could design using PC hardware and a touch screen, a pretty unbreakable, unproblematic voting machine. And you know how long it would take me to do it... 6 months. The first month is all planning. The second month is design. Third month is redesign/replanning. Fourth final design. Month Five, guess what fixing small bugs, which shouldn't be a big problem with the proper planning. Month Six, taking the machine out on the public and letting them try to break it. Find elderly people at a retirement home let them test it for ease of use and understanding. Take it to corporate america and let them see if it will let them vote fast enough.
Now here is the kicker... using fiber optic cabling, port security enabled on switch, and 5 redundant counting mechanism on 3 different machines, two machines which are off site. Oh and guess what... all I need to communicate between the site and the servers offsite is a 56k modem. Why so small bandwidth? Because passing votes around doesn't require much bandwidth... its not a movie or even streaming audio, its text, that would of course be encrypted using massive shared keys. So phone tapping won't work, shit, I will go ahead and implement an error checking mechanism ontop of the already existing modem error checking. Why can companies no do simple things simply. I bet a good portion of those machines are running windows... why because windows sounds good. Hell, I can remember a touch screen on Apple IIe computers, we can use one of them for our clients. They had modems for those... We can do some rudimentary encryption and error checking on them.... whats wrong? Afraid of using older simpler hardware to do a simple task.
Oh well, I got to rant, now I wonder if this will be modded troll or interesting.
Do you know about the recent estimates that 27,000 votes will be lost by highly predictable computer errors in mostly black precincts?
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make install -not war
You might get your mind blown back the other way after watching the 13 minutes of John Stewart (_The Daily Show_) on Crossfire. He calls "Conservative" Tucker Carlson a dick without increasing his sneer, while Carlson's token "Liberal" opposite just bobbles his head while included in the same condemnation. These mediadroids are thinking only about working within the conventional wisdom from their corporate producers, not even whether an intelligent, real person is denouncing their lies and deranged harm to America, right in their faces, on camera. They are purely formal apparatchiks; the content is irrelevant to their buzzword sniffers. Viewers of any intelligence at all can only be appalled.
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make install -not war
I'm posting this message from a Florida Voting machine. Browsing under IE is great! Had to download and install flash plugin for a few sites, though. I have no idea why all these posters are saying this electronic voting system is insecure. Everytime these popup windows appear telling me they need to confirm my credit card information, the numbers are displayed as asterisks (*) when I type it in. This voting machine seems plenty secure to me.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
Iraq, etc., is not about democracy. I'm not 100% sure *what* it's about, exactly, but democracy it is not. The modern GOP is primarily concerned with maintaining power, not democracy, or liberty, or justice in any meaningful sense.
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)
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'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.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine