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Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success
Dachannien writes "Capital News Service reports that the Maryland State Board of Elections has staged a test of its Diebold touch-screen voting machines in an effort to demonstrate their security and accuracy. A machine randomly selected from Maryland's voting machine warehouse was tested in a mock vote against two human vote-counting counterparts, and after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine. But is this a legitimate test of the concerns of voting machine activists, or does it merely support a logical fallacy?"
Where does this intense desire to use an electronic voting system come from in the first place? What is the net result of pulling people away from the process? Withough vote counters and poll workers, will we eventually cause people to care even less about elections?
Florida taught us one thing: News broadcasts showing jillions of people counting and recounting ballots can spur interest in the political process and get more people to vote.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
The conspiracy theorists on the left think that Diabold has ties to the right wing and may assist in election fraud
If you think Diebold does the rigging, you are an idiot. If they tried that and someone found out, they would be out of the voting machine business permanently. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Not to mention it's kind of hard to do, given how many variables there are. All they need to do is make a system with some backdoors, and they can be assured that the election will be rigged.
The real danger here is that any state election official can tamper with the results. From what I've heard, Diebold basically uses Access to store stuff and anyone can modify it. The most likely rigging scenario is that some state employee will add/remove a few dozen extra votes from a couple of critical counties and change the outcome for that state. Sounds much more likely, doesn't it? Now tell me, how will open-sourcing the Diebold software prevent that?
People make mistkes on paper all the time.
No shit, Sherlock. That's why you have the machine print out the ballot with the choices filled in, and you verify it before casting it. If you are saying people make mistakes when recounting votes -- that doesn't matter if they are random mistakes and they don't happen very often. Besides, you can recount paper ballots with optical scanners -- haven't you ever taken a standardized test? Those machines are fairly simple and reliable.
these backwater bastards are 99% pro-bush/pro-neocon/pro-racial purity who have nothing more than 4 more years of bush in their hearts.
That's an interesting statement about a state that voted for Gore in 2000 and will almost certainly go to Kerry in 2004.
I mean things always happen. Just getting a new browser and email client have been months of hard work and debugging for the Mozilla developers.
... especially in the USA.
Personally, I'm skeptical. People are willing to kill over $10 in someone's pocket. Why wouldn't we believe that people will resort to things like election machine tampering when it affects who controls the most powerful nation on Earth?
I'm not reassured by Diebold's CEO about "doing anything" to get Bush re-elected. But really, is a paper trail going to fix that?
There is nothing preventing a system from printing one thing, and logging another. Any hand-counted discrepancies would be considered "human error" and discounted, anyway. And while a code audit may not be realistic, having the machine's code secret due to patent rights is just plain silly!
Machines could be checked by a number of ways, including a sort of ghosting/registry check done by an independent agency supervised by the various parties. And so on.
But then there's the need to hardened the machines to external manipulation. The casinos have been fighting this for years, and still people find ways to cheat.
All we can do as citizens is keep fighting. The struggle for freedom will never go away, not even in the USA
media girl
Imagine that some state has n ballots which are mistakenly marked, but are done so randomly, that is each one is 50% likely to be Democratic instead of Republican or vice versa (I'm simplifying things by using a 2-party system here, but the same argument would hold with more parties).
Each time we miscount a Democratic Vote as a Republican, we mistakenly increase the Republican's margin by 2 votes. The reverse holds true when we miscount the other way. So the error in our margin can be thought of as the sum of n random numbers, each of which is equally likely to be 2 and -2. It is a known result from probability theory that such a "random walk" will be on (root mean square) average only about 2sqrt(n) steps away from 0. In other words, almost all the errors cancel!
Florida had a 537-vote margin in 2000. For that margin to have a 50% chance of occuring would have required roughly 72,000 random errors in counting (probably more, since usually less than half of a set of data is above its Root mean square). On the other hand, a 600 vote sufficiently systematic error would have been plenty.
This disparity only gets worse when we look at margins which would have been larger than 537 votes before error creeps in, but even at this level I'd be more worried about losing 600 votes by Fraud than having 72,000 of them miscounted.