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New Mexico Touchscreen Voting Problems
phr1 writes "The
Albuquerque Journal reports yet more hassles with electronic voting machines.
Early voters pressing the Kerry button have repeatedly found the machine instead putting a check mark next to 'Bush'. The operators of course say it's the voters' fault. It would be just too unfortunate if the machines happened to systematically favor one candidate over the other, heh, heh."
Does this expert political analyst know what state ABQ is in?
Destroy the fucking things. They're a blatant means for whoever, Republicans in this case, to disenfranchise millions of voters and skew the election. Break them. Make them not work. Refuse to use them, kick out the plug, tip it over. Take a big magnet to them, sledgehammer, shotgun, whatever.
Untold numbers of our ancestors have DIED to bring us the right to vote. Such measures as I am suggesting here are no more out of bounds than is locking away a violent criminal.
Take them down. Justice demands it. I paid for it with my tax dollars, and I do NOT care.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This looks to be nothing more than misaligned touchscreens. The main question is "Are they misaligned on purpose?"
And why won't someone realign them.
badness 10000
To be fair, the article (around the middle) mentions that voters had the opposite problem: votes intended for Bush were showing up for Kerry. So it doesn't sound like a systematic attempt to cheat the vote. (Although statistics on how many mis-votes occur each way would be very interesting.)
That said, of course the friggin' problem is in the machines. OK, so the voters are maybe not using them exactly as intended. But, I'm sorry, if touching the screen with my palm accidentally will mis-register a vote, then they need to re-work the design. It's clear that a lot of people are having this sort of problem, so it's a design flaw.
If they're selling the things under the premise that they'll make voting easier and more accurate, they'd better be able to handle real-world usage.
(And that's all assuming that the problem is not a more basic bug in the system. The fact that people have had multiple misvotes in a row implies, to me, that it might be a more basic flaw than how people are using them. When you make a mistake once, you usually are much more careful the next time. So I'm dubious that people are making the same mistakes. It's possible, but I'm not convinced.)
It's too bad all this energy isn't be directed at trying to correct the problems and fraud caused by paper ballots.
Punching extra holes in a punchcard, or filling in a bubble with a pencil is the easiest thing in the world.
Or how about simply lying about the numbers when you call to report them to the supervisors running the election?
Yes, it really is done that way is many places.
Okay, so you don't trust programmers writing voting software. But how then can you trust all these other people in the chain? What makes you think they're honest?
What about ballots mailed in? How do you know they even make it through the post office? How do the people counting these ballots even know it was you that really sent it? How do they know you're even a real person and not Fido T. Dog?
Vote fraud is real, and it goes way beyond miscalibrated touch screens.
If it's a software problem, am sure everyone should've been facing the same issue, considering how trivially simple a thing a vote accumulating app would/should be (unless of course the developer has goofed up majorly)
... They're hitting the wrong button."
She believes it's a people problem. "I have confidence in the machines," she said. "They are touch screens. People are touching them with their palms, or leaning their hand.
Why get to a stage where ppl complain at all!? Why not have the different clickable entries reasonably far away from one another?! It's not as if you have to include the names of hundreds of candidates as in here in india.
We don't need another stupid thing that adds to the ppl's woes
"In Sandoval County, three Rio Rancho residents said they had a similar problem, with opposite results. They said a touch-screen machine switched their presidential votes from Bush to Kerry."
Of course the abstract for this story only mensions votes being switched from Kerry to Bush.
What a surprise.
What we need is non-partisan, or better, multi-partisan, voting commissions. Bring in a Dem, a Repub, and throw in a 3rd party person every now and then. It will give a better air of legitimacy to the circus we call elelection.
The real problem here is not any attempt of voter fraud - it's the goddamn things not working correctly and the official blaming it on the users. It's hilarious to hear his excuses: "they're hitting their palms! they're not doing it right!!!" I've had a problem with many touch screens before, usually depending on the angle at which you view the screen. If you're a different height than the person who calibrates it, and the options are close enough together, it'll basicially shift the whole ballot up or down.
The real question is: why the hell did they use touch screens when they could have made a simple system with actual buttons? And why did they decide that this was the year that we must test our electronic voting machines, I guess because they were sick of guessing whether a dimple in the card meant a vote? The whole thing smacks of the disgusting trend in our country: we'd rather be certain than right. If you think there's any system which won't confuse or provide difficulty for seniors, you clearly have never had a grandmother.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Arizona touchscreen voting equipment places Albuquerque in Arizona!
Read between the lines in the article. The only people they interviewer were voting Kerry. The only person defending the machines was also the only one saying it affected both sides. The article either:
1) Couldn't find any Bush voters (which is interesting since New Mexico has just as many Republicans as Democrats)
or
2) Let the only comments about Republicans come from the woman who is already in suspicion of tampering with the votes, so that you'll make mental associations between the concepts of "tampered votes" and "Republicans". Subtle propaganda, I love it.
Direct away from face when opening.
Every time there's a vote "problem" the principles try to find a way to make voting easier, which they usually interpret as more effortless. So in South Florida, they go from punch-card paper ballots to video terminals, which is supposed to require even less effort because the problem is incorrectly diagnosed as people being unable to punch a hole in a thin sheet of paper even under the circumstance that the hole was pre-weakened.
So now we start seeing problems with screen registration and we're suprised? Now it's even EASIER to vote WRONG! On a side note, after hundreds of people touching these things, they're gonna get really greasy and gross. Is someone going to wipe the screen after each user?
What we need is a system that makes voting deliberate. Maybe have people write the full name or something, spell out yes or no on referendums, etc. Maybe have some anonymous system for voters to check their own votes after the election to make sure they are recorded correctly.
What we don't need is more "easy voting" schemes that a light breeze could influnce.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Pot calling kettle black? You claim one-sidedness, yet state that "many" people had the opposite problem. In what world does the number "3" constitute many? A "few" or maybe stretching the point to say "several". "Many" may be a relative term, but it's disingenuous to use it to describe a total of 3 voters in a whole county.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
3) The Rebuplicans voting didn't actually have any problems and so there were no voters to interview abotu it and the woman they interviewed simply defended the machines by saying people were making the mistakes and that it was happening to everyone. I love how Bush supporters call any news that could possibly be construed as negative towards Bush or the Republicans 'propaganda', but their candidate lying to the country and the world is just a 'mistake'.
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
Point of order - if you read the article, its about voters in Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque is) and Sandoval County, in New Mexico, not Arizona.
Here in Southern Arizona, we have optical scan ballots, which the best of all worlds. I vote with a pen, a computer scans it, and if there's a question about a recount, a human can go back and look at what I marked on my ballot.
Are there any arguments for touchscreens over optical scan ballots? I can't think of any.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
1. Yes, I know Albuquerque is in NM. I simply had a brainfart when I saw "abqjournal" and read it as "azjournal" or something like that. 2. The article I submitted was edited for length before posting, so some stuff I'd asked was chopped out, like whether there were errors in Kerry's favor similar to the ones for Bush. The abqjournal article itself was not clear about that at all. While it says there were some errors in each direction, we don't know at all whether 90% of the errors favored Bush, 90% favored Kerry, or what. 3. ABQ Journal is apparently a Republican paper and it has endorsed Bush, so anything it prints is certainly not Democratic propoganda.
What a surprise
Frankly, I'm shocked. I am beside myself in outrage. It is unfathomable to me that Slashdot would ever post a story with a misleading abstract.
I think this is going to permanently tarnish Slashdot's reputation of fair, honest and unbiased reporting.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's what "federally certified means". NADA. And denise lamb is the one who does this to you (denise.lamb@state.nm.us).
Denise is a rabid, machines-can-do-no-wrong political animal, logig means nothing to her, so lying to achive an agenda is simply machivelian to her. In fact she makes up lies about the machines and tells people for example that all paper trails would be printed on 1.5 inch wide ribbons of tissue paper. (no I'm not making this up, I've saw her demo before the ACLU.).
If that were not enough, we have a Secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron who if you look on "followthemoney,org" you will see takes not only corporate donations from vendors but also personal ones. She is also head of the NAtional association of secretaries of state and issues policy reccomendations to all the others SOS. About half of her $500,000 budget comes in "gifts" from machine vendors.
So you can see that if New Mexico has a problem then the whole united states has a problem
I urge you to write Denise Lamb denise.lamb@state.nm.us and tell her you are a professional programmer and give her your candid opinion. And while you are at it ask her to mail you one of those noodle voting tapes she had made up--she hands out copies.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.