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."

Comments

Go Boston Tea Party on em

[revscat]

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.

Re:Go Boston Tea Party on em

[crmartin]

I'll tell you a little secret -- not much of a secret -- about this. If the machine is clearly showing the check mark going wrong, it's a bug, not a conscious attempt to manipulate the vote.

A long time ago I was a Republican election judge in a Democratic machine county. We were using the punched-card ballots, which get an undeserved bad rap -- they have a lower proportion of bad ballots than the traditional paper ballot.

However, that year the machine candidate for the House was 3000 votes (about 10 percent) behind after 90 percent of the votes were counted.

The Election Commission discovered "computer problems". There's a delay, and afterwards -- voila! -- the votes are re-run and it turns out that the machine candidate has the big margin.

The point? It's not the machines you have to trust: it's the County Election Commission you have to trust.

Re:Go Boston Tea Party on em

[xlv]

Myself, I have no idea if I can refuse to use the machines on election day.

I believe I've seen on the news or some political web site (it might even have been on another discussion here about electronic voting) that you're allowed to refuse to use electronic machines and that each voting place is supposed to have paper ballots. When I saw that, the controversy was that poll workers were instructed not to mention that fact when greeting voters.

Human interface guidelines for voting machines.

[Black Parrot]

1. Whatever happens, blame the user.
2. If that doesn't fix the problem, see #1.

Misaligned Touchscreens

[NotoriousQ]

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.

Re:Misaligned Touchscreens

[rtaylor]

This looks to be nothing more than misaligned touchscreens. The main question is "Are they misaligned on purpose?"

A better question would be to ask why the order isn't randomized for each new voter?

To Be Fair

[CheshireCatCO]

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.)

Non-partisan election commissions

[lothar97]

The problem: we're the only Western democracy that allows for partisan election commissions. We get people in charge of state voting oversight also being chair of the state campaign for a candidate- Katherine Harris comes to mind. Sure she's allowed to have her political views outside of her job, but when she decided who won Florida in 2000, she was also chair of the Bush campaign in Florida. There is something fundamentally wrong with this. I don't have examples now, but I know the Dems have pulled crap like this as well.

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.

Re:phr1: Idiot or troll?

[!ucif3r]

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'.