Slashdot Mirror
Florida E-Voting Machine Fails
cmason32 writes "An optical voting machine memory card failed earlier today in Daytona Beach, Florida, sending election officials scrambling to secure the 13,000 paper receipts. Without the paper ballots, all 13,000 votes would have been lost. Considering how close some predict this election to be, losing that many ballots would be catastrophic. Let's hope that we won't see any more of this in the next 24 hours, and that these problems are fixed before 2006."
The title of this article may be misleading for those who equate "e-voting" with "touchscreen machines."
The machine that failed was an optical scan machine. This is like a scantron for school exams; it's the type we use here in Arizona. You fill in little arrows and it reads which ones are darkened. There are still paper ballots that go into a lock box under the machine.
Personally, I don't think this is "e-voting" at all and that the title is just plain wrong, but since optical scan machines do, indeed, use electrons, I suppose it's arguable.
the good news is that there is paper trail. It can be secured, and it can be recounted.
It also shows the importance of spot checking paper trails. What if this error had not been so blaringly obvious? Who would ever know. Since its not routine practice (its illegal) to recount paper ballots there would not be any way to know.
hence we need paper trails and we need to spot check them.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, hell. Might as well not have elections at all, just phone up 15 or 20 people and see who they want.
but that's were the logic ends.
first let's consider the statistical fluctuations that might be present in 13,000 votes chosen at random from a larger set. If the votes were 50:50 for either candidate then in the variance of 13,000 cast ballots the outcome would be about fluctuate by 50 votes, or a difference bewteen the two candidates of 100 votes. That's the average deviation from the true average the actual deviation would be much higher. If more than one candidate is running, lets say nader is getting 10% of the votes, then the statistical fluctuation in naders total would be about 32 votes with those missing votes not equaly distributed among the other candidates.
Second, this is one precint in one county in florida. it's literally an island. One shoul dave ZERO expectation that its average demographics and voting pattern represents the state average.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Considering that almost anybody that has attended public school knows how to fill out a Scan-Tron sheet blindfoled and upside down, I'd say that is a good criteria for usability. Well, I guess if you're not blind or something, in which case the electronic machines don't really help either. I don't understand why we need full-on generic purpose computing processors and on-screen displays and bullshit, just to perform a multiple choice selection. Come on, it's not that hard. It's embarrassing.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
This has been on CNN (TV) for a while now. Supposedly "Republican observers" noted that machines at one location had registered 1300 votes before the polls had opened. "Poll officials" and some "impartial observers" checked the machines. The 1300 votes were actually the votes cast using that machine over its lifetime, not number of votes recorded today.
The mayor of Philadelphia seemed to think this was Republican shenanigans. I think it's more likely that the observers had one two many double espressos this morning.
I just saw on cnn news about a woman who voted for Kerry but when she saw the screen showed her summary report it was for Bush. She called a lawyer and reviewed her selections with the election officials and it did show she selected kerry for her answers. They say it was "computer error" *Cough**bullshit**cough*