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E-Voting Glitch Alters Election Outcome
An anonymous reader writes "According to a local news source, 'A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a Democrat enough votes to bump a Republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.' Any ideas on how we can check for similar problems in other close elections?"
I don't think these electronic voting machine problems should be characterized as trivial "glitches". They are complete failures of the software, since the whole purpose of these machines is to accurately count votes. Would losing a few hundred database records at your company be considered a glitch?
By referring to these problems as glitches, the media are downplaying the severity of the problem. Regardless of the candidates, if voting can not be reliable and verifiable people lose trust in the process and the outcomes will always be questioned. We either want democracy in the United States or we do not. But using technology that fails in its basic function should not be acceptable.
Remember that human volunteers have a high chance at screwing up also. Most of the volunteers in my area are over 60 years old (yes I live in Florida... LOL) and had huge glasses and were kinda crazy... like remember Will Ferrell as Harry Caray on SNL? yeah anyways..
of course there were a high percentage of the voters that were like that too...
Anyways, the best perfected machine (read most accurate) for counting votes should be the one we use. It should be the 99.9% accurate reflection what the votes were.
So what I say is, how can we tell these closed source systems work to 99.9% accuracy? Oh we can't.
So we're just supposed to close our eyes and trust the outcome we see on TV? Oh we are... hmm ok.
Makes me feel all tingly inside!
Get paid to code OSS
It isn't about red team vs. blue team, or sore losers, "desired results" or any of the other nonsense that is being thrown about to cloud the issue. I happen to be a republican, but I'm adamant about wanting this looked into. Why? Because honest matters more to me than "winning."
The way I was raised, if you cheated you didn't win, no matter what the score board says.
I have yet to hear a rational reason why anyone should oppose doing whatever it takes to make sure elections are fair, unless they are either cheaters or suspect that their side cheated and value victory more than integrity. What bothers me is that there are so many people in both parties that seem to fall into the later category.
-- MarkusQ
But, let's face it: it's harder to alter both the computer AND paper records identically than to just do one or the other.
Two scenarios, then:
1. Honest computer glitch gets discovered when paper ballots don't match up;
2. Dishonest computer manipulation gets discovered when paper ballots don't match up, although paper ballots aren't necessarily correct, either.
If you take the position that most (if not all) of these issues are honest glitches (as the emachine defenders often do) then you should be thrilled to have paper trails, as they'll uncover the glitches -- just like what happened in this circumstance. Really, it's delightful to see what can happen with a paper trail backup, isn't it?
On the other hand, if you know that the "glitches" are usually manipulation -- then you're probably going to avoid paper trails like the plague.