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North Carolina May Redo State Election
goombah99 writes "The North Carolina Observer reports that due to failure of computerized voting system to properly record votes after its memory cards filled North Carolina may have to redo the November 2 statewide election. They believe 4400 votes were lost and from this have decided that only the State Ag commissioner race must be re-run. Still it's going to cost them a lot, indeed its going to cost them about the same price as 1000 new voting machines (3 million dollars) , or about $750 for every lost vote. Guess they wont be able to afford a paper trail system now."
If they actually get around to doing another election, how will they collect votes this time?
There are few times that you get a "second chance". Wonder if they'll make the same mistake twice...
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I feel that this is going to make a lot of us look a little less paranoid. I've been telling people for years about how bad it is, some of them have been interested, but it's so easy for people in this country to kind of roll their eyes and insist that everything will always work and everyone will play by the rules, because they wouldn't let it happen any other way.
We can use this as an example of just one of the many problems on Nov. 2, and if they end up doing a new election, how costly it is to make mistakes or use untrustworthy technologies in voting. Then segue to Florida and Ohio...
Designs a machine to continue to receive and process votes even when such votes can't be stored!?!?
Does that REALLY have to be spelled out in the design document? (And was it?)
Jack Gerbel, president of the California company, said in response to the letters that the machine was set incorrectly to store too few votes. He called the problem "a mistake of omission" on the part of a UniLect software engineer. But he said that a warning message should have appeared on the machine when it was full.
At least these guys can come out say what went wrong. Do we have any statement yet from Diebold or ES&S? Forgive me for asking, but how hard is it to count votes? This isn't the 80's anymore - hardware is cheap. I'm having a hard time figuring out why storage is apparently such an issue here. I can't remember the last time an ATM machine forgot/lost my PIN number. Powerball machines leave adequate paper trails. Come on.
Maybe the recounts in New Hampshire and Ohio will shed some light on the issue.
Municipalities no doubt *hate* to have to redo an election. So I'm sure the result of this snafu will be to ensure that either, A) This sort of fuckup of our votes never happens again, or 2) They can't be compelled to redo an election the next time this sort of fuckup of our votes happens.
Anybody wanna take a guess at which of these outcomes is vastly more likely than the other?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
OVC needs the support too (cash and serious programmers). Visit their web page .
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I would be rereading the contract, fighting to get my money back, and think hard about suing for damages.
Does the manufacturer really have no responsibility for these costs at all? $3 million is a friggin' lot of money for tax payers to spend for something UniLect screwed up.
This blows my mind. Yes, an error message "sort of" pops up in among all the other commands. And here I am worried that I'd better make it super-obvious when an error might cause a score to be lost in an educational training drill. AARGH!
From the article:
The counter hit 3,016 before the warning message came up. It went on and off, as Sanderson worked the control panel to accept more votes. If the machine worked during early voting as it did on Tuesday, the message could have appeared hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
But county elections workers said the message was hard to see. Sanderson said a precinct worker could easily miss it while setting the machines.
L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he said, with no explanation of what to do if it pops up.
After Bev Harris catching the elections officials red-handed disposing of ballots, poll-logs, and other interesting documents on Tuesday, I suspect things may get interesting down there as well. Even more interesting, it's the same people who had -16K votes for Gore in 2000.
Who knows, it may even make the newspapers someday.
-- MarkusQ
Better, it should stop after the last vote that it can save, rather than the first one that it can't.
Not rocket science. But, given that some precincts had these machines and others didn't, possibly election rigging.
-- MarkusQ
They're called Patriot Voting Systems???? Maybe UniLect's engineers have been indoctrinated by the sponsors of the PATRIOT Act....
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I'm confused. What is the advantage of paper? Everyone keeps saying "OH, it's necessary," but why?
If the voting machine spits out a piece of paper the voter gives to some random person, does that make the voting process any more secure? The paper doesn't identify them, but they could look at the piece of paper and know what they punched and somehow find voter fraud? Then, they can feel safe that this piece of paper won't change, and the random person will put the paper with no hanging chads in the ballot box and not stuff the ballot.
What if you gave the precinct worker a CDWORM? would that be the same? You could still give it to the random worker, and then you could even put your name on your ballot, but then you can't *see* what you gave the random worker. So what? At least your name is on it, and it makes it a little harder for the random poll worker to change it. Of course, you can't see the holes you punched, but after the paper comes out of the ballot it's pretty much greek anyway.
If you don't see much difference between the piece of paper and the CD, or think the CD is better, I think you will have a hard time finding a difference between *not* handing the CD to the random vote taker, and just putting your vote on a disk drive.
Somehow I suspect that the error in electronic voting will be far better than the manual processes. Geez, if you don't believe that, why are you reading slashdot! Or why are you a techie! Get a new profession.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
For those who don't remember, our previous (elected) Ag commissioner, Meg Scott Phipps, is now is the Federal Pen for doing some bad things. Ag Commissisoner does a lot of stuff in North Carolina, and if the republicans win it, it'd be a big upset.
I'll gladly vote again.
Jay | http://oldos.org
What's wrong with just having a do-over in the county or precints that used the botched machine?
If you know who the 3000-odd people who voted first are, simply invite the 4000-odd people whose votes didn't count to re-vote.
If you don't knoow, take them away from the total and invite all 7000-odd people to re-vote.
If you didn't vote on Nov. 2, or your vote isn't one of the ones that was lost or one of the unlucky 3000, you can't vote the 2nd time.
It's a lot cheaper.
The only downside is that people will know how important their votes really are, and everyone will be watching.
Then again, this could happen today with the Presidency:
Imagine a Presidential race that was divided by region, with only Hawaii uncertain. Let's assume Hawaii is polling 50/50 and Alaska is a gimme for one candidate. By the time the polls closed on the West Coast, all states but Alaska and Hawaii would be "called." Let's assume that with Alaska, it's within 3 electoral votes - enough for Hawaii to tip the balance.
Those Hawaiians who voted late in the day would know they held the Presidency in their hands.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How odd. Someone modded the parent post "overrated" even though it (at this point) hasn't had any other moderation.
I suspect who ever did it didn't bother reading the linked article (which details the events to which I refered). In short, they went to pick up copies of the records to which they were granted under their Freedom Of Information Act request. They were instead given newly generated records (the printer had date stampted them). They pointed this out, and were told they would have to come back the next day to get photocopies of the real data. They came back the next day (ariving a bit early) and found the elections officials doing something in the warehouse that involved black plastic garbage bags. They were told the bags were "on the way to the shredder"; it later turned out that these bags contained the official records, which did not match the "copies" they had been given.
Not that that's suspicious or anything.
-- MarkusQ
I hope it doesn't happen much, but I am so glad it happened. I truly think that it will take the visibility and expense of a few redone elections to get the point across that electonic voting terminals need paper trails and other security features. This is not wasted money if it prods us into having better elections.
Washington State is having a similar problem with its Governors Race. Less than 300 votes separate the candidates.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
You vote. I don't care how, but you vote. It will probably be electronic, with a paper receipt in a secure container. There will be a paper receipt given to you with a serial number on it and an encrypted account of your vote as a verification. You go home, and off the internet, you type in your serial number, and a pin number, and viola, your vote shows up as recorded. If it wasn't recorded, or recorded incorrectly, you go to your local voting office, and raise hell.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a republican (just letting you know :-p) ... but I like Easley (not as much as Ballantine, but that's another story)...
Grandparents' post shows a big problem: People don't care about local/state politics anymore. Let me tell you what: Ag Commissioner will MOST LIKELY affect NC residents moreso than who is Sec. of State, or Sec. of Defense, Sec of Education, et cetera.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I wrote a little calculator to help analyze the economies of voting machines. One of the problems of the recent election was that there weren't enough voting machines to go around, and cost may have played a factor. I heard from my country clerk that new HAVA complaiant DRE voting machines were often costing about $4000 each. Even if you estimate that they could be built for as little as $500, they're not economical. I combined the recent Ohio statistic of 100-200 votes per machine per election to arrive at the following conclusions.
.
A machine must last at least 7.5 elections to break even vs. hand counted ballots and possibly as many as 685.714285714286
Human cost per ballot counted $0.0583333333333333-$0.333333333333333.
Machine cost per ballot counted (over 10 elections) $0.25-$4.
http://bolson.org/cgi-bin/vote_tco
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