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Berkeley Researchers Analyze Florida Voting Patterns
empraptor writes "Researchers at UC Berkeley have crunched numbers and determined that 130,000-260,000 excess votes went to Bush in Florida. They have held a conference and posted their findings online. You can find articles on their research from CNet, Wired News, and many other sources. While the research used statistical analysis based on past elections and demographics, how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?"
You're nuts. Paper and pencil are NOT more reliable than computers. Haven't you ever heard the term "ballot stuffing?" Physical media such as paper are also fraught with security concerns. They boil down to the same thing as computers: do you trust the election officials running them? Who has physical access to the vote once it has been cast? Etc. I'm not saying they are the same, but c'mon, all of a sudden the old paper method is the gold standard? No way.
The trouble with voting security is that it requires authentication, anonymity and ability to verify later. The verification necessarily must be done by the voter himself, or else somebody else will know how you voted.
Here's my idea: after you vote, you get a random ID and password associated with your vote. Later, you can log onto a website and verify that your vote is as you cast it, without divulging your identity. Make the process for getting votes from the machine to the central data repository open-sourced, open, open open, totally so that we know exactly what is happening.
Hey, it's a start. But I'm in favor of these voting machines. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Currently hooked on AMP
I sent this letter to the editor of the washington post a few days ago on the evoting topic (wasn't published)...
l es/A556 91-2004Nov16.html
re: In ATMs, Not Votes, We Trust
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic
I'm a programmer a major corporate bank in Manhattan.
Anne Applebaum's analogy of e-voting to ATM and credit card banking was misleading and uninformed.
Users receive regular bank statements, with each ATM transaction itemized.
Cross-checks of all transactions can be validated by the user through this method or
at any time with a phone call or with web access.
This is a paper trail.
For a credit card, it's the same deal, of course.
Again, there is a paper trail.
Increasingly e-voting machines have no paper trail requirement.
This is highly troubling.
Anne seemed to label this as "conspiracy", but it is no such thing.
To say so is irresponsible.
There is no way for the individual to verify that their vote was counted as they registered it, as you
can at an ATM, with or without a receipt. Do you find this troubling? I do.
This is just one short-coming in the system, among many.
As a computer programmer and security expert, I know how easily computers can be manipulated.
It is a fact that the coding on these machines could literally do anything.
We're irresponsibly putting our votes into a black box, and don't even have an audit trail.
This issue has nothing to do with whether fraud occurred in this particular election or not.
Glitches frequently occur due to human and machine errors.
An audit trail is a minimum necessary requirement -
And this is just the beginning of the problems with e-voting as currently implemented.
I'm surprised that the Washington Post allowed such a flimsy analysis to be published.
They neglect to factor in the "Hurricane effect." The President's visits and aid raised him popularity in the area.
From glancing at the numbers, I think you are wrong. Why would a hurricane, cause there to be more discrepancy between who people said they voted for, coming out of the polls, and who actually was given the votes? You are looking for explanations, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I don't think the one you give makes any sense. The only sort of things I can think of, that might account for such a discrepancy, are people not wanting to admit, to people doing polling, who it was they voted for. Perhaps if the persons polled felt intimidated, or ashamed of their votes. Even that, however, is really iffy. I think technical errors, or voter fraud, are the most likely culprits for this statistical anomaly.
What I don't like about paper audit trails in electronic voting machines is that everyone thinks they should be printed out in real time, like a cash register receipt at the grocery store as each item (voter) goes past. That makes it rather simple to match up voters to their votes if someone wished, and remove all the protections of the secret ballot process. Are you concerned?
And I do find it curious that voting machines are only being questioned in states that Republicans have won. Don't you?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When the UN monitors elections it relies mostly on exit polls to determine if the counts are being manipulated.
In this case the exit polls showed that people were voting for Kerry but the counts showed otherwise.
Now what? How do we know which is true?
You know what the sad thing is? The sad thing is that we even have to ask that question. I for one don't trust the machines or the voting process, I am not the only one either. That's sad.
evil is as evil does
No no no....The main advantage to an e-vote is that it gets counted automatically. When you have an e-vote with a paper receipt, you can vote electronically, the number gets beamed to a central DB, AND you get a paper ballot you can visually check and put in a box. Sure there won't be any faster recounts, but once the technology has been around for a while, people will trust the data. The whole state of Nevada was like this during the last election, everything got counted fast, and if there is any questions about the outcome, it's easy to double check by counting the receipts.
The REAL question is why are there electronic voting machines that DON'T have a paper trail?
"If it sucks without butter, it still sucks with butter, only creamier." - AC
Who cares about the code. It is data that should be signed and countersigned at every step and travel by at least 2 or more parallel pathways which are crossverified as well as the signatures. I am sorry, but 5th world country like Bulgaria has been doing this for nearly 10 years now. India has done it in the last election. It is time for the US to actually get a clue and learn how to run an election or import the Bulgarian or Indians who designed the election data flow (note the architecture, not the code) for a short H1B stint.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This is exactly how we do things in Canada, by the way, and it works wonders. Of course, TV-wise, it is much less interesting: we have a projected winner one hour after polls close and have the final and definitive results for all counties two hours after that. A party can ask for a recount without being accused of "hurting the country" and said recount happens in days. On the up-side, we do save money on exit polling. When the electoral system works, who needs exit polling?
Here's what he found:
I have been a scrutineer at the past two Canadian federal elections, and the parent is correct. There were 2-4 people counting votes from each of six ballot boxes. We had everything counted, recounted, and called in 20 minutes after the polls closed. Technology is great, but it does not need to replace everything.
What's to stop them from changing the code on enough of the machines to win? We'd never know what happens after we inspect the code. In the right area they COULD possibly win with only a handful of doctored machines.
It is already certain that vote fraud occured in an alarming number of isolated cases. The only question now is if it occured and went undetected in enough places to actually swing the election. Here are a few of the things we already know for certain:
In several districts, electronic voting machines were preloaded with thousands of votes for Bush before the election started. Where it was discovered, the machines were reset and did not effect the outcome. The question is, in how many districts did this go undetected because voter protection advocates were not there to check the machines.
In at least one case, a location in which only about 600 people voted recorded over 4000 votes for Bush. No explanation has been given for this, though it is likely another example of 'pre-loaded' machines.
In at least one local election, a manual recount of the ballots swung the vote total by a large amount compared to what the electronic vote machines had reported, enough to move the winner from the republican candidate to the democrat.
But the biggest smoking gun is in Florida's Volusia county where election offitials were caught red handed throwing out the official signed poll tapes from Nov 2nd. When these tapes were compared to the reported vote numbers, they showed that votes had been added to Bush's total IN EVERY SINGLE PRECINCT EXAMINED. If this was done in many more Florida precincts, it could explain the eight point swing between the exit polls showing Kerry winning and the official tally showing a Bush win. We must at least acknowledge the possibility, and insist on a full audit of the Florida results... not just a recount done by the same Florida partisans, but full, impartial audit.
The Bolachek Journals
Conspiracy crap? A good percentage of liberals I know are very uneasy about the choice of companies that created these voting machines.
Here is a test. Next 4 years, we can choose our companies to build the machines and to count the numbers. Michael Moore, and George Sourros will head the companies. Does that make you feel comfortable? Don't complain if somehow Barbara Streisand wins California, You just have to Move On.
Oh. and just because you can site an example where the Republicans didn't win, when they've had a great showing of blithering failures (oh, the economy, pollution, the rising cost of healthcare + anything else I'd bother to mention), does not mean that they didn't try to cheat.
The Libertarian you mention may actually be pushing the same NeoCon agenda that has worked so well for Mexico. I don't want to get into that debate, but having been a Libertarian and a Republican for I while, I had to leave because their economic concepts were not sustainable, and the Dems looked the least evil by a smidgen.
But I also live in Georgia, which is the Belt Buckle of the Bible Belt, so no amount of self interest or reality will outweigh a good rhetorical moralizer. And the ignorance of people listening to Neal Bortz and nodding to his ideas of a Value Added Tax are making me want to retch.
By the way, some months ago, the president of DieBold publicly stated that he would do everything in his power to see that President Bush was re-elected.
Can you not admit, that a system where elected officials approve the budgets for private corporations who control who gets elected IS a system that is bound to be corrupted? What are we paying for these boxes anyway? About $100k a piece? Doesn't that mean that most of the expense is for "services rendered".
And note, that in 2000, the Florida Government payed the people who conducted the voting about 10 times as much as 4 years before. The number of rejected voters went from about 8,000 to over 90,000. It has now been verified, that many of the people who were rejected was unwarranted (and of course, mostly from Democratic voters). I could point to a number of articles discussing this, but you would not be convinced.
Why are people so dead set against an idea of a "conspiracy." It is damn well profitable to have a president give taxpayer money to corporations. It is worth Billions. And we have many examples of overpaid contracts to look at. There are all sorts of conspiracies. But it seems that anyone pointing it out is automatically a nut. So what does anyone do about a conspiracy? Hand the crooks the keys and hope they run over a school bus full of kids on prime time news so that we can be sure they are the bad guys?
I'll say it. I think the Bush administration is a bunch of crooks. They behave like crooks. They act like crooks. They want everything secret and they punish anyone who criticizes them. They were conveniently incompetent on 9/11 and it has done nothing but give them a green light to push through their agenda. They have pandered to just about every corporate supporter, in historically cynical ways. They have lied and said Iraq was an immanent threat. Oops. Now we must forgive them because it is a tough job. Meanwhile, Billions of dollars of taxpayer money are going to companies owned by the Carlyle group, which has financial dealings with almost all of the Bush administration (Halliburton ain't half of it). And we are supposed to shrug that off because it's only coincidence that it's their pockets the money lands in "hey, it could happen to anyone".
Wow, the energy bill even indemnifies oil companies from lawsuits they might incur over gasoline additives. OK. The future looks bright. King George will start the "No two-headed baby left behind" program. Retraining as a circus freak can help a large portion of the genetically damaged. Good thing they can't sue.
And all 5 of the electronic voting companies have been major donators to the Reelect Bush fund.
This statement; f
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Actually, up until the 2000 election, exit polls were remarkably accurate.
They are still remarkably accurate -- if done for elections held anywhere but in the U.S. Magic.
And if exit polls no longer work, statistically the variant outcomes should scatter for Bush and Kerry roughly equally. They do not. They all skewed way, in some cases REALLY WAY, over to Bush.
And something is definitely wrong. Check Bev Harris's work these past few days. In Florida, she was issued unsigned audit tapes in response to her requests for evidence after the election, rather than the signed and verified ones.
After being denied the originals, she actually found them in the TRASH. Police were called to stop her, but she got the tapes.
Kids, they compared the unsigned results to the actual, disposed-of results from the dumpster.
The copies she was given do not match the originals. The vote was way, way adjusted for Bush. In. Every. Case.
She won't make the conclusion outright, but it's obvious. Where Jeb could cheat, he did. Mygod, how could he NOT cheat??