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Buggy Voting Machines
dkleinsc writes "The NYTimes is running an article arguing in layman's terms that voting machines are inherently buggier (Sperm sample required. Sorry ladies) than most software systems because they are not tested properly. A fun quote: "Extensive discussions are under way at sites like VerifiedVoting.org, CalVoter.org, and the "news for nerds" forum Slashdot.org about inexpensive, practical ways to make automated voting as reliable as, say, buying books online. Their recommendations make sense."" We makese sense? Wah?
I think this is just silly argument. Just because a system is used for voting can't make it inherently buggier. The problem is more that there isn't an established standart to which the machines are held. There should be a law put into effect that first defines what is expected from the voting machines, second there should be possiblity of independent review of these machines expressed in that law. Perhaps the touch screens of the voting machines could have socket to which a recorder could be attached so that separate count could be made with competitors machine.
While voting machines may be inherently buggy, I think in certain cases, the paper ones weren't much better. It also doesn't help that some voters can't read and/or fill out a paper ballot. For those of you that remember the 2000 election, the process of filling out a paper ballot was just as buggy, where bugs were "incomplete marks", "multiple marks", or "hanging chads".
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Seriously folks, stop worrying about Ukraine and start looking at what went on in your own back yard. The Ukranians seem to be handling things quite nicely themselves, but where are the mass protests in the US?
When officials refuse to adopt secure voting machines, there are two explanations. Incompetence, or bad will.
In either case, these process by which such officials get themselves into positions of power over the voting system should be examined very closely. No democratic government can rule when it stands of being accused of stealing an election.
Unless of course that is what it has done.
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Electronic voting should be as easy as standard, non-electronic voting. My parents couldn't buy a book of Amazon if their life depended on it. Why are we making this so hard. Electronic voting should work as follows:
1. The voting machine does not keep track of any votes. A voter will walk up to the machine and be presented with a list of candidates. Next to each name there will be a box. The voter makes a mark in the desired box with an electronic stylus. A write in blank will be available if needed.
2. At the bottom of the screen there will be two large boxes. One will be red and says "I wish to make changes on my ballot." The other box will be green and it says "I am satisfied with my ballot." After touching the green box another screen will come up. It will basically say that by touching continue you will be done voting. A go back button will be provided in case someone got to this screen by accident.
3. After clicking done, your ballot will be printed out at the machine you are at. This will allow you to look over the completed ballot before having it counted.
This system is the best of both worlds. The voting machine itself does not count anything. It is just an interface for making the completed ballot. There is a paper trail with this system. This system will also cut down on waste due to extra ballots that were not used. Finally a change the ballot at the last minute will not be a big deal since the interface is electronic. The ballots won't have to be printed weeks in advance.
For the last two evenings, I've been slowly going through the data on machine problems at EIRS
and I can say that while voting machines in general are not something much more complicated than an application preferences menu, the ones we used here in the U.S. in 2004 ARE inherently buggy.
Even when they were not switching votes, or crashing in the middle of voting, there were fundamental user interface design issues.
For example, a large number of complaints were lodged because machines would not allow a person to vote a party line, and then modify one or two votes. Any sensible designer knows how to do something like this right.
Another problem is that they had a big flashing vote button that turned on as soon as a ballot had any votes on it. So if you were at the first screen, and you voted, the vote button would start flashing. Any sensible designer would know that some users would think that they should press the vote button to get to the next screen, but when pressed, the ballot would be cast and the ability to vote on all the other candidates would be lost.
Finally, there were machines that showed you a review screen, but on the review screen, hitting enter, which is the key used normally to scroll down, to see if there is more, would actually alter the first vote on the screen. On a review screen. Ah and cooincidentally, the first vote on the screen was for president and hitting enter would switch it to Bush.
Whether deliberate or caused by some of the most incompetant programmers on the face of the earth, that is some buggy shiznit.
(P.S. I'll be posting my results when I'm done, probably on daily kos. I'll link that somewhere in the page you get when you click on my signature.)
Someone had to do it.
... and in the past it has been correct within .5 percent of the vote before the absentee ballots are figured in.
The rock solid trend diverged in Florida 2000. Now it has strangely diverged in most of the Battleground states.
There is no way to prove that the electronic vote was hacked. Conversely, there is no way to prove that the electronic vote is correct. We have lost the concept of auditability.
As Stalin once said, it doesn't matter who does the voting, it's who does the COUNTING!!!! Well, Diebold, ES&S, Seqouia and other companies led by Republican devotees seem poised to take over the counting in US elections. One can only speculate as to the results and why they differ so much from exit polls.
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You sir, are a fucking idiot. And I mean that in the best possible way. Right now, the biggest obstacle to democracy in this election is the combined work of both the Republican "lose the tinfoil hats" Party, and the Democratic "it doesn't matter" Party.
Yeah well, guess what. The President wasn't the only question on those ballots. Volusia county wouldn't have changed the outcome of the presidential election if it had voted 100% Kerry. But what about state elections? County seats? Mayors? Democracy must happen at all levels!
Why don't you get over your obsession with Kerry and Bush, and look at the big picture here? Accept that the truth is that Volusia county for certain has MAJOR human-created voting problems (or are you going to tell me that a bug in the machine made the election officials "forget" to sign the forged results that Volusia has been giving out as real? BBV pulled the real signed results out of the trash. Or are you going to tell me that BBV has a forgery, that they successfully forged the signatures of ALL of the election officials and the real document was accidentally signed in invisible ink?) and other counties may have had problems either human-made or machine-made.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Canada votes with plain paper and manual tabulation. They finish their counting in a single night.
In any case, you can trust the individual vote totals on the machines (with manual central tabluation) just so long as you do random audits, or targeted challenge audits to check for irregularities.
Any audit that turns up a problem would trigger a manual recount of all precincts.
BTW, I don't think there is anything wrong with hand counting. You may think it's too expensive. But what is Democracy worth to you???
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I've said it before, I'll say it again. The *counting* portion of any voting system *MUST* be wide open, and subject to public scrutiny, and there *must* be a physical (paper being the most logical) record of an individuals vote, that *that* individual can verify correctly recorded their votes.
The mechanism used to *create* that paper record doesnt matter, so long as it remains in the posession of, and can be inspected by, the individual casting the vote, after it is created and before it is counted. It can be done by hand, or with the assistance of some ATM-like machine that then *PRINTS* the paper which neither does any counting, nor keeps any record of who is voting. In fact other than the printed output, it should keep no records whatsoever. It should not even know the identity of the voter.
The paper vote record itself, should also not have any sort of information which could identify *who* the voter is. The machine used to read and count the paper record *MUST* be open, auditable and its entire process and function must be fully and publically documented. After counting, the paper ballots should drop into a box, or otherwise be retained to allow for recounts.
The huge irony here is that a "voting program" is about the simplist thing you could write. Thousands of people have written RPG character generators that are more complicated than a voting program.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You don't have to be a republican or a democrat or a supporter of a third party to want everyone's vote to count. That should be what everyone wants. And the only way that will happen is with constant vigilance.
I have a low-tech solution to the voting problem: Use paper ballots.
Here is the process:
- A voter arrives at their polling station.
- An election official confirms that the voter is eligible to cast a ballot.
- The official hands the voter a paper ballot and is told to make their choice in private behind a screen or inside a booth.
- The voter takes the ballot, goes into the private area, and makes their choice by placing an X next to the candidate of their choice.
- The voter returns with their folded ballot and deposits it into a sealed ballot box.
At the end of the night, the official opens the ballot box, tallies the totals for each candidate, and reports the totals to the main office conducting the election.Elections held this way are simple and secure. There is no worry about paper trails or verification, because the ballots themselves are the proof.
As for the ballots themselves, they look something like this:
I guess what I am trying to say is that elections do not need to be complicated by technology. The method I am proposing there depends on the ability of people to count, nothing else.
The method I propose here really works too. Where I live, it is the standard for both my provincial and federal elections.
I really hope that the voting method throughout every county in the U.S. is reformed. Personally, I know it is hard to accept election results when your preferred candidate loses, but at least where I live, I know that the vote itself was fair.
Folks its time to move on. George Bush did not win because of some evil Diebold exec or magical vote changing election booths. He won because over 61 million Americans pulled the lever for him.
Erm. How do you know that? I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, I'd just like to know what special information that you have access to that, say, the New York Times doesn't? If you've got some sort of audit logs from all of the voting machines, please, by all means, share with the GAO.
This election was a mess not because of evil Republican voting machines but because people were paid (some in crack) to register voters which brought in fraudulent voter registrations.
I call bullshit. There two -- two -- known incidents of people being registered fraudulently, according to the Republican National Committee Vote Fraud group. (Listen to This American Life's November 1 episode, "Swing Set," Act 2, which is 21:10 into the episode.) Not only were both of these committed by petty criminals paid by the registrant to sign up voters (that is, it was not systemic, just a pair of dopes), but it doesn't matter, since there is, in fact, no way for Mary Poppins to show up and vote. The other case was a Colorado man who registered 35 times. He can only vote once, as you can imagine, so, again, it doesn't matter.
Your implication that there is any parity between two isolated incidents of greedy workers signing up people wrongly and the massive, jail-time-yielding Republican work to suppress the vote or, worse still, systemic Diebold/ES&S fraud is well beyond ludicrous; it is, simply, stupid, and I am embarrassed on your behalf, because it seems that you don't have the good sense to be embarrassed for yourself.
-Waldo Jaquith
What a cynical view you have of the world? Yes, the machines would still be buggy. The editorial on their bugginess, however, would have been in a neo-con leaning newspaper. The complaint would be the same. The metaphors would be the same. Only the writers and the publication place would be different.
From this year's election exit poll results, there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people. If this is in fact true, the various exit polls likely underrepresented many Republican candidates. Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system, and politicizing the issue by making claims against one particular candidate only stands in the way of getting our political leaders to support the election system we need.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Bush fan (I voted for McCain in 2000 and while I wasn't a fan of Kerry either, I voted for him to vote against Bush this year) but I'm getting sick and tired of conspiracy theorists on Slashdot. If you check out my signature, you'll see an insightful speech made by Bill Clinton on why the Democrats lost this election but I will expend on it here. Also note that I used the term "left-wingers" to describe far left liberals, not the Democrats in general.
1. Democrats relied too much on young voters: Problem is that while the 18-24 year old age group makes the most noise, when it comes to voting, they consistently turn out to have the worst voting record. Hollywood celebrities and singers backing Kerry (in hopes of getting young citizens to vote) probably harmed him more by alienating the older voters. Bill Clinton didn't win the election by capturing young voters' votes, he won by capturing the older voters' votes. Now back to Bush vs. Kerry. Majority of voters 65 and older voted for Bush. Majority of voters 24 and younger voted for Kerry. And guess who won?
2. Democrats did not learn form the Austrian elections: The Australian Prime Minister Howard took a lot of heat for supporting Bush and his war in Iraq. The media expected a big loss for Howard on the last election, but Howard ended winning by a good margin. When the Austrian voters were polled, most of them responded that they voted for Howard because economy was a bigger issue than the Iraqi war.
3. Michael Moore and Bin Laden: Telling you that those two guys dislike Bush would be an understatement. However, their messages probably ended up helping Bush more than hurting him. I like Moore's movies because they are entertaining, but unlike the left-wingers, I find his movies highly biased. What Fahrenheit 9/11 did was it ended up causing Bush supporters to work harder to get Bush fans to vote. It's the same thing with the Bin Laden message before the election. Most Americans hate Bin Laden so why does he believe that Americans will listen to him? If he came out and told the Americans to drink milk on Mondays, most Americans will stop drinking milk on Mondays just to spite him.
4. Democrats relied too much on minority voters: Minorities tend to vote Democrat but Democrats didn't realize that minorities can be religious as well and the religious tend to vote Republican. The Republicans pushed the gay marriage and abortion issues to successfully split the minority votes. Why do you think that 44% of Hispanics voted for Bush? Kerry realized this and pushed the fact that he is a Catholic but that fall short of Bush and him pushing the religious agenda for the past four years.
5. Democrats discounting the gun owner voters: There is a good reason why the 2nd Amendment has not be abolished; many Americans own guns or believe that they should have the right to own a gun. (BTW, commander-in-chief for the National Guard is still the President, thus making them more like a federal troop than state militia). Kerry knew about this and pointed out numerous times that he's also a hunter and he'll never take the guns away. However, his voting records betray him and the Bush camp used it to win the votes of the gun owners.
6. Democrats pushed the draft issue: Another issue pushed by the left-wingers was the draft, when only draft bill presented so far was by a democrat and only one other democrat voted for it. Now with Bush reelected, where's the draft? Do the left-wingers honestly believe that most Republicans and Democrats will cast a career ending vote for a draft bill even if one makes it to the floor?
I stayed up on the election night to track the results and the exit polls in general seemed to give Bush an edge so I really wasn't surprised that he ended up winning and Kerry conceding rather early. I'm pretty sure that there were miscounted votes and other voting difficulties but I'm pretty sure those issues exis
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This is the whole problem. Flawed election, and then everyone says "Well, Thank goodness that's over. We can stop thinking about it." Then they're all completely suprised when it happens four years later.
"But if the economy continues to improve over the next 4 years and the war in Iraq is concluded the Democrats major issues will have gone away."
If everything is better then all is well.
But, I think you'll find Democrats having a hard time beliving that America's troops will be back home in four years and our economy will be back on it's feet. (Remember National Debt == Future Taxes) But if it does happen, if things do get better, if the national debt goes down, if we got back the freedoms we lost right after 9/11, and if we bring our troops home (alive), all over the next four years, are you suggesting the democrats in general will be unhappy?
Don't be silly. If Bush and the Republican congress can really make this country a better place, then Yay! Four more years! We just don't think he can do it. He certainly didn't with his first four.
We're not voting for prom queen here. We're voteing for who we think can make a diference.
I suspect that if the exit pollers gave the true results, you'd have had the networks reporting that "None of your fucking business" held a huge lead.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Who the hell cares if Bush or anyone else tried to get out of being thrown into the slaughter pit that was Vietnam. Bush dodged the draft by joining the reserves and doing everything in his power to get out. I don't see a damn thing wrong with that. I would have done the exact same thing. If I couldn't have gotten the family doctor to find an excuse for me to not get FORCED by the government to go fight in a war I didn't want to fight in, I would have merrily joined the reserves and then done everything to keep from being shipped out.
The political environment is obsessed with one-upping each other with stupid minor political victories. For a politician, a single slip of the tongue or off handed comment that any human would make could be the end of their career. This dumb shit about who tried to dodge what or who said what after they got back is fucking childish and completely irrelevant to real issues.
Kerry came back from his four month tour in Vietnam a left wing nut who wanted to freeze the nuclear arms build up leaving the Soviet Union with the advantage. Bush did just about everything to get out of being shot at, and in the ended succeeded.
Who the fuck cares? They were both CHILDREN. You are talking about two boys who were not old enough to fucking drink. Who gives a shit if Kerry jumped off the left end of the pool and Bush ran away? Hell, I know people who grew up in the 70's that were self declared communist who stuffed every drug into their body they could find, and who are now soccer moms and hold management positions in corporations. No one would dig up their childhood to find all the dumb shit they did before they were men.
Who Bush and Kerry were as CHILDREN is utterly irrelevant. There are a lot of good reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry. I could make a big list for both of them. No where on that list would I bother to mention what they did 40 years ago when they were.
Maybe the US is becoming complacent to democracy. The Ukraine hasn't been free for that long and so its people know what the alternative is like, and will fight for it. To be honest, from the outside, it seems a lot of people in the US and many other democratic countries just don't care...
I think the issue of Bush being a draft-dodger comes to the forefront when he sends *other* people's children to war.
To force others to fight for your country when you were not willing to is hypocrisy, and it's relevant to know that about one's president.
I think you miss the point entirely. Draft dodgers elected to their position have the right to send a volunteer army arm into war. The difference between Iraq and Vietnam, and this is a stark difference, is that the army fighting in Iraq is made up of men and woman who volunteered to fight in the US armed services. They made a conscious choice to their life to whatever endeavor that the US puts them too. In this case, the congress gave the president the power to go to war, and the president used it. The system worked like it was supposed to. You might not like the outcome. Hell, I don't like the outcome, but the simple fact of the matter is that Iraq is a far cry from being anything like Vietnam so long as it is fought with a volunteer army.
The draft is a disgusting practice. I can't think of anything more revolting then a nation demanding that its citizens surrender their lives against their will. I don't care what the cause is. If the cause is so good and so great, they will do it willingly. If Bush or Kerry dodged the draft or came back to speak against it, good for them. Decrying this disgusting practice or dodging it all together - especially when they are still CHILDREN - doesn't cause me to lose any sleep. If Bush wanted to reinstate the draft, you would certainly have flimsy, but at least credible argument, if you utterly ignoring that you are judging the actions of someone who was just barely a man, some 30 years after the fact.
Dredging up what those two did as children when the government was using violence against its own populace to compel them to go to war is stupid and childish political banter. There are a lot of reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry, but none of those reasons have anything to do with what either one of those children did in Vietnam