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No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes
In the Washington state gubernatorial election, the hand recount has begun, and Snohomish County -- which had nearly 100K votes cast on Sequoia electronic voting machines -- won't have to print up and count them all by hand, as had been previously thought by county officials. Instead, they will print up the totals from each of the 937 machines, and compare those to the grand total. (The statewide hand recount is expected to complete before Christmas, modulo court challenges.)
Unless the printouts were done as each voter voted, there's no accountability. Of course printing out the total from the machine is going to give you the same total that the machine gave you.
There is no way to recount the electronic "votes"
stuff
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It's just a matter of how stupid/apathetic they think the voters are.
Hypothetical scenarios:
If the voters are stupid, then they'd print everything out and do a full manual recount.
If they are very stupid, then they'd do this.
If they are completely stupid, there wouldn't be a recount.
The end objective is to convince the voters that everything is fine and they can resume their normal programming.
...modulo court challenges.)
2/3 of Slashdot just had their eyes glaze over at the sight of weird computer speak.
The other 1/3 is still trying to figure out what the result of that function would be. Is it a function? What were the parameters again? Dammit.
Direct away from face when opening.
No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes
I never knew you couldn't count electronic votes by hand. Especially considering there is nothing to hold in the first place.
Unless all of the machines are just the equivalent to dummy terminals of some larger machine, each one kept a separate tally that had to be added up for the county.
They're just double-checking to see if the end total is correct.
We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes.
They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.
That's Monday...
Get off my launchpad!
woudnt it make sense to pick 10 machines at random(or something), and then do a hand count for each machine, and compare that to the electronic total? If they all match, than youre probably ok. THis is just stupid.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
so it isnt really a hand recount then, right ?
Not true, in nevada our electronic machines print out a paper reciept that they keep, so they could print out those results for proof. Not sure how many other places have this in place.
I can't believe its not butter!
Because they've made recounting the votes impossible (the "vote" is whatever the voter got to look at, which for most electronic voting machines is an ephemeral pattern of lights on a screen), they're recounting electronic copies of the votes instead - the honest people are just hoping the copies match the originals and the dishonest ones are hoping nobody calls them on the distinction.
Discussions about paper trails, auditing and such are for future elections. Only votes (not necessarily ballots) which have an origin which can be proven should be accepted. All others should be discarded. Without being able to prove the provenance of the "votes" it cannot proven that there was no monkey business. That's a lot of what having an open and fair election is about - proving there was no monkey business.
There are visible discrepancies between exit polls and poll results indicate that something is amiss and should be investigated.
Among several probelms, there seems to be a correlation between use of voting machines and skewed poll results as show by several investigations, including the Berkeley report. (Of interest for future reference, other analysis suggests a correlation between red counties and ClearChannel market dominance). Furthermore, the last few years of use have shown that the technology and methods used by the electronic voting machine companies that this little or no chance of preventing tampering nor of directly detecting tampering due to inherently badly designed systems. This was known prior to the election.
Such serious things should not be given the benefit of the doubt. The electoral college should overturn these irreproducable results and hold a second, paper-only election. It would have been both faster and cheaper to count them by hand like in Canada. Don't let it get so bad that it gets resolved by another civil war.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Well, if the machine gives a substantially different total than before, you've definitely got a problem that would matter! Using this a test for vote tampering is likely to have a very high false negative rate, but a very low false positve. Not massively useful, but not completely useless.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Let's say a person votes for candidate A, their screen shows candidate A, and the vote is recorded for candidate B. EVERY TIME you "recount" that machine, it's going to give you the wrong vote. Unless there's a printout that the voter can verify, and then place into a ballot box, ther IS NO REAL RECOUNT.
If every state had those machines, then I would not have a problem with electronic voting. Our machines in Orange County, CA do not have a paper receipt, so I for one voted on paper. Unfortunately, most people don't understand the issue enough to demand paper.
having lived in Snohomish County, my view point:
The Electronic voting machines, were terminals and each machine output a smart card and I turned in the smart card to the poll worker. You could take the record on the card and compare it to the record in the machine. But truly, then the issue becomes the integrity of the system, and I am a lot more concerned with Mail-in ballots and forgeries than i am with e-voting systems.
Because the trustworthyness of the machines which collect the votes and subtotal them is beyond doubt, right? What if they're really just KILLER ROBOTS FROM THE FUTURE?
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make install -not war
I note that pudge believes that "sanity" has scored one here, by not actually recounting the ballots, but jumping in somewhere arbitrarily in the counting chain that makes sense only as an artifact of the counting product, not the actions of voters. Who's keeping this score, pudge? Can anyone see the tally, or just people inside the party?
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make install -not war
Have a national biometrics database connected to your SSN, name, etc.
Require every voter to submit to a comprehensive biometrics exam and tag their vote with the data. Second, anyone who accesses the system to have any interaction with the results whatsoever has to submit to a biometrics scan that gets their DNA, finger prints and retina scan as well as name and all that. Do not allow mass deletion of any data without at least five third parties and the press observing the action and recording it for public record. Finally, only allow mass deletion of data from the vote database after the election is over.
The only way that voter fraud is going to be majorly cracked down on without draconian measures is to eliminate entirely voter anonymity and to arrest anyone caught try to allow it to happen. Too often voter fraud gets pushed under the rug because politicians are afraid of shrill, reactionary activists screaming "disenfranchisement." Who who would have thought that the Democrats represent the dead or the Republicans the democratic voters who are Republicans in their heart (a la this current debacle)?
One could easily argue that mass voter fraud should be legally regarded as coup d'etat, not a low-level, insignificant crime. Seriously, voter fraud should be one of our most severe crimes once it reaches a certain level. It is attempting to overthrow an elected government by means other than armed thugs entering the parliament/congress and declaring an end to democratic government.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!