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Does Voting Technology Affect Election Outcomes?
l2718 writes "Two
economists have just posted a paper online, showing a small correlation between counties' use of paperless electronic voting systems and voting results in the recent presidential election (after controlling for other factors). They found no evidence for systematic fraud by testing several potential indicators. Rather, the voting method seems to affect the relative turnout of different voter demographies. Thanks to Election Law Blog for the pointer."
To me it sounds like a case of, "lets try out the cool new tech." I say give it a few years, and voter apathy will return.
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
When your electoral system discards 49% of the votes in the case of a 2 party election. Or worse, discards 64% of votes in a 3 party election, as just happened in the UK. The Labour party was returned to power with just 36% of the vote.
Deleted
Rather, the voting method seems to affect the relative turnout of different voter demographies. Meaning: more /.ers who couldn't vote with a lever due to lack of muscle mass could now vote with the added bonus of it being on a computer!
I tried voting for John Kerry, but everytime I pushed the button, my voting terminal would blue screen
There is no sig
And the people vote as the people would vote, and the new machines are actually recording true results, as opposed to what so many alarmists would have us think?
More like:
Two economists are *selling* a paper online (for $5).
After the fiasco in 2000, I looked into the numbers, and it seemed to be that a good portion of the difference in the number of counted votes is made up by spoiled ballots.
Different voting methods have different methods of error. In fact, this is enough to throw an election to one side or the other. I havn't done the numbers for 2004, but I suspect they're somewhat similar.
To add on to that, the ruling for Bush v. Gore, in all reality, should have overturned practically ever election nationwide, as the jdugement that reducing the margin of error for some districts would cause an Equal Protection violation...
The different margin of errors cause that in the FIRST place. At least if the Surpreme Court was honest, they would have made it a precident, and forced the nation to clean (Read, Standardize) up the electoral system.
And it isn't worth the $5 to get the material if I cannot post it here.
And they're looking at touch-screen tech and talking about paper-less machines.
It is possible to have touch-screen tech and a paper trail.
Doesn't it strike you as absolutely breathtaking that (in America) machines like this could even exist?
Paperless designs violate absolutely basic, shockingly obvious, bedrock principles of security. There is a problem simply because I often don't have the vocabulary or metaphors to express to a disinterested layman how wrong a paperless voting machine is. It's like building a bank vault to hold the most valuable thing in the entire world, and refusing to include a lock for the door.
I frankly do not care if the study didn't show malfeasance _or_ some esoteric demographic effect this time. These machines need to go. And all the people who built them, approved them, and paid for them, need to be investigated.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." -- Joseph Stalin I don't think it's an issue of technology but how it is applied. Without accountability, there's no difference.
The Diebold voting machine. Is there any evidence that these machines went haywire on Tuesday? Nationally, there were more than 1,100 reports of electronic voting machine malfunctions. A few examples:
In Broward County, Florida, election workers were shocked to discover that their shiny new machines were counting backwards. "Tallies should go up as more votes are counted," according to this report. "That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."
In Franklin County, Ohio, electronic voting machines gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B," according to this report. "Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did not vote for president."
In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283 extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software equipment," according to this report, "had downloaded voting information from nine of the county's 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were added, the precinct totals were added a second time. An override, like those occurring when one attempts to save a computer file that already exists, is supposed to prevent double counting, but did not function correctly."
In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500 votes may be lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."
In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, the electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."
In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra votes," according to this report, "have been tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals. Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the Papillion City Council. The difference between victory and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin says, 'When I went in to work the next day and saw that 3,342 people had shown up to vote in our ward, I thought something's not right.' He's right. There are not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward. For some reason, some votes were counted twice." Stories like this have been popping up in many of the states that put these touch-screen voting machines to use. Beyond these reports are the folks who attempted to vote for one candidate and saw the machine give their vote to the other candidate. Sometimes, the flawed machines were taken off-line, and sometimes they were not. As for the reports above, the mistakes described were caught and corrected. How many mistakes made by these machines were not caught, were not corrected, and have now become part of the record?
So certain groups (i.e. Democrats) vote less on touch screen machines? If someone was shaving Democrat votes on those machines, wouldn't the results be the same?
We'll never know because there is NO AUDIT TRAIL.
The system is broken and will not be fixed until we have voter verified paper ballots.
The larger problem is far deeper than this. In America, and in the UK the majority of voters simply don't matter in the first place.
You see, there are these things called safe seats, or safe states I suppose in the US. These safe seats and safe states can pretty much be ignored by all, allowing them to concentrate on seats/states which could potentially switch allegiance.
Deleted
I'm in the UK and personally I wouldn't trust the current system or anyone based on machines. I live in a small village an hours journey by train from London, so election comes and to vote you take a small card (with just your name and address and a 3 digit number on it) to the town hall. They go "are you this person?" you go "yes", they hand you the papers and you walk into a little wooden box and vote... that's it... how can we trust a system so simple and easy to defraud with something as simple as stealing a peice of paper.
Machines wouldn't be any more difficult to trick since the same sort of system would apply.
So no, I don't think technology will help at all, the system is far too simple as it is. People can break it now and the only difference if we use machines is we can have errors or crashs which voids all former votes.
So no technology doesn't solve anything int his case, it just makes more problems.
I like muppets.
I'm glad to see people are actually talking about this. Since looking into this subject before election 2004, I've found few people who would even keep an open mind on the subject. Many people will just glaze over if you mention that neo-con controlled companies like dieb0ld and sequia (sp?) might have some discrepancies in their secret proprietary software that determines the outcome of our "elections". People prefer to believe that those damn "bible belt values folks" elected bush.
In my oppinion, since there have been elections, there has been fraud. It's so much easier these days with these new machines though.....also having complete control over the media to surpress any investigative reporting into fraud is a must.
The linked site blackbox voting is the only site i've seen that is really trying to have this discussion. It may be too late to save the good ol' US of A......hang on for the ride....it should be interesting.
...does voting affect election outcomes?
(which is how I read that headline the first time)
Under TECK, constituents contact their local office and, with call-back or in-person authentication, vote for bills and/or proxy their votes for bills before congress or state legislatures. Their representative is elected on the Open Proxy Party's political platform which has one plank: Their representative will vote the way the constituents say via their open proxies.
TECK is the seed technology for what is to become the US third-party that succeeds in dramatically decentralizing, reducing and changing politics for the better:
The Open Proxy Party.
The Open Proxy Party's honesty is assured in the most obvious manner imaginable: everyone can see how everyone is voting at any point in time. The current votes and proxies are published on a web page generated by an open-source computer program. Currently this program consists of around 120 lines of Perl code (not counting preformatted text like this) to tally and present the proxies for the public.
Electoral corruption is an opportunity for Open Proxy candidates to win against incumbents. Electoral corruption has alienated the vast majority of the voters from the political process. With foreign labor displacing hundreds of thousands of middle aged technical workers in the United States, who have now redispersed to lower-cost-of-living districts, there is a pool of potential candidates who are more than capable of operating the TECK websites, more than motivated to clean up the electoral process and more than available to work for the modest salaries paid to representatives in State legislatures. Moreover, the majority of voters are more than ready for a reform of the political process.
Installation
Just for the heck of it you might have a campaign kick-off party and invite all the un/der-employed computer people you can find to join the fun of doing the TECK installation. An under-employed live band with pot-luck can't hurt either and will keep expenses down.
You may want to send your guests home with a campaign statement along the following lines:
Seastead this.
I admit that I didn't read their whole study, since it's not available without paying them, but it seems that in order to assert that the electronic voting machines had an impact on an election, you need to have the same election both with and without electronic voting machines. I mean, you could compare it with last presidential election, but that was an entirely different situation, with different candidates and priorities. Or, you could compare electronic counties with paper counties, but come on, they're different places. This study doesn't seem terribly reliable, and it's probably mostly an attempt to cash in on the desire for a "scientific" answer to a question we all want answered.
IIRC the UK and US are the only two countries (there may be one other) that still use the "first past the post" system - its rediculous.
In the UK Labour said they would fix the voting system in 1997. Now they are saying that they have fulfilled that promise because they use proportional representation in various regional and EU elections, but the election that really matters, the one for Westminster, is still in the dark ages.
The Independent newspaper is pushing the issue, see this article.
"If irregularities did take place, they would be most likely in counties that could potentially affect statewide election totals, or in counties where election officials had incentives to affect the results. Contrary to this prediction, we find no evidence that touch-screen voting had a larger effect in swing states, or in states with a Republican Secretary of State."
What if "irregularities" took place in lots of places, all of which favored Bush (by their own results)? That would include the more highly "incented" counties, and others, valuable for their masking effect. Of course, they can't analyze the electronic voting data itself for fraud, because faked data is undetectable in these trivially rewritable records, not to mention the many ways to record a different vote from that indicated by the voter - without a trace.
A scientific analysis would not have such holes in such a definitive statement discounting fraud. And honest people don't refer to vote fraud as "irregularities". States are paying lots of money to (Republican owned cartel) voting machine companies. I'd like to see some analysis of how these economists benefit from their "no fault" conclusions.
--
make install -not war
That's exactly right, in Soviet Russia the voting results (from the last election) affects voting technology (Diebold).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
If anything, that perhaps there may not have been any fraud in the last election. Do we know this for certain? No. All they have are statistics. Does this mean that we should embrace a paperless vote, especially one that doesn't provide any means of verification/audit?? HELL no. This is something that requires a great deal of care- NOT the kind that we've seen exercised by the likes of Diebold. Knowing how the votes are processed is not an option- it should be public information, and it should be mandated by law. There are some things that are simply beyond the scope of "trade secrets".
Well, electronic voting may not be perfect, but what's the alternative? Strange ladies lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!
Sniper's Motto: One shot, One kill- If you run, you'll only die tired.
There is another huge difference between machines and paper, and that's the way the votes are tabulated.
With machine counting, you place your trust in an individual or small group of individuals (i.e. those programming and running the machines) With only a few people responsible for the count, one person can affect a LOT of votes.
With hand counting, you place your trust in dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individuals. In this case, one person cannot affect nearly as many votes. This makes the count more secure and reliable. By having many people count the votes and watch each other count the votes, the opportunity for mass fraud is diminished -- no one person ever has control of enough votes to affect the results.
You have multiple indicators that fraud occured in your latest elections. You have multiple reports of people giving evidence that they know that there was software written to defraud the vote. You have multiple bizarre case of obvious 'errors'
AND
You have no way at all to check or confirm either vote totals, or the software that creates it.
AND
You have compelling evidence that your government lied to you in order to go to war, with major media conivance. Your media still lies to you. Distracts you with drivelNews, and avoids subjects that might drive you toward action. Your media is so filled with irrelevant feces that the two most trustable media sources are comedians.
And you can discuss, third party reports, that say "Probably everything is ok, don't worry."
Many of your parents died or put their lives at risk to protect democracy. Millions died to stop fascism. And you are happy to let your democracy, the control of the largest, most destructive, most deadly, military ever created, the largest polluter, the largest economy,
fall into the hands other than your own.
Shame on you.
Why is Diebold still refusing to show the software of their voting machines to independent UN inspectors? Why is our government protecting Diebold? If they had nothing to hide they would gladly cooperate.
Electronic voting merely makes the screw ups either blatantly obvious (when they're noticed) or invisible (when they're not)
Using paper voting, ballots get lost, dissappeared, misplaced, etc.
SNAFU
Remember that paper that concluded it'd only require changing a couple of votes per machine to seriously skew election results? Don't you think that this already happens with paper ballots?
The problem with crunching numbers, is that we do not have perfect information, so all kinds of fudge factors and assumptions are employed. I'm not even sure wtf their conclusion is?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
ok, let's say you don't like and or trust voting machines, so perhaps you don't vote
meanwhile the less educated, less technical and less thoughtful people, who see only the convenience, vote in greater numbers
this could shift the outcome to candidates, and parties, who directly appeal to the shallow and more popular issues, directly leading to a shallow, populist government
Words to men, as air to birds.
Put honest data in, get honest data out. Everyone believes this. I believed it too until I met a computer with a sense of humor. - Robert Heinlein
Have we reached a point, technologically speaking that is, where the major issues could actually be voted on by the people directly? Any issue not getting X direct votes would then go to Congress... Or something like that.
Perhaps the best issues to vote directly for might be general laws that govern how Congress actually works. IE no riders or "Congress may not vote on any issue that affects them and only them i.e. pay increases. Such issues must go to a popular vote (referendum?) While you are at it, have we reached a point, technologically speaking that is, where the major issues could actually be voted on by the people directly? Any issue not getting X direct votes would then go to Congress... Or something like that.
It is not as if you ever see what is done with your paper ballot. And if you want everyone's vote to be publicly visible, you open the door to bribery and intimidation.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
Is that it's difficult to perform large scale fraud, the kind that might effect the election result. Ok, so a few people might be able to get a couple of extra votes, it isn't going to change the result.
Of course this *all* goes out the window with postal ballots, a bloody stupid idea as the large scale postal voter fraud in Birminham shows.
Deleted
There is no reason why you cannot watch the ballot boxes, and the vote count.
With paper ballots, that is.
In theory, any citizen can watch the entire process.
It's 5 bucks to read the paper?
This paper isn't here, is it free to read anyplace else? All I see is an advertisement at the link. I wanted to see how they "analysed" blackbox voting without seeing source code or any *credible* audit trail.
One thing fascinating about the US elections is how results are announced as the election proceeds. I believe this has a larger effect on the elections than the technology. After all, why bet on a (clearly) losing horse?
What do you think?
That way, the individual can verify that his vote is printed correctly on the receipt.
...
He drops the receipt in a sealed ballot box.
The machine adds up the votes at the end of the day.
If there's any question about vote fraud
the machine's displayed total
is checked against
the machine's internal tape
which is checked against
the sealed ballot box.
In case of error, the ballots in the sealed box are the official record.
That way you get instant results, 100% verfication and the voter can individually confirm his/her vote.
The question of WHY it isn't being done like this reveals the corruption behind the current line of "voting" machines.
They DID find a correlation between electronic voting and Bush, but they dismissed it because they believe it couldn't have been done on such a broad scale (they think it would only have been done in a few districts in swing states).
That is a very poor reason to throw away statistical results.
After dismissing the idea of fraud, they went on to say they think it is a turnout problem. Having an electronic machine turn away voters seems just as unlikely of a theory.
Repeat after me class:
.
Correlation does not indicate causation
For example, there is a strong correlation between the IQ of somebody and the number of books they have on a bookshelf. I guess we'd all better go fill our shelves with books so our IQ's go up!
--James
part of the America First Party platform is that there should always be paper trail, and that e-voting is probably just altogether bad.
AFP is also pretty much the only conservative party in support of the working class, against illegal imigration, outsourcing, et cetera, instead of the interests of corporate internationalist oligarchs. Much better than stupid libertarian hippies anyway.
Oh come on.
Congress is already fighting against the interest of the population, as you admitted in your lead-in.
Congress is surely not in favor of fair voting -- that would be very last thing they'd want. Even people with morals don't like losing their jobs, so you know Congresspeople don't want that.
from the abstract:
We first show that there is a positive correlation between use of touch-screen voting and the level of electoral support for George Bush. This is true in models that compare the 2000-2004 changes in vote shares between adopting and non-adopting counties within a state, after controlling for income, demographic composition, and other factors. Although small, the effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some closely contested states. While on the surface this pattern would appear to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a closer examination suggests this interpretation is incorrect. If irregularities did take place, they would be most likely in counties that could potentially affect statewide election totals, or in counties where election officials had incentives to affect the results. Contrary to this prediction, we find no evidence that touch-screen voting had a larger effect in swing states, or in states with a Republican Secretary of State.
Um, folks, maybe the people who programmed the machines were a little more interested in winning a federal presidential election than who gets elected dogcatcher in Podunk, Ohio? There's a fallacious assumption here that the alleged fraudsters would have to be the local election officials. If you're going to hack the vote, you don't make it obvious--you do the absolute minimum required in order to sway the results your way.
Remain calm! All is well!
...everytime I pushed the button, my voting terminal would blue screen
In Longhorn the BSOD has been replaced by a RSOD to correctly reflect the party colors of the your corrected voting choice as determined by the system.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
You missed the point which is that you can do this without changing any laws.
Seastead this.
People are worried about some slightly anomolous results from voting machines...
Meanwhile, both the Democracts and Republicans have so gerrimandered voting districts as to give each party unending total control of entire areas. The Democrats and Republicans have created laws across the country which require that political party selection be open to everyone, so that they can send in their people to sabatoge smaller political parties like the Libertarians and the Greens (Democrats even openly organized and then claimed credit when they sabatoged Nadar's bid for the Green nomination). Democrats and Republicans openly call people, and ask them their names, and if they are going to vote in the next election, so that they have a list of who is not going to vote in a district in the next election. They then send their activists to vote in those districts as the people not voting. The Democrats and Republicans limit the amount of money that people can give to political parties, thereby ensuring that only candidates who are part of the two large parties are able to advertise.
If you voted for Democrats and Republicans, you knowingly and willingly voted for a party that commits widespread electorial fraud. Most of it is completly in the open and in public record, and the stuff that isn't is easy to see/confirm for yourself by volunteering for one of the big parties. You have to either be retarded, or completly brainwashed and blinded by your alegence to the Democrats or Republicans not to think those parties engage in vast widespread election fraud.
So, if you voted for Democrats or Republicans, shut up already. "Boohoo, the Republicans stole the election with electronic voting machines"... well, Democrats, I can see you can be a little upset that the other party was a lot more sophisticated that you were in their attemps at fraud... but neither the Democrats or Republicans can make any sort of moral arguement against the fraud of the other. Fraud acusations are something that Democrats and Republicans throw at each other when they have been beat at their own fraud game.
Blaming Diebold for shaving a half-percent in Ohio is stupid.
Blaming the DNC for selecting Edwards for the Veep slot, who could not and did not deliver any of the southern Swing States, rather than Graham, who has =never= lost an election in Florida, is far more reasonable. A Kerry-Graham ticket would have delivered Florida and maybe Arkansas and West Virginia, too, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Dean made one hell of a run during the primaries with a shoestring budget and virtually no influence on the national scene... hopefully he'll bring some of that savvy to the Democratic party and have them stop pushing unelectable candidates. (Please note, electable does not mean "right-wing." Lieberman didn't help Gore's cause at all in 2000.)
SoupIsGood Food
Without having an actual article to read, this entire thread is a waste of space. We can already see that the comments have yet again degenerated into a series of back-and-forth unsubstantiated claims, conspiracies and rumors (and denials of same) about the 2004 and/or 2000 elections.
Why did this story even get posted? The readers who actually care about getting at the facts and data behind the study can't get at that data to evaluate its veracity and determine what the actual conclusions are beyond the sketchy abstract that was linked.
who allocates the voting machines... and who has to wait in long lines...
o ting+machines
http://www.google.com/search?q=misallocation+of+v
I beg to differ...
m l
t m
A paper came out shortly after the Nov '04 election showing how exit poll data differend from official tallies in Florida, Ohio & Pennsylvania. Exit polls in all 3 states showed a Kerry win. Official results has Bush winning Florida & Ohio, and Kerry winning Pennsylvania by a much smaller margin than exit polling showed. Given the long, accurate-within-a-margin-of-error track record of exit polls, the probability of the exit polls being that wrong in all 3 states is 662,000 to 1.
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.ht
And who decides to not vote just because e-vote machines are in use? The method used to cast my vote at the polling station is the LAST thing on my mind when I go to vote.
Recently, UniLect had their e-vote machines decertified in Pennsylvania, thanks to the efforts of 1 citizen who coughed up $450 for a re-evaluation of their functionality. The results were pretty embarassing for UniLect, to say the least, and I'm baffled as to how this wasn't discovered BEFORE the election: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001364.htm
ES&S's explanation for the thousands of extra Bush votes counted by their machines in Franklin County, Ohio in Nov '04 was that the card reader they had hooked up their tabulation laptop was sending the data to the laptop too quickly for the laptop to process it, so some data got dropped. This is either a huge lie, or only demonstrates some magnificent incompetence in ES&S's development team: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001184.htm Either way, they should also have their e-vote machines decertified. Here's to hoping.
The Miama Herald also reported this week that their ES&S machines counted more votes than voters in Nov '04: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001390.htm
And the fact that Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc, sent a fundraising letter to Republicans in Ohio in 2003 saying that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" casts doubt on the legitimacy of all reported results from Diebold machines in Ohio in Nov '04.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.h
I realize that nothing that humans do is perfect, but these e-vote machines used in '04 show a definite trend towards "much less perfect" than in previous elections.
It shows that since democrats when presented with touch screens decide to vote republican.
Of course with no way to verify the actual votes neither papere actaull worthy of anything.
I'll admit to only having read the abstract, but I think they're missing the point. They compared the tendency to vote Republican with having touchscreens. I'd compare the tendency to have the vote say Republican and the exit poll say Democrat with having particular brands of touch screens. The paper-ballot states had dead-on exit polls; the hotly contested states with Diebold had very large pro-Republican variations. To me, that's the killer info. [Note: I don't think this needed to be a large or powerful conspiracy, I'm more than willing to believe it was a "Lone Gunman" ]
More on the parent's topic, here (US) we usually call that "IRV" - Instant Runoff Voting - and we're using it in some local elections.
http://www.fairvote.org/index.php?page=19
And in response to one of the sibling posts, I strongly believe it does make a difference. Not in how much somebody can "game the system", but on how much the two parties matter - it gives a mostly fair shake to a third party candidate. Politicians here vote along party lines with reckless disregard to what they think about issues - like in the recent Bolton stuff. Because the parties have all the control.
I'd rate the partisan stranglehold as the top problem in US politics today.
I'd rate the elimination of most journalistic integrity from the popular media second.
I'd rate the ability of corporations to outvote citizens third. This is partly weak campaign finance laws and partly citizen apathy.
I believe that if we fixed these three problems most of the details would start to fix themselves.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
But, why are we taking advice from economists on election fraud? I could understand statisticians, sociologists, or constitutional scholars. But, economists?
No, I'm not a real election expert. But, I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night!
Now, for the freepers on here that like to take every situation that isn't an outright and total failure for their gods and declare victory: There is more evidence than just these guys that election fraud took place in 2000, 2002, and 2004. But, if you are that way anyway, nothing I say or post or link will convince you...unless it's about the 2004 Washington Mayor's Race.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Yippee. There's a reason why we have a representative republic and not a phone-a-vote democracy.
/not/ need the direct supervision of a UN supremo in the former Yugoslav republic, and see if you find people who even remember who Mladic and Karazdic are.
It'd be rather unlikely to get a remotely reasonable foreign policy from the masses, for instance, considering how improbable it would be that they'd be informed about the topics at hand. Go ask random people walking on the street about what the US or NATO should be doing about the continued failure to apprehend General Mladic or to form governments that do
For that matter, go ask people about whether we should be extraditing Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, or perhaps Cuba. That's not an unfair question; it's current news, that's made it to the front page of the NYT (so it's not really obscure), that goes to the question of the US's treatment of former CIA assets who also happen to be terrorists and whether or not the US is willing to sacrifice a former asset and anti-Castro partisan to the notional War on Terrorism. If you're asking somebody who's not, say, a Cuban exile, it wouldn't surprise me if the response was confusion.
Even more simply, most people aren't very interested in following the economic ramifications of, say, agricultural subsidies and won't have such theories to fall back on if you ask them to decide.
On the other hand, legislators get placed on committees and have staffs so in theory they can and should dedicate nontrivial attention to following such issues and making informed decisions. Of course, sometimes they're irresponsible bastards. It's the citizens' responsibility to toss them out, then.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I can't believe no one is stating the obvious. Those voting Democrat are too stupid and uneducated to use paperless electronic voting systems.
(Whoever mods this as a troll first gets a cookie.)
Another "paper" by a so-called non-partisan institution that get's the majority of its funding from right-wing philantropy foundations. Bradley, Scaife, Olin-all underwriting the NBER. And surprise, surprise, they didn't find anything amiss with the 2004 elections, despite evidence to the contrary.
And now there's some unexplained correlation shown to slightly favor Bush.
Don't get whiplash watching those original supporters suddenly flip-flop on their support!
-MrLogic
Come on, you didn't even bother to read the post.
Seastead this.
Of course it does, as this dramatized voting session will indicate:
.5 vote credit. Those with H1B visas please insert your cash contribution into the bill acceptor below. Don't forget to take your receipt.
... we already know how you really wanted to vote anyway.
Welcome, Citizen!
The new DIEBOLD MARK IV VOTER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM is online and ready to take your order, uh, vote. Green card holders please insert your card to receive your free
Press the button next to the candidate of your choice. If you don't see a button next to the desired candidate, don't worry
A. Touch here to vote for John Kerry and a substantial tax increase, or
B. Touch here to vote for George Bush and receive a free Domino's pizza and two-liter bottle of Coke.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Looked into what number? What does this mean "...a good portion of the difference in the number of counted votes is made up by spoiled ballots."? The number of votes counted by what or whom?
"Different voting methods have different methods of error. In fact, this is enough to throw an election to one side or the other." In what "fact" do you base this on. Do you have any useful facts or links to facts for us to judge your statement with?
What do you mean by "if the Surpreme Court was honest" and "...[force] the nation to clean...up the electoral system." How were they dishonest and how can they force a change to a system that is clearly defined in the Constitution? Only the States can change the Constitution, not the Supreme Court.
There may be reasonable ideas in the post but it's just too sloppy and misleading to be considered "insightful".
I'm not sure why. But that's what they say in the good old USA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh wait, that is what happened. They got caught in Washington state. Nobody cares.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I also recall a reanalysis of the exit poll data.
I seems something like 80% of respondents were female.
Eather the pollsters were horney slashdotters or they were deliberatly trying to skew their results.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... and statistics.
Not to say there was, but its very hard to prove (from a scientific standpoint) something did not occur (or does not exist).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Growing trend, so there's probably more post-mortem analyses available from other nations' experiences.
0 9-7337_3-5387540.html
http://news.com.com/Global+lessons+in+e-voting/20
Of some tangential relevance, the Carter Center's report on the Venezuelan recall vote, which involved e-voting machines that produced paper receipts for verification:
http://cartercenter.org/doc1801.htm
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I'm not sure what this means--how in the heck could the voting method affect the relative turnout?
Do people really think this way?
A much more likely explanation: some voting methods allow for more people to vote (faster throughput) and--if they are disproportionately deployed with respect to precinct demographics--you see what looks like a bias in voter turnout but really is election-rigging via selective resource allocation.The people didn't stay home based on the voting method--they turned out, but they saw the long lines (which were caused by the voting method) and decided they they didn't have time to vote. In several races (e.g. WA Gov, OH Pres), well crafted manipulation of this effect would have been enough to turn the race.
--MarkusQ
The problem is, we aren't as worried about error as we are about fraud or other abuse of the system. Passwords (or any system of authentication) make the process slightly more complex and thus (by your reasoning) increase the error rate. But they are worth it because they reduce the chance of unathorized persons abusing the system.
Would you use an ATM that didn't require a PIN (or, for that matter, a card)? Suppose you could just walk up to it, enter your name, and withdraw money from your account. Simple, and much less chance of error, right?
What amazes me is that people realize that a bad guy would go to considerable length to be able to filch a few hundred dollars out of their bank accounts, or even to wrest control of some third world bannana republic, but very few people accept that somebody might want to exercise undue influence over the richest and most powerful nation in the world. I guess you'd have to be some sort of conspiracy theory nut job to think that control of the US would be a prize worth cheating a little bit for.
--MarkusQ
If it's no longer a democraracy, if we cannot trust that our votes are counted as cast, why are we still paying taxes? Oh, right, those nasty jackbooted thugs at the IRS.
It's not up to voters to prove elections dishonest, it's up to elections officials to prove elections honest, else the citizenry is likely to stop voting (and paying taxes).
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
That is the guarantee.Again, you're confusing the act of marking a "secret" ballot with the process of counting the votes.
Other than the initial marking of the ballot (the "secret" part), the entire process can be viewed by any citizen.
And each political party has its own representatives present to do just that.
From the comments, it seems that few have access to the SSRN papers via university subscription. The following are snippets of the paper which I feel are important. Much of the paper is a discussion of the econometric models the authors built. I never studied econometrics so I can't comment on those. No doubt those are important; I would be interested to hear what others thought about those models.
The authors investigate "whether voting technology has a differential impact on the turnout rates of different subgroups..[and if] certain subgroups of voters---for example, minorities---are more or less likely to turn out when balloting is conducted with touch screen machinery, or if their vote is more or less likely to be counted as valid, there could be an effect on election outcomes."(p.15)
They discuss some possible causes for a differential in use: Finally, they reach some conclusions on the use of electronic voting and its adoption in strategic states:The context in which you use it seems to indicate that you do not.I think you also have a problem with the word "cast".
Someone counts a ballot with a vote for Gore.
And you still claim there is a problem.
Either you don't know what you're talking about or you don't know the meaning of the words you are using to express it.
Either way, buh bye!
So you're saying the outcome of proxy voting is essentially the same as direct democracy.
But then you say: you still see overly cozy relationships between board members and executives, for instance, and it's very rare for a shareholder revolt to actually succeed. Hence boards, though nominally reflective of their shareholders, not infrequently act against shareholder interest in such things as approving excessive compensation for CEOs and similar positions.
So then you are saying that proxy voting has all the bad characteristics of representative voting and none of the good characteristics of participatory democracy.
Sorry, the bogometer just pegged.
Seastead this.
It would result in fewer errors if people could just get money from the cash machine without entering any info or carrying any cards, right?
Yeah, I know.
You make excellent points but you did leave off one item.
User interface testing.
We can test the system BEFORE the elections and work out the worst "bugs". We can use the dumbest people we can round up.
We can put together fully interactive context-sensitive help systems (voice/video/help screens).
We can make a system so easy that a 10 year old could use it (and we should be TESTING it with those 10 year olds).Are you ready for the real kicker?
Why isn't there a FEDERAL agency overseeing this issue? Where are the FEDERAL agents to review the code and hardware?
Vote for me! My first act will be to establish a FEDERAL department for electronic voting with completely Open Source software and open standards for hardware.
I'll make it so easy for every person in the US to vote me out of office.
I'll put together a system so that 4 years later, you can see me lose the election, state by state, hour by hour.
With no question that every vote is counted correctly.
At the time the US introduced their current presidential election system the country was almost too big for a central government. This is the major reason the US was created as a union of states. When the US was founded it could take weeks and months for information to travel from one end of the US to the other end. Because of this the US voters could not make a meaningful vote for president, as most voters would vote based on information several weeks old. And the US was created as a union of states, so it made sense to let the states each send a a number of electors to form an electoral college to elect the president.
Today communications delay in the US is measured in milliseconds instead of weeks. And the time it takes to travel across the nation is measured in hours instead of weeks. The US is no longer almost too big for a central government because of these technological advances.
Changing the US presidential election system to direct popular elections would make sense because of these technological advances. Instead of effectively having 50 weighted votes for president a direct election would have millions of equal votes for president. This IMHO would cause less waste of votes and better democracy in the US.
(Please note that I am not a US citizen. I do not want to tell the US people how to run their country. I am only trying to point out what I think is a technical problem in the US election system.)
Exit polls are almost always taken in large population centers, and do not necessary reflect the trends in voting across an entire state. It might be meaningful if you could compare the exit poll results at a certain polling station to the actual results at that station, but you can't.
In order to account for this, news agencies "normalize" their results once the election is in. This means that exit poll data is only useful to access what issues swung the election, and which demographics voted which way. They do not necessary reflect the actual outcome of the election. If you wanted to predict that, you would need to poll at every place of voting, and then normalize that with the number of people who voted at that station.
People should not have been surprised that the poll results differed from the election results. In a close election, this has a pretty good chance of happening. This is especially true when you consider that people living near large population centers (where most exit polls are taken) are more likely to vote democrat.
It is funny to read theories from Democrats about how the Reps and Big Business rigged the voting machines, and then read theories from Republicans about how the Dems and Big Media rigged the exit polls.
Quote of the Day: Diebold CEO promises Ohio to Bush
In a fall 2003 fundraising letter sent to Republicans, from Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell:
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
SICK SICK SICK SICK SICK SICK SICK SICK.
At that point those voting machines should have been IMMEDIATELY pulled from every place they were installed and we should have voted the old way.
But that wasn't the PLAN.
What we really need is www.approvalvoting.org
But we'll NEVER get it.
If this were really the country they make it out to be, then approval voting (and other options) would be explained to the people, and the method would be voted on by the people, (using the old paper trail method), and we would then have a superior method for selecting our leaders.
I'm in the UK and personally I wouldn't trust the current system or anyone based on machines.
:
Keep in mind that, when you vote, you don't vote for many things. I beg your correction on this, but, as I recall, for your May 5 election you voted only once: for your preferred candidate for Parliament. So marking an X in a box on a piece of paper and counting the papers is pretty easy.
In Nov. 2004 we in Columbus (Franklin County OH) voted for 57 different offices and issues
*President-VP
*Senator
*Congressman
*State Rep
*State Senator (in some part of the county)
*County Commissioner, Recorder, Coroner, Engineer, Clerk of Courts (other county offices I know I've forgotten)
*More County and Municipal Judges than you can safely shake a stick at
*One State Constitutional Amendment
*9 City of Columbus bond issues
*One City of Columbus referendum
*One Columbus School Tax levy
Admittedly, that was an unusually large election (The poll lines were about 2-3 hours because it took so long for voters to vote.)
At any rate, it's asking quite a lot for pollworkers to accurately count a ballot that large. Certain US Jursidctions have much smaller ballots (like in New England) and some voting precincts may be small enough to count the ballots regardless of the size of the individual ballot...but there were about 550,000 Franklin Countians who voted in Nov. 2004 (avg. 1100 per precinct), and once you multiply that by 57 ballot sections you get a lot of X's.
First they advocate "statistical sampling" instead of enumeration to perform each census. Plenty of hard evidence of Democrat vote tampering shows up all over the country over the course of two presidential elections, not to mention absentee ballots from servicementhat Democrats didn't want counted at all. Meanwhile, they scream at the top of their lungs about being "disenfranchized" (the motor voter bill and the butterfly ballot were their idea) and how Bush was "selected, not elected". Just when they decide to give their rhetoric a rest and focus on just how directionless their movement has become, here comes more statistically-derived proof for why Bush is eeeviilll. Well, keep it coming. It's worked really well so far.
In Australia, we have preferential voting. This means one can vote for some small party, and if they don't get in (likely), the vote still goes to the second preference so it isn't wasted.
This also benifits the small parties in two additional ways:
1. as they get to direct preferences (on their how to vote cards), bigger parties will make deals to get the preferences. This means the little parties get to have policy input on the big parties, proportial to the amount of primary votes they get (or the big parties think they will get).
2. The more votes they get, the more public election campaign funding they get for next time.
Will.
Never forget that.
If you think Bush is extreme you're crazy. Offhand, I'd say Bush's closest presidential equivalent is Kennedy - Kennedy cut taxes, put US troops in Vietnam, his CIA invaded Cuba by proxy, and Kennedy confronted the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
You'd have my vote. But then, I was always a sucker for statesmen. I'd rather have an honest man I disagreed with than a smarmy bastard that said everything I wanted to hear.
The question is, at what point will people be so fed up with the politicians that honesty will become the best policy again? In other words, am I alone in my disgust? I think not. I was at a small party last week where it came out that none of the Republicans present had voted for Bush, and none of the Democrats had voted for Kerry. The main reason? Nobody really liked or trusted either one of them, and nobody was all that confident that the system by which one of them got chosen wasn't rigged.
But they weren't all that concerned by the possibility that it was rigged because they didn't like either major party candidate.
So here's an idea that just might work (for either party). Run somebody honest and forthright, somebody who will speak his or her mind plainly and clearly regardless of what the day's audience wants to hear. And then see if people don't start caring about the honesty of the system.
Who knows, somebody that followed this course might get re-elected because people liked them, instead of because they were less dispicable than their opponent.
--MarkusQ
P.S. We could even dust off that old concept of "leadership"...
So what is the demographic for the Quake Voting System?
Examining the paper and its data, a significant correlation disappears when the data is analyzed at the precinct level instead of the county level. And the control variables are weak in comparison to studies by respected authors in this field.
This is a yawn. If the authors remove the copyright restrictions then I'll post the analysis on a web site.
The time: November 2000
The place: USA
The cable station: CNN
Dave:
Hi, I'm Dave Abrasive, CNN anchor for this shift. I'm with Judy StayUp. Today we're covering the ongoing election story in Florida. America is holding its breath, as Bush wants the election to stop while he's ahead, and Gore wants every possible Democratic vote counted. We take you now to Katherine Harris, Florida's Republican Secretary of State:
Katherine Harris:
Florida law mandates I certify the vote today, and I do. My hero, George W. Bush, has won by 300 votes. If the overseas ballots confirm Mr. Bush's lead, I will recertify the vote on Saturday. If the Democratic counties insist on hand counting every Gore vote, I'll consider counting those votes too (HaHaHa), and then make a decision.
Dave:
Well Judy, it looks like the election is still up in the air.
Judy:
Not if Katherine Harris can help it. Now we take you to Jeb Bush, George W's brother, and also governor of Florida. - Jeb?
Jeb Bush:
Hello, Judy, My brother and I are taking the position that counting ballots by hand is unconstitutional. We oppose counting any extra Gore votes. In fact, we want to invalidate all elections prior to 1964, when computers were first widely used to count votes. Computers are impartial and trustworthy. People are unpredictable, mischievous, subjective. It will be a better day when only computers vote.
Judy:
Well, I don't know about computers. Our computers gave Florida to Gore, then to Bush, and now say it's still undecided.
Jeb:
Well, we need a decision. We need to freeze the vote while my brother's ahead. We only have nine weeks before the inauguration, and George's cabinet will have to arrange housing in Washington. Also, the congressmen and senators who have been elected, and their staffs have a headstart on reserving moving vans. It's not fair that George W. has to wait. But he's still working hard as Governor. He's executing three more people this week, just to make Texas safe for the rich. We need a decision now.
Judy:
But how about voters in Palm Beach who are demanding a recount because they voted for Pat Buchanan by accident?
Jeb:
I've heard of the butterfly ballot and how it's making my brother a monarch. The reason the presidential ballot had to go to two pages is because there were so many candidates for President. If only we'd outlawed the Reform party, and the Green party, and all the others, we wouldn't have this problem.
Judy:
You mean, just a choice between tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dumber?
Jeb:
No, no, between Democan and Republicrat. Now you've got me all mixed up - between my brother and that smart-aleck nerd. People need a real choice, a red-blooded choice, someone whose head isn't full of numbers and facts and useless stuff. Someone who's a real American, who can talk with other real Americans at tailgate parties.
Judy:
Thanks, Jeb. We take you now to Warren Christopher, former Secretary of State for the Democrats. Warren?
Warren:
Hi, Judy. We Democrats take elections seriously. Every vote should be properly counted so that no voter loses his vote. In many counties, it all depends on the chad. You know the chad, don't you? In semi-pre-punched computer cards, it's the little piece that the voter pricks out to make his vote. Now, it's held by four corners to start with, and ideally the voter pricks it completely out. But if it's held by one, or two, or three corners after the voter has pricked it, the machines may think it hasn't been pricked at all. That's why the recount showed extra votes for both Bush and Gore. But Gore voters must be a l
did we really need people to do a study to figure this one out? florida? remember that? Gore should have been able to handle that situation, i mean he did invent the internet, couldn't he have just hacked in and changed some numbers? Skills like inventing the internet should denote the ability to use it properly.
-jÆ Nana korobi ya oki
I followed both your links, and they're wrong. Wrong enough to sound like vote-FUD to me.
IRV always gets the two most deserving candidates last and always picks the candidate most people this is somewhat positive. IRV also never requires any strategic voting - you just vote for everyone you want in the order you want on your ballot.
I think the author got bogged down in the details of how to count for IRV and got confused. Here's another way to think of it:
IRV will always pick the candidate the most people this is somewhat positive. This is because IRV will almost always pick the candidate that appears on the largest _number of ballots_. The order of votes only matters in elections where the top 2 candidates appeared on many of the same ballots as _each other_.
As long as you can make enough votes on the same ballot, this absolutely eliminates the spoiler effect - voters can always vote for both. MUCH more importantly to me, it eliminates the PERCIEVED spoiler effect where everbody doesn't vote for a third party candidate for fear of wasting their vote.
I'll give only one more short rebuttal detail: You have an example where you say the Republicans might loose an election to a Democrat because of a powerful Libertarian third party. And that certainly could happen. But if more people give higher votes to both the Democrat AND Libertarian parties, that Republican candidate surely deserves to lose.
Have you tried perhaps running some simulations to try to show what you mean?
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The problem with the system described is that it moves power from "elected representitives" (at least a little accountability) to the "national media" (absolutely no accountability whatsoever).
For example, the last "bad bill" was when they attached RealID to the Iraq funding bill. If the media predominately talked about the Iraq war, the bill would pass. If the media predominately talked about RealID, the bill would fail. (I'm not discussing the merits of either position, I'm just showing that which side is chosen by the public depends on how they are informed.)
Members of the public will not read the bills, and will vote however their favorite news star tells them to. This would not be a good thing...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
These guys look like they are paid for research.
How do you trust a study like this? And for $5 I do
not think it is worth the paper it is printed on.
The big push for tipping the last presidential election was the manipulation of voting registrations, suppressing turnout and not counting votes (provisional voting, etc.)
Most systems electronic or otherwise can be manipulated, especially absentee ballots, but even
so-called scanner systems are not verified and have county wide control points where the vote can be manipulated. Ramsey County Public Voting Test
This shaky system is layered on top of real manipulation, the gerrymandering of districts. So we have a system that is so full of holes, chokepoints and thumbs on the scales that it is a wonder it is accepted by the public
1 Job = 1 Vote. If you work 2 jobs then you get more votes.
Wow I missed the news. When did they capture him or did they come to some negotiation with him to turn himself in?
Besided it would not be Cuba he would be returned to because we don't have an extradition treaty with them.
I don't want to chuck out the $5 it will take for me to further take this article apart, but it seems that on the onset that the authors aren't very theory driven in their approach. As they beat in our heads over and over again in the social sciences "correlation does not equal causation", and just because the authors find some weak statistical relationship does not mean there is any causality in that relationship. I suspect that this relationship is spurious and merely happenstance, but would be interested in reading the whole article...
Actually, I think this means that both (major) parties try to get as close as possible to the median viewpoint without being identical. (Some argue as to whether they succeed on that last point.) Witness, for example, Kerry's expressed position on gay marriage. One can always divide a line so that half of the people are to the left and the other half to the right, and our political system seems very adept at drawing such a line. (Granted, the terms "left" and "right" are somewhat vague, and in the sense that I'm using them they do not necessarily conform to a strict "liberal"/"conservative" defintion.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
[nit]In fact, the correlation is 0.883933799, which is an outstandingly strong correlation. However, it does not appear to be a very linear relationship, which is what I assume is bothering you.[/pick] ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?