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."

Comments

Diebold Errors

[Bananatree3]

It seemsthat diebold, at least during the 2004 elections, had some SERIOUS mixups/malfunctions. To list a few: (According to this site)

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?

Re:Diebold Errors

[whitis]

I think this does a pretty good job of explaining why exit polls resulted in such a poor estimate of election results.

That report has been discredited.

Re:It hardly matters very much

[Thunderstruck]

49% of the votes? Last time I looked every one of my state's electoral votes was counted, just like every other state.

Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic

[EvanED]

The receipt isn't done because it eliminates the secret ballot, and is thus illegal.

Re:It hardly matters very much

[Colin Smith]

They got only 36% of the votes but won 55% of the seats in the parliament, they have a working majority. There is remarkably little correlation between how people vote and the makeup of the UK parliament.

e.g.

Labour, 36% votes, 55% seats
Tory, 33% votes, 30.5% seats.
Lib Dem, 22% votes, 9.5% seats
Others, 9% votes, 4.6% seats

Re:This is arranging deckchairs on the Titanic

[tinrobot]

Let me clarify.

ATM - Receipt.

Voting machine - voter verified paper ballot.

This means that, after the voter verifies the ballot, it gets tossed in a box just like any other paper ballot, eliminating any connection to the voter, but providing a paper record should a recount be required.

Besides, if Diebold cannot provide a proer audit trail for a recount, then maybe we should just go to pure paper ballots and eliminate the technology (and the problem) entirely.

Re:It hardly matters very much

[arodland]

Actually, I think it would be fairer to say that 70% of all eligible voters didn't vote for Bush, while 71% of all eligible voters didn't vote for Kerry.

much more compelling evidence to the contrary

[some_raisins]

I beg to differ...

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.htm l

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.ht m

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.

Re:much more compelling evidence to the contrary

[MoneyT]

What changed is that we looked at early exit polls rather than late exit polls. From a less biased (from your point of view) source than myself:

http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/do nkeyrising/archives/000940.php

Specifically:

Consider this. The unweighted--completely unweighted--data from the last four presidential elections before this year are as follows:

1988: Dukakis, 50.3; Bush, 49.7

1992: Clinton, 46; Bush, 33.2

1996: Clinton, 52.2; Dole, 37.5

2000: Gore, 48.5; Bush, 46.2

President Dukakis? Obviously, the unweighted data have always been highly problematic and--interestingly--have always shown a strong Democratic bias. Now these unweighted data from past years do not, admittedly, correspond to where we were in the weighting process on election night this year when the +3 Kerry poll hit the 'net--those data had presumably already been weighted to some extent to correct for factors 1. and 2.--but it is still food for thought.

And to follow up:

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/have_t he_exit_p.html

Exit polls have been wrong before, because as I stated and as those sites show, there are flaws to the methodology of exit polling. The reason that they eventualy become accurate as the day wears on is because of wieghting and adjusting for trends.

Furthermore, electronic machines are not new in 2004. They were used in 2000, and appeared in a siginificant section (about 7% of the voting populus) in 1996.

Re:It hardly matters very much

[MoneyT]

It doesn't have to work that way. A few states in the US split their electoral votes. There's no federal law saying that all the votes have to go to one candidate. Any law saying that is a state law.

Re:Cool Tech

[Anonymous Coward]

l2718 writes "Two economists have just posted a paper online

Why not link to the actual paper, rather than a pay-to-view site?

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~moretti/dre.pdf