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

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

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.