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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."
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
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
Changing a few electronic votes in every precinct with voting machines simply requires a corrupt programmer.
Changing a few paper votes in every precinct would require hundreds or thousands of corrupt poll workers.
Which is more likely?
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?
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
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!
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.
If the people who could fix an election were smart enough to do so, I'd imagine they'd be smart enough to rig the statistical outcome, as well. Tweak the right districts, steer the right voting rolls, etc. It isn't like knowledge of statistics rests solely in the people doing post-election analysis. Other people know about this stuff, too.
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.
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No, he's right. Exit polls are worthless because they only measure certian areas.
Look at a map of NY state by county for last election. If your exit pollers were in NYC or Albany, Kerry was winning. If your pollers were anywhere else in the state, the state would be going to bush.
It's true for all exit polls, they're only as useful as the data they cover. Since exit polls don't cover every voting location, they're only good for data at the locations they do cover.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.