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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
None of the counties you listed run Diebold touchscreens.
Broward County, FL: ES&S
Franklin County, OH: Danaher Control
Craven County, NC: ES&S
Carteret County, NC: Unilect
LaPorte County, IN: ES&S
Sarpy County, NE: ES&S
Nice FUD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The Urosevich brothers wrote the code for the ES&S and Diebold machines. Both are well known among ultra right wing and theocratic groups. Their association with the Christian Reconstructionists worry me. They are staunch supporters of bush and other ultra right wing politicians.
80% of the votes cast in the US is counted on machines they coded.
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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.
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.