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NYT Says Paperless Voting A Serious Problem
joshdick writes "In an editorial today, the NYTimes comes out strongly in favor of a paper trail for all elections, supporting a recent lobbying effort by Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to pass H.R. 550. 'Electronic voting has been rolled out nationwide without necessary safeguards. The machines' computers can be programmed to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another. There are also many ways hackers can break in to tamper with the count. Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form; such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.'"
The link to H.R. 550 is broken in the summary, but it can be seen here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Diebold was also a major bush campaign contributer...
"such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy."
Don't we live in a republic?
"A wolf's eyes can see into your soul"
My writing
Here's three links that support the parent:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.h
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Diebolds_politica
http://www.boalt.org/biplog/archive/000546.html
If you disagree with the parent, be a man and argue the point with him. Don't mod him as 'flamebait' merely because what he says makes you feel uncomfortable.
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Wasn't it Diebolds CEO that said he would do anything to make sure George W. Bush would win Ohio.
Yes, and here's the link.
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why did they suddenly begin making machines that had absolutely NO paper trail?
The initial reason was that they didn't make the machines. Diebold got into the voting machine business by buying Global Election Systems in January of 2002. So, throughout 2002 when they began their marketing effort, they were actually selling software and hardware that they didn't design.
So the answer to your question is... they didn't want to invest in re-engineering.
That may not have been the only reason, of course, and it always seemed to me that they protested too much. When customers began to demand a paper trail, why did they hold out so long? But there may not have been any ill intent. Per Hanlon's Razor, I prefer to presume incompetence rather than malice.
In any case, they now offer machines with a voter-verifiable paper trail. At least, that's what my state has supposedly decided to purchase from them. The news reports made a big deal about the paper trail.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Sorry, your pen story is false according to Snopes.
Here in Venezuela we had an electronic voting process recently, and the technology only added to the distrust.
In this case seeing is believing and the machines actually hide the physical vote. If you add the problems with the electors lists, as it happened in Florida and also in Venezuela, you end undermining the faith of the people in democracy and sowing the missrespect for the elected.
It was not clear here in Venezuela if the transmission of the data happened before or after the clossing of the process, if the transmission was unidirectional, what was transmitted and so on.
So, if you can not figure a system that can give confidence to anyone, you will end with a problem of the kind of Florida, but over the whole country.
So beware!
Electronic voting in other countries:
Australia uses open-source code for voting software. However, they don't require a paper ballot printout that goes to a locked box... so the software company that wrote the voting software says on their webpage that the voting system is still not trustworthy.
Brazil had computerized elections for their last election (of their current president, Lula). Paper backups were required, and Lula (unpopular with the US and corporations since he was a labor leader) won. However, after the election, a new federal law was passed in Brazil getting rid of the paper-trail mandate.
You need both open-source software (how complicated should it be to add 1 + 1 + 1.. etc...should this really be proprietary code??? no, not if it is doing what it should!!), and also you need printouts that get checked by the voter to go to a locked ballot box... that way if there needs to be a recount, votes you can trust (paper) are there to be counted.
I hope we change these electronic voting systems to make them more trustworthy. When I was in California I was part of an open-source software group (check Sourceforge) working to make software for US voting... but it needs to be accompanied by those paper ballots AND by voter education.
Regards,
Lori
The voter does NOT take the paper with him.
The paper is so the voter can verify who the machine says he voted for.
Then the paper vote is dropped in a sealed box.
If there is any question about anything, the paper ballots in the box are compared to the electronic record of the machine.
The voter does NOT take the paper with him.
The slate article even links to that snopes article. ..but you wouldn't notice, because you didn't even bother reading past the first few lines of the comment or TFA.
I'm in Canada and have voted every opportunity I've had....I don't get why voting seems to be so difficult in other so called democracies. What's the deal with punching holes in ballots, using machines, etc, etc.... The way we do it here is a person hands you a piece of paper with the candidates names on it, they cross your name off a list, you mark an X beside the one you want, and you drop it in a box. Later on someone counts up the votes. I've never even had to wait in line to vote once...then again I go in the middle of the day while everyone's at work...but even when busy the lines are no longer than a 5 minute wait.
Quick answer: the printed paper is shown to the voter before final casting for a visual confirmation check (make sure it says who they really voted for). After the voter confirms the paper receipt is cut off and falls into a big box of identical pieces of paper. No one can count backwards to see who voted for who.
It prints out a ballot that you deposit in a ballot box. It is not a cash regeister type record...
The article, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer begins with this quote:
There is no proof that any improprieties were committed, but the suggestion that the head of the company that makes vote-counting machines should not be making such biased comments in public is hardly a radical one.
Here's an idea - maybe the person who runs the company making vote-counting machines should be making public statements about how he's "committed to ensuring that the machines deliver an accurate count of the vote tallies", instead of such blatant political posturing.
No, O'Dell never made any public statements that he would engage in election fraud, but he did say that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio's Electoral votes to Bush. That is a bit more specific than saying he wanted to help Bush win in Ohio, and it is mostly the particular wording used that caused the uproar.
I am not saying that I think he knowingly engaged in election fraud (considering that Blackwell was both the Sec. of State of Ohio and the co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio, and he did more than his share of election "fixing", it's not like O'Dell needed to), but I am saying that having the head of the company pushing for a particular result could be perceived as encouraging underlings to take that as a more important goal than accuracy.
It's just a bad idea for people involved in vote-counting to have an obvious political agenda that could be perceived as being more important with their professional impartiality. I believe that harms the people's confidence in our electoral system, and by extension, harms our democracy,
Aparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening here in Washington (as in the Pacific Northwest, not DC). The Republican candidate finally gave up Monday on his lawsuit claiming that fraud determined the outcome of the extremely close governors race.
The vast majority of our voting is done on paper, and at least here in King County we use bubble-in ballots.
It doesn't scale very well, at least at the budget levels we've been willing to tolerate. It may scale if you're willing to pay skilled people to run and monitor it, but we don't do anything of the kind. Instead we pay people very little money to run polling stations (they're basically retirees who volunteer for a tiny amount of money), and they don't know what they're doing. In theory everyone who votes is supposed to be checked off on the registrar, but even that doesn't work (off by hundreds of votes here in KC, which is better than I'd expect.)
You also have to deal with:
1. Idiots. People simply can't read and follow basic instructions. They circle the candidates names, they black out all the bubbles _except_ for the person they want to vote for, you name it, they do it. And the Washington state constitution pretty reasonably says that you have to figure out what the voter wanted. If it's obvious to a human, then that's what you do, but it's sure not going to be obvious to a scantron.
2. Physical damage. In a very close race, you're going to get damage to the ballots. In the hand recount they found things like bugs squished in the right place to make it look like an overvote. What are you supposed to do there?
3. Other flavors of idiots. Basically, people who don't want to follow rules for voting, and will do whatever they think will be most confusing for the poor slob counting votes.
4. Illegal voters. Voters who lost the right to vote through a felony conviction, for example, but still voted. Huge issue here, and the Republican who lost the election claimed that we should throw out the votes of felons we could identify. (He had a specious formula worked out that basically claimed "felons vote for my opponent, so I really won!")
5. More physical problems. Absentee ballots stored but not counted. A tiny, tiny fraction of the votes, but unless you're willing to spend the money to have redundant checks built into the system you're going to have some guy stick a package of envelopes in the wrong place.
Really what we've got is a paper voting system that has a margin of error that was greater than the winning margin. 99.9% accuracy (which, amazingly enough, is what elections officials claim constantly around here) just isn't good enough in a really tight state race. Getting to 99.99999 is, shall we say, significantly more money than we've ever been willing to spend on elections.
I call bullshit. They were able to look at the precinct roster and see whether or not a voter had signed his name and thus received a ballot. They were not able to see how he voted. Go back and read the archived stories in the news if you don't believe me.
The only legal way to find out how a person voted is to ask him. The other methods involve removing a ballot from a sealed envelope, or watching over someone's shoulder as they vote. Both of which are crimes.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
So all this is really pointless, how about fighting for a proper democracy, then worry about counting votes when votes actually count. One person, one vote, how about that first?
DONT PANIC
Read Preserving Democracy - What Went Wrong in Ohio. " "We have found numerous, serious election irregularities . . . which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. . . . "In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."
Think about that for a moment. The person in charge of vote counting in Ohio was also running the Bush campaign.
I don't know how it works in your precinct, but everywhere I've voted, there is no mechanism for determining the order with which people vote....There are a few tables with volunteers and you sign your name in a booklet that has last names that begin with the same letter as yours. Once you are signed up, you proceed to a booth--whichever one is available next. There is no record as to the time that you signed in or any such information. You just sign next to your name and are approved. That being said, we use optical ballots in my current precinct and they are great....simple, machine readable, and also a paper trail. I wish more precincts would adopt that solution.
You want a paper trail, but you want that RETAINED at the voting both; NO copy should go to a voter.
Condorcet methods have their advantages, but they're somewhat vulnerable to strategic voting, and almost no one understands them. If you want a different system, use approval voting -- it's better, and much easier for Joe Voter to understand.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)