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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.'"
That's the plain and simple of it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that they'll save money during an election, nor that they're anywhere close to being secure. Diebold's machines are black-box proprietary and it's essentially impossible to determine if someone (say, a bought-and-paid-for Diebold exec) has tampered with the results.
I used to work with county and city elections. No machines were used, just a supervisory staff of elections officials and a horde of volunteers. All voting locations would count each box of ballots twice, each time by a different person, and if the tallies weren't exact they'd go through the whole process again for that ballot box. This would continue until two separate individuals got the same count for the box.
Afterwards, all of the paper ballots would be boxed and stored in a secure location in case it became necessary to do a recount. And again, all recounts were done by box, twice, and any discrepancies meant starting over from scratch for that box.
This wasn't a terribly expensive way of doing things. The primary cost was in printing and mailing the ballots (for mail-ins). The elections sites themselves were run by volunteers, and the supervisory staff was already paid for. Fraud was rather difficult to pull off on the part of the volunteers and the entire process was 'open source'. Individual citizen groups could demand to have a representative sit in on the recounts, as could any political party that was running a candidate.
Why, exactly, are we dumping a system like this for Diebold machines? It makes no sense at all unless someone is specifically looking for a way to fuck up the elections in their favor, or in favor of whomever happens to be paying them off.
And don't tell me that this system can't be scaled; that's bullshit. The system I'm speaking of here was used on the city, county, and state level. If it can be done by one state, it can be scaled for any state, and it's the STATES who run the elections, not the federal government.
1034-6728
Part of the issue is privacy. If you can take the paper trail and use it to say "you" voted for candidate X, then you have violated privacy for that person.
I'm not saying that outweighs the fraud issue, rather, I am saying I can see their point.
Anonymity - for voting - is VERY highly valued here in the USA. People don't like it when other's know who they voted for.
What exactly is wrong with making a checkmark in a circle beside the name of a candidate one wishes to vote for, and then counting such votes manually? It's a system that works very well in countries like Ireland, Scotland, Great Britain, Canada, France, Switzerland, most of Germany, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Austria, Spain, most of Norway, Italy, and Greece, to name a few.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
That is a pile of crap. No matter how much trouble we have to go to, we should always manually count ballots in elections.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
A voting paper trail should have Four attributes.
First, votes are counted by counting the votes ON the paper, not in the machines that create the paper.
Secondly, you should have both machine readable and HUMAN readable votes on the same paper.
Third, Paper ballots should have an edge mark for each vote.
Four, Paper ballots should be of consistent weight, and size, and sturdy enough to stand recounting.
During recounts, only the human readable marks should be counted. (IE character scanners should be used).
Ballots should be sortable during recounts, in a fashion so that humans can rapidly verify the sorts by riffling stacks of ballots and eyeballing edge marks, and weighing ballots. (This will provide rapid verification that the machines are counting incorrectly).
A lot of election supervisors didn't, or allowed the company's techs to test & give the A-OK, or just followed the testing procedure that the company told them to do (i.e., didn't do full-spectrum blackbox testing). None of which is conducive to confidence in the systems.
There were documented cases of company techies patching the machines ON THE DAY of elections, and in some cases not telling the election officials (admitting only after they were caught). Even if they were doing only "normal" bug fixes, it _still_ doesn't give much confidence in the system. You can find lots of news articles about these cases, although the story didn't seem to gain much traction in the press (i.e., not enough people got pissed off about it).
You seem to be either really naive or disingenuous about the possibility of voter fraud. When the results of a election can cost the public hundreds billions of dollars of taxpayer money & a steady erosion of civil liberties, don't you think it's worth making our voting process as robust as possible?
Blogs and opinion columns do not exactly make for reliable sources, especially when you're trying to support insinuations of the rather serious charge of electon fraud.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Paper ballots are necessary, because we have generations of techniques, technology, and sensibilities for finding evidence of fraud in their post-election condition. But, of course, we also have generations of ways to defraud voters with them as props.
For example, Washington and Florida states each have recent laws to prevent paper ballot recounts from interfering with a successful fraud. And remember that "hanging chads", and Florida's destruction of confidence in presidential ballots, are made of paper. Our Florida lab also produced 2004 "optical scan" results often reversing Democratic county registration rates in favor of Bush, while (hardcopyless) touchscreens tracked with registration and exit poll numbers.
Paper is a link in a chain. Paper ballots might not be the weak link, but they have their own weaknesses, some as old as fire.
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make install -not war