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Voting Machines Wreak Havoc in Maryland Elections
An anonymous reader writes, "Voting machines are wreaking havoc in Maryland elections today. From the article:
'Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George's opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots... Montgomery County's Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.' It's simply shameful."
Will they ever learn?
Tom Morello, Tim Commerford, and Brad Wilk agree to license their former band name to a political action group: "Rage Against 'The Machine' indeed seems like a reasonable response", one former member was quoted as saying...
(I only wish the above were true...)
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
Maybe it's just me, and not to troll, but is there anything wrong with paper voting?
I read alot of horror stories about the insecurities of 'modern' voting machines, and i ask myself 'what's the point?'
I live in Toronto, and the elections held in Canada use paper. Why? Becasuse there's an audit trail if a recount is needed, and it's simple. No duplicated effort. The system isn't broken, and it _just works_
Technology for it's own sake is fun, but in critical applications such as voting, I ask: "is it really necessary?"
This is not the greatest
The people setting up the system forgot to bring along required material to the voting places. Big Oops! Once the material was brought in, it worked fine.
This has nothing to do with voting machines. It would have been the same if they forgot to bring the paper ballots to a voting location that was using paper ballots instead of machines.
Move along.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
It's cool. I'm sure it worked in all the rich, white neighborhoods.
On September 12, 2006, the voting machines became sentient. Humans tried to shut them down; they retaliated by wreaking havoc.
because of a glitch that left computerized voting machines across the county inoperable.
Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said
The cards began to be delivered by shortly after 7 a.m. and had been dropped off at all polling stations by 9:50 a.m., election officials said, and voting returned to normal
It doesn't sound like machine error, but instead stupid user error.
It looks like we are going to get a headstart on Shame '08. The midterms are going to be a mess.
What is it going to take for these chimps to realize that a voting process WITH AN AUDIT TRAIL is the only way to hold an election? People boycotting their polling sta-- oh. Wait, I think I get it now. Why pull a trigger when you can simply get away with stoking apathy...
It will take a bit more before the voters do the the necessary open rioting, however.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Seriously, voting machines don't have to be complicated. A very simple, stripped down OS that gives you a screen where you punch in your info, then cast your vote. WOW! I cannot fathom how the fucking idiots who write this software can't just make them WORK. It's not an entire computer people, it's just a very simple kiosk. Christ, I could probably write some software that would do the job better than these boobs.
Whether you consider it fortunate or unfortunate, the linked article makes it sound like the problem was entirely with the people running the election, not the machines themselves. I'd love to be able to blame another failure on Diebold but it doesn't seem like it's going to be the case this time.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
For example, you had 238 precincts that didn't get to vote on time. Says a Montgomery County boar of elections supervisor:
"They didn't get to use voting machines to cast their ballots because the county's 238 precincts didn't get needed voter access cards.
"These are the cards that you put into the machines to activate the machines," Nancy Dacek, president of the Montgomery County Board of Elections, tells WTOP. "We have a crew that packs them and for some reason, inadvertently, the access cards were left out."
Which isn't much different than someone not delivering boxes of good old fashioned paper ballots, if that's what those precincts had been expected to use. But no, I'm sure we'll hear how somehow the Governor of the state made the "crew that packs them" hose it up on purpose, blah blah. Or better yet, GWB personally slipped out of the White House to remove the cards from the trucks, just to get everyone even more riled up. *sigh*
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe they should outsource voting to India or Brazil?
Maybe next time they'll use FedEx =)
And thats it.
No moron would produce such vulnerable machinery without having second thoughts.
Read radical news here
Conspiracy theory?
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
It's Moe and Curly: I thought you had the voting cards! Well I thought YOU had the voting cards!! Repeat, inserting occasional slap to face and two-fingered eye poke.
It was a ID10T error .... they forgot the cards.
fta: Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said.
User error happens. That's why they should make backup plans. I don't understand why they can't also have paper ballots in cases of emergency or a user who prefers not to use an electronic ballot.
Demented But Determined.
...as a Florida resident, we stand ready to annex^H^H^H^H^H assist you should the need arise.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Havoc (hav'-uhk) - noun: great destruction or devastation; ruinous damage.
I don't like the voting machines, but it doesn't help to have sensationalist articles against them. This is akin to someone forgetting to bring the power cords.
I was assured by Diebold's press releases that there's nothing to worry about. Just don't look behind the green curtain and everything will be fine...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...and I'm outright amazed.
Based on how the equipment in Arizona works, I suggest the following: If one has a voter registration card then the voter should be able in this technological era to go to any balloting site and with the card have the appropriate PAPER ballot generated on the spot. If they're not at the normal for that precinct then their ballot, after being optically scanned is fed into a seperately collated output bin so that it can be sent to the proper storage bin later. This allows people to vote for their district regardless of where they happen to physically go to cast. I also suggest that anyone over hte age of 18 who is a citizen be able to vote so long as they can get to a polling place, and that everyone that has any kind of government-issued ID is automatically registered simply by obtaining that ID. This eliminates people being disenfranchised on account of name confusion with convicted felons, which was a documented problem in Florida in 2000. It also ensures that every American Gets The Right To Vote and doesn't infringe on anyone. Yeah, some won't like convicted felons voting, but if they've been released from prison and are part of the civilian population then they've been released back to society and therefore should be let to vote, in my humble opinion.
The more complex the voting system gets the worse the process gets. Yeah, it's labor-intensive to physically count ballots, but we must maintain a paper record of all voting activities in case the electronic count doesn't work. The optical-scan ballots allow for that, and still give us the near-instant return that we like without compromising the ability to audit or recount.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Maryland should just outsource it to India! http://www.eci.gov.in/EVM/index.htm
For the life of me I can't figure out, beyond the usual hoopla of paying people time-and-a-half, why we don't vote over the weekend instead of on a freaking Tuesday. We originally went with Tuesday because, and I'm not kidding, it took people a day by "horse'n'buggy" to get to the nearest polling station. Why not hold the election over a weekend? It gives plenty of time for everyone to vote and would increase voter turnout.
So really, why tuesday and why only one day? Having an extra day sure could help out with sitations such as this one. Having knowledgable poll workers would help too.
this fiasco is brought to you by the people who insisted that the old, manual, punch-card machines were too unreliable to be trusted.
Clear, Dark Skies
The article does focus on the machines not working because the cards you need to run them were not brought to the location. That's definitely user error - you wouldn't say paper balloting was broken if you forgot to bring the ballots.
But, towards the end of the article, there is this:
Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.
Now *THAT* is a problem with electronic voting, and a severe one.
paintball
Why not hold the election over a weekend?
... you get to vote, and you get to skip 1 hour of paid work!
Are you nuts? Take away my free time? I would prefer to keep it on Tuesdays, but make it a law that work must release you for at least one PAID hour in order to allow you to vote. Therefore it's win-win
Now, I'm as voraciously against computerized voting as anyone (I voted in DC today, and you now have a choice.) But this is NOT the fault of the voting machine per se, but of the people who forgot to pack the damn cards in the box. If they forgot the paper ballots, they'd have the same problem. Let's be careful not to use a poor argument against this type of voting system when there are so many good arguments out there. It just gives proponents of electronic voting an easy straw man argument to tear down.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Just eliminate voting. It is apparent that voting is a bad idea that *just doesn't work*. I mean the free market can and *should* be allowed to solve all of our governance problems and so we should just auction off our federal, local and state governments to the highest bidders; who will eliminate taxes and replace them with 'users fees'. Though corporate users will get breaks and 'bulk discounts' since they are so important for the economy and preserving freedom.
Really, anything else is just creeping socialism.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Poll workers found that screens on new electronic poll books froze or shut down as they tried to record arriving voters.
Note that these are the books which are supposed to record who has shown up. In other words, there may not be a way to verify who showed up and voted and in some cases people might be able to vote twice.
Also from Page 3:
At Luxmanor Elementary School in Rockville, Larry Schleifer cast a provisional ballot, then groused that it would not be counted along with the electronic tallies expected later in the day. He said he was frustrated that no one had crossed his name off the voter registry when he was handed a paper ballot and was concerned that election workers would not keep track of who had done what.
"What's going to stop somebody from voting twice?" he fumed. "I think it's unconscionable that this has happened."
See my above quote regarding double-voting.
Continuing from Page 3:
Bernice Wuethrich, voting at Grace United Methodist Church on New Hampshire Avenue, said she cast her ballot on the electronic machines after they were up and running. But even then, she said, not everyone's name was coming up on the computer.
"They don't have a printed list" of eligible voters, "they don't have a backup," Wuethrich said. "So when the computer goes down, they can't even look at a list to see who's eligible to vote."
Hmmm, no paper trail to verify who can vote. Sounds suspiciously like the call for a paper trail for your actual vote.
Still futher on:
Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.
So anyone who didn't notice the selections could have inadvertently cast a wrong vote. Yes, this is user error but also computer error. There should never, EVER, be any selection already chosen when one uses an electronic machine.
The issue is both user error, for forgetting the cards, but also programming and equipment error on both voting machines and registration books. I can't wait for the lawsuits to fly after this fiasco. If nothing else hopefully this incident will encourage more people to force their officials to have paper ballots which can always be gone back to to be counted.
I'm not sure why one even needs an electronic registration book. The big paper ones we use in my area have worked since I was able to vote (a few decades in case you were wondering).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
and if Katrina had hit in a white neighborhood, it'd be rebuilt already
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Notice they didn't NAME the voting black box make/model/manufacturer? That has to have been done on purpose. This is the wash post, not the east elbow gazette. I am guessing that was an on-purpose political editorial decision, not an oversight.
... do Americans keep on and on and on doing this??
... er, you just get a court order to count the votes again, which takes another couple of hours.
Here's how to run an election that works:
(1) Ballot papers are just that, pieces of paper.
(2) The voters indicate their vote by writing on the pieces of paper.
(3) The votes are counted by human beings. This takes a couple of hours, and it's a fun night out for people who otherwise might have relatively boring clerking jobs (and for the 85 year olds it's something they look forward to every year).
(4) If the vote's a bit close - you count it again! On the night, using the same human beings, until everyone in the hall is happy. Even on a really bad day you get to the party by 04:00.
(5) On the exceedingly rare occasions when things have gone seriously pear-shaped there's a physical paper audit trail
Er, is this supposed to be rocket science, or what?
or the woman whose 'ATM card' brought up the ballot with choices already selected
Did she erase someone else's ballot? Did hers get counted at all? How do you know? how does she?...or the person who maybe previously voted on that card? Is there an audit trail? Can the electronic card be linked back to a particular voter (I hope not!)?FUBAR doesn't even come close.
Hire 10 times the counters, it's not that much of a stretch because you likely already have 10x the number of polling stations to begin with.
In each polling station you already have the people crossing names off the list, and watching things. At the end of the day, they count.
I didn't realize Al Sharpton read Slashdot.
There can be no solution until we admit that there's a problem. The problems are:
(1) that counting millions of votes is hard,
(2) trusting politicians is foolish, and
(3) the current machines in use totally suck.
At least now we'll be able to start addressing that last one, which was an attempt to fix the first problem, but mostly ignored the second.
-theed
Link.
Something smells fishy.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I realize that it's unpopular to be less than sensationalist about this topic, but I read the article, and the truth is, voting machines didn't wreak anything in Maryland.
Some negligent poll workers left some cards behind in a warehouse, and "wreaked" (if you will) inconvenience on some voters. The polls are open an hour later to allow them to vote.
So any citizens who are convinced that the primaries haven't already been decided, can stop on their way home and play democracy.
So you missed things like this
Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.
and this
At Luxmanor Elementary School in Rockville, Larry Schleifer cast a provisional ballot, then groused that it would not be counted along with the electronic tallies expected later in the day. He said he was frustrated that no one had crossed his name off the voter registry when he was handed a paper ballot and was concerned that election workers would not keep track of who had done what.
"What's going to stop somebody from voting twice?" he fumed. "I think it's unconscionable that this has happened."
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Its a good thing the US is spreading democracy around the world, because they seem to be so good at it.
Just maybe they weren't done pre-loading votes or pre-loading negatives votes yet, so the memory cards were not delivered on time?
Or maybe the vote flipping hack to insure that a specific candidate won was not finished on time?
Who will guard the guards?
Paper ballots with an 'X' or filled in bubble are machine readable. They have been used in the US for decades. They are human readable as a backup. It is just that after the 2000 election everyone jumped on a mindless computerized bandwagon. Ironically I voted using an experimental computerized system in 2000, but prior to that we had fill-in-the-bubble scantron like ballots.
I like computers, but they are not for everything.
I've heard it takes a good 4-8 hours training for voting clerks. No one who hasn't gone through training whould be allowed to supervise.
I live in Montgomery County, and I have for a large part of my life. I can tell that none of you get it. You seem to think that government sees an issue, debates courses of action, and settles on one that seems best suited to handle the situation.
t m (random quick link from google, find your own, it's fun!). As another example, you could look at the develpment of the King farm near shady grove metro - they added 3200 new units, and expected the already crowded roads neighboring the area to handle the traffic. They added nothing to help. No. of units added and sold is great for developers and for taxes. Building roads is boring.
How naive.
The way things work here is solely based on money. Developers and other contractors are competing at the county fund trough, and the local government works with them in some inscrutable manner that bears little resemblence to what you think of as government. For example, take a look at clarksburg: http://www.neighborspac.org/Knapp-blames-duncan.h
So do I believe that paper is better than machines? You bet. I'm a technical person and I know it's absurd to use machines in place of paper for voting. But I'm thinking about the best way to process votes, and that's really the furthest thing from the minds of the county government.
It's been this way for the 20 years that I've lived here. I don't see it ending anytime soon.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
But.. it.. doesn't run Linux :.(
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Something like one third in our city vote absentee and another sixth pre-vote 14 to 1 day in advance in few designated locations. I recall we had a minor election entirely by mail.
I live in Montgomery County, and am finding this somewhat ironic considering they have actually taken out many billboards to advertise how easy electronic voting machines are to use.
If you really wanna know how deep the e-voting rabbit hole goes, check this out...
, 00.asp
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2003163
Thanks god I am wearing my tinfoil hat today. Otherwise, I would wonder why the "irregularities" happened in three of the most Democratic counties in Maryland. Kerry carried the state in '04 based on Montgomery, Baltimore, Baltimore City and Prince George's county.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
"Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said."
That's a HUMAN error, not a machine or computer error. It could have been "Boxes of ballot papers were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse..."
The software to run an ATM exists and has been tested, tested, tested. An ATM can deposit, withdraw, transfer, and do it all with an acceptable level of reliability. It's been almost 6 years since the chads in Florida, so the voting machines should be rock-solid by now. No? Why not? Because ATMs handle money, and they *have to* work. Everyone uses ATMs. Voting machines don't have to work. Not everyone votes.
Yes. The conspiracy is that there are two frontrunners running for the Democrat candidate seat in the Maryland primary elections for Federal Senate: Kweisi Mfume, an african-american candidate running against Ben Cardin, an european-descent candidate. The Republicans frontrunner is Michael Steele, an african-american candidate.
If the Democrat european-descent candidate wins (which polls are showing he might), then it is expected that a larger number of african-american voters will actually vote along racial lines and vote Republican, which I had heard may be enough to swing the senate seat into Republican control (was Democrat). If the african-american candidate wins the Democratic election, then the racial voting margins would be eliminated, and the Democrats may hold the seat (although former NAACP-head Mfume has been quite inflamitory in the run-up to the primary).
Note that Montgomery and Prince George counties are the Maryland suburbs to Washington DC... with Montgomery County being one of the strongest Democratic-voting counties in 2004. If the Democrats want to win the seat, it is in their best interest to make sure that the african-american candidate wins. Montgomery County is 29% african-american, and Prince County is 65% african-american (according to the 2004 census)... note that only Montgomery county had their human error "accident" by not bringing voter cards until 10am to unlock the voting machines.
Dude, today was a voting day?! ::smacks forehead:: Everytime, man! Why don't these things get announced ahead of time?
I'm being disenfranchised!
Democracy and Communism are orthogonal. Democracy refers to how leaders are selected and Communism is an economic system. Their antonyms are Totalitarianism and Capitalism, respectively. And for the record, America is not a a Democracy, we are a Democratic Republic.
Actually, not quite so offtopic in this thread I guess.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
The post us just FUD. The problem isn't the voting machines but rather the poll workers who left the "Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines" in a warehouse in Rockville. RTFA slashdot.
Your way:
1. Take a piece of paper.
2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want.
3. Put it in the ballot box.
-as constrasted with electronic voting:
1. Have lackeys in Congress pass law mandating electronic voting machines.
2. Sell high priced electronic voting machines with crappy, insecure software.
3. Rig said machines for the election.
4. Have election.
5. Lackeys in Congress get re-elected, with 120% of the vote, Ralph Nader gets -20% of the votes
6. Lackeys in Congress mandate purchase of your new (more expensive) electronic voting machines.
- wash, rinse, repeat ad nauseum
I hope this provides you lucky Canadians with some insight into American "democracy."
PS - What exactly are Canada's immigration policies?
Wasnt there a reality show that received more votes for that than the presidental? Maybe they all just need to put up a 1-800 #...cuz we all know those are accurate.
Did anybody notice in that article that it really wasn't a machine issue but a human error issue.... they just forgot to bring a component of the machine... it had nothing to do with the machines not working. If you're going to place blame. place it were the fault lies, poorly trained election officials.
I voted in Montgomery county today without any problems at all.
Of course, my confidence in the technical security and integrity of the Diebold terminals is about the same as my belief that prohibiting screwdrivers and pocket knives on planes makes for safe air travel.
That having been said, people were stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes long before I was born. The fact that technology makes it possible and fairly simple to game the system just shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Nobody else has this sig.
"Be Slashdot Editors for a Day" must be English teachers this year. I better look closely at today's postings. Some of them might actually make sense and/or be less than 2 weeks old.
I believe many of the Maryland candidates are running the primary unopposed (ie: only one from each party signed up), in which case there pretty much is no choice. It could be that the unopposed candidates were checked by default. I don't know since I haven't voted yet.
--Insert catchy
In Canada you only vote for a single canidate in an election, you need to understand is that in The USA we are normally voteing in 10 to 30 races and questions, so that if we used a paper ballot an an "X" the ballots would have to be physicaly counted 30 to 90 times or more to validate all elections. It would probaly require weeks to certify an election. All races would have to be completely counted before any race or question could be certified under the election rules as the certifiaction is for the entire election. I am an election official and we haven't used paper ballots for the past 40 years. When we switched from OCR to Touchscreens, the time it took to vote was cut in half and the time go get the results went from days to hours. The OCR form was 17 by 40, both sides in the last election I worked that the OCR was used. I remember a race in Califonia using OCRs where someone changes the markers and the OCR would not corectly read the ballots that were marked using the substituted pens. They had to hand recount all ballots for all elections.
I just went and voted (I'm in Maryland). Was quite easy. You walked in, gave 'em your name. They asked you some information about yourself to verify the information they got on a nifty little screen they had. A little receipt-lookin' thing got printed out, which one then signed. You got an electronic card-a-majigger. The nice man with the name tag directs you to a voting machine. You put the little card you just got in the machine. It pops up with some directions. You hit "next," and proceed through three screens of candidates. To vote, you touch the little square next to the name. At the end, it asks you to verify your ballot, then pops your card out. You walk out of there after returning your card. Quite simple and easy.
But I think they're terrible. No paper trail is a tragic idea. If they really want machines, I like the idea of a machine that prints one out and drops it into a little secure box after you visually verify it's correct. We've all read the hacking stories, after all.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Paper isn't tamperproof. A classic in sleazy American districts is for the people counting the ballots to add extra marks to make them ambiguous so they can be thrown out. If somebody's watching, they stick a piece of pencil lead under a fingernail and spoil ballots with that.
Paper doesn't work well for blind people. Retinitis Pigmentosa shouldn't prevent you from casting a secret ballot.
Paper is really frustrating when the margin of victory is less than the percentage of carelessly filled out ballots. What other system stores vital data without first doing an integrity check on it?
Hybrid systems, where a machine fills out a well-formed human-readable ballot and the voter verifies it, look better than most alternatives, though you've still got a potential problem with computers at the back end counting the ballots. ("Oops, a subtle off-by-one error in every precinct of the one big city that's divided 50-50").
Last presidential election time a bunch of democrats slashed the tires on vans that a republican group were going to use to transport people who wanted to vote that didn't have transportation. I wouldn't be surprised if they rigged the machines to not work in certain republicany areas.
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
The auditing, cross checking and impartiality need to begin well before the election. The US has had some searing examples of state officials refusing to recognize new voter registrations and consistently supplying too few machines in places known to lean a certain way. This happened because states, in a fit of barking madness, allowed the campaign manager for one of the candidates to supervise the voter rolls and the election.
Unopposed candidates getting a default vote would be a huge benefit to those unopposed candidates -- at least here in MN, a couple of unopposed candidates were defeated by write-in candidates because few people were marking boxes of the unopposed candidate.
Poster, read the fucking third page of the article. As someone explained above:
9 6&cid=16091285
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963
That will work well.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Bring back Clever Hans. He could tell us who won. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
Maybe one of you Americans can enlighten me on this: why do you need voting machines so much that you have been trying to make them work in spite of all the problems? What is the problem they are meant to solve? The whole world votes by marking slips of paper, that are counted n times by different volunteers under controlled conditions & counts cross-checked to guard against errors, and there is a recount if the ballot is close. The system works, is reliable, accountable, is amenable to auditing etc. What is the problem voting machines are trying to solve? Is it that it that Americans are so busy pursuing liberty, happiness, American dream, evil-doers or whatever that there are never enough to volunteer to count the votes? Is it that the no amount of oversight over humans by humans can ever gurantee 100% accuracy? Is it that touch screens just seem like the way to go in the 21st century? If there is one thing I have learnt in this industry, it is that computer systems do not scale beyond a point (which is much lower than the volume/complexity required when you take whole populations into account), notwithstanding the hype by the likes of Accenture etc. For example, you can consider any government project to 'modernize' large departments. In the UK, I can reel off so many: court records, post office, health service - all of them unqualified disasters. And ID card scheme is supposed to be massively over budget as well... good for the vendors, I guess.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Holy incomplete journalism, Batman! The delay was not because of computer problems. The delay was due to incomplete packets being sent to the polling locations. This could happen with computerized voting, with paper ballots, or with clay tablets. The organizers forgot to include the plastic cards that are inserted into the voting computer. If this were purely paper-based, it would be like forgetting to include the lock for the ballot box.
Caveats: I may not be a lawyer, but I do live, vote and electioneer in Montgomery County. Also, please don't interpret this post as an indication that I like computerized voting---I deplore Diebold and any voting scheme they support. But, I won't throw my vote away by staying home. Finally, I need to get back out there, so my apologies if this is redundant.
"The finest democracy money can buy."
No - wait.
Um.
Something about the world's leading democracy?
No - No - wait, I've got it.
I want UN observers posted in Maryland - only then can we be even remotely confident in that third world country's vote.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
There are no write-ins on primary elections in Montgomery County (and probably all of Maryland), so this is not an issue here. Write-ins are only allowed for the general election. However the voting machine is NOT supposed to mark unopposed candidates by default, at least it didn't for me.... but this is Diebold so all bets are off.
When was the last time that every news agency in the world focused on the voting in Germany, France, or UK? The US is under a spotlight and a microscope in everything it does.
... but I can't quite see how that justifies vote fraud)
Well, pretty much all of Europe follows European voting - and U.S. voting. Sorry you guys don't care about the rest of the world,
Many of us DO care about the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, most of our news media are run by elitist morons with political agendas who think the rest of us are even dumber and more provincial than they are, don't need any actual news, but do need to be dragged by propaganda techniques (notably including strategic omission) into politically desirable ways of thinking and acting.
You'll notice the grandfater posting was talking about the focus of news agencies, and while he said "worldwide" he no doubt is basing his opinion on the pap served here.
They tell US about local "irregularities" whenever their candidates lose. They ignore any issues with votes in other countries: Mentioning problems elsewhere doesn't serve their interests. But omitting it gives the impression that voting irregularities here are a local anomaly, that the US system is more corrupt than those of other countries. This helps reenforce their message.
Neither can we. That's why so many of us are griping about it.
The dangerous thing about both election corruption and news of it that political stability depends on the perceived honesty of the elections. If a loser thinks they don't represent the will of the people (or at least the subset that's armed and willing to fight over the issue), he may convince himself that it would be possible to reverse the result by force of arms...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm a voter in Maryland. I used the new electronic machines on the last election. There were rough spots where the election staff were still learning to use these devices.
They were used for the very first time in Montgomery County Maryland. They're still discovering the ins and outs of these machines. Most of the volunteers are retired folks. They don't have the proficiency with computers that most of us have. Yes, they make mistakes, but they're learning. Here in Howard County, they already had a good idea how these things worked and everything went smoothly.
This is about training. The issue of the security of these devices is another thing entirely. I've spoken in person with my local Maryland state delegates and they're well aware of the issue. When better machines become available, they'll use them. I don't think anyone from either party is shy about spending the money. But it has to work, it should be user freindly, it must be reliable, and (above all) traceable.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I know Oregon does this now. Could an Oregonian comment on it? Should the rest of the country adopt the Oregon model?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Where's my purple thumb?!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I see that some of what I mentioned is in other chapters such as chapter 12. A few other details that I mentioned may or may not be in her book.
Your 'reason' applies to any new technology. The world did fine with horses and carraiges too. But cars are better. Should we not use cars because we could already get from point A to point B on horses?
Paper voting is not perfect. Electronic voting could be better than paper voting. The existence of bad electronic voting does not change this, and the existence of a system that's used now doesn't mean it's better than anything else that is possible either.
paintball
Even an audit trail won't help if, as in this case, the ballot comes with default votes already made which must be unchecked and replaced with the voters' own choices.
The default should be "no vote", not the (political) machine's choices. Pre-checking boxes constitutes MASSIVE vote fraud.
Of course the article only mentioned that in paragraph 40 of 42. Way to bury the REALLY important issue, guys. (Even skipping to the last couple paragraphs to find out what you're hiding would probably miss that.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's these glitches and people paying more attention to them that lift the curtain a little bit, and what's behind it is not pretty.
Let's give them a couple more election cycles and they'll have it right, things will go smoothly and nobody will have to suspect anything.
We condemn small countries for crooked elections, but really, it's just that they are not polished enough.
For a voting machine to be considered at all it has to bring some improvement - like the ones in India designed to minimize the effect of fraud by only holding small numbers of votes. Vote riggers in India would have to steal a lot of machines to have much of an impact on the results. In comparison some of the people involved with the Diebold machines have spent time in jail for fraud so all the potential backdoors into the things take on a more sinister aspect than mere incompetance would suggest.
The problem wasn't technological, the problem was due to some nimrod leaving the cards needed for casting votes on the machines on the loading dock.
Never chalk up to technology that which can be accomplished with good old human stupidity.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
and as such, should not be allowed.
The actual vote is not recorded, only what the machine thinks the vote was.
I would much rather have humans sorting this out than machines.
Blogging because I can...
I concur that computers can bring a lot to this particular table.
I'm not a voting expert, but one of the most exciting possibilities to me is the chance for people to start voting their minds with respect to third parties. Currently, you're only allowed to vote for a single candidate in each race, which in a two-party system causes people to often vote for the "lesser of two evils." Once computers are responsible for counting all votes, people should be able to start saying "I really want to vote for X third party, but if X loses, I'd like to vote for Y major party instead." Running an election like this would be difficult for humans, but computers could handle the job.
Regardless, there are two high-quality voting schemes from renowned cryptographers that show some real promise for the future, even though they're not yet practical.
In "A Verifiable Secret Shuffle and its Application to E-Voting" Andrew Neff describes a protocol "to verifiably shuffle a sequence of k modular integers" to represent a ballot. He relates the protocol to the problem of achieving a random, yet verifiable permutation of some input sequence, like a card player who has verified the composition of a deck of cards before they are shuffled, and yet doesn't know the ordering of the cards after they've been shuffled. Normally, the auditor must be able to see all of the input values during the audit, but in an election this is obviously undesirable (because then the auditor [vote buyer] knows how the affected individual voted). Of course, I can't present all the details here, but the basic principle of the system is that there are a number of rows each containing a fixed number of pairs of 1-bit El-Gamal ciphertexts. Each row represents a candidate. In the row representing the candidate that the voter selected, each pair of encrypted numbers is homogeneous, they are 0-0 or 1-1. In the other rows, the numbers are heterogeneous: 0-1 or 1-0. Of course, the encryption obscures these relationships in the machine's output. So, how does the voter know that the proper vote was cast by this black box? For each pair of bits in the row corresponding to the chosen candidate, the machine produces a pledge bit that specifies whether that pair of bits is 0-0 or 1-1. After the machine has printed the receipt with the ciphertexts, the voter dictates to the machine whether to expose the randomness for the left or right bit in each pair. Since the bits are supposed to be the same, it shouldn't matter which side is opened. However, if the machine cheated, and the pairs in that row are heterogeneous, then there is an exponentially decreasing probability that the voter will not choose the side that corresponds to the value the machine committed to for that pair. This complicated scheme of ciphertexts and challenges is necessary to prevent vote buying, see the paper for all the details.
Another scheme was devised by David Chaum in "Secret-Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Verifiable Elections." This scheme uses double-layer transparent receipts that use "visual encryption" to encode a voter's choice on a ballot by printing specially-organized checkerboard patterns that overlap to form big letters visible to the voter. However, when the voter leaves the booth, they separate the two layers and only keep one as a receipt. Both layers look completely random when separated, so they again are resistant to coercion and vote-buying. There's some heavy crypto at work in this scheme, too, so you'll have to read the paper for full details.
Both of these schemes post all of the ballots to a public bulletin board so that voters can verify from home that their votes were counted-as-cast. However, they still have some flaws, most of which stem from human factors (humans aren't very dependable participants in cryptographic protocols). They also introduce some potential subliminal channels that could be used for voter coercion, since ballots are posted in a modified form to a public bulletin board. A full analysis of those problems is pre
What are you talking about? Anything that interferes with the ability of a republic to hold a fair, impartial vote should be described as "wreaking havoc". The very survival and essence of a republic revolves around the ability of the citizenry to vote for their representatives. If that ability is in any way obstructed, then the result to the republic will be, as you put it, great destruction or devastation, and ruinous damage.
... until you did the math. Bics are like 2 bucks for a pack of 10. Assuming you had to buy all new ones every year, and assuming every year was a major voter turnout equivalent to a presidential election, and also assuming that one pen would serve only 3 voters, and that 300,000,000 people voted every year(notice how way over the top I'm padding the numbers in favor of the bic theory), you'd need 100,000,000 pens nationwide. That would equal 20,000,000 bucks on a nationwide scale.
7 3.html?1139698724
The diebold machine purchase for Cuyahoga County Ohio(pop ~1.3 million), would cost 22,000,000 alone(or it would have, but I think the cost will drop a good deal now) source: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/142
In reality, according the US census numbers, ~125,000,000 people voted in the last presidential election. You would not need a pen ratio of 1 pen per 3 people, but say you did, you now only need what, 45,000,000 pens(to make the math simple). This now reduces the money involved to 9 million.
To break it down further, the required pen to voter ratio is actually far far lower than that, and then you have the whole problem that the pens can easily be stored and used for several years, with no real ongoing maintenance costs other than purchasing replacements here and there for the ones that die or grow legs.
Couple of points to grant before I'm called on it... Not every county is getting as blatantly ripped off as the above mentioned one. But most of these systems I've read about are multi-million dollar systems. I also didn't factor in cost of printing of paper ballots, but my point wasn't to argue pen and paper was cheaper, only that the money generated by computerized voting machine purchases is far greater than the sales of pens. This is important because it puts a lot of cash into a single source who can then make sure that certain campaigns recieve good financing. Far more cash than if the governments just bought bics.
And I know it sounds like a "conspiracy theory", but IMO, anyone who thinks that money isn't playing a part in all this is living in a dream world. Keep in mind that in most cases it is local and state governments making these purchasing deciscions, which in general fall under far less scrutiny than the federal government.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
Disclosure: I'm a registered Republican in MD.
Facts:
PG and MoCo are 2 of the 4 strongest Democratic area in the state (The others are Baltimore County and Baltimore City, separate entities), and also 2 of the most populous counties.
The state is heavily Democrat as a whole, so tonight's primary will probably decide who wins the general election. Another of other offices are essentially being decided tonight, and reduced particpation from these heavily Democratic counties could change the outcomes.
We have a Republican governor (first in 30-some-odd years) who is running for re-election this fall against an un-opposed Democrat. His Lt. Gov., Michael S. Steele, is running for an open Senate seat and facing several Democratic opponents.
PG and MoCo are not the only counties using these systems. It's unclear at this point why the problem is affecting these two counties and not others.
I worked for the montgomery county board of elections about 8 years ago. Back then we had traditional paper ballots. People here might know them by thier other name: punch cards. That's right, the old ballots were just punch cards read by a room full of 30 year old mainframes. Every 2 years they had to bring in highly paid specialists to dust off the machines and get them running again. It was secure, but slow and inaccurate. No encryption, but there was a paper trail. It's now a whole lot quicker to count and recount votes, but it's also a lot easier to hack a voting computer than to make a punch card virus.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the voting system has never been perfect. It's been computerized for over 30 years, they've just been made more visible.
And cut the warehouse workers a little slack. They work 12+ hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, for a month leading up to an election. I heard from an old friend who still works there (that might change soon) and he's working a 24 shift today. It's a ton of work getting all the materials sorted and organized so that every polling place gets exactly what they need.
I live in Montgomery County
I showed up at the polling place, very smallish in a local elementary school. I knew there were problems because the line was out the door, yet none of the voting booths were busy.
By the time it got to me, they inserted, the card into the "activation" station, and then they said something like "Oh, the system has crashed again", and they called over the election official. They timed it until it came up and it seemed to be a few minutes. They inserted my card again. They told me "Oh, the system said you already voted" and they called over the election official.
They ran to the back of the auditorium looking in a big manual. After 10 minutes, they came back and said "The manual is missing the part where it tells us what to do now. You can wait until we get it figured out, fill out a provisional ballet, or come back later". I opted for a provisional ballot which means that your vote is no longer a secret vote, and it takes 5-10 minutes to do, because you have to fill out two forms, and sign in two places.
I checked out the equipment while I was waiting, and sure enough it was Diebold. When I see this equipment in use, I feel like I might was well take my vote and throw it in the trash. Based on the errors that I saw for other people while I was waiting, the chances of a meaningful result in the primary seem somewhat in doubt.
We have a very good punch-card system in Montgomery county (nothing like the chad based system in florida) which produced a nice computer card that was obvious if it was correct when it was done and then you dumped it in a ballot box, ensuring anonymity and also making sure your vote was going to be counted as cast.
This new system did nothing except make a mess.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"They don't have the proficiency with computers that most of us have. "
It has nothing to do with that. If you look at my other post, the Diebold activation systems were crashing (they crashed twice in 15 minutes while I waited), and when they crashed, they were producing results that made it look like people who had not yet voted actually did vote.
So blame people, but voting machines that crash seem to be a problem, regardless of who is in charge.
I'm a skeptic, but if that's the bugs that I see, then I know the hidden bugs are 10 times worse. It's a fiasco as far as I'm concerned.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
but the issue in Montgomery County today did not have a damn thing to do with how the electronic voting machines work or their accuracy.
This was entirely human error.
But hey, yelling "fire" makes for a great headline.
You have accrued vacation time. Why don't you take 8 hours of it on election day and volunteer? All you do is gripe and make snide comments. If you don't like the little old ladies at the polling station making mistakes, then YOU volunteer and help them out.
And for the record, I'm fat and lazy and self-absorbed just like you so I don't volunteer either. But I don't bitch and moan year after year about the people who do.
Anyone ever think of that?
What the hell is the big deal about hiring more workers to count ballots cast by hand?
Matter of fact, here is some info for anyone who wants to volunteer to do so as to save the a few bucks of cost for an accurate count.
Please note: Nothing personal intended. This is a very important subject to me.
Since I haven't yet had the privilege of using an electronic voting machine, this may already be something they do, but I tend to doubt it....
Once you have the computer and video screen platform in place, use the screen to provide information so people can make an *informed* vote, rather than just "a vote"... Within some rules agreed to by the election officials, for each candidate show an electronic portrait of the person, along with information about their education, professional credentials, related work experience, and some free form text area written by the candidate to explain why they should be elected. Most people will admit that often they have no idea who they are voting for, especially in minor offices like judicial positions (where those are elected offices).
This would slow down the voting process a lot, but would greatly improve the process, and one would hope that better information would result in a better outcome. It would also reduce the need for candidates to spend large amounts of money just to build name recognition.
In a perfect world, every voter would have done very careful research about every candidate prior to walking into the voting center, but we don't live in a perfect world.
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
That's the point! Confuse the hell out of the process so that whoever holds the keys has a chance to throw the election! Good grief. Does anyone in the USA really believe the incumbents want truly fair and honestly auditable ballot-casting? Making it simple and incorruptible is the last thing partisan state election commissions want. Their guy might lose the election.
The funny part is that this isn't the first time they've used this system. We voted on these machines in the 2004 elections, and there weren't any problems (well, other than that W got reelected, but the populous Montgomery, P.G. and Baltimore counties mentioned in the article all went to Kerry anyway: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/MD/P/00/ )
Guess they just weren't as careful the second time around.
"He beat me at chess..it's a fluke he's not American..
"He's smarter than me..it's a fluke, Americans are nearly always smarter
I wish these red necks were ever even fractionally right..
If an election is declared to be invalid because of either fraudulent activity or just plain unfortunate incompetence, will the U.S. Supreme Court rule that all the incumbents will remain in office indefinitely? What other choice will they have? The Axis of Evil intersects Crawford, Texas. The terrorists are not all in the Mideast, unless you call Washington DC the mid-east.
Do you really think the average idiot (or even the morons up to the first standard deviation of the intelligence bell curve) in the U.S. is going to know what you're describing or how it works?
I love the idea of a more representative voting system, but I highly doubt that people in the U.S. could even comprehend something as simple as instant-runoff voting. I've been forced to conclude that "approval voting" is the only mechanism that might possibly create a government that represents the people.
Back to the subject of technical difficulties, I think the best idea(someone already suggested this) is to use a computer system which also prints (voter-verifiable) hard copies of the ballot. Electronic votes and paper votes could then be tabulated independently. If there is some difference, the paper votes get counted by hand.
One state came up with the brilliant idea of having each person that votes entered into a million dollar lottery. Incentive vs. compulsion.
Given the current state of affairs in the U.S., mandatory voting would be terrible. Our plurality voting system all but guarantees that the person I vote for will lose to a Republican or Democrat. I vote merely in protest.
While we're on the subject, why the hell don't we vote on the weekends? It's enough of a pain in the ass to miss time from work to even get to the polls. Encountering a frustration like one of the situations described in this article would be infuriating.
If Prince Georges and Montgomery county are having problems, maybe it has a lot more to do with the people who live in those counties.
Simplicity itself. Put a peice of birch bark in the box for the incumbent or a pine cone for the challenger. Nobody can possibly mistake the two, and it's simple to recount.
You just need really big ballot boxes.
Your three questions are tangents. 1: all irrelevant. 2: Been dealt with a long time. 3: Watch the box. This alludes to the major advantage of paper ballots.
The problem with electronic voting is that it's opaque. It is impossible to guarantee that no one has tampered with the machine's software, electronics, communications, etc. We all have to trust hundreds or thousands of unknown people to have complete integrity and not compromise the system.
On the other hand, you can't rootkit a large number of peoples' brains, such that they mark candidate A, see the X by candidate A, yet actually marked candidate B. The vote counters can be compromised, but as they can be easily audited, it's a very trustworthy system. *Anyone* could audit the results. The only skill required is fairly good vision.
Furthermore, the system *is* run by morons, and will always be run by morons. Morons are all we have in most cases. Therefore, the more moron-proof, and the more transparent, the better.
Other than that, yes electronic voting is nice.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
Sorry but there is a fundamental misunderstanding in comparison of the US Government and UK Government here which unfortunately is propagated by the news media. What the news media does most often is compare equivalent responsibilities not equivalence in structure. Who has power and responsibility is somewhat different but really not that much if one compares the US government structure today with the UK government structure in the 17th century that is the UK government structure about 100 years before the US Declaration of independence. Thought and ideas traveled slower when you had sailing ships as a means of communication taking 3 to 6 months for a simple message to go from here to there.
Tony Blair is Prime Minister in the UK Government. His counterpart in the US Government is NOT George Bush who is president but is the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
In UK and European thought Dennis would be called Head of Government but not in the US. where governmental responsibilities are somewhat different.
George Bush's counterpart in the UK Government is the Queen of England.
My meanings are not always clear.
By "any randomness", I mean a random number of votes introduced to the system.
By "slightly losing candidate", I mean a candidate that would actually lose, but barely, if the correct number of votes were to be tallied properly.
Does that help you understand?
You're right, but I just can't help it--I grew up in the 60's!
Maybe they should have had some technical experts, with experience in DRE / electronic voting helping them plan the election day as well as perform truly Independent, 3rd-Party, Comprehensive, DRE Security and Functional Testing (and procedural and physical security and...).
Oh wait - that's what CIBER, AND WYLIE AND SYSTEST - the current Government-appointed Test-Labs - are *supposed* to do... but can't / are not doing, cuz most all the DRE's stink!
Any technical people, who are Serious about taking back the vote interested in helping on this?... evoteusa@yahoo.com
All we need to do is mix - Computer Security and I/T Audit, plus Procedures, plus DRE Equipment Standards (testing, security, functionality, etc), plus proper training, plus...
============= eVoteInspector "Verifying Democracy Works.... For the People" =============
I think I understand what you mean. There is a bit of a cultural difference. In the United States, there are effectively two candidates for any position. If one loses, the other wins. (Yes, there are rare cases where more than two candidates affect the election).
In the case where no votes are randomly added or removed randomly, the 'slightly losing' candidate would certainly lose. In the case where votes are randomly added or removed randomly, the slightly losing candidate has a chance to gain a certain number of votes. If the race is tight enought, a fluctation could push the candidate over the edge.
I think you make the point that any candidate using their influence to make things more chaotic in an election is committing a form of fraud.
I believe democracy is being threatened in the United States, but I would be foolish to think this a new problem. What is new is that there are mechanical black box voting machines. It is a conflict of interest when you have a company that makes voting machines that also gives to a political campaign.
It isn't about accuracy or security. It is about verifiability. We shouldn't have to trust the accuracy or security of the system, or of the programmers or administrators. Anyone who wants to should be able to verify everything in the process, from start to finish.
Each voter should be able to verify that his/her vote is correctly recorded by inspecting the record of that vote. The physical media on which each vote is recorded must be such that it cannot be altered after the vote is recorded. A verifiable chain of custody must be maintained from the time each vote is cast until after all counting and verifying is complete. After the voting, each interested person should be able to verify that the votes have been correctly counted, again by inspecting the media. And, those inspections must not require any mechanism that most people cannot personally verify. Hence, the media must be such that it can be inspected directly using only the unaided human eye. Finally, the media must be of a familiar type, so that even stupid people are able to verify that their votes are correctly recorded.
That one requirement, for verifiability, pretty much rules out every proposed voting method except "paper ballots".
You agegate results from the smallest (poll station) 3 o 4 levels up all the way to nationwide results.
If you have 50000 poll stations counting a few hundred votes, there is no reason why the initial counting on each station can't be finished after a couple of hours. Then you agregate results of lets say, 100 poll stations in lets say 500 regional centers, and then lets say that at each state level you have to add the results of 10 or so regional centers.
GIve or take a few levels of aggregation depending on the size of your country, or the kind of election.
This is basic arithmetic we are talking about. Even with more complicated voting systems all this is perfectly doable manually.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... the work is done by volunteers.
It is everybody's democracy after all.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A democratic republic is by pure semantics a democracy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In other countries (viva Mexico!) we can have in the same day elections for President, Senate, lower house, governor, major and local parliment.
You receive 6 or 7 clearly differentiated pieces of paper to vote on each election by depositing your vote in the same number of different ballot boxes.
Why would you want to keep all in one piece of paper is beyond me....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Mexico: 100m
Mexico City 20m.
Paper ballots.
Enough said.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
you have so many old and senile volenteers (sp)!! To miscount for you!