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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."
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.
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
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
Well, in Argentina voting is mandatory, which means around 15-20 million votes, and they are usually counted in 1-2 days at most, with witnesses of different parties, etc.
It's quite simple, really.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
I just don't buy that argument. In Germany, all voting is also paper-based only and everything is counted by hand. Polls close at 6 pm and we generally have firm results the latest around 10 pm. The morning newspapers the next day have the preliminary official result on the front pages. The final official result is only available several weeks later, but that is the same in the US (election results are officially certified by each state's Secretary of State in the weeks after election day). The process in which votes are counted in Germany scales perfectly well (each precinct counts its own ballots, then reports the results to the county from where it goes to the state level and then finally to the federal level): Elections didn't suddenly take longer to count after we added 16 million citizens through the reunification.
Just to add some data: In the 2004 US presidential elections, 122,293,548 valid votes were cast. In the 2005 federal elections in Germany, 48,044,841 valid votes were cast. Germany has 16 states.
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, but I can't quite see how that justifies vote fraud)
The point is, these European countries manage just fine to vote on paper. Elections for the European parliament are done on paper, too. And to top it off, votes are counted extremely rapidly - the first precincts report within 30 minutes or so, pretty accurate numbers within two hours, and usually you have the results within a day at most.
Explain to me again why we should use electronic voting if the manual alternative works better *and* is more tamper proof?
> I'm sure that works great in Canada, but we have more than 4 people who live here. Also, we have electricity, so we can power our counting-machines.
Ok, yuk yuk. Very funny. However, compare Canada with an equivalent population, say, Florida (remember 2000). Some 10,000,000+ votes cast in our election, all on paper, counted within 8 hours. We knew who our government was the same day. No supreme-court injunctions.
Part of the problem is resolved by a simple paper vote with a clear big circle to mark an X, but a large part of the differences between our countries are two-fold:
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You do not need computers to do this.
This type of voting (there are several types of transferable vote system) is used to elect the European Parliament, the Mayor of London, the Australian senate, the president of Sri Lanka, the Irish Parliament. I have voted in two of these on ballot papers that were obviously intended to be hand counted. Single transferable vote systems were also used Denmark, as well as in Tasmania, long before computers were invented.