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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."
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.
I think that then goes back to KISS. If you only have to remember the ballots and either hole punches or pens, it's not that hard. But when you get to having who knows what along with the machines, it's reasonable for someone to forget something, especially if it's not well documented (and/or they aren't properly informed). There's a lot that goes into this. The big part is, there's a lot of room for human error in this one unfortunately.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Yes be sure to discount the pile of evidence of voter fraud around this country.
Parties are full of people...some people will do anything to win.
The right thing to do would have been a revote.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a Canadian who has read Slashdot for many years, will someone please explain to me what is so hard about voting?
;-) http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211. html
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.
Can it really be that simple? Yes!
As a software developer, I have to ask:
WHY IS ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS USING A BLOODY COMPUTER TO DO THIS? I don't care if it's open source or closed source software on it, running on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, whatever. All of these are harder to verify (if not impossible) that no tampering was done than SIMPLE PIECES OF PAPER.
Here, I'll link to Cringely, that way you'll know it's true
...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.
counted and counted correctly
Paper does not ensure that the counters will count accurately. Paper does not ensure that the counters are not subject to a poltical bias or bribes. Only a well-defined process with proper auditing, traceability, etc. regardless of the actual method used to poll the constituents, is the method that will be accurate.
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
Why are they using computers?
Because somebody, somewhere is getting a cut of the contract costs...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Ok, so even if there wasn't any intentional wrong doing here, I think this is a pretty straight-forward example of where technology is not the best solution to a problem.
Electronic voting machines just add another big layer of complexity to a process that really doesn't need to be so hard. A paper ballot has just two parts, the ballot sheet and a pen. If the ballot sheet breaks, the voter can just grab a new one, and the whole process gets held up for a minute, instead of hours or more. If someone forgets the pens, you can run to corner store and grab a box, or chances are enough of the first batch of voters will happen to have pens with them that they don't mind leaving behind.
Instead we have computerized machines that require specialized knowledge to set up and service, and which can break in a huge number of ways.
Even a secure, tamperproof, open-sourced electronic voting machine is a waste of money. The only problem it solves is speeding up the tallying of votes. And all that is really good for is letting the media report on partial results before half the people out there have even had a chance to vote. That benefit hardly seems worth the extra complexity or cost.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Voting like that is pretty easy, but it would take forever to count the tens of thousands (at least) of ballots.
"Forever" is perhaps more precisely stated as "several hours for initial results, a few days for the recounts".
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Really, that argument just doesn't stand up. It works out fine in Canada (ya ya, there's nobody in Canada or whatever -- but we do have large population centres like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, etc. that do it just like everyone else).
The reason that argument doesn't work is simple: the ballots don't go to some central location for say, the entire province or anything like that. There are people in each riding doing the counting (and in fact, multiple locations within one riding). That way, you just need enough volunteers from within an area to cover that area. In other words, the number of voting stations and people counting scales with the population.
But you know, everyone loves to solve non-existent problems with computers.
As a fellow Canadian, I believe I can tell you the answer is "not always that simple" in the case of US elections.
People could be electing their Sherrif, councilmen, or a state refferendum on the same ballot as they also vote for either their state or federal representatives. It's my understanding that some ballots can have over a dozen issues on them. (Anyone who has better first hand knowledge of this feel to correct me if this is an inaccurate summation.)
I guess there is the perception that electronic voting is better, or less error prone, or people can understand what they are doing better. Or, that due to low voter turn out, get them to answer as many questions as you can so people get to voice their opinions on as many things as possible as once.
I do believe that a typical visit to the polls for our American cousins involves more than the greatly simplified answering of exactly one question we do here ("which candidate do you like for the job you're voting on")
Cheers (eh)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
These arguments are simply not valid, for one very good reason: The rest of the democratic world does just fine with manual voting. When was the last time you heard that there were problems counting votes in Germany, or France, or the UK, or Norway, or ancient Greece, or whatever.
First off, why you people even need to make an X on a long list of candidates is beyond me. Here in Sweden (where there'll be an election on Sunday) each party has its own ballot, you simply stick that in an envelope, give it to a voting-official which checks your identity and suffrage, that voting offical puts the envelope in a box, and you're done! No confusion over votes, no-one can vote twice, no arguments over which candidates are first on the list (you can get ballots from all the parties in the parliament right there, and there are usually people handing out ballots for the other parties at the voting station). I repeat, for the rest of the world, this is not a problem,
As a plus, if it is desired, this can easily be counted by machine. Since each ballot is unique, you could easily have a machine recognize from what party it comes from. Not that you'd have too, it shouldn't take more than, say, 6-12 hours after the polls have closed to have a result counted by hand. In the last few years, I've never heard of any democratic and free country, that doesn't have wide-spread voter fraud (ie. psuedo-democracies, that deliberatly tamper with elections) messing up an election. Except for America.
I can think of very few things that are more stupid than elecronic voting. The manual system works perfectly, and has done so for a century! Why, ohh, why, mess it up.
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
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?
Wrong. 2200 of about 80000 electoral districts used Nedap voting machines in the last Bundestag election. Our German readers might find these articles (2005) informative (2006).
I hope I didn't brain my damage.