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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."
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/
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.
1. Take a piece of paper.
How many candidates per piece of paper? How big should each candidate's name be written? In what ORDER should the names of the candidates be written? When are the ballots printed?
2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want.
What does, and does not, count as an X? If I just have a small dash, should that count? What if I have a small dash in two boxes, or an X in one box and a dash in another box, or X's in all but one box?
3. Put it in the ballot box.
What if I put two ballots in the box?
Electronic voting lets you do a lot of parts of voting better. They key to any electronic system is redundancy - you don't have fewer than 2 of any critical component, and you have a non-electrical backup.
For electronic voting, that means you have enough provisional ballots to do the entire election if needed. It means you have a physical (paper or other non-alterable type) record. There's nothing wrong with electronic voting, except that the people who are implementing it appear to be morons.
paintball
1) Setup a System with 1 (one) USB port, a network connection, and MySQL.
1a) Use the USB port to hold a flash drive. On said flash drive is a crypto key for the hard drive. The Flash Drive and System at the end of the election are transported by two seperate but neutral parties to the proper officials.
2) Make a small WIRED network in each polling place, not connected to the internet (are you nuts!?)
3) Add Kiosk Machines running apache/PHP on a loopback interface
4) Have each Kiosk machine SSH into the MySQL server. Verification by Trusted RSA keys.
5) Use Firefox and some fancy web programming to give a senior-friendy interface
6[optional]) Add score bord that updates every 10 minutes (to protect the anonymous ballot) that shows the current vote tally.
Please, I invite a critique
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Hm. I wouldn't say that people are trying to solve non-existant problems with computers. Computers have the advantage of being impartial (if that is how they're programmed) and unlikely to make mistakes (again, depending on programming). Humans are generally anything but unbiased and infallible.
Personally I'd prefer a system where the votes get counted in every practical manner, or at least allows for such. Electronic voting -- all votes are tabulated by computer over a network, that also provides a human and easily machine readable paper ballot. Have the machines that count the paper ballots and the electronic ballots operate seperately and then verify their results with one another. In the event of a significant discrepancy or the need for a recount, have humans count them, as well as do another paper ballot machine count, using a different machine, perhaps.
It might be a bit expensive, but as our elections are at the foundation of our democratic republic, I think we can afford to "splurge" in this area.
> I've never heard of voter fraud in France
Then listen to the radio/tv these days, they are finally putting to trial a massive fraud which took place in Paris in 1989.
The fraud was done by making some people vote in a different part of the city where they weren't allowed to vote in. Also I think they made some dead people vote...
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
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.
And just as bad, how do we know she did not wipe someone elses vote out in the process?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Or better yet, FTA:
"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."
Hal, STOP trying to vote for me, dammit!
I'm sorry Dave, but I can't let you do that.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
There's no real problem with direct election of US officials. The biggest problem is their indirect election, the Electoral College, which counts states as disproportionate values. A Wyoming voter (like Dick Cheney) has much more weighted ballots than a California voter (like a Gore voter). So Gore could win more voters in 2000, but lose the electoral vote, because president and vice president aren't elected direcly enough. Drop the EC and count votes nationwide.
There might be a single exception to successful direct election, which is judges. Campaigning for judges in crime ridden areas allows people to elect judges biased for or against them, when the judging law must be more impartial than writing or executing it. This is not so much a problem of direct election of judges as merely the entire problem of selecting judges in a democracy. Electing them is just a consequence of that defective system.
None of that requires separate ballots for each candidate. While long ballot sheets with many offices might be necessary, that doesn't make them much harder to count. And even if 195M voters turned out (110M is the current high turnout), it doesn't take longer to count more ballots. Because every district has its own counters, who all count in parallel. If each ballot is counted three times by different people, with nonunanimous ballots counted again, that's still probably only a 5 minute pipeline. That's filled with 1 minute per ballot. If each counter works for 6 hours plus breaks, that's 360 ballots per person. 110M people require 305K counters, in 3K counties means about 100 counters per county, or 50 if they take 2 days. Paper tools like stencils can increase productivity to probably 10-20s per ballot, which or a couple dozen counters per county. Immediate results should be reported solely from exit polls, which are more obviously unofficial. Official results today take weeks or months, so handcounting isn't any slower than machine counting. And if ballots are shuffled among counties for counting for added security, we're talking about a few days for extremely reliable results, which also takes the pressure off any a single day in which to "pull a fast one" in a fraud conspiracy.
Canada's parliamentary system is different from the US system in essential ways as you mention, so we shouldn't change to it. The system is most importantly reflective of how voters expect to be represented. Our system is already too dependent on parties, and Canada's parliamentary system is even worse: the chief executive is chosen not by the people, but by the most popular party. That's an artifact of the British system that the USA rejected to create our country, and indeed constitutional republican democracy.
The bottom line is that Canada demonstrates fast, reliable, cheap voting with 10% of America's population. More counting can be done in parallel, so there's no extra delay from the larger population. And we can keep the representation system, even simplify it for better representation, that Americans believe represents us in our republic. Especially compared with the complicated, deeply broken mess that produced the current US government, we certainly need to change to something proven to work among people much like us, in our own way.
--
make install -not war
And guess who programs the computers? I mean, jesucristo, people.
Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress should be required reading for anyone who thinks that throwing technology at an election will make the election more honest. I cannot freaking believe the number of times I see someone saying "Let's let a computer do it, because it's impartial and honest". If you're too cheap to buy your own copy, here's a relevant extract referring to, surprisingly enough, a national election tallied by a computer:
Next election around here, I'm gonna volunteer one of my computers to be used to count votes, because that computer was brought up to be faithful, upstanding, walk elderly grammas across the street, and has an honest bezel. Cross my heatsink and hope to crash. (I won't mention that the particular system I have in mind has been sitting unpatched on a cable internet system for the last year and probably has more trojans and rootkits than original OS code.)
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
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
Proprietary rioting would be the government staged demonstrations you see on the news in most third world countries.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important