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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."
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.
When the rivers no longer flow to the sea...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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.
You mean the voters? Some know, some don't. It is our job to educate people.
If you know the politicians and beaurocrats? Some know and care, some know and delight. Any randomness is going to increase the chance of a slightly losing candidate to actually win.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Voting like that is pretty easy, but it would take forever to count the tens of thousands (at least) of ballots.
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
As a Chicagoan, I have to mention that you left out:
4. Repeat.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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+
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?
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
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.
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
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.
I thought you had to be dead to vote in Chicago.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
My county was reported as having one of the most effective voting systems in place. "Here's your paper with a bubble placed next to each candidate, which are reasonably separated, here's your black felt tip pen. Go nuts." The best part? If you even make a mistake, you just take your ballot to an official, they destroy it, log it, and give you a new one.
Apparently next year we're getting machines installed. Grr.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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
Canada, including Toronto (2.5 million people, 5th largest in N America including Mexico City), counts millions of paper ballots without our computerized problems. Our computers have repeatedly proven bad at this job.
Canada has several official languages and handicapped people.
Their paper doesn't seem to have "interpretation" problems.
Everyone I know who makes computers do things knows that computers are the wrong tool for voting. Their flexibility makes it easir to commit fraud, and much more easy to leave no evidence, especially coordinated in complex ways over distant areas - perfect for voting fraud.
Computers aren't just overkill. Their risks so outweigh their benefits in voting that they are the wrong tool. As has now been proven over and over for years. Including today in Maryland. How much more demonstration do you need that just paper ballots are better?
--
make install -not war
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.
Between candidates for constituional offices, local offices, statewide ballot propositions, local measures and all of the other things that were given to the people to voter on, the last California ballot had between 15-25 separate items. And that was just a gubernatorial primary. Multiply that by the thousands of precincts, and you've got a long wait.
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.
The area I live in has optical mark cards. Make an X, put it in the box, the box has already counted it by the time I'm out the door. It's as fast as using a computerized system where flash cards have to be carried to a central reader and counted. If they want to recount, they can take the ballots out of the box and run them through again, or look at them and count them by hand.
The real reason for using the computer systems is to save the cost and time required to design and print paper ballots, not to speed up the vote count
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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
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?
In France, there's one candidate per piece of paper. There are piles for each candidate; you're supposed to take several to keep the secret (you're also getting some in the mail). Put one piece of paper in the envelope (in secret), put the envelope in the box (in front of election officials). I've never heard of voter fraud in France (doesn't mean there isn't any though)
If there was ever a need for moving Mod points to +6 level it's the parent-post. Increasing the level of technology involved in any endeavor increases exponentially the human interventions involved, which increases the possibility that errors can be accidently introduced, which makes it possible to introduce errors intentionally, which (if even short of gaming the result) can call into question an entire district's reported results, and when seen already that the Supreme Court doesn't want us to waste time on verifying the exactitudes of such a small number of votes, regardless of how major that impact might be.... Technology doesn't muck thinks up. Technology makes it possible for people to muck things up and get away with it. (Speaking as another software developer).
Exit polls will give a reasonable estimate on the results.
Are these the same exit polls that predicted a win for Gore, then Bush, then Gore, then Bush? No thanks, I'd prefer to wait for the official totals. Some people lie to exit pollers. I'm one of them.
> 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 !
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?
A properly designed electronic voting system will be far more accurate and far more secure than counting ballots by hand or using punch cards or optical scanners. Additionally, the results can be tabulated a lot more quickly.
Unfortunately, proper design seems to be something of a stumbling block among e-voting manufacturers.
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?
"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." I guess you didn't see 2001: A Space Odyssey, did you?
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
I would, too. Which is why the exit polls are an estimate. As you know, in 2000, the vote was officially decided by 537 votes -- a statistical dead heat. They didn't do too bad. If I go home and see that candidate X or ballot issue Y is winning by 10% on the exit polls, I can be pretty sure that when the final tallies come out, that candidate will win or issue will pass.
And he wonders why exit polls don't work. What an ass! The only thing lying to pollsters does is increases the suspicion of fraud in elections, something you're ostensibly working against, and perhaps gives you some giddy feeling that you're lying to someone for the sake of lying.
> 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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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
We don't do most of that in the UK - we have what is called a "representative democracy" which means that you elect people to represent you, and they then make the decisions rather than running back to the electorate for each little thing.
As an example, we most certainly do not elect judges! In the UK judges are non political, and we want people who are good at being judges, not people who are good at winning elections. Similarly "city officials" are appointed by normal recruitment processes, with elected local politicians taking part in the process when hiring senior officials.
Re "taxes/bonds/ordinances", referenda in the UK are very rare. We elect the politicians to make these decisions for us. If we don't like how they do it we throw them out. Having said which, as a politician I am involved in endless consultation with my electorate to find out what they think on various issues, but these are not elections.