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More Voting Shenanigans in Florida
stewwy writes "It looks like the the shenanigans have started already, the Register is running a story about the difficulty early voters are having with casting votes for Democrats." From the article: "The touch-screen gizmos seem strangely attracted to Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist."
Our evil plan is working perfectly.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
Serious question for those familiar with the technology:
Is this similar to the electronic credit card signature systems that display my signature half an inch below where I put the stylus?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Maybe the machines know that nobody would vote against Christ.
Oh, it's Crist? Hmm... well, it's still 84% of our savior.
The article summary is misleading in ways that would give CNN a hardon.
/. hordes into a raging frenzy.
It says nothing about why the terminals were malfunctioning, which had everything to do with touch screen calibration (and the need to recalibrate from time to time) and nothing to do with some right-wing conspiracy. In fact, the article implies that it was one machine in particular, not all of them.
Way to spin it to work the
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
You seem to have never used a touch screen in your life. Allow me to explain: They are always poorly calibrated peices of shit due to the seperation between the display and the sensors. They often read inputs a bit above or below what you intend to push. Depending on the type of touchscreen, this often is due to the height of the user, though simple poor maintenence is also an issue and can lead to left/right problems as well.
People in Florida are well known for not knowing what to push based on what they see and how tall they are, see: http://www.newyorkslime.com/florida-ballot.jpg
I recommend getting rid of all the short people.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
And then the Greens or Libertarians sweep it with 113% of the vote.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I don't want to sound like a Mel-Gibson-style conspiracy nut, but it's hard not to reach for the tinfoil when you read anecdotal reports like this. It would take such a small shift of votes to change an election ... I dunno, can the party in power resist that temptation? Given that they can't resist any other temptations?
One problem with anecdotal reports is that they can easily be abused by the media to skew people's opinions of what is happening. Suppose, for a moment, that these voting machines are buggy and that you have similar numbers of Republicans and Democrats that have problems voting for their candidates. Now with past voting irregularities in Florida there is an increased sensitivity in Democrat voters to problems like this; this means that these people are more likely to report these problems to the media, and the media are far more likely to report these occurances.
I'm not saying this is what is happening, it is just a possibility.
"Florida voters using electronic ballot machines are having persistent problems choosing Democrats in early elections, the Miami Herald reports."
:-)
I have trouble voting for Democrats too.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I am working reviewing the voting machine software for a major US State. The vendors are very slow bringing out any software for review. The review is technical and not for valid elections.
I have looked at the software and I could see the weaknesses the critics describe. They are real. Any election system that lacks a paper trail including paper ballots that are user validated is in my view fraudulent. The systems have a lot of weaknesses as well.
The most important thing that should change in election machines is that the process we uses should be machine independent. That is the failure or status of any particular machine should not halt the election or prevent the correct casting of a ballot.
The true criterion for an election machine should be that it is (1) Easy to use. (2) Very very difficult for anyone to misuse. (3) It should have a paper ballot copy that is saved and validated by the voter and then placed in a secure box for validation and recounts. (4) The system should have off site valid totals kept in at least 3 locations at all times. These locations should be in different custody chains. (5) The election should be subject to automatic recounts if any of the 3 off site totals do not match up to the local totals or between each other.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
The Register read an article at the Miami Herald saying people were having trouble voting. The Miami Herald reported the experience of some (one or two users) and some hearsay about poll workers saying it happens all the time. How about the journalist at the Miami Herald trying to get more information. Both Democrat and Republican reps are at every polling station. Election officials are known people. Other people are voting early. Put some meat on the story.
... so now why would I want to be taxed out the ass to help a bunch of lazy people on social programs.
Your generous support is helping the lazy rich stay of politics so they can give their money to the lazy people on social programs. You just gotta love being a middle class taxpayer.
Touch screens can be aligned and then they are not hard to use. Alignment does not have to be a lengthy process, nor is it difficult, nor does it have to be done often. Anyone who ever used a Newton or Palm knows this.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"making voting idiot proof" shouldn't mean making it easier for idiots to vote.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Touchscreens are used extensively in the manufacturing industry for operator/machine interfaces. Some of the better HMI packages even have built in drivers and calibration.
These screens are used by people of widely varying height, vision, mental bandwidth, sometimes wearing gloves and sometimes not. They are also exposed to dust and sand and solvents and grease.
While I agree that people have a hard time knowing what to push I wouldn't blame the screens. If someone can't cobble together a reliable touch interface that doesn't need to be calibrated in the field, for a system will run only one application, they are either incompetent or purposely screwing up. The latter would be my guess.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The headline on the Miami Herald piece? Only minor glitches reported in early voting
Read the full article. You have one woman in Florida who had a problem (or made a mistake), realized the problem, and had it corrected. This is HARDLY voting "shenannigans."
Excerpting from the article:
original story via this journal entry
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Something else to consider is that the candidates are most likely always listed in the same order for every voter. Depending on the facing of the screen, it may cause problems for tall users, short users, or people on the extremes of each, and the errors will always be in the same direction for each of those groups.
In the case of short people, for example, if Crist is listed first and Davis is second, then the alignment of the image with the touchscreen is likelier to be such that attempting to select Davis will lead to actually selecting Crist. Short people attempting to vote for Crist won't have the problem of accidentally voting for Davis, because they'd already be either off the top of the list of names or at the top of the touchscreen.
One solution would be an adjustable screen that can be pivoted to face the user. If the screens are LCD, then the feature is self-managing, because users wouldn't be able to see a screen that's not adjusted to face them. Of course, a cheaper solution would be to make the selectable regions as large as possible. ("The fingers you are using to dial this phone are too fat. If you would like to order a special phone, please mash the keypad with your palm now.")
Believe it or not, we have this parallax problem in our D&D group. We use a 1/4" sheet of clear plexiglass on our tabletop for mapping dungeons, and under that we put a grid mat (the grid mat sucks for writing on with markers, but the plexi works great). The only problem is that, depending on where you're sitting, the grid lines on the mat appear to match up with a different spot on the plexi, so if two people on opposite sides of the table are cooperating to draw out a map, sometimes their lines won't match up.
Anyway, it bears mentioning that this was the same problem that led zillions of Floridians to accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, and was partly to blame for the dramatic push toward "modern" voting machines. At least you don't get hanging chads with a touchscreen, I guess.
While I agree that people have a hard time knowing what to push I wouldn't blame the screens. If someone can't cobble together a reliable touch interface that doesn't need to be calibrated in the field, for a system will run only one application, they are either incompetent or purposely screwing up. The latter would be my guess.
I disagree. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to idiocy, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, or laziness; particularly in combination with each other.
That the machines are just poorly-thought-out, poorly-engineered, poorly-constructed, poorly-maintained piles of shit, seems far more likely than such an obvious conspiracy.
I suspect that people cutting corners and generally being lazy or careless results in the deaths of more people every year than intentional, thoughtful acts of evil do. Probably a lot more.
There is a finite amount of evil in the world, but an infinite amount of stupidity.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Even if it was the voting machine randomly switching votes isn't that something to be concerned about? You make it sound like if the votes were switched randomly everything is hunky dory.
Having said that...
1) There is documented evidence of votes for democrats going to republicans.
2) There is no documented evidence of votes for republicans going to democrats.
3) The elections office is being run by republicans.
4) The voting machines are made by a company which is being run by an avid republican supporter.
If you want to keep pretending that this is some minor glitch then go ahead.
evil is as evil does
From what I read in this article, several users encountered a miscalibrated touchscreen so that a press on the screen registered in the wrong place. Several voters only caught the error when reviewing their votes on the final page.
It sounds like a small, correctable problem, and pretty damn far from "sheannigans."
From the article:
And from TFA: Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
SO what we have here is a few incidents with misaligned screens, and a some of the cases, the screen registered the republican instead of the democrat, and of course the press picked up on those in order to feed the conspiracy theories. Actually, the story picked a single incident that that happened in.
So to recap TFA:
There are reports of errors with the voting machines. These appear to be relatively minor and the poll workers are trained to fix them. Some districts keep records of maintenance, some don't, and at least one seals the machines for later review. And in one case, the voter was selecting a Democrat, but it came up Republican, but after three tries they were able to vote for the candidate they wanted. Then they called the press.
Excuse me, but making a big deal about this is just FUD.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
Speaking as a UI designer, there's an easy way to counter minor calibration drift: Give people large buttons.
Most races have a small number of candidates, and giving users the largest possible button drastically decreases misvotes. Interestingly, the larger the button, the more the user will press the center of it, resulting in fewer miscalibration (or, more likely in a voting environment, parallax) issues.
It would be interesting to run a few empirical tests and see if the calibration drifts depending on whether the democrat or republican is listed first.
Another good answer would be to unobtrusively recalibrate for each user by giving them a few simple 'press here to continue' screens.
Kevin Fox
Problem number one.
I think there's evidence of a functional conspiracy, the main smoking gun being the patterns in exit-poll discrepancies in the 2004 election, though the widespread reports of more conventional irregularities in Ohio are good too.Like I said, functional. I don't know if this would count as "brilliant". And I wouldn't "presuppose" this if I didn't think there was evidence for it.
The difficulty with the electronic voting machines in use is that the size of the conspiracy you need to do the job is much smaller. They allow wholesale fraud.Hm, well which do you think, am I claiming that they've never slipped up, or am I claiming that they have slipped up?
The transparency of this particular exploit is indeed pretty peculiar: that's what I'm commenting on. If the bad guys have to work like this, then they're definitely not invincible.
If you want a wild-ass guess: maybe the programmer's were being incompetent on purpose, because they wanted to sabotage the effort?
Well, it could be an IslamoMartian conspiracy to make the Republicans look bad.
Note: your "tinfoil" is past it's expiration date. Please upgrade your rhetoric dispenser.
Um.. No. In fact there is a large amount of data which shows that my "theories" ARE fact. It was modded as a troll by Free Speech Suppressors fairly quickly, so you may have missed my earlier post with the link to several studies showing that there is indeed a Liberal media bias in America. My opinion is borne out by scientific study and fact.
Studies carried out by conservative institutes, paid for by conservative political funds, and used for conservative political purposes. With such impartial credentials who could doubt the results?
Occams Razor dictates that the simplest answer is most likely the correct one. What is more likely; That a national conspiracy involving Diebold, The Republican party, and THOUSANDS of election workers of all political stripes banded together to hand elections over to the Bush and the Republicans, OR, that a company has made an inferior product that sometimes causes irregularities in the voting records?
I love Occam's Razor games. However, what you've done is create a strawman argument. First you need to add the "unfortunate" declaration by the Diebold that he was personally going to hand victory in Ohio to Bush. Then you subtract the election wokers of all political stripes, because they're not involved. Then you add Diebold employees who admit to having secretly modified the code days before an election occured, and having been deliberately lied to about what the patch did, and being instructed to keep the changes secret from the election officials. Now which explanation is simpler? That the liberal media is making this stuff up, or that just maybe there's something the should be seriously investigated.
Oh right, you don't give a fuck as long as your side is winning, asshole.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I have total control of the voting machines, and I'm going to fix the election. I need some help though...I have a hard decision to make...
Should I a) let the voter choose whatever he or she wants, and then assign all the votes to my candidate? or b) randomly have the machine reassign input to choose my candidate, giving them a chance to verify and correct their vote?
I just don't know...this is such a tough decision...I must not be cut out for this election stealing business.
... it's best to be alert for it.
Have we become so cynical that we believe the absolute worst of everyone?
In politics? It's not hard. This has nothing to do with political philosophy, and everything to do with actions that look shady, both circumstantially and concretely. Perhaps you've heard about the recent campaign letter in Orange County discouraging immigrants? Perhaps you've heard about the groups threatening individuals with arrest if they show up at the pools, or telling that 'Democrats vote on Wednesday'? Blackwell's management of voter registration in Ohio 2004?
I'm not about to argue the Democrats have a clean history in this regard. Evidence of machines making it difficult to vote for Republicans is equally worthy of investigation. However, there's ample evidence there are people in both parties -- *Republicans Included* -- who are willing to cheat. The motive's there. The means and opportunity are documented. That makes it nearly inevitable, so when some voting trouble comes up that looks and quacks like a duck....
The Democrats offer no real solutions than to say they would do "better" than the Republicans
First of all, even *assuming* all the Democrats have to offer over the Republicans is that they're not the current crop of Republicans, that's still a virtue. Expressing disapproval is a real form of feedback. Turning over ineffective officials may not get you who you want immediately, but it's absolutely necessary if you want change, and it tells politicians who NOT to be.
Second of all, while the statement 'Democrats offer no real solutions' may be true of a given candidate, and while it's more largely true in terms of campaign tactics (which value rhetoric over substance), I'd say that phrase far more commonly means "I'm unfamiliar with the Democratic candidate's policy positions." I can't count the number of times that people said that about Kerry during 2004, but when I'd follow up with something like "So, you don't like Kerry's plan for shaping tax incentives to hire domestically?", 90% of them had no idea what I was talking about.
And the Democratic candidate for Senate I'm supporting this election (Pete Ashdown) has been genuinely expressive about many of his positions and views.
It's also true, of course, that not every Democrat is a good candidate, nor does every Republican need to be turned out. I simply find that phrases like "the Democrats are just as bad" or "the Democrats have no ideas" to be false.
Why can't we just focus on the problems with electronic voting rather than turning it into a political debate?
It's an excellent idea, but for whatever reason, talking ourselves blue on the technical merits of the issue seems to have done nothing to get the population up in arms and our elected officials to do anything.
I think in the end, the problem isn't that there's partisan accusations of cheating. It's that we seem to have no significant social equipment for investigating the issues without invoking partisan ire.
Tweet, tweet.
I agree; it is important that idiots be able to vote because there are so many of us. We should be able to get the government we want without having to hang an aristocrat from every lamppost.
http://www.cmpa.com/documents/06.10.31.Bad.news.pd f
From the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Right there on the first page, 77% of Democrat coverage (ABC, NBC, CBS) is favorable, and 12% of Republican coverage is favorable to them. Heck, some news I've seen still mentions Tom Delay (Republicans = corrupt), but I never heard what happened to Rep William Jefferson (D-Louisiana) and his $90k in the freezer. Here in Illinois, two big fund raisers for the governor (a democrat) are in trouble for illegalities with their raising. Yet, I don't consider every democrat in the country corrupt because a few are.
What I don't recall from the 1994 takeover of Congress, was this HUGE push for weeks/months beforehand like they have now, saying how it's a done-deal, Democrats have won, Nancy Pilosi is Speaker, Bush will be impeached immediately, etc.