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E-voting State By State
jcatcw writes "One-third of Americans will use voting machines next week that have never before served in a general election. Computerworld.com provides an overview of e-voting in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia — equipment, systems for voter registration, polling, significant legal challenges to the systems, previous media coverage, links to government watchdog sites, the vendors, technologies and laws that are important to the issue, and a review of 'Hacking Democracy.'"
In the middle years of America's history, elections were rigged by parties like Tammany hall through voter coercion and having supporters vote several times in several different districts (or multiple times at a single poll). Now we can rig elections without having to force anyone to do anything. No one is under threat of pain or death for failing to 'vote early and often'. Rather, it's all kept behind the scenes inside microchips that don't care one way or another who wins as long as they run their programs correctly.
You may say you want 'fair' elections, but you don't really want a return to the bad old days, do you?
One-third of Americans will use voting machines next week that have never before served in a general election.
Not to worry! I hear that the machines help you pick the right candidate, if you have trouble. Diebold actually licensed the clippy AI from Microsoft for that one.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
i ror'd
Here is to a problem free election in Arizona and across the states!
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I just heard on the news that the average age of poll workers is 70! I've seen many older people, even younger than 70, try to use a computer--and figure out what it's doing, and it's painfully difficult to watch. It's just a technology that they haven't grown up with, and have a hard time grasping. I'm not knocking the abilities of old dogs to learn new tricks, but it seems to me that the younger generation (including myself), need to step up to the plate here and start to help out in polling places.
I mean I'm not trying to sound cynical or mean, but alot of the poll workers I've encountered have a difficult enough time trying to find my name on their roll sheets. How are they supposed to be the safe-guards against people tampering with these machines?
For the 3rd or 4th election we're using electronic machines that read a paper card. The candidates have an arrow pointing towards their name with the center missing, you vote for the candidate by filling in the arrow. It's simple as hell and older people don't seem to have any problems with it. Dunno why everyone wants a touch screen or something similar. There is simply nothing wrong with paper.
The new state law requiring state issued picture ID is a nice touch too.
Oh yea, Harrison Country, Indiana btw.
Gone!
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
Couldn't most of the issues involved in e-voting be solved by producing the voter with a paper 'receipt' as proof of their vote (as well as a corresponding receipt for their precinct)? Taking it a step further, they could then, somehow, verify their vote by showing proof using this receipt. I'm purposely leaving out a lot of details here. But I'm just wondering if the voting system could benefit from the electronic monetary transaction technology and protocols that we interact with on a daily basis. What are your thoughts?
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
May the best hacker win!
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
This is one place where paper is still called for. Even if the paper is generated by computer in the form of a reciept, there must be some way to account for every vote. Perception of the voting machines alone is enough reason not to use them without a paper trail.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWThanks to our Cowboy heritage, we ain't got these newfangled eVoting machines here in Oklahoma.....yet.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I know quite a few poll workers and I don't know any of them that I would trust to be
able to turn on a machine much less anything else more technical that needed to be done
with one.
Got Code?
What is wrong with paper ballots? Anyone? Bueller?
Seriously, what is the reason that so many of the counties in the US are switching to electronic voting machines when they're clearly unverifiable, untested, and unreliable?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Just dont know which direction.
""One-third of Americans will use voting machines next week that have never before served in a general election."
OK. So how many people will NOT vote in their local elections because the above are being used?
Voter fraud is already happening, and is extremely obvious, in Texas, according to a local news station: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/11/01/more-alle gations-of-voter-fraud-and-guess-which-party-it-fa vors/
Paper Ballot / Optical Scan
Accept no substitutes.
when I arrive at my polling place and am confronted with an electronic voting machine with no voter-verifiable paper trail, how do I opt out and fill out a paper ballot? Is there a standard procedure that I've been unaware of?
Who else will be trying this?
They're supposed to be a verifiable, permanent record of the vote. Not being reusable is the whole bloody point!
Good! I trust a printing press printing 100,000 equal ballots more than I trust a thousand computers running flawed software to always correlate a touch-screen press for Candidate Y with an Access entry for Candidate Y, 100% of the time. There are multiple possible points of failure for the latter scenario, and only one easily noticable one for the former.
Again, good! People can be held to account for their failures. Machines cannot.
It takes a calamity or capital crime to 'lose' 100,000 ballots, but only a single hard drive crash or power failure to lose 100,000 electronic ones. I know which system I'd rather have.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I still like absentee balloting best. There's a voter verifiable paper trail, despite all the jokes about the post office, they do treat absentee balloting very respectfully and carefully and it's quite secure. 90% of washington now votes by absentee ballot, so we've got to be doing something right.
Here, you not only have a paper ballot, but you are also required to actually write in the name of the candidate. However, Japan still manages to get a decent turnout, and get the votes counted in a reasonably short span of time, even for local elections which had, in my local town's case last month, about 40 candidates vying for 35 seats.
Knowing the result at 10pm versus knowing it at 2am surely doesn't really make that much of a difference?
As for literacy, surely the same degree is needed when comparing ticking a box versus pushing a button or a touch-screen?
No, no, no, and for the last time, NO. Didn't vote for the candidate that the mobsters down the street are in collusion with? Don't expect a pretty outcome when they come knocking to check out who you voted for.
Our elections clerk Sherri Swenson signed off on the Diebold machines. I went to vote early monday (they have been encouraging everybody to do so) because I knew there was going to be problems. I got there, and there was a _long_ line snaking out the door (this was in the afternoon). When I inquired I was told that there was problems with the machines, and that not to worry there would be no problems next week.
I went to the office and voted by paper ballot that looked like it was meant to be optically scanned. Whether it will be or not I do not know. Regardless, it has to be better than voting on a Diebold machine. BTW, Swenson is running for re-election this year. Please help me vote her out.
"Whether or not *your* vote is anonymous matters much less than whether *you* vote. If you have to be identified with a government-issued identification card, then you automatically lose the protection of anonymity and thus restricts your freedom to make clear-conscience choices."
You lose no such thing. There's no coupling between the person who walked through the door and the vote cast. At best one can say so and so voted at location so and so, and that was already known from the roster one has to sign. Paper or electronic doesn't record who the voter is. Just the candidates voted for.
BTW, not your comment, all of these damn articles re: election/vote theft.
May the better crook win!
I missed the registration deadline AGAIN. I had an excuse last year, I had never lived in a state with a deadline before. This year it's all my fault, but it still sucks.
No, not really, but returning to those bad old days might very well be an improvement on the bad new days.
Wholesale, undetectable election fraud has become a possibility using the types of electronic voting machines that are currently in use ("DREs", "direct recording electronic" machines that have no paper trail being the worst offenders). These electronic voting machines allow attacks on the Democratic process that are much less labor intensive, and hence much more likely to be attempted, than the old fashioned approaches.
Establishing a re-countable, auditable paper-trail is certainly not a guarantee of secure elections, but it is the first step that needs to be made. It's a pretty obvious step, really, recommended by everyone who understands the problem.
I say ditch the voting machines, print up ballots, stock pens at the polling stations, and hand count the ballots. It can't be any worse than the system we have now.
An election has to be seen as free and fair and those that are elected have to actually get put in the post - look at Algeria as an extreme example of what happens to a country when people start playing with elections. Even having a fair election that doesn't look fair due to a lack of checks and balances gives groups the idea that they will never get anywhere without violent action. It has to both be fair and verifyably fair. From a distance Diebold looks like a nest of criminals due to a few suspicious actions - IMHO it is in their own best interests to let these things be audited by anyone that cares.
that in Oregon, there are no polling places? No voting machines of any kind? Everyone votes from home? And you get a good two or three weeks to spend with your ballot before it's due?
I moved to Oregon recently and voting is great. It's by mail. For everyone. You get ballot mailed to you along with a booklet with non partisan descriptions of all of the races. It also contains arguments for and against ballot measures written by citizens and organizations. Anyone who pays $500 gets one page to make their argument and have it included in the guide.
It's the best voting experience I've ever had. I sit down at the kitchen table and read the voters guide for each issue. I read other voter's guides put out by the local papers and the League of Women Voters. And then I vote. If something requires more thought, I'll sleep on it and fill it in the next day. Or the next week. Then drop it in the mail. As long as it's in the hands of the state by the Tuesday deadline, it's counted.
As I was saying, they worked just fine in DeKalb County, GA.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
with the "help america vote act", you can google it for details.
I keep seeing people in here with methods of printing out reciepts with hashes to "check" your vote online. How about you select your candidate (preferably have a none option) the machine adds your vote to its tally then spits out a filled in ballot paper that you then drop into the box as per normal. This way we can get an instant tally from the machine and the paper ballots are counted for verification. Other than lost ballot boxes (pretty damn hard to lose one of them here, not sure in the States) there should be zero descrepancy between the automatically tabulated results and the hand counted ballots.
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
Once again numerous posts from the luddites who have no problem with digital technology for all kinds of marvels if not critical aspects of modern life, medicine, commerce, transportation, education, research, but yet pull out the tin foil hat when it comes to implementing the same digital technology to elect our leaders.
/.'ers to continually play the "evil republican" card when you and I know, its not about electronic voting, its about the failure of democrats to present anything of substance in any matter, a malaise they continue to wallow in with no end in site.
They spew rhetoric about republicans rigging elections and will continue because as we all know, repeat a lie enough and it becomes truth, thanks Adolf. The proof is in the data they offer to buttress their policies whether it be global warming, the war on terror or economic, diplomatic and social policy.
Its as empty and hollow as John Kerrys head.
Thats what democrats and the left have been reduced to, whining and crying that they lost an election due to flawed, rigged or (insert current conspiracy dujour here)technology, systems etc. rather than flawed and plain stupid public policy which hath brought them to their current state of doom.
Its downright ridiculous especially for
Paranoia will destroy ya
See for yourself.
Great solution to the problem of voter fraud.
See ya later America!
Where ever America instates democracy, they always enforce the use of paper votes so that they can be counted and recounted if necessary to prevent tempering with the votes.
... I think that tells everything there has to be told about e-voting.
Verified Voting has long had The Verifier up on their site. This provides an interactive interface that gives more detailed info often on a county-by-county level. In many U.S. States the nuances of machines chosen and how they're deployed are up to the counties not the states. This results in an interesting patchwork of systems being run (often quite differently) under general and variable state laws.
Because if it's required, and if it isn't issued for free, then Indiana has reinvented the poll tax.
Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as
Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.
In August of 2005 North Carolina unanimously passed a law to meet the 2002 HAVA requirements. Our law requires a VVPAT and random audits of the paper. Without random audits a paper trail is useless. This law also requires vendors to post a US$ 7.5M bond to cover the costs of any problems. Additionally the law requires the CEO of any vendor to sign off on personal responcibility for any problems. The law carries felony penalties for things like switching the software version. The law requires the vendors to allow the state board of elections to examine their source code.
Three vendors were certified to sell their wares in our state; ES&S, Diebold and Seqouia. Diebold and Sequoia decided to not sell their products in NC. Gee, I wonder why? Maybe someone was scared of doing time in one of our fine correctional facilities.
The rest of the US needs to take a look at the law passed in NC.
S223
For one thing, voter rolls that the poll workers use (usually!) contain the DOB. So, it'd be hard to pull off the grandpa angle. For another thing, the town clerk should be coordinating activities with the state to purge dead people. Additionally, in (smaller) precincts, people know each other, and would notice.
Most importantly, however, is that for this form of voter fraud to have a significant chance of impacting the outcome of a race, it would have to be done multiple times. If done by the same person, he risks getting recognized. If done by many people, they risk their conspiracy being leaked, since it means far too many people keeping the same secret.
In MA, the fine is $10,000 and/or 5 years in prison... to cast a single fraudulent vote. Now, how many people do you think would risk that kind of punishment to cast a single fraudulent vote? Not bloody many.
Requiring voters to show ID is designed to filter out certain types of people. Who isn't likely to have a current, valid drivers license with their current address? City dwellers. The poor. Young people like college students who move frequently. All of these groups tend to vote Democratically (big D). So, is it any surprise that the Republicans are so afraid of the lone fraudster casting a vote under his grandfather's name, when it oh so conveniently also places a hurdle (both bureaucratic and financial) in front of so many voters who, statistically, will vote for Democrats? The GOP wants to discourage people like me -- a graduate student who lives in a city, doesn't own a valid drivers license, but has been voting (legally!) in my neighborhood for four years now -- from voting, since I likely won't vote for their candidates. Suburban and rural voters, where the GOP gets their votes from, almost always have valid drivers licenses. The requirement oh so conveniently isn't a burden on statistically likely GOP voters at all.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Any state interested in better voting service, not just corporate welfare for digital voting system vendors (and who knows, perhaps rigged/broken elections), would test these new machines side by side with the old ones.
Not the "public beta" insanity that puts machines known to fail into the critical path for so many votes. Rather, just have a demo booth, and ask every voter to vote on the demo machines, after they've voted on the machines that will be counted. Don't count the demo votes. But compare their totals to the totals of the regular machines, mostly out of curiosity. The real data will come first from interviewing demo voters about whether the system seemed to work for them. After those UI bugs are worked out, then we can try a demo cycle testing teh actual counting of the demo votes.
The government has one of the best beta program populations available. Because it's large, geographically distributed, highly varied in skill, mostly highly motivated to take the process seriously, and already showing up to perform this function on existing machines. Of course, we're giving that benefit free to voting system vendors, but without forcing them to feedback the results into their production, or even preventing beta results from making important changes to essential real-world systems.
Let's roll back the rollout, and scale up the beta, before we crash the whole system. Our political system, which relies on voters trusting the voting process.
--
make install -not war
I'd be interested to know what kind of maintenance, testing, and calibration these things have to go through and how often. Any machine that is unmaintained will eventually malfunction. The errors you describe could all be credibly ascribed to the incompetance of the local election officials in not maintaining and testing the machines before the election, instead of an inherent flaw in the machinery.
I would think it should be trivial to test all these optical scan machines before the election. You just need a set of a few hundred pre-made control ballots (say 200 for Ballot Option A and 200 for Ballot Option B), feed them though the machine, and see if you get the expected result back from the machine. Do it three times. Wrong test result on any run means the machine needs to be pulled and serviced. This is an obvious test to run and if the officials don't do it, then they are incompetent.
There have been a lot of comments along the lines of "The old paper/optical scan system works fine, why go electronic".
There are many reasons to move to a different system. Most of them dealing with accessibility. Electronic voting machines can present a ballot in multiple languages, electronic machines could present an audible ballot for the blind or a large print ballot for the sight impaired. Electronic machines are easier to vote on than filling in circles for those with motor skill issues.
A 2003 article presented error rates for the technologies as: 2.5% punch cards, 2.3% touch screen, 1.8% paper ballots, 1.5% optical scan and level machines. The real mission for electronic voting machines is to allow more people to vote unassisted but to do it in a way that is as accurate or more accurate as existing technology. The technology is clearly not available yet.
It seems a lot of reliability issues result from the use of touch screens and touch screen calibration. It seems that a machine with buttons around the screen (like most ATMs) would make more sense and would more closely duplicate the old lever system that proved to be so accurate. I will admit ignorance of the usability issues for this type of interface.
So the question that needs to be asked is, if a paper audit trail is so important, why is it being universally ignored? The answer lies in the reliability of the printing mechanism and the typical usage scenario that result in voting machines being idle for two years between uses. This was, I believe, the justification for leaving the printer requirement out of the first (defeated) IEEE proposed standard, but also, in some people's opinion, the primary reason why the standard proposal was defeated.
I have already voted in this election. I was offered the choice of touch screen or optical scan ballot, I chose optical scan.
"In many U.S. States the nuances of machines chosen and how they're deployed are up to the counties not the states. This results in an interesting patchwork of systems being run (often quite differently) under general and variable state laws."
OK so there's no monoculture. Sounds like there's even less of a reason to fear vote fraud.
Would be fun if someone exposed the security flaws in those machines by electing Santa Clause.
i'm pretty sure people would go for it if they all received gifts instead of taxes.
What the hell are you talking about?
There are some complaints about voter id, but that is not one of them. The poll workers check your name against the voter registration rolls, so they know who you are (unless you lie, but that will cause trouble if the real voter shows up, and is really what voter id would solve).
Map requires Flash. Anyone care to compile the data for the 50 states plus a district in a text-friendly post?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
...or one-third of American voters? I didn't think that voter turnout for mid-term elections was even one-half of all Americans, so 33.3% of Americans using these evil machines is really a high number.
While I'm being a grammar Nazi, the preferred term is U.S. Citizens, not Americans. I don't think that the North Americans living in Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and etc. will be voting in the U.S. elections; but I could be wrong.
"One-third of Americans will use voting machines next week that have never before served in a general election."
Given that it's a midterm election with only a handful of close races, I doubt that one-third of (eligible) Americans will be voting AT ALL next week, much less using new and potentially unreliable machines.
Many states have programs that allow you to vote early. Here in Iowa, it's not unusual to walk into a supermarket a week or two before the election and find a table set up for early voting. The system uses the same paper ballot as absentee voting; the only difference is that you fill it out there and then drop it in a box.
I voted earlier this week. If your state has a similar program, take advantage of it.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
I consider myself a patriot, a realist, and an optimist. And as those things, I ask all you hackers on Slashdot, for the sake of Democracy, somebody, please steal an election. Preferably a major one.
I don't want votes flipped between Democrats and Republicans. I don't want Greens or Libertarians to get a disproportionate amount of the vote, or even win. I want Oscar the Grouch to win a Senate seat on a write-in campaign. Preferably, several Senate seats and maybe a governorship or two.
As Sunday's Foxtrot elegantly put it, the scariest thing this Halloween isn't that Democracy may have been stolen from us, but that hardly anyone seems to know or care.
The only way I can see to shift the priority of this issue in the American Mind from somewhere below whether or not one's going to run out of Doritos all the way up to putting it on par with who's going to win a reality TV show, is to make Oscar win big. Don't let the news get away with their "unbiased" reporting where they say "Princeton says the vote's not secure, but Diebold says it is. Are hemlines on their way back down? Stay tuned for the new fall fashions, when we return." People don't think this is an issue. We know it should be. Make it one.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Ain't it interesting how all the errors in code (bugs?) all favor the republican candidates? What are the odds!
No. While the nuances are up the counties a) many of them are using the same machines, and b) vote fraud is often purpetuated locally. In fact if local actors cause fraud in different ways and different places the national pattern will be less obvious and similarly harder to detect. Keep in mind though that the last two U.S. Presidential elections were "decided" by a single county in a single state. In both cases people knew that those counties would be the key areas well in advance so it wasn't an absolute surprise.
When you think about it though, national fraud (e.g. a Presidential Election) is of a different character than local fraud. It also requies a much larger base of people and resources to pull off. Local actors messing with machines (and they are not that hard to mess with) are more likely. Local elections typically have smaller margins and the payoff can be a lot closer to home. A single unscrupulous bagman might swing a mayoral election and get the district re-zoned in his favor or swing a County election and get the new highway contract. Surprisingly large amounts of money and corruption re in the offing in local elections. People just spend a great deal of time focusing on the national stuff.
In Holland about 30% of the electronic voting machines have had
... if a briefcase sized box with $50 of electronics
to be scrapped because you can build a box that will show you which
way a person is voting from 120' away from the machine (the 70% that
they are keeping leak less RF and can only be read from 15').
What's the story on the Diebold etc. boxes in the US? Has anyone
looked at their RFI emissions?
I'm also somewhat suspicious about the "Can be read from x'" numbers.
Surely with a better antenna and more expensive electronics one
can push such a limit
can read at 15', then a truck sized box with $1,000,000 of electronic can
probably be made to read up to a quarter mile.
Go volunteer! I'm taking the afternoon off to do a shift as a poll watcher. I'm in a heavily-D area, so the outcome is pretty much a foregone conclusion, but its the principle of the thing.
Sig cannot be found.
Even though I'm not a programmer, that sounds like there is screwed up programming, IMO.