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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.'"
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 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!
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.
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NSFWFor example, exit polls are a proven and incredibly accurate way of estimating results. In fact, the only times anywhere in the world ever that they have broken down is when gross electoral fraud has taken place - except in America during the last two presidential elections where the pollsters suddenly and catastrophically failed to conduct an accurate exit poll, but it wasn't due to electoral fraud, oh no.
It seems to have turned into a party political issue where the supporters of the winning party accuse the losers of "whining" when the actual evidence of fraud should scare them more than their opponents because it means that they, the loyal voters have become expendible. They don't need you anymore. They can win the election without you. The president now has the power to declare martial law & he has the machinary (hah!) to deliver the results he wants.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
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?
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?
Unless you live in a dumb state that does not require paper trails, all this talk of hacking elections is really off base
Like... ALL of Georgia, ALL of Maryland, >1M voters in Iowa, almost 3M in Florida, 540k in Virginia, 885k in PA, and so forth (and that's only for Diebold machines without a paper trail). (pdf link).
As for audits, my impression is that auditing only occurs if the vote is close (the definition of 'close' varying by locale). If I were hacking the vote, I'd go the extra mile to make it likely that the results didn't meet this criteria. As you'll recall from Ohio, election officials usually aren't chomping at the bit to do a recount.
Ignorant paranoia? I wish.
Actually, what I really wish for is a third party candidate with no money and no support in the polls to win a major race on Nov. 7th. Say, Libertarian Kevin Litten in the governor race in Iowa. With unusual support in those districts with unverifiable Diebolds. That would be interesting.
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Because if it's required, and if it isn't issued for free, then Indiana has reinvented the poll tax.
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.