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Voting Machine Glitches Already Being Reported
Neovanglist writes "CNN, FOX, and MSNBC are reporting that voting machines in three states (Ohio, Indiana, and Florida) have already been showing issues, both in the machines themselves and in the training of poll attendants, causing many districts to switch to paper ballots." From the article: "Voters put the Republican congressional majority and a multitude of new voting equipment to the test Tuesday in an election that defined the balance of power for the rest of George W. Bush's presidency. Both parties hustled to get their supporters out in high-stakes contests across the country, Democrats appealing one more time for change, and appearing confident the mood was on their side. Republicans conceded nothing as their vaunted get-out-the-vote machine swung into motion." If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!
What is wrong with paper ballots?!!!??!? Canada seems to be able to handle paper balloting followed up with results within 24 hours, so what is the deal with all of the money and risk associated with trusting our politics to hackable solutions?
I was out this morning at 7:00am voting and predictably, two of the ten voting machines (20% folks!) at our location would not take their programs...... Take their programs! And how many times do we have to be shown how easy it is to hack the system? When I left after voting, we were still looking at machines that were not working.
Again, paper ballots folks. It's a simple, cost effective solution that is easier to secure than electronic voting. I have yet to see a valid statistical study that demonstrates that electronic voting is inherently more reliable/statistically valid than paper ballot voting. How much is this move towards electronic voting costing the US taxpayer? Was this a favor for political contributors? I think that the evidence is pretty strong for it which might give even more credibility to the FBI in their new focus on corruption in Washington DC politics.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Heard about it on KCBS this morning. About half(??) of California voters are using absentee, too.
Remember to vote early and often
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Dont forget to pour one out for your 500,000 homies in washington DC who are disenfranchised and not represented in congress and therefore wont be voting for anyone besides our corrupt crack-smoking city officials and thus would gladly change places with any of you. :D
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
...it would be hilarious if Ohio once again reported a majority for George Bush tonight...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Yep, there were some glitches like you couldn't turn the dad-burned thing on when there was no power out there in them thar boondocks. What's a puter anyway? Some new-fangled thang?
-- Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.
;)
:)
Well, I guess this eliminates the hacking option.
By the way, everyone, go out and vote today. Even if you don't agree with either party (which is where I often find myself), you have a chance to create some fun by giving a Republican president a Democrat congress.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
Each story is timed-stamped so you know how fresh/stale the story is.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Well, Slashdot, you've done it. After all the stories of insecure voting machines, I opted for a paper ballot. I sat in the corner with the old folks who shun technology, but at least I know where my vote went.
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
go vote if you have not voted yet. no excuses
if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?)
the gore bush fiasco back in 2000 should have finally once and for all taught everyone how much their vote really does matter
imagine the state of the world today had the vote tally been slightly different back in 2000
if the government does something you don't like from 2007-2008, and you do not vote today, then go find a mirror, and look at yourself for blame
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let's see... if voting machines are required for one day every two years, doesn't that leave 729 days (assuming no leap year span) to schedule things like TESTING and TRAINING?
While listening to the radio this morning on the way to work, a number of people called in with problems all over south-central PA. Some voters had to be turned away because the machines wouldn't work at all. The majority of them reported pressing to vote for their party, but all of the selections for the other party became highlighted. (For those who are ready to decry evil republicans for rigging the devices, the people who called in wanted to vote party-line republican but all of the democrat candidates highlighted instead - even after multiple attempts.) Some called in to say that they had no problems, but they were few and far between.
This whole notion of going electronic for the sake of going electronic, which is what it feels like, is bullshit. For almost two decades I've been using the "fill in the oval" voting method and it's worked fine. Sometimes change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good idea.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I guess no one else (not even the judges- hah!) got the flier I did saying due to computer issues the election was going to be postponed till Thursday, huh?
Before the "It's your right to not vote/It doesn't matter" proponents insert muddly the water too much, I'd like to join in encouraging people to go vote regardless. Really - even if you hate the candidates, there are a lot of voter initiatives and state constitution issues out there that deserve serious consideration. Google 'Sample Ballot [County name] [State Name]' for your state and county and you should be able to find a sample ballot including the initiatives. Regardless of your stance, I encourage everyone in the US to exersize their right to vote today.
Ryan Fenton
Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.
I re-tapped the square for "Jim Davis", this time using my nail instead of the tip of my finger, and the check mark moved from "Charlie Crist" to "Jim Davis".
Want to know how to fix this? Don't put the most important square as the FIRST box that someone has to click. Make it something UNIMPORTANT or better yet, give us a TEST / CALIBRATION SEQUENCE for each user before any voting can begin.
Never assume your average user knows how to use your newfangled touch-screen machines.
Some links to stay informed and also to report voting irregularities:
ProtectOurVotes.org
Election Protection 365
Video The Vote
VeektheVote (cellphone video reports)
National hotlines:
1-866-OUR VOTE (1-866-687-8683) (website here)
1-888-SAV-VOTE (1-888-728-8683)(voting machine problems)
Also dailykos.com (liberal) has some good coverage, and I know I'll be watching Jon Stewart tonight for his comedic (and often insightful) coverage.
It's the best solution. Oregon has had this for a while. It's an option in California (you can get permanent absentee voter status and have a ballot mailed to you automatically for every election).
My understanding is that Oregon has seen an increase in voter participation since adopting the vote-by-mail system.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Here in Oregon, I voted at my dining room table last week. It was fun and relaxing, plus I got to show my kids how the whole voting process works. Plus it's cheaper, as you don't have to transport polling equipment around and hire so many people to manage it.
Fortunately it sounds like the idea might be catching on other places. There's a Vote By Mail Project that discusses the idea, plus some politicians are talking about it to other folks too. Interesting times.
The windows based ones here in michigan are all having problems. I talked to 3 other people in different voting places and they all noticed that the electronic machines were not working with some kind of error window popped up on the screen.
Where I was the official was so pissed at the machines he said loudly to someone on a phone... "The paper ballots dont need a reboot! why should we use this junk?"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I used the old fill in the circle ballot today in (MI), I think next time I will vote before hand via absentee ballot.
Get up!
Must be those quality Diebold voting machines.
I don't know what they're talking about. I've voted several times today and the machines are working great!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As a resident of DC, the most important vote for me this year is for mayor...
...I asked. They claimed to not have any and therefore I had to use the machine. The precint was Coconut Creek, Broward County.
Perhaps they should switch to paper ballots indefinitely.
> Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.
Maybe the power of Crist was compelling you?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Just finished casting my vote the old fashioned way - filling in the little ovals with a pen. Strangely enough, my state gets one of the highest ratings for doing voting the right way in all of the different categories.
Okay, so there is a machine, the one that scans the ballot. But that's a pretty low complexity technology and had quite a lot of testing before it was ever used for elections.
I don't personally fear big electronic vote conspiracies - yet. I think it's feasible and is a major issue that needs to be addressed. But at this point I think it would be hard to rig the machines because they're just so unreliable to begin with. As a country, we have put this issue WAY to far down on the priority scale.
Not sure, my ballot appeared ok, but then again I wasnt comparing line for line all the candidates or options, I just voted for the ones I knew ahead of time, which all appeared normal.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
I think Apple needs to get in on the voting machine market.
click wheel vote selector anyone? Or how about Aqua!
I love memes. but at least use a little discretion so you don't ruin it.
God Bless Diebold and their Open Access voting machines!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I went and voted today. I have many, many reservations about electronic voting and those have been discussed many times on Slashdot.
:)
However, I was THRILLED to see that the Diebold machines I voted on included an auditable paper trail that I was shown and could verify before it was chomped into the machine for keeping. One problem down, 900 to go.
I *might* have noticed a calibration issue with the touch screen, but I'm not sure that it wasn't a programming error. Several local elections had only 1 candidate and I hit the "write in" box intending to leave it blank. It promptly checked the box for the candidate. It was simply a matter of wanting to express distaste for a race with no competition so I just ignored it and skipped the rest of the similar races. In retrospect, I should have made a stink about it for the sake of principle.
However, all my votes in races with more then one candidate were recorded properly.
Until touchscreen technology gets some major improvements in usability and reliability, I don't know why it's used at all. It's just not ready for it. There's an argument that's it's more "intuitive". I agree. But not until these problems are fixed. I don't know about other security/reliability issues, but the wheel machines by eSlate aren't bad. I wouldn't say they are as intuitive as an optical scan form, though.
I voted in Franklin County in Ohio, and I was pleasantly surprised at the voting machines at my polling place. I used a iVotronic system by Election Systems & Software that had a real time printout of my vote. The touchscreen was easy to use and it gave me the ability to review my votes at the end.
Although I think the source code to voting machines should be publicly available, I feel confident that the paper receipt is accurate. The important thing that needs to be done is random paper recounts to make sure what's on the paper matches what's in the database on that machine.
Some geezers in FL punch the wrong hole in an historically close election between 2 major-party presidential duds and insignificant 3rd-parties. Cries of disenfranchisement and revotes and stolen elections lead to major consensus that something must be done. In typical top-down big-government fashion we make a new law HAVA. Federal carrot of funds with arbitrary deadline attached is dangled in front of a polyglot of localities. Localities, never faced with a surplus of funds, make deadlines, accept cash. Were good decisions made? Or fast ones to get the cash? Did things get better for your locality? Did you read those public notices? Did you participate in the selection process? Do you have a clue as to your localities process for voting? Have you ever acted as a judge of elections?
Rather than complain and wonder how a top-down big-government program made things worse, volunteer next election to get involved in the election process. Normally only geezers work the polls, because no one else shows up. And this is a perfect place for disenfranchised third-parties to get involved with the voting process. And local yokels are almost universally welcomed to help in the voting process.
I'm for voting halls. A bunch of large locales per town where anyone who wants to vote can come meet at a specific time. A person stands on a podium, reads off the candidate/issue, then says, "Yes!" and waits for applause. He then says "No!" and waits for applause. The candidate/issue with the loudest applause meter reading (there'll be someone off to the side holding the big thermometer-looking thing) gets the win.
Simple yet nostalgic, and you have someone to hang if the crowd is obviously louder than what the thermometer is showing.
(definitely not a Diebold, another brand, which shall remain unnamed here) less than 30 minutes ago and it worked flawlessly. It gave me the opportunity to review all my votes at the end of the session and correct any mistakes before hitting the final 'VOTE' button.
Maybe it's time for a little electoral reform. If our system existed anywhere else but the USofA, we would call it corrupt. It is just way to easy to abuse. Jimmy Carter just monitored the election in Nicaragua. As far as the election monitors could tell, it was pretty much honestly run. Those same election monitors would likely refuse to monitor our election. The main reason is that the election is not run nationally. It is run at the county level. There is no overall authority which has the responsibility for preventing abuse and making sure the results are honest.
y Id=6439233
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Here's a quote from the Carter interview:
"But there's no doubt in my mind that the United States electoral system is severely troubled and has many faults in it. It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing. We require for instance that there be uniform voting procedures throughout an entire nation. In the United States you've got not only fragmented from one state to another but also from one county to another. There is no central election commission in the United States that can make final judgment. It's a cacophony of voices that come in after the election is over with, thousands or hundreds of lawyers contending with each other. There's no uniformity in the nation at all. There's no doubt that that there's severe discrimination against poor people because of the quality of voting procedures presented to them. Another thing in the United States that we wouldn't permit in a country other than the United States is that we require that every candidate in a country in which we monitor the elections have equal access to the major news media, regardless of how much money they have. In the United States, as you know, it's how much advertising you can by on television and radio. And so the richest candidates prevail, and unless a candidate can raise sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, they can't even hope to mount a campaign, so the United States has a very inadequate election procedure."
wtf i modded parent insightful, is the mod system still borken??
There is a key difference between our Canadian elections and the American elections.
In Canada we've got 1 question per election. We just have to choose our MP (Member of Parliament) or MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament). Just one X, and around 4 options.
I gather from the media that the Americans have a whole series of questions (perhaps our southern cousins can confirm this?).
So, manually tabulating Canadian votes is considerably easier than manuallly tabulating American votes.
Don't mean to be a troll, but maybe the Canadian elections are more user friendly, not necessarily for the voter, but perhaps for the counter.
From a quick read-through, I can now see that Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb is an idiot or seeing only what she wants to see, which essentially makes her a liar.
They already put big honkin' screens on those things. They should just make the buttons as big as possible. It'd also make things a lot easier for amputees and people with tremors.
polls consistently shows democrat winning from a few weeks but a few days before the elections, a poll showed a republican progression and another one still showed democrats winning by a large margin.
My guess is that, to the world's (and US ?) surprise, republicans will win by a small margin, explaining it by the last day of campaign.
And now the scary part : people will buy it.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
> Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.
Maybe the power of Crist was compelling you?
Now I have to wipe pop off my monitor.
Oh, no! Slashdot caught whatever virus the voting machines have! Whenever anyone goes to type in a meaningful tag like "voting" or "diebold" or something like that, it always comes out as "itsatrap".
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
To answer your question, I had about 30 choices to make on my ballot. 5 Ohio constitutional ammendment issues and roughly 25 or so people to vote for from Governor of Ohio to several judges. We used an electronic machine that printed your results in a spool of paper behind a small window, so you could see but not change the paper trail. It went quickly and it was 7 or 8 minutes from the time I walked in the door till the time I walked out.
I already voted Absentee, and probably will do so from now on, every chance I get.
Absentee Ballots are the way to go:
* No campaginer gauntlet outside the polling place.
* No long lines at the polls.
* No clueless or senile volunteer workers that have to be shown where you are on the Registered Voter Roster, even when you fill out your "application to vote form" legibly. (God Bless the elderly, but please, keep them away from being a polling place volunteer. It's frustrating, every time I have voted in person.)
* No clueless or senile volunteer workers that have to be shown the VOTING PROCEDURES, because you know what they are and THEY DON'T. (That's also maddening.)
* No touch screens.
* No hacker-inviting electronic voting machines.
* No harassment from "election monitors".
* No screaming, colicky brat kids that were dragged there by their parents. (God Bless the children, but please... stay out of the damn polling place until of legal voting age!)
My voting experience was much nicer this time. Ten minutes of marking a paper ballot, stuffing an envelope, and off to turn the thing in.
Now if only there were technology to filter out political ads for those of us who already cast our ballots...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
We have the fill in the arrow paper ballots which are read by machines. Don't like the results? Recount by hand.
Fine, this is Slashdot, but you don't need touchscreen and you shouldn't have it it. Stick to paper!
Harrison Country, Indiana.
Gone!
Is anyone surprised that problems with voting machines happen to be reported in swing states?
I predicted a revolution was coming back in 2004. George Bush can smell it coming now.
Why don't we get the day off. I was at work late last night, and I'm behind on some projects. I barely have time to take a lunch let alone go stand in a line for an hour. We get all kinds of silly days off in the United States. President's day!!! But not election day. I'm very disappointed in our reps on both side of the isle in dealing with the voting situation.
As for paper ballots I think we should stick with them until we get a system ironed out. At the same time they are not perfect either. Remember the Buccanon debacle in the Florida 00 election.
I'd like to see each voter get a random "card" with a bar code on it. This would be unique for everyone and handed out randomly at the polling station. Then you would stick that card into a machine which would record your vote and the bar code. Then later you could go online and scan it in...or some office...and "verify" your vote. Furthermore I think we should use two different system from two different vendors. Even better to have the Republicans choose one and the Democrats the other. Then when the country goes to verify the vote they can make sure that both machines match up.
When you walk away from the machine(s) you should get a paper copy that you can use to double verify. If we can spend 100's of billions on war, I think we can spend some cash on our election systems.
Just for the record, I had no problem voting this morning in MD on a Diebold machine. It did give me pause, but everything seemed to work just fine. The only "glitch" that happened while I was there was a woman who was screaming her head off that once she touched a candidate, she couldn't change her vote. Problem was that she just didn't read the frickin' instructions on the machine.
:)
So, that was my experience. Judge as you will
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
And with the number of old people in Florida, who'll not understand the significance of the check mark (how often have you had to hand-hold people through, for example, pressing a key in response to a clear, unambiguous, "Press any key to continue" prompt on the screen?), I bet Crist is going to benefit from this bug to the tune of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of votes.
And when it's pointed out, the usual jeers of "Well, if they're so stupid they can't even see..." BS will be repeated, because, you know, it's ok and entirely fair to subject people to a test where if they "fail", only the Republican will ever benefit.
Crist will win, quite possibly because of this.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
...it's a one party system! That's what Paul Francis says anyway... It's shocking that Florida and Ohio are having problems, HA! Update: Presidential election 2000: Somewhere in Florida votes are still being counted... Yesterday I said YAY! for Open Source Mac and Cheese, today I say YAY! for the population being tricked into the oldest divide and conquer technique in the book! Godspeed Richard Stallman, save us from this country. Maybe trim down the beard a little so the bible thumpers don't think you're a hippie... maybe not though, set a trendy beard thing, maybe we can call it Open Source beard... NOT!
ALTERNATIVE FREEDOM
(http://alternativefreedom.org)
a documentary about the invisible war on culture
features Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Danger Mouse from Gnarls Barkley, X-Box hacker/author bunnie huang, doseone and EFF superstar Jason Schultz
My wife and I went to vote this morning at a precinct in Boulder County, Colorado where they had about 10 voting booths set up, all paper ballots except for one electronic machine (an 'eSlate' model that advertised "Verifiable Ballot Option").
While we were waiting the electronic station opened up but the election officials didn't escot anyone to it. My wife asked if it was available, and the officials' shocked response was "You want to use the electronic machine???" She said she'd give it a try (she's a techie and was curious). I went to a paper ballot at about the same time, and was finished 10 minutes earlier. When she was done she mentioned that while she didn't think it was "glitchy" it was a pain in the ass to use, because it had so many screens, the "iPod"-esque scrollwheel was touchy, and when it presented the final verification screen, each ammendment and referendum was only listed by number/letter and we had so many of them she couldn't remember which was which.
I'm glad I picked paper -- easy, fast, just fill in the boxes and I could read the issues and vote on them in any order.
Live Free or Diebold.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
"If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!"
The polls do not close for 6 hours here in Texas, get off my back old man.
"NASA's Rollercoaster For Moon Rocket Escape"
Xonk?
Other problems had nothing to do with machines. A location in Columbus, Ohio, opened a few minutes late because of a break-in at the school where the precinct is located.
Watch for A) high voter turn out here or B) strong discrepancies in the way people say they voted and the actual count. My guess is the machine was hax0red.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
...Hello truthfulness...
Wow... are you ever in for a shock.
If you expect "truthfulness" from either camp, I suspect you're being unreasonably optimistic. At best I think you should hope that the post-election honeymoon period lasts a while. That's assuming the Democrats take the house... and the citizens of the U.S. surprised everybody two years ago. It could happen again.
You make them fill it out with a Sharpie, and if they mark the wrong box, then they have to bring the ballot back to the poll worker, who destroys it, and gives them a new ballot.
If you mark two boxes, then the ballot is just spoiled and it doesn't count. The ballots need to have the check boxes sufficiently far away from each other, but if you have half-inch boxes that are at least an inch away from each other, and you still can't manage to mark one without hitting the other, you're probably too stupid to be voting anyway.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!"
Unless you're stupid. Stupid people really shouldn't vote.
I'm just another luddite! If I can't have instant gratification it's not worth the trouble. I'd rather spend more time thinking about what TV diner I'm going to eat tonight than considering who I'll vote for.
Jackasses.
I voted today using a fill in the dots ballot at a Lutheran church in Minnesota. The ballot was clear, even the tax increase measures. The process was very efficient and professional. The volunteers are really something. It just amazes me how the media can be saturated with sleazy ads, but the actual voting process is haloed, partisan free, intimidation free. This is a lot to be proud of. My only complaint was that ID was not required. Just a signature on a voter registration sheet. This really needs to change, especially since you can register and vote at the same time.
an ill wind that blows no good
Right and they are usually pissed off any way because someone has told them X party is going to take away their medicare, welfare or social security checks.
in louisville there is a chance that you could get your ass kicked at a polling station.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Everyone I talked to today noticed there were no exit pollsters this time. Last election most everyone complained about noticing a huge number of exit poll people outside the polling place asking everyone who they voted for...
Nothing this year.... were they banned?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They give us pencils up here in Canada. We don't punch holes, we place an "X" in the box for the candidate that we choose.
The nice thing about voting absentee in WA state (2/3 of us), and the same in OR (all mail-in), is that you just fill in the circle with a pencil or pen.
It's that simple. No punching. No chads. No arrows.
And, like Canada's 99.99 percent accuracy (ours is much lower in the USA), it works.
The only people that need electronic voting are those who are disabled - physical, visual, motor (shake too much), or whatever.
Let's get REAL, people!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The sad part is that the general lack of paper trail isn't really Diebold's fault. It's the fault of the elected officials that did not require it. And it's the fault of the people who voted for them. Companies tend to be amoral and uninterested in anything but the bottom line. If it's cheaper to not build in a paper trail, that's the choice they are going to pick.
Of course, the counterargument is that they've screwed this up so badly that there may be some major blowback. We'll see how that pans out.
If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!
Geez...I'm gettin' really sick of this blind "Get out and vote!" crap. Yes, as responsible citizens, we sure as hell should vote, but we can't call ourselves responsible if we haven't really worked to understand what we're voting on, who we're voting for, and why. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of folks in this country aren't voting in an informed manor. I'd rather of 2% voter turnout if all who voted were informed, rather than 85% voter turnout if only 2% were informed. We deserve the effed up country for which we've voted these past 100 years.
It's "PLOAF," not "P-LOAF." Ask about it.
If you don't like the way that things are, then get out and vote ... Drag your friends out, let politicians know what you're doing, and make sure you're in a position to have them listen to you next time you want them to do something..
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Does anyone else find the traditional past-tense style inherited from newspaper reporting to be really odd when used in online journalism to describe current events? These things are still going on, right now! Isn't it time the media developed a writing style that recognized that news can now be reported in "print" as it occurs, rather than well after the fact?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Are all the stories today going to get tagged 'itsatrap' ? So much cynicism.
Here we had massive problems with Diebold TSx systems this morning. No, im not a poll worker, but in a small town, talks get around very fast... within hours. I was told that there was ONE person, ONE person dealing with problems on these systems between 5 counties in Mississippi, and that she had to be in Benton county twice to deal with bad optical scan machines, and once here. Here in Tippah County, we have 3 TSx systems for my district, all but one failed this morning. And there were reports of failures/problems in other districts too.
The machines print out paper ballots on a roll when they are done, and we do NOT get to see the roll, NOR do we get a copy of the vote we cast. So its pretty much up to whoever runs the machines to see what goes on, and that is what I don't trust. I voted democrat across the board, but voted libertarian once since he favors net neutrality. For circuit judge, I voted for a friend of mine that showed up on the ballot, and myself 4 times since there were no choices but one for each, and I didn't care for the persons running since they were all up tight republicans, and mostly rich old lawyers.
It is 1:22pm here, and the polls are open until 7:00, I am waiting to see if there are any more failures. My gf works at the local news paper, so I get to know whats going on quicker than everyone else. They are running an article on the failures.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
I am sitting here at my desk remembering when we here at /. first got wind of electronic voting machines and the issues associated with them. There have been countless debates about the issue on slashdot and I just want to take a moment and say:
Nice work, everyone! The American public now knows about this issue. I have no idea what the eventual outcome will be but we should all pat ourselves on the back (just a little bit) for making the public better informed about these problems. With technology issues and concerns, we constantly lament about the general public "not getting it". And in most cases, they don't. This time, however, I think they actually get it.
And that makes me smile because there was a time, not so long ago, when this issue wasn't on ANYONE's radar. Now it is.
Keep up the good work and keep the discussion going! It's the only way things will change.
So basically, we're going to spend millions of dollars and throw our electoral system into question ... so we can have the immediate gratification of official results the night of the election? (Because if it's not a close race, you can pretty much tell who's going to win based on the exit polls and unofficial results anyway.)
Well, that's a new low.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
go here
http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp
And tell all your dead friends and relatives, also!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
DailyKos today is really pushing today for a mail-in system like Oregon apparently has available. That would be good, but still a voter doesn't see the ballot going into the box that is counted, and that's where the voting machines and mail-in both fail.
No, in Oregon (and soon in all of Washington state), you can take your mail-in ballot to special Election boxes (like mailboxes) at the post offices and at major intersections at cities if you don't trust the mail.
I trust the USPS a lot more than I trust Diebold.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Multnomah County Elections put together a video on how exactly vote-by-mail in oregon works. Got their Elections office web page and there is a link at the bottom of the page to the video. I'm an Oregonian, and have voted by mail many times, but still found the video of how it works "behind the scenes" facinating.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Why can't we just vote on the Internet? It seems it would be a lot simpler and easier to manager, just have one website to handle the votes rather than hundreds of these voting machines all over the place. Plus people would be a lot more likely to vote if they could do it from home. Of course, you would still be able to vote by paper if you don't have a computer or internet. You could even have a separate website for each state to better manage the scale. They already have a database of voters, just mail each voter a secret password so they can access the SSL site. Anyway, I'm rambling, but it just seems very inefficient and error prone to roll out all these physical voting machines.
About all I can say is right on, "go vote" is empty without research. Go vote if you care enough to actively research what you vote on. If you rely on commercials or otherwise are passive on info gathering, *DON'T VOTE*. If you care, you'll research for yourself, if you don't care, don't vote.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And:
Now maybe I'm being naive, but why do the machines need a special card to activate them? Are they talking about the flash cards that store the ballot definitions, the flash cards that store the votes, or some other card?
If it's the cards with the ballot definitions that were messed up, these are supposed to be re-flashed after each use. If it's the cards that store the votes, there should not be any programming on the cards. If it's not one of these two, then why do you need any other card? All code on the device should be in a non-flashable ROM, with no way to alter it without opening the case. How was this problem "fixed" on-site?
As for wiping the ballot activators, if they're talking about the same cards as in the first instance, again why were these cards writable? No one at a polling place should be able to modify any code on any part of the system. Sure, it makes it harder to do maintenance. Which means you have to actually test it before deploying it.
Damn, I'm pissed.
Nope, no sig
Why is this so hard? ** Welcome to ev0tex0r. Issue 1: Senate. For Rick Santorum, enter 1. For Casey, enter 2. #> 2 ** Thank you, your vote for Casey has been noted. Issue 2: ..........
why is it so easy to pull money from an ATM or order a sandwich but so hard to vote? Give me a break.
And as for ensuring your vote is counted-as-cast, well that's a bit more tricky.
That person is Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. Unfortunately for this excellent plan, TX Supreme Court said that DeLay's name has to stay on the ballot, since he won the primary. So Republican voters have to write her name in on a track-ball voting machine. With no hyphen.
Thanks for the response and the information.
Ha ha ha....
You'd laugh hard if you came by our elections.
We walk it, they checkup our name on the registry, have us sign off, and give us a slip of paper, say 3x4 inches.
The paper has (say) 4 names on it, with a white circle beside each name, about 1/2 inch in diameter.
We walk to a booth, draw an X on one of the cirlces.
Fold the paper.
Come back to the registration desk and slide it in a box.
Say thanks and leave.
5 state constitutional amendments! That sounds amazing.
I find it hard to set aside the time and energy to read up on our MP candidates. How do you guys consider the amendments and the judges and all that.
On one hand, your system sounds much more "democratic", and ours seems much more "representative" (we vote for the people who then vote for our judges).
But on the other hand, it sounds overwhelming, too many considerations. Would it be better to bank on one good decision rather than many less-than perfect decisions?
... and everything worked fine. There was a paper printout, a review screen, and everything I touched was checked correctly the first time.
In Indianapolis this morning, it took till about 8:30 to finish getting the electronic machines working in about 175 precincts. But these are the handicapped accessible machines that almost no one uses - they cost $10,000 each. People vote paper ballots that get optically scanned.
Gilmore fans who object to showing ID without a warrant are offered provisional ballots, which then don't get counted. My lawsuit about that continues: joellpalmer.blogspot.com
In Delaware County, home of Ball state, polling hours have been extended to 8:30 pm because MicroVote machines weren't working at first.
Electionlawblog.org is one place to follow glitch reports during the day.
+2 informative insightful
Canada doesn't seem to have 300 million people... more like... 30 million, EH? So the load of voting and counting ballots doesn't even come close to what we see in the U.S. On the other hand, we do need to get away from glitchy, perhaps easy to hack, computer based machines. I went to vote this morning in New Orleans and was told, "Machine is down, come back later." If I did want to use a provisional ballot I was told I could do so only for the federal election and not for state and local matters. It would be nice if we could get a standardized system.
The "what's the point in going electronic" crowd brings up an interesting question. As America is a capital rich country and not a labor rich country, it my finally be more economically sound to replace vote counters with machines.
Come on, voting machines really shouldn't be that difficult. The real problem is WHO's building them and who's not.
There is a group of computer/hardware programmers that have an immense amount of experience building machines to interact with human input. In the 80's one of these companies was so successful it became a household name and revolutionized home life. They were called ATARI.
So, I am of the opinion, that Nintendo could manage a much better electronic voting system. Here you go grandma. Just wave the wand toward the candidate you want. When it's on the candidate you want. Hit the yellow button to lock and the green but to cast your vote. The blue button will undo your selection.
"Wii thank you for voting!"
As a student on a campus in a state that I am not a long-term resident of, I can't in good conscience push my opinion on the way things should be run locally. Who am I to push liberal or socialist agendas on a town that clearly does not agree with that mentality, simple because I go to school there for a couple of years? Now, I certainly don't mind voting for national congressman and senators, since they will have an influence slightly beyond their own state borders (especially senators). But again, I think that students and others living temporarily in a place should weigh the pros and cons of adding their voice to local issues.
Now, THAT'S an awesome idea!
If you vote Democrat, you get a ham sandwich with lots of pork and useless filler that is then taken away from you and given to someone else who is more deserving.
If you vote Republican, you get a small amount of fat taken out but it's covered in our special Sanctimonious Sauce(TM) - unless you're gay, in which case you get nothing.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
First, because that requires a conspiracy of a large number of people. You need to have a group of people for each polling station, at least. The more people you have to involve in your vote-changing scheme, the bigger chance you have of getting caught. Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes, requiring teams of people, and keeping it all a secret? It's virtually zero.
Second, changing paper ballots leaves physical evidence. The police, having hundreds of years of collective experience investigating physical crimes, are pretty good at picking up on that stuff. As is the general public. The smell of burning paper coming from the polling places might tip someone off; and if it doesn't, the barrels of paper ash probably would. Or the truckloads of ash that you're hauling away to dump in the river/ocean/whatever. It becomes a big logistical problem.
Third, an electronic attack could self-propagate. If you infected a machine, or firmware loader, it might be possible to make that machine infect other machines, without any intervention on your behalf. This is basically impossible in the physical world: you can't (or rather, it's pretty difficult) to craft some sort of intelligent paper ballot that would sneak in and destroy or change a bunch of other ballots when nobody's looking, and then destroy itself, without leaving a trace.
Fourth, the ways of manipulating elections via the paper-ballot systems are long established and for the most part, well recognized. Chances are, you're not going to come up with a way of fudging votes that somebody hasn't already thought of. With electronic voting, it's a brave new world, rife with untried opportunities.
So are there ways to mess up an election with paper ballots? Sure. But they are much easier to combat than the various ways that you can manipulate electronic systems, and law enforcement and electoral boards are more familiar with it, and it leaves a lot more evidence that can tip people off later on.
Electronic voting might, some day, be appropriate for use in a general election. In a few centuries, I assume that every podunk police department in the country will probably be just as savvy at investigating computer crimes as they are at gathering physical evidence today, and average people will be familiar enough with the normal operation of computers to detect when something funny is going on, and there will be thousands of man-years of experience in the computer-security field as it relates to electronic voting, taken from its years of use in non-critical systems. Under those conditions, I think the feasibility of an all-electronic voting system could be revisited.
But in our world, right now? It's insane.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But that discriminates against mutes! As well as people who have lost their voices/have sore throats, etc. And after 30 or so candidates, judges, and issues, there are bound to be some of those.
It also allows underage individuals (particularly babies) to vote, sometimes even disproportionately!
The League of Women Voters might even claim that women can't cheer as loudly as men!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Is anyone else scared that the summery is writting in past tense?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Glitch(v) Definition 1:(Layman) "It don't work", "there's nothing on the screen", Solution 1: Use paper ballots Solution 2: Plug the machine into and electrical socket Definition 2:(Tech minded) PEBKAC , Bad programming , Poor Software QC , Bad deployment. Solution 1: Fire the design company for severe incompetence. Solution 2: Use paper ballots
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
By the way, everyone, go out and vote today. Even if you don't agree with either party (which is where I often find myself), you have a chance to create some fun by giving a Republican president a Democrat congress. :)
Screw that, if you don't agree with either party then go Libertarian! Show some support for a third party and someday they might actually be a real power to help counterbalance the two extremes we see today.
How is a vote for a Libertarian any less wasted than a vote for someone you don't really like anyway?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe the voting system should be idiot-proof.
I am interested in these idiot-proof voting machines of which you speak. Please send me your catalog for your full line of idiot-proof products. I am particularly interested in idiot-proof power tools and nuclear weapons, and any other products which allow stupid people to do important things with complete safety and security.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
People don't seem to understand how to color inside the lines, or are too ignorant to look at the nice diagram that shows you how to not suck at drawing an "X" in a box. Voting is not hard.
If you have a disability, this is not directed at you. If you don't.. uhh.. read the directions. They're right there.
Apparently somebody doesn't pay attention to history. I recall more than a handful of reports where machines were recording negative votes, more votes than registered voters, and even in this very same story, machines not working and poll workers not knowing how to use them. Somebody also apparently didn't watch the "Hacking Democracy" documentary or those reports on hacking the Diebold machines.
Paper ballots don't crash, pens don't need instructions, and any damned fool can put the pen and ballot together, and the same damned fool can read and count them.
For those who say that there's no point in being a luddite and refusing to accept electronic voting, I say this: in this matter, I'll be a luddite, thankyouverymuch.
Remember, "To err is human; to really fuck it up takes a computer."
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
And with the number of old people in Florida, who'll not understand the significance of the check mark (how often have you had to hand-hold people through, for example, pressing a key in response to a clear, unambiguous, "Press any key to continue" prompt on the screen?),
Those are two totally different things. In your example you have a computer telling them to press a key that does not even exist, on a keyboard that looks like the cockpit of an F-16 to someone that doesn't know computers.
Meanwhile at the voting computer, everyone knows what a checkmark in a box means. I agree the touch screens suck as far as accuracy but people just press again, the screens are generally very large and the check marks very clear - plus of course there are review screens later on.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike electronic voting as it exists today, but I don't think there is going to be a huge gain from any one candidate because of touch-screen inaccuracies. I do agree more careful thought should be put into the ergonomics of where boxes go on screens though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not I but my brother voted on one of our iVotronic's today and told me that everything seemed to go well while he was at the polling place. One of the workers did tell him that the process is taking longer and voters are requiring a lot more assitance.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
God Bless the elderly, but please, keep them away from being a polling place volunteer. It's frustrating, every time I have voted in person
... um ... tennis was a man's game ... and, um ... hats! we all wore hats ... um... what were we talking about? Hey, get off my lawn!
Listen here, sonny. Why, in MY day, we had to vote uphill both ways, in a snowstorm. Why we had voting in the way that potatoes were up to the
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
(Well, except for a lack of a verifiable paper trail)
Out here in Northern Virginia, I noticed that between primary day and today they up an decided to shuffle around the voting precincts. The voting cards we got last week show the new location, but the ones from earlier this year are now incorrect. I also noticed I was not the only one that showed up at the wrong polling place, others where softly complaining about it.
As for voting machines, the precincts I showed up at looking for my own (I didn't have my new card) appeared to have short waiting times and calm atmospheres (except for one Republican outside one of the polling places that was confronting voters as to whether or not they supported the marriage amendment). Voting without a drivers licence is possible, but a hassle (requires legal paperwork to be filled out). All the voting machines (Sequoia), from a glance, appeared to be in use, but had no verifiable paper trail.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Here's Fox News' roundup on the voting shenanigans.
It leads with coverage of the voter intimidation in the Virgina Allen/Web race (in which registered democrats are receiving calls informing them, incorrectly, that their polling place has changed), but does not list the candidates or parties involved. And the description of the incidents was written to make them sound vague:
Note the "use" of "quotes" around "single" words when they're really not "necessary."
Okay, so they're not naming names, right? But the second report in the Fox News article gets right to the point:
<Borat>very nice.</Borat>
And then Fox News found it necessary to report some graffiti with a Republican's name in it:
...but no mention whatsoever that Colorado Democrat candidate Jay Fawcett's HQ was also vandalized overnight.
And more naming names:
Compare this to Fox News' coverage of the incidents reported last week in Florida and Texas, in which people who tried to vote Democrat had their votes changed to Republican. Oh yeah, there wasn't any (please post a link if I'm wrong).
And then back to giving vague details that don't mention party affiliation:
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
and abstain from choosing on all my ballot choices?
Damn, that would have been a good test of the e-voting machine I used; too bad I value my one vote too much to take that chance.
Actually it's a good thing I didn't think of that til after I voted otherwise based on the choices in my area, this might have been a good year to try that.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
However, the real question is, would a direct democratic system be inferior to the reality of our current representative system, which functions nothing at all like how you describe?
Having every citizen decide based on a 5-sentence position statement, seems like it might be better than letting a handful of citizens decide based on that same 5-sentence position statement and a large wad of cash.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I voted. With a touchscreen. And I think a lot of fears for voting problems were solved by the system they had there. There was no "OMG DIEBOLD" label. (Post voting research turned up the machines were 'Edge VeriVote' systems) I got my strangely notched smart card from the attendant, and went to the terminal. They had six at my location (I live in a relatively small town), arranged in a circle, each machine had its own "privacy blinders" so only the voter could see the screen. They were on their own stands, and all six went to power outlets, and nothing else. The circle of machines was in the open, and the seals on the machines had blatant security tape. Each machine faced inwards, so had anyone gone to the 'hackable' portion of the machine, five other people would have instantly seen it. To "hack" these, you would have had to tell two dozen people "EVERYONE! LOOK OVER THERE FOR A FEW MINUTES!".... just to start.
After casting my votes on all the people, and measures, and propositions, it put up a screen to review. I confirmed, and then it printed the ballot on a roll of paper in a locked box for me to visually confirm. It had a form of "voter id" hash on it, and a "polling location" as well. Then at the bottom, a multi-row barcode and a few other visual/human readable 'checksums'
Perfect? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe it was a good fake, and I'd have to watch the paper rolls getting moved. At least there is the appearance of a paper-based audit trail as well as solutions to many of the other concerns I've seen raised here, and many other forums.
I voted this morning with a Direct-Recording Electronic Voting System. Just before going behind the screen, I mentioned to the poll worker that I knew how to crack it (ok, admittedly, I used the word 'hack' just so I was reasonably sure she understood). She was rather... disappointed.
There weren't any problems with the three machines in my precinct (that were detectable, anyway). The lady in line in front of me couldn't find her driver's license, though, which would keep her from voting in Indiana.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
How do you guys consider the amendments and the judges and all that.
Mostly we don't. That is why political ads are so huge here most of the electorate don't take any time to decide how to vote.
My wife for instance votes for people she thinks have nice sounding names. As for amendments, etc. there is short summary of it on the ballot, I get the feeling that is all most people have read about it. I've often wondered if it would be possible to sneak through a really nasty amendment by making sure that the nasty parts of it aren't in the little summary.
...never duke any local girls-women and *girls*- over in wherever they are killing people or in some port city with tons of hookers. Right, never happens...
As someone who basically agrees with you, something has been bothering me. How is this different from absentee ballots? Sure, you have to sign the back of the envelope, but can't he be with you watching to make sure you vote the "right" way?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result.
That's actually exactly what we have in MN, though I think there's only one such machine per polling place. The ballots are all paper and you fill in circles next to your candidate (we've had this voting system for probbably 20 years). You then put the ballot into an electronic counter. Just this year they've added a machine just like you described that fills in the circles on the ballot from your choices on a touchscreen. I used one during the primary, but only because I asked the election judges about them. They seemed pleased someone was trying it out.
There's a few problems of course. The machines are horribly slow in initially loading, and eventually printing the ballot. I think there's also only one per polling place. Currently the system is really only usefull for blind or handicapped voters.
Also there's no concept of the printers counting votes. I'm not certain that's really a great idea anyway since you might introduce more errors in the system.
AccountKiller
Why spend good money on rigging machines, when you can just stuff the ballot boxes by hand?
--
make install -not war
...Your fingers are too fat to vote. If you would like to order a special voting wand, mash your fingers on the touch screen now. :P
:P), with people explaining very well how to use 'em.
Had newfangled electronic voting machines in PA today. Absolutely no problems; stupidly simple to use. They were well manned in at least two places (Went with family, mind you, I didn't vote early and often, haha
I found the experience rather pleasant. The touch areas were fairly wide, so it would've been hard to vote for the wrong person. Hell, the instructions given included a demonstration on how the touch screen worked, even. Everything was clearly labelled and explained; can't say the same for old school mechanical contraptions. Of course, I didn't see the horrible label of 'Diebold' on the machine I used, so eh.
Wrong. There are plenty of excuses, not the least of which is when enough machines fail to function so that people have to stand in line for 4 or 5 hours as was well documented in 2004. And will probably happen again today.
Wrong. There are plenty of reasons to feel entitled to complain about government's (in)action even if one did not vote. Human rights abuses can rightly be complained about by anyone, voter or non-voter, citizen or non-citizen. That's everyone's right as a human.
Wrong. It taught everyone that their vote doesn't matter, only the electoral college's vote and the Supreme Court's vote counts. We ought to rewrite the Constitution to make that more clear: "All people are created equal, but their votes are not."
Wrong. I think most everyone with two brain cells to rub together who's still reading my post can figure out why.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
I actually just wrote up a post about my (rather poor) experience at the polls here in Ohio.
The gist is - they wanted a second form of ID because the address on my valid state issued ID didn't match the ID I was registered to vote with. They were wrong! According to Ohio voting laws I had a legit ID and should be allowed to vote. After some arguing and finally making them take a look at the rules (read: LAW) the polling workers finally agreed that I did indeed have proper ID.
90% of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.
Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots...
I just remember my office buddy, who's first name was "Chad".
Punch. Punched. Dangling. Hanging. Pregnant... Somehow, he took it all pretty well.
Then you can take your printout to your boss at work and show him you voted the way he told you to so he won't fire you. Threw your printout away? Fired. Voted wrong? Fired.
That's the nightmare that people always talk about, but it's not very realistic. I bet what you'd see is businesses offering discounts on things if you give them a reciept says you voted the right way. "Show us your receipt that you voted for Bob Smith, and get a 10% discount for a whole year!!". Or maybe you'd see promotions or raises for people that voted the right way. Or you'd see people just selling votes (which I'd argue the promotional discount is just a form of).
All are pretty horrible, unless of course you're the boss or have a lot of money to throw around.
AccountKiller
Some talking heads on TV just wistfully longed for the days of paper ballots. Only 6 years ago these same people were complaining about hanging chads, and chads falling out of boxes of ballots to be recounted, and election officials examining "pregnant" chads under jeweler's loupes and debating the "intent" of the voter.
...is not my emergency. Follow the advice long given out by most anyone with political experience. Vote by absentee ballot and skip the show.
Why, for the love of democracy, could we not have created machines that would accurately punch the holes in the cards?
Viola. Electronic voting "accuracy", with punch card audit trails.
My Heart Is A Flower
I do not agree that everyone should vote. Today, I think many people are not informed enough to vote. Smear campaigns and sound bites do NOT make an informed citizen. It takes WORK to become informed and dig below all the hyperbole. While I do think that people should become informed and then vote, and would love to see everyone do so, I do not think that uninformed people contribute to good government. I would say, if you know the issues and candidates, then VOTE. If you haven't a clue, just stay home.
If you let people cast votes without enforcing that they do so in total privacy, it makes it possible for others to demand to see those votes if they've got enough leverage to commit blackmail or enough money to commit bribery. Also, if your ballot has both your name and your vote on it, it makes it possible for the vote counters to report that fact to whoever you voted against.
Maybe those are tolerable problems. But if we don't care about having a perfectly secret ballot, why make it a physical ballot at all? If you reduce the anonymity requirements, secure electronic voting becomes trivial. You go to the polling website, you vote, and you save a copy of your ballot as well as an encrypted copy of your unique voter ID (e.g. your full name + voter registration number, whose encryption you can doublecheck yourself using the public key). The website then publishes to the public an alphabetically sorted list of unencrypted voter IDs, as well as a numerically sorted list of encrypted IDs with their corresponding ballots.
If you're worried that your vote got changed, you download the list of encrypted IDs and doublecheck your vote yourself. If you're worried that the votes weren't counted correctly, you download the lists of IDs and count them yourself. If you're worried that nonvoters were fraudulently added to the list, you look some random names up in the phone book and call to ask them if they really voted. Fraud is still possible, but it's always detectable.
Of course, I wouldn't ever want this system to be implemented - one of the safeguards of democracy is the secret ballot which makes it impossible for an elected official to retaliate against someone who voted against him. (As an aside, that's an unintended danger of transparency in campaign financing too...) Anyway, since that secrecy is lost to a similar extent when we use mail-in ballots; why not get even more verifiability and convenience out of it in exchange?
I voted this morning.
I had the option of waiting in line for the touchscreen machines, or to take a paper ballot. I opted for the paper ballot.
I heard some of the complaints about the touch-screen machines while I filled in my paper ballot. One person complained that the machine didn't record the correct vote. Some machines stopped working. A BIG problem was that people kept forgetting to give back the smart card, apparently quite a few of them walked out the door ("by accident").
As I was leaving, there was a guy sitting on a chair with two of the machines in his lap, and he was opening up one of the machines (with that stupid little tubular key) and chatting with a poll worker. They were discussing the fact that they were out of the non-tamper tape. . .
As a voter, I'm outraged. Why are machines being modified *during* the election?
As a taxpayer, I'm outraged. Why did we spend money on these pieces of crap?
Yeah! If /. wasn't here, no one would have noticed the huge voting discrepencies in 2000, 2002, and 2004 that were reported on everywhere else as well. Go us!
Thanks for making that note - very informative.
I do trust the USPS, and they are about as trustworthy as Elections Canada must be, and there are already laws in place if USPS staff tampers with mail. It's good that they have a way to eliminate the middle man when returning the ballot, however.
Oh You POS
I've been trying to tell people this for a month, no one wants to "waste" a vote on a 3rd party... IT'S NOT A WASTE! Just imagine if everyone who feels neither the Repub. or Dem. candidate deserves a vote did this, 3rd party candidates could easily get elected in some places.
Also, younger citizens need to get out and vote, represent yourselves. It's how Jessie Ventura got elected... (or so I hear)
I voted in Florida this morning (a small backwater county in Northeast Florida if any of you care) & when I walked in I was offered a choice of paper or electronic voting of which I took the paper ballot, of course. I was happy to see the single electronic machine was pretty much being ignored by my fellow voters. The paper ballot was a simple "fill in the circle" type ballot (same as last election year actually). I then fed it into the scan-tron & went on my way.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Lucky bastard. I asked for one just to force the election monitors to tell me I couldn't have one.
To me, there are three obvious deficiencies with these machines and the way they have been put in place. Listed in order of increasing severity they are:
No printed verification that the machine recorded what you think it should have. Would you deposit $1000 into a bank machine if you knew it doesn't give out receipts?
No accounting trail of any sort. Would you do business with a bank that only keeps track of how many dollars it thinks you owe it, with no corroborating information that would permit an audit?
No way to verify that the system works as designed.
This last one is the killer. Everyone who has ever had anything to do with automating a previously manual system--or even replacing one automated system with another--knows that you have to be very cautious. It's probably not going to work right the first time. You want to have the ability to track how well the new system is doing, to be sure it's working as designed. For example, I'd make sure each voting machine also prints a paper ballot that can be inspected by the voter and put into the usual ballot box. Then I'd be able to do statistical sampling of the electronic polling results to see how they correlate to the paper results. In the beginning, I'd want to do a lot of checking. If it turns out that the results are mostly OK, then we could cut down the amount of manual sampling--but I'd never want to give it up completely. To me, it just makes sense to do this. It's a way to assure the continuing integrity of the process.
So here we have a bank that has replaced all its human tellers with machines that look remarkably like Daleks, and Daleks do not give out receipts--they just take your money and eat it. The Daleks will also tell you that they're transferring money to cover payments that you've requested. But they can't be bothered with keeping records of how much was transferred when, or to whom. They just keep track of your balance...or of what they say is your balance. "Just trust us", say the Daleks.
Seriously now, would you do business with these guys? And if the answer is "no", why in the world would you let them decide who runs your government?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
The natives built a school there knowing full well students would be voting there. It does not matter how temporary your stay is - if it's long enough to register to vote, it's long enough to be considered a legitimate resident.
If the alternative is having thousands of students not vote because they can't get home, I'd prefer you vote where you are.
Then have a poll worker or other trusted person help the disabled person vote. Or let them bring somebody with them to read the ballot and mark it, if they'd prefer.
I'm pretty sure that anyone living with a disability that severe, is probably used to dealing with obstacles far greater than checking a box on a ballot on a daily basis. Just stay out of their way.
Electronic voting systems might have big buttons, but what do you do if you're a paralyzed quadriplegic? Obviously we need to think of a new system that you can use, using only your eye muscles and tongue, and make everyone use that. Would that be fair? No, it would be stupid.
There's a point where you have to say "this is a system that works for 99% of the population, and the remaining 1% aren't going to have any more trouble with it than they do with any other daily task." You're always going to be able to find someone that's disenfranchised by a particular system or voting method, but that doesn't mean the entire system needs to be scrapped.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In other news, 'Click Next to Continue' elected with 98% of the vote...
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I don't know whether it's a state or federal law, but I believe that's illegal where I live.
Too close to voter intimidation, etc.
If you haven't watched it yet, check out Hacking Democracy.
I like the idea of electronic voting. In the end it will be more secure than paper when it is done right but as it is now, security and tamper resistance haven't even been made a priority. If these things had the kind of security that you find in an X-Box it would be an enormous improvement.
They argue essentially "We cant tell you how the system works because if you knew that the system would be compromised." The problem is that some people *do* know how it works and other people can and have figured it out. Therefor The system is already compromised.
A system done right will be able to be watched very carefully. It will have an audit trail, it will find problems and when inspected carefully, catch people attempting to commit voter fraud. Any system that doesn't allow you to double check it is not tamper evident and shouldn't be used. Any system that comes out perfectly and finds no issues is probably not tamper evident.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
If it's so frustrating, and you're such an expert on the procedure, why don't you volunteer to work the polls, jackass? And are you really serious about parents not being able to bring their kids?! What the hell do you expect them to do?
The precinct machines that hold a few hundred votes each have their data dumped to centralized tabulating machines which then report the final outcome. In the 2004 elections, it was conclusively demonstrated that /some/ of these centralized tabulators were hooked up to networks that were publicly available. In some cases this was in violation of the law. In other places, no regulation even considered the possibility.
But the real problem is that without a physical paper trail there exists no method by which the outcome can be verified. In a purely electronic system, we are entirely at the mercy of a trail of electrons. As someone who has worked with various types of computers since 1995, this greatly concerns me. It doesn't take nefarious intent to change the outcome of the election when incompetence may very well suffice. With paper ballots, there is an unlimited do-over. The physical ballots can be counted again and again in a room full of observers keeping check on each other. That simply isn't feasible with a purely electronic solution.
Not to mention that power outages on election day don't inhibit voting on paper.
All this fear of electronics is silly when voting fraud is so easy. I committed electoral fraud today in NJ, completely by accident.
I registered to vote more than a month ago. I got a sample ballot sent to someone with a very strange perturbation of my real name. This suggests that NJ doesn't check voter registrations to see if the person actually exists (let alone is eligable to vote).
So I voted. I told them my name wasn't the same as what they had, but they let me vote anyway. They didn't even ask to see my ID - the sample ballot was enough.
Then I went to my old voting district. I went to the polling station, and sure enough I was still registered to vote. They didn't ask me for ID either. I didn't vote, but only because I'm honest. They didn't even try to stop me.
So that's how I voted under a false name, and had the opportunity to vote twice.
the vote from a senator than from the majority.
Well that means nothing much as per hacking democracy that claimed diebold was re branding its new machines. Not saying you got one of those, but don't think your safe because some company changed their products name.
Nope. All you need to do is preinfect the memory cards, or even better, some slight of hand when taking it out of the machine would do. Even say a poll worker pretends to trip spilling them onto the ground. Do you think they would disqualify them all because of something like that? Hacking democracy proved that you can even have the machine 0 initally, and then have a hack performed on the reading of the ballots. How do you know the cards were virus free previous to being shipped from diebold?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I voted today and the only option was paper ballots where you fill in the circle completely. I see no confusion with this and can't understand why they don't do this everywhere. With all the different new voting machines, you've got technical glitches, improperly trained people and people who have no idea how to make their selections because they're not "computer people". I understand it's not complicated but I've had trouble explaining some very basic concepts to people, not because they couldn't understand, but because they didn't want to.
But why is the rum gone?
Yea, that's why I said "(just a little bit)"...
Listen, it's mainstream now. Back then, you didn't have many people agreeing there are problems. With the voting machine debate nowadays, you are starting to see that. And regarding the 4 companies that MAKE the machines, that's a good thing.
Wasn't the thread about voting machines and the problems going on today?
Students are supposed to vote from their permanent address, but the law is fuzzy on how you define permanent address. You obviously don't feel part of the local community and don't plan on staying. You probably don't have a long term job there, and just listing your permanent address differently in your school records should be enough to fulfill the legal requirements.
You are in the unique position to choose where you vote. Take advantage of it. You might still have time if your voter registration is current in your hometown. You have the added benefit of being immune to TV smear ads if you are far enough away, while still having access to internet resources.
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Well, I guess it all comes down to your polling place. When I voted this morning, there were:
* No campaigners present. Not even a sign.
* No long lines. In fact, there were only three other people voting at the time, and three empty polling stations.
* Clued in, competent workers who were able to quickly find my name in the register.
* Clued in, competent workers who gave clear, detailed explanations of the voting technology used in the polling station, and procedures for voting.
* No touch screens.
* No hacker-inviting electronic voting machines.
* No harassment from "election monitors".
* No screaming, colicky brat kids that were dragged there by their parents.
And to make things even better, my polling station was held on the showroom floor of the SoCal Trikes shop, so I had the opportunity to drool over some cool looking custom trikes after I finished voting.
I don't get how this is so hard. Make a program to count votes... this is like simple programming... How are there bugs?!
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
I just voted in Indiana and didn't run into any problems. Even the staff was helpful. One odd bit, family members that moved away years ago appeared on the same sign-in sheet that I had to sign. I wonder how often they update that crap.
I really hope alot of people make noise about these "no paper trail" electronic voting machines. I hope enough noise is made that the government finally realizes it needs to do something about them.
Jon Stokes covered this on Ars[1].
To prove how much easier it is to commit wholesale fraud when we having electronic voting machines, consider the following. I want Mickey Mouse to win every seat in the Senate. Is this feasible with a paper ballot? How about evoting technology?
Sure, we'd have small-scale stuff, but we always have small-scale stuff and the poll workers are accustomed to handling it. This new stuff confuses them, and makes it much easier to be malevolent.
[1] How to Steal an Election
:(){
Fair enough. I wasn't necessarily reacting to you, but there are a lot of people who seem to think that the opinions expressed on Slashdot reflect anything WRT the "common person," and that's sort-of what I was responding to.
If you make the voting machines idiot proof, somebody will make a better idiot.
I'll write a more detailed experience on my blog soon, but this election took the cake as the worst. When I voted (in Florida) this morning, the electronic voting machine wouldn't allow me to press three of the (party of my choice) names. To test whether or not the problem was user error or hardware related, I pressed the name of the opposing party and that click was accepted. The big problem was, it wouldn't let me click back to the other. When I asked someone for a paper ballot because the machine was rigg... er, broken, I was told there WAS NO paper voting. Electronic only. I even asked the hired help if I can get a paper receipt of my votes to verify the correct votes were tallied. I was told NO. At the end of my voting session, the screen showed me a review of all the votes in case I needed to change something. The problem was, the [BACK] button was broken and it would not allow me to change any of the three incorrect votes it tallied. It's obvious to me that (IMHO) either the voting system is broken, or horrifically rigged. Scream at me all you want, mod me down, but this really happened. I'm going to write up a long, multi-page thing about it later when I get home and post it on my blog. Then I'm going to call the local NBC, ABC and CBS television affiliates to tell them about it. Then the two local newspapers gets an email from me. I'm not going to keep quiet about it. Everyone need to know about this.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
There's nothing wrong with a paper ballot...
But do you have any idea how many ballots voters in a US election are actually casting ?
You have to vote for dozens of elections, and propositions.
Not only you vote for your US congressman, and/or your US senator...
Then you have state elections: Governor, State Senators, State congressman,
Already there you are starting to get things complicated, but thats only the tip of the iceberg...
Then you have locals: you have to vote for the school superintendant, for the sheriff, for the hospital board, for judges, and what not...
And the worst comes last: Ballot Propositions! Statewide and locals! Prop 86, 87, 88, 89, 90... Measure A, B, C... etc...
The problem here is simple: too much democracy.
As a citizen, I'm electing representants and senators to do a job: pass laws! Why do I have to do their job by voting on propositions ? Those propositions are full of legales and impossible to understand for most people, and they undermine the legislative bodies in their work...
Thats the problem in the first place. There wouldnot be a need for complex election system if we were letting the legislative bodies do their job.
Note to anyone with access to a voting machine with security tape but no paper trail: you could sabotage the election simply by tampering with the tape. While it wouldn't change the records on the machine, you might succeed in getting the votes on that machine invalidated.
Luckily, California requires paper trails on its machines. I assume that tampering with the tape in that case just forces them to re-count the ballots manually.
While I have not stayed current with all the politicians, I spent a couple hours yesterday reviewing a couple of websites (a local newspaper and a local political website) to brush up. I made a cheat sheet to take with me since I won't be memorizing 25 names. When I did my research, I tried to filter out as much propaganda as I could and look at direct quotes and their stands on the bigger issues without getting weighted down in negative language. Relying on a few quotes in a newspaper is not the best way to judge someone's character, but you can read what others opinions of them are and what kind of jobs they have done in their current positions.
The issues are pretty cut and dried. One was to raise taxes for the local bus system. Two dealt with banning smoking in public areas. One was an increase in the local minimum wage and the other dealt with allowing slot machines in a few businesses in the state.
The most difficult to choose is the judges. The Governor, Senators and Members of the House are pretty high profile and have lots of information about them, the judges do not. I pretty much tried to pick people that would just enforce the law and not try to legislate from the bench, but it's really a crap shoot with the amount of information really available.
sorry but all this poopooing of vote by mail and receipts is...BULLSHIT. Give me a break, compared to the casino circus of charlatans we have now, and incredible amounts of vote fraud, vote by mail is a MASSIVE IMPROVEMENT. Hell very few (ie. 30% for midterms) even give a fuck to vote at all, much less coerce someone else's vote.
America is an apathetic piece of shit
America is run by fascist corporatists
America can change, but ONLY if the people rise up in revolution and force it.
If you choose to be employed by an employer who would coerce you to vote along a particular axis, you should be shot.
If you are an employer who would coerce an employee to vote along a particular axis, you too, should be shot.
In the head, BTW, not in the foot.
Seriously, if you are in either of those groups, you really should stay at home, because a voter's civic duty is to vote one's conscience. Coercion is unconscionable, as is taking a bribe for special interests--and that is what you would be doing if you vote the way your boss wants you to vote. You're basically saying, "I'll vote how you like if you'll agree not to fire me." How fricking WEAK is that?
If you vote based on the PSAs we all see, instead of actually reading propsitions and measures, are you really sure you know what you're doing, what you're getting yourself into, what you're helping to get us all into? Are you sure you didn't just vote the way the opposition was hoping you'd vote? You don't really know, do you. If you actually do read about that great provision that will save the planet for free and with no harm done to lab animals, you might find out that it's basically a tax shelter for rich politicians. Or you might find out that it also limits gay rights. Or that next year you'll be taxed at a 20% higher rate. Sounds preposterous doesn't it? Crap gets rolled up into ballot measures all the time. They design some measures to be palatable on the surface, so it garners votes from sheep. Then later we realize we just elected the Cylons to power. If only we had investigated before marking the X or punching the chad or tapping the pretty touchscreen.
If blindly vote for the party you belong to, trusting they they want what you want, you're only reinforcing the herd mentality. What's good for my grandpa and my daddy is good for me... BS. People in power do what they can to stay there. People without power do what they can to transplant those who have it. Can you implicitly trust their motives?
No matter what party you think you belong to, be independent in your thinking and problem solving. Don't take the party line. You don't eat up the line at the bar when someone's hitting on you do you? Think for yourself, and think for your SELF.
"Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view." E. Mach
lol...definitely fair on that one. :)
I voted in Austin, Texas. My electronic vote-o-matic had a big selection wheel, a large select button, and a smaller, off to the side nuke-launcher red "Cast Vote" button. You never touch the screen. Had no problems, nothing weird. I can see how it might have put my grandmother off, but back in the day of limited literacy the same problems existed. Honestly it was easier and more enviromentally friendly than the last time I voted in the US (paper ballot) or I voted overseas (which probably never got read).
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
Perhaps kids should not be in the polling place, however, as a minor who just got home from observing part of the election in my hometown, I would not appreciate it if children were banned from the polling place.
I figured there was more to it, thanks for the detailed explanation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see that as a write-in candidate you have an option for Randy Stufflebeam.
How could you not vote for someone names "Stufflebeam", especially when his campaign domain is "RunRandyRun"?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The news you are getting is American Leftist propaganda.
Our elections are normal and legitimate.Yes there is fraud and corruption-at the local level.A district of a big city for a council seat or a rural county for sheriff.There is no "rigging" in big or national elections.
This crap started with Florida in 2000. Bush won narrowly with the smallest of margins.All recounts both official and after the election showed he won.Some elements of the left/democrat party began implying fraud in an effort to de-legitamise the Victory.
This has backfired on them as their poor minority uneducated supporters believe it and now don't vote.Only the truly paranoid un-hinged lunatics think anything was wrong with 2004.America is a Conservative country.A third of our population-the political right-feels that Bush is far too liberal.His support is largely based on the War as Americans know the left will surrender to and appease the Islamic Terrorists. You get this misinformation from sites like slasdot as it is frequented by computer workers with poor skills and certificates from third tier tech schools such as DeVry.They are under-employed and wile away their miserable days complaining about Bush and successful tech companies like Diebold and Microsoft.
To "hack" these, you would have had to tell two dozen people "EVERYONE! LOOK OVER THERE FOR A FEW MINUTES!".... just to start.
Either that or get access to the machine before the polls opened. Or after they close.
At least there is the appearance of a paper-based audit trail
It's not just an appearance, as long as (as you mentioned) the rolls are properly managed and delivered. Unfortunately, 2004 experiences with attempted recounts based on such rolls proved disappointing. The paper rolls are very hard to recount accurately, and the paper is too fragile to support multiple recounts. So while there is a paper-based audit trail, it's not what it should be.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I wondered the same thing as the grandparent post, and guessed at the same conclusions as the parent post. There's a way to do it without giving everyone a free holiday (but really, I think a strong argument could be made for it to be a holiday). Election day could be on a weekend! In Brazil (they just had runoff presidential elections last week), election day is Sunday, although voting is mandatory there, so perhaps it wouldn't work here with voluntary voting...
At least 32 polling places in Utah were having problems with their Diebold machines this morning--the press were reporting 32, but some people I talked to who should know suspect the number was actually higher. The one I voted at this afternoon was having problems in the morning, but they were fixed by the time I got there around 1PM.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
I don't vote. Voting's not cool.
The last three national elections show staged voting fraud incidents and how bad they are for the USA. Paper ballots, government issued at no cost photo voter id used to both register to vote and to actually vote, and throwing out spoiled, invalid ballots are the only way to preserve a non-fraudlent vote. Most disenhearting is the big media's 24x7 portrayal of each ellection as being 100% stolen or fraudlent via ancedotal soundbites.
You are quite correct. My post, as well as my own experience comes from a default assumption that the poll workers were not corrupt, nor were they given "Non-Honorable" machines. My post was in reference to "Could a voter hack these..." and assuming the poll workers were 100% honorable.
Yes, but as I said, as an Average Voter, my shot at altering my particular voting place might as well been 0. I do not have any info as to the circumstances FOR a pollster worker. PERHAPS they could have loaded the virii before the 7am poll opening, and then taped the machines with the sec tape. I have no proof of Yea or Nay. I just report on my experience.
Voting is done on Saturdays in Australia, but you are required to show up at a polling place (you don't actually have to vote - but you do need to take the voting paper and put it in the box), or cast an absentee ballot. You can get a fine if you fail to show up without a good reason.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
Really important issues such as wars are sometimes decided with something called a referendum .
You need to brush up on U.S. politics. There might not be referrendums at the federal level, but there sure as hell are at the state level. How do I know? I just cast my vote for one less than 20 minutes ago!
Contrary to popular overseas opinion, each state is relatively autonomous, free to dictate laws that affect only their citizens. Interstate or country-wide matters are in the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Because the U.S. military is just that -- the U.S. military -- that falls into the jurisdiction of the Executive branch of the U.S. government. Although each state has its own military, they are specifically under the jursdiction of each state. In fact, the President requires permission from each state's governor in order to utilize them. In fact, one state's governor recently declined permission to use their troops to go on Mexico-border assignments.
But, hey, if you feel better now that you've had a chance to rant, then I'm glad to have been the shoulder that you apparently needed.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!
no thanks.. if i could i would vote people out of office.. not in.
While I know nothing about the system where you are, if it has been designed properly (like in many civilised countries) then you and any other voter can sign up to do precisely that: stand and observe the poll workers (without interfering with them in any way) as they do their jobs, to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong. In places with such systems, it's traditional for the party of each major candidate to send a couple of people to every polling site to do precisely this - they ask for volunteers from their members. There's usually no shortage of middle-aged people with nothing better to do and a powerful desire to poke their noses in.
I remember the mechanical lever systems from where I used to live, and I think they had a small paper tape down at the bottom of the levers, next to its own lever. If you wanted to write somebody in, you pulled that special lever, and then wrote it on the tape.
It's been a while since I've seen one though. There was definitely a way to do write-ins, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My experience today, at my polling place, was just like that. Nice and easy.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The problem with that is that I'm perfectly comfortable not working for someone who would force me to vote a certain way. I'd never work for such a person. This is much like the debates over surveillance in that regard. I really don't have anything to hide. The problem is other people.
Other people can be influenced by coercion. The fact that you can't be influenced by coercion doesn't change that fact.
Surveillance can be used for coercion. The (possible) fact that you don't have anything to hide doesn't mean that surveillance can't be used (indirectly) against you.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The post I responded to didn't say anything about the average voter, it said "To hack these...". As you indicated in another post, you understand there are lots of other opportunities to hack them, so I don't need to go into that.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I don't know why this has not been requested by the voters. This is the information age. In theory, I could copy all the data from every voting machine in the entire country across my DSL link in matter of minutes. And why not ?
I think there should be a law, where the system capturing the vote is required to send its vote to multiple independant systems that can "verify" the vote. Anyone who is capable of digesting the data from voting machines is allowed to collect the data. Tabulators that have discrepancies must be investigated.
So the question is how do you do this so as to remove issues on secrecy.
So this is the system I think should happen. It does require networking the vote entry machines. Firstly, a poll booth requests a number of vote public keys that are verifiably generated from a central vote key generator. These vote keys are handed to voters on a one-to-one basis. The vote key generator does not disclose which polling booth got which keys. Only upon presentation of N (N>5) passphrases can the vote key generator data be discovered.
Voting terminals take the vote and encrypt it with the vote public key and send it to N independant collators which are required to only store the information in real time.
A third collection of independant machines take the collator machine data and then decrypty and process it to determine the winner. The vote private keys are made available only after the the polling booths have closed and so no results can be given until all votes are in.
Now there are definitive checks and balances. If there are discrepancies (like I got 1000 more votes than I have voters), I can track down which polling booth authorized the votes and track them down.
So, if I really really need to, I can check which election official allowed more voters than were checked off on their roll.
In essance this is a verifiable system, even more verifiable than regular paper ballots.
Enough ranting, this does entirely depend on the notion of independant operators othe various system components.
In fact, if you'll look at my original comment you'll see that I "wouldn't ever want this system to be implemented" because of the risks of blackmail, bribery, and retribution; and I wrote that the risks of voting blackmail with mail-in ballots are just as great as the risks in the system I described.
I did write that blackmail is "unlikely to be happening very often", because it's a detectable and reportable form of fraud and I haven't seen any reports... but since you said "it currently isn't a big problem" I don't think I've written anything you disagree with.
So did you just click on the wrong "Reply to This" link? Or did you whip out the personal attacks because you didn't understand my posts? Either way, it sounds like you might want to make "myopic vision" cracks more sparingly until after you've updated your own reading glasses prescription.
If I told u how bad it was to vote in Ohio, u wouldn't believe it. I had to be at class at 9. Went to vote at 8 and there was a line of peeps. There were only 5 voting booths. I stood there 15-20 mins and one person out of 5 in the booth completed voting.. I said screw this I will never get out of here by 9 and left. I came back at 2pm and I was like only person there. I pulled out my id (new law) and the lady looked at my address and said u cant vote here (when you change address, the State of Ohio does not update your license with sticker or nothing). I told her I MOVED a year ago and my voter card said come here. They checked books and I was not even in the book for this polling place. Finally she gave me provisional ballot and I filled it out and then understood why it tooks so long. Ballot was 4 pages total and u had to fill the box in for yes or no completely in with some shitty ass made in china ink pen. I knew exactly who I was voting for and it took 10 mins to fill out the form. Anyway apparently until noon, most of the polling places were turning away voters with incorrect addresses on their drivers license. They even sent a Senator home cause of this. So for you people who say we are a bunch of whiners, I say enjoy ur tour of duty in Iraq, u deserve it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The get out the vote legislation was a giveback by the Republican Congress and Administration to Republican supporters, in that it heavily encouraged the adoption of faster, better, more accurate, blah blah blah new electronic voting systems by local election officials. Add federal funds to pay the local costs and voila, another corporate welfare plan. Given its anemic non-common-sensical functionality and easy to crack, er administer, accesibility and one has either the case for yet another government contractor delivering shoddy goods in order to maximize profits or that conspiracy.
Now, the guys who are in power will tell you they want everyone to vote, but how much of their campaign funds are spent to piss independent voters off, encourage them stay home, effectively getting the middle to disenfranchise itself. How much of their legislative agenda is aimed at finding ways to make it more of a nusiance for their opponent's voters to get to the voting booth. Think about picture ID legislation for voting, ostensibly put in law to prevent undocumented worker voter fraud. I would have loved to see the cost benefit analysis on that one.
Have you ever thought of volunteering to help with an election? Where I vote, every year, they have a sign-up sheet asking for people interested in assisting to sign up. Every year for the past five years, I've put my name down. No calls, but this year, for some reason, the little old ladies in tennis shoes at the polling place seemed really excited about the fact that I was willing to volunteer. Maybe it's the presence of the new electronic voting machines being a change in the normal process that they're used to.
In any case - if you have the option to get involved, why not do so, instead of complaining?
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
You forgot something.
*Google. The truth at your fingertips.
Florida is the schlong of America.
The Dems took the prize this time. Watch how quickly this "story" conveniently disappears.
I don't volunteer at the polls because I have a money-paying job. A job that, by the way, also requires me to be away from home. I suppose that makes me a selfish greedy bastard that only cares about myself... fine, so be it. Consider, though, that a portion of my (not-so-)ill-gotten-gains were confiscated by greedy government, but I digress. This morning, as per my normal schedule, I left for work before the polls opened. I routinely do not return home until around the time the polls close.
That's why I voted absentee in the first place... what's your name? Oh, Anonymous Coward, I see.
(My wife also commutes to her own day job... in the opposite direction.)
And yes, I was dead serious about not bringing kids into the polling place. They have ZERO business being there. They cannot vote, and while certainly not all kids are unruly or screaming brats (and it seems you missed the sarcasm, but oh well, not everyone has a sense of either humor nor common sense) they can do nobody at the polling place any good.
What the hell do I expect parents to do? I expect them not to bring thier kids into the polling place. I expect them to be considerate and respectful of other people there who are trying to make thier own important choices about the future of our country.
Don't tell me that parents have a right to come in to a polling place, bring their kids in and let them run around the polling place unsupervised while he or she is making their choices. Common sense dictates that is a really, really dumb thing to do.
If both parents are there at the same time, they can take turns waiting in the car while the other one votes. Only one parent? Got a friend or relative who can watch the kids for a minute? No? Then TRY VOTING ABSENTEE, which was what I was trying to recommend in the first place. This is yet another situation that voting absentee can address.
And stop trying to be such a jackass yourself.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Speaking of voting and making stupidity more painful, I propose that people who vote should put their money where their mouth is by signing a binding pledge to pay their proportional share (out of total number of voters) of the spending of whatever government body they are voting people into. Non-voters get a free pass.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It's way past time to redraw the District of Columbia boundaries. Only official government functions should be in the district: the capitol, library of congress, white house, supreme court, monuments etc. The residential and commercial areas properly belong in the states of Maryland and Virginia, not DC. Having people live in DC is a hold-over from the era when the politicians brought their slaves along with them. The need for that ended with Lincoln. DC residents should enjoy all the rights and privileges, and bear the same responsibilities, as any other resident of their state.