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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!
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.
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.
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?)
To paraphrase another post yesterday: this is wrong every time it is said.
This is a representative government, so the elected officials represent ME, if I voted for them or not. I didn't vote for Bush in '04, so can I not complain about his actions?
Say I go out and vote Democrat today, and a Republican wins. Do I then lose my right to bitch about what the Republican does? My vote was basically for naught, so I might as well have not voted in the first place, right?
Now replace "Green" or "Libertarian" with "Democrat" etc..do those voters not get to bitch and complain, since they've effectively cast pointless votes?
I pay taxes, and that gives me the right to bitch. Stop repeating this bullshit, because it is incorrect.
militant gun owning 'liberal'
If I bothered voting I'd simply turn in a blank ballot, defeating your argument anyway.
The voice I have is one of disgust and contempt at the system in general, and I feel I can express that quite well without going out to a voting station and performing in a purely symbolic gesture when the significance would be lost at the counting office as it would just get thrown away.
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?)
Please explain the logic of this. I hear this argument used every election and no one's bothered justifying it. Please back this statement up with a reason.
move to a different state
You probably mean, "move to a state." DC isn't a state. Whatever isn't being used for governement buildings should probably be given back to Maryland. Then those asshats will hopefully finally shut up. Or maybe they can form a new state with Northern Virginia. Anyone who's lived elsewhere in Virginia can tell you it's really a separate state already.
Hear, hear.
In nominally backwater Oklahoma, we've used the fill-in-the-arrow-with-the-black-marker ScanTron system for 15+ years. It's very clean and neat, and we've never had any problems with it. The optical scanner does the tally quickly. It lets you know immediately if there's a problem. And the paper trail is the heavy card stock ballot itself. Best of all, every polling station in the entire state uses the same system set up exactly the same way every election.
There was some minor discussion in 2000 about going to a "more modern" system, but that thankfully died a quick and quiet death.
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
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.
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?
What's sad is that I live near a base and have heard a lot of talk like this. This post may be full of shit, but this shit is definitely going on out there. Yet another way our troops are getting shafted...
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."
if people is too stupid
Fitting.
to punch all the way through a card
Of course, the issue is that they WERE punching all the way through the card, they just failed to pull off the little square tabs when they were done, since it's next to impossible to actually knock out a square piece of paper with a small pointy stick. The system's been used since the 60's and there have always been hanging chads, and there has always been a standard that allowed hanging chads to count as a vote.
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.
Why spend good money on rigging machines, when you can just stuff the ballot boxes by hand?
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make install -not war
We use paper ballots, with markers and Scantronic machines. It's a bit like a large-print SAT. You mark your ballot, then feed it into the machine, which scans it, spits it back out if it's not sufficiently clear and valid, and otherwise counts it and also keeps it in the box. It would be pretty difficult to end up with a ballot which was incorrect but valid (since there are large keep-out areas between where you make marks), and it's not hard to make the correct mark (you need to fill in a broken line with a marker), and the machine is going to reject anything that a human wouldn't read unambiguously the way the machine reads it.
What makes it a good system is the digital discipline: there's a lot of separation between valid states, and the transmitting end has a much narrower valid range than the receiving end does. In order from the ballot to make it out of the voter's hands, it must be very clear; if it gets into the box, it's considered valid and counts for whatever it's close to.
I voted on a Diebold machine in Atlanta this morning. I figure it's going to be a long day -- long about the third race I pressed the button for my candidate and a candidate about six inches away lit up. I was able to correct it, but it happened about three more times before I got to the end of the ballot.
// This is not a sig.
You can't have something people take away from the polling place that indicates the way they vote. If you can verify you vote after the fact, someone can pay you $20 bucks for your vote of John Doe. At that rate a million will buy 50K votes. Cheaper and more effective than advertising.
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.