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Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count
Catbeller writes "The AP is reporting that Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people) discovered that the electronic voting system hadn't registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him ... because he cast it himself. The Machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36." From the article: "Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said the issue had been discussed but no action taken yet. 'It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals,' Payne said. 'The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available.'"
Oops.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
about the article is that his wife was the one who told him he got zero votes. She asked him if he had voted for himself to make sure it was wrong....err, someone's going to be sleeping on the couch.
So he voted for himself, but his wife went to check the vote for him. Okay, so who did his WIFE vote for?!
Watch my YouTube atheist video blog (user NickGisburne2000) for arguments against religion
What there needs to be is a way to check that write-in candidates are counted properly. This last election, I voted for Michael Jordan, Dave Mustaine, Ford Bronco, and Global Warming for the school board. There's no way to know if my votes got counted, or if someone thought it was a joke and threw it out (along with my "real" votes).
The World is Yours.
It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
It doesn't matter if it was abject fraud or not. Either way it needs to be determined why his vote wasn't counted, and then the issue needs to be fixed. Just because it's not intentional doesn't mean it's okay for votes to go AWOL.
I VOTED FOR HIM TOO!
this comment makes it sound like its his own fault as he didn't cast a paper vote: ...'The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available.'"
"Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said
WTF? Blame the guy for his own vote not being counted!!
It doesn't need to be fraud to be disturbing. It means the machines don't do their fundamental job, to wit, correctly counting votes. Even if nobody was trying to manipulate the vote, that should scare the hell out of you.
I put in a write in for a local office with a strange name. ANy idea where i could find the listings of write ins in MD? I checked the elections sites, but couldnt find anything.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If one vote was missing or applied to the wrong candidate, other votes could also be lost or shifted.
If other votes could, then enough votes to change the election could have.
It all starts with verifying a single vote.
Voting machines are rigged for the two-party system, who's really surprised here?
Care about privacy? Read this!
Which is why the country election commissioner should take the machine(s) apart and check the vote tape. It is only 36 votes, so it shouldn't be hard to do. I am simply pointing out that this example is more likely error than fraud.
Why? Don't they have first-graders who can help them count the votes?
I'm sorry, but who in their right mind would blow money on a voting machine for 80 votes.
Our election officials have gone mad !
I think I can tally 80 votes in less than 15 minutes so it's not as if "time to tally" is at issue.
Accuracy is certainly not at issue either.
I think the US must stop having elections driven by locals and have a federally mandated independant voting "authority" that answers only to the judicial branch. Politicians must not have any say in the way it is run and the legal standards must be very stringently applied.
The HBO special really did shock me more than I expected it to. Unless we have utmost confidence in our voting system, we will alienate our society.
Oh, while we are at it, we should also go to a preference system as this two party system just means can never hit your own party where it counts without voting for the dark side.
Had his vote, and the votes he assumes had been cast for him (because his friends said they did), he still wouldn't have received enough votes to win the election. Further, it's not clear he would have received even enough votes to change the *outcome* of the election (there will be a runoff due to two other candidates having won the same vote count).
As others have pointed out, who cares that he wouldn't have won? The votes should be accurate purely out of principle. Even if the leading candidate is winning with 99% of the votes and the losing candidate is 1 vote off, we must know what happened to that one vote so that the system can be improved.
However, in this case I think those missing votes certainly did change the outcome. The other two candidates got 18 votes each. If there are several votes missing for Wooten, which candidate got the benefit of those misplaced votes? This results in a runoff election on November 28th instead of declaring a clear winner already.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It is completely irrelevant if he would have won or not. The election results are wrong.
Therefore, there needs to be an invetigation even if there is no reason to suspect fraud.
Why is that so hard to understand? Do not try to downplay botch election results just because the outcome might've been the same if everytihng went smoothly. If the machines can't reliably count up 80 votes then you can't trust them to count up 100+ million.
=Smidge=
So accuracy in counting votes only matters when it could change the outcome of an election? Bullshit. How do you know whether or not the votes will change the outcome if you don't accurately track them? In a close race, especially in a small town of only 80 voters, one vote could make all the difference even if it's not cast for the two parties in contention. Besides that, voting for third parties is often used as a statement even if the percentage of votes the parties get is miniscule. Getting 5% of the vote is nowhere near enough to win an election, but it's a significant minority and is quite a bit more than 0%.
Why would a town of 80 people even use an electronic voting machine? Too much money in the budget? If people can't be bothered with count a 80 paper votes, i would label it the most lazy people in the world.
for the article, it appears that they have to get a court order to see the paper. I would love to know why that is. But if they go for a court order on this, they should consider the idea of pushing to have other boxes cracked open and counted as well. In particular, they should do this in areas where the race was close AND had the same manufacturer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's not the point. Hopefully it's just that the guy's too dumb to work a voting machine, and his friends lied about voting for him, but if it turns out that the machine did, for whatever reason, fail to accurately record the votes of a mere few dozen people, this has disturbing implications for the integrity of elections nationwide. I certainly hope they don't just shrug this off.
I think the issue is with your dismissive tone with respect to what is almost universally held to be our most important right.
Dude, you are totaly missing the point of why this is news. Just *what* *the* *hell* is going on inside of these voting machines if they are making this kind of error. With such a small number of votes to count, missing a single one, much less 8 or 9, is exceedingly suspicious.
It really makes one wonder what the algorithm inside these things is. They're essentially black boxes, and if there is some code inside that ensures that the "right" candidate gets elected, it's very possible that the malicious programmer didn't consider the case where a single vote by a single voter would be able to be identified by this. Think about it: Typically you're dealing with thousands or millions of votes, and a 5-10% "error" in the direction you want would not be able to be traced or proved because votes are not mapped to specific voters. But in this small community this total anonymity wasn't there, and someone *did* notice.
The guy didn't win, and maybe he had no chance of winning. But this is _definitely_ something that should make people raise their eyebrows.
I wrote in "Cthulhu" for Governor and the optical scan machine was jammed so
the poll worker--some asian dude--told me to put the ballot in the lockbox
slot. I had trouble getting it in because one of the pages was bent so the
guy grabbed the ballot and moved them. On top was my write-in: CTHULHU
in big black letters. He paused. Looked at it, looked at me. Swallowed. And
I said "Thank you" and left.
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
>>>"No, this incident is probably not an example of electronic voter fraud."
How can you say that???? This is most certainly an major indicator that something is very wrong. Whether it be one person or 100,000, if a vote is missing there is a problem. It would be very hard to prove 100,000 votes were manipulated so this one known vote missing is probably the best indicator you will get. If someone did manipulate the machine they made the fatal mistake of not registering a 'minimum' vote count against a candidate.
If the machines cant do their fundamental job then the programmers need be shot because they are impersonators.
$candidates['candidate 1']++;
I think it's worth pointing out that the machines themselves don't appear to be at fault, but rather a person or persons that counted the votes, so to speak.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Why does it even have to be close to do the checking?
Think about it - it's easy to verify when your write in isn't there. How do you check when it's just a checkbox?
It's very unlikely that someone would try to rig the vote for town mayor. But what if the machine were selectively droping votes for a specific senator or representative? Messing up the other questions on the ballot would be a side effect.
Holy crap! It doesn't matter if the votes would have mattered. That's not even close to important. If every vote wasn't counted properly, the election is meaningless - especially in a small election like the one in the article. With computer voting systems involved, we should expect 100% accuracy - there's no excuse for any "issues" like this.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
And you can bet that the machine was purchased using taxpayer money gleaned from the state or county. The e-voting machine for the town of 80 is like the bridge to nowhere of the electoral system.
I am not sure that it really matters to me if he would or would not have won.
The article does not specify whether the total votes that should have been cast totaled the number of voters that voted as shown from the polling place records. So from this article you can't tell if Wooten's vote went to another candidate or if it just wasn't recorded at all. Of course, the error could be that he used the machine incorrectly or that the transfer of totals from machine to the official record was inaccurate.
However, whether it is fraud, machine error or human error, it is still quite alarming, isn't it?
Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle. -Firefly
It really does.
Uhh... that's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's *already been shown* that federal standards on this sort of thing have exactly one effect - they require everyone to get it wrong.
The federal government isn't more trustworthy than local governments. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case - as the governmental body governs more people it tends to have less accountability to the people.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
That is, he COULD have an personal beef with the new voting machines, and is deceiving everyone to further his agenda.
At best it is an indication of inaccuracy.
You say it is is probably not an example of electronic voter fraud, but in fact you have zero data at this point to make that assertion. It may, or may not have been an example of fraud. Imagine a fraudster who decides to salami-slice n votes from other candidates and add it to his/her preferred candidate. That act is likely to result in something like the reported error.
The jury isn't just out - it hasn't even been assembled yet.
This is a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT in our entire country. Votes MUST COUNT, and the VOTING PROCESS MUST BE ACCURATE! It doesn't matter at all if this "might" not have affected the outcome. How will we even know if the outcome that is presented is correct without a valid audit? And how can there be a valid audit if there is no trail other then the known incorrect data? We KNOW for a FACT that the data is wrong. We KNOW for a FACT that there is no paper trail in the machine. And because of that, we KNOW for a FACT that ANY RESULTS which use THIS MACHINE or ANY OF THE SAME TYPE are also subject to KNOWN BAD DATA.
How do we know that 40 people didn't vote for the person on the defective machine? We DON'T know that.
My point is, that without a valid paper trail, which the voter can verify him or herself at the time the vote is cast, we will never have valid voting on electronic machines. I have noting against using an easy to use machine. It can be electronic or otherwise, but I want actualy, tangible, physical proof that my vote is set to whomever I picked. Any programmer or system administrator will tell you that there will always be bugs, flaws, and system failures that result in strange things happening. I don't want a fault piece a RAM to keep my vote from ever being reported. Voting is too important to not have a simple, easy to read paper print out that the voter can look at and verify that the vote was correct.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
If there is one error on the machine, why would it not be possible for there to be more? In fact, it is possible that 20 of the votes were for him, which would mean that he won. Until the check this machine, and hopefully, several other machines from other areas are checked. If there is a failure, it needs to be determined if it is in one machine or is system wide.
What I want to know, is why is it that we are not spot checking ALL system across the nation? It strikes me that all systems should be checked. What is amazing is that all closed systems AND both major parties seem to fight this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Even if nobody was trying to manipulate the vote, that should scare the hell out of you.
Even if the fucking machines *do* count votes correctly in this and future elections, the fact that certain people *can* and *will* manipulate votes without anyone ever being able to tell otherwise is what scares the hell out of me.
Why the fuck can we not have E-Voting machines for those people that want to use the pieces of shit and then the same old paper ballots that we have used for thousands of years for the people that know they are pointless and crooked?
Well, if someone hires an incompetent, what does that make him? The real culprits aren't the software guys but the suits that either a. hired incompetent engineers or b. hired good ones but didn't give them the resources to develop and test sound software.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If the guy: A - Voted correctly B - Pressed the right button, not a slip of the finger to another candidate. They've all got printouts right? So comapre the 36 printouts with the 36 votes, and see if they match, easily done in such a small town. Also, 80 people and only 36 votes?
Who said that it was a write-in? Not the article. The machines that I used, created a paper output that goes into the box. That box is sealed. In addition, the vote was recorded on a server. It is the total on the server that is used by Douglas county Co.. As a WAG, I would say that Arkansas is using the same or similar system. In fact, the fact that the courthouse had his name on the list with a count of 0 would say that he was on the machine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If his vote wasn't counted, how do we know the votes for the winning candidate and runner up were correct? Investigating this could indeed change the outcome.
Someone had to do it.
It's a trade secret, you can't look inside the voting machines.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Many localities had no desire to move to electronic voting, but as of this year it is no longer in their capacity to make this decision. The Help America Vote Act moved the responsibility from the local/county level to the state level, while also mandating upgraded/electronic voting machines nationwide. I know my locality was P/O'd that they had to upgrade, even though it was partly subsidized by the federal government since they converted in time.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Fraud, manipulated voting machines or simply voting machines that don't work. Your pick.
Whatever it is, those things should go to the dump. Now.
No wait. After they've been taken apart and checked.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Voting machines (or processes) will never reliably count one hundred million votes. Or one hundred thousand. There is always a margin of error. Which is why election officials care about race outcomes and not individual votes. However, in this case the vote totals are small and obviously in error. So, open the machine and count paper trail.
But IMO, this is not the instance to freak out over. I highly doubt this is a case of voter fraud. More likely it is a case of election official error, or possibly a machine malfunction.
You know, it's a good thing you're trolling (I can recognize a troll when I see one) or I'd actually think you were serious.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
I think we need a law that requires 100% accuracy for any electronic voting system. When people counting votes, you'd expect some error and you'd expect that error to be some reasnabally small number. When a computer doing the counting, you'd expect 100% accuracy. If you have a mistake, you can't assume it's some small percentage that can be ignored. It's just as likely to be a very large error.
Anyone care to draft legislation to send to our reps?
...or reported. I don't know whether this is a terrible thing or not. Anyone who has ever cast a frivolous vote for themself, their friend, or their pet and looked for it in the official tally has been disappointed. Only when you have a large systematic write-in campaign do they really get counted... and even then, the organizers of such campaigns routinely charge undercounting of such votes.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There is no way of us knowing that he really did this. He could be lying for whatever twisted reason... he just doesn't like new-fangled electronic things.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I must ask: what confidence do you actually have in our voting system?
The reason I ask is this: our voting system, though not _officially_ designed so support a 2-party system is fundamentally flawed in the way that votes are tallied. Let me give an example. Let's say there are 3 candidates - 2 conservative and one liberal. Let's say that 30% of people voted for each conservative and the remaining 40% voted for the liberal. The winner here would be the liberal despite the fact that 60% of the people that voted wanted a conservative winner. See the issue here?
This is why voting for a third-party candidate is considered "throwing your vote away" Unless this changes, we will rarely see the public's best choice as the winner.
A simple solution would be to have voters rank the candidates instead of simply choosing one. In the example above, a voter could give one conservative candidate a '1', the other a '2' and the liberal a '3' - the canidate with the lowest number wins.
People take about voting reform and doing away with the electoral college, but I don't think there is enough emphasis on this particular issue.
-w
calling all destroyers
But the outcome of the election may have changed. What if his vote was actually counted as someone elses? Then that means the top 2 vote count should really be 18-17, which is not a tie, so no runoff needed.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
You didn't RTFA, did you? The machines contain a roll of paper similar to what is used in a cash register. These are used to verify vote totals and then signed by the county elections commissioner prior to the Secretary of State certifying the state vote. Other, fully electronic, systems record that vote tallies upon a smart card. It is this unverifiable system that computer security experts like Avi Ruben have been so concerned about.
If a bank pulled this sort of thing with your finances would you give them a pass because 'it becomes impossible to count _every_ dollar, so our records are differ from the actual amount of money by 3%, but hey, we can probably tell you if that latest check you wrote will bounce or not'? A machine _can_ count every single vote. That's part of the reason to employ electronic voting. If it fails to do that accurately then there is no excuse.
.. with the words 'votting masheen' written on the cardboard box in crayon. He didn't count the vote because - in his words - Randy Wooten is 'a big poo-poo head.'
That's not meant to be funny. It's true. The software and insides of the machine are considered trade secrets, and nobody can look at either.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The system works fine. I voted for the other guy 18 times and each time the machines worked perfectly.
And the count came out correct. I don't see the problem.
Simple. Assume He's not crazy and he voted for himself. Then canidates X or Y should have one less vote. Vote counting is a zero sum result. Votes for X + Votes For Y + Votes for Z - Number of Votes == 0
Since the results had to pass this basic smell test, then one can figure one canidate has too many votes.
Your candidate won!!
Let's use the net to replicate all votes in real time, let's set an id onto each vote and trace its movements wherever it goes.
In fact it should be as easy as a mailing list of all votes!
http://leparlement.org/security
And also, could there be any missing votes for either of the other candidates as well, which could definitely have changed the outcome (seeing as how they allegedly received 18 votes each).
You have a machine that facilitates the voter's selection by way of touch screen etc.... then it creates a paper ballot, the voter verifies the ballot and puts it in the ballot box. If there is any question, you just count the paper ballots. How is it that you folks can't seem to get this simple concept down?
It sounds like they're going 'pppft. Well, if you wanted accuracy, you should have voted by paper.' This is one damn good reason why computers shouldn't be used for something as important as a vote. Having worked in IT, I've seen systems in business that have errors and bugs and so forth and the general reaction is 'Well, it's just teething problems.. it'll get sorted out.' Seems to me there's a similar reaction here. The system should not be in place unless it's 100% accurate. I just hope no-one's been applying the same attitude to air traffic control computers. I *do* know that the UK had an ambulance system screw up which caused major problems, though I don't how many if any lives were lost.
It's time to switch back to beans.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
First of all, the politicians appoint the judiciary and therefore have a 'say' in everything they do.
Second, your suggestion removes the only peaceful 'check' that 'the people' have on their government. Believe it or not, the constitution mandates a government for the people, of the people, and by the people. Removing the current voting structure is not going to help our problems with that, it will only make it worse. (Especially if Gun control legislation is passed, then the second 'check' the people have on government will also be gone.)
If you really believe in your comment you need to move to Idaho or Montana and join some militia; because you have already torn up the basis for the constitution. (I am assuming you are not already a Montana/Idaho resident and member of said militia.)
The electronics reported the same votes from many precincts, showing how Chavez stole the election, and he does hold the codes for the back door into America's elections.
Good point. So far, slashdot hasn't gotten over the "The Sky is Falling" effect. A vote is either missing, or miscounted. It is easy to determine which it is: look at the number of signatures/voters at the office. If it isn't 36, then the vote is missing. If that number is 36, then the machine registered the vote for the wrong candidate or the guy lied, and nobody will ever know. However, if the vote is registered for the wrong candidate, how is it possible to verify the election.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
This machine possibly made 1 error out of a total of 36 votes. Since we don't know what actually caused the error, it is possible that this machine would make the same error for every 1/36 votes. What happens if this machine, or one with a similar defect, is used in a larger election? Wouldn't you say it is better to at least investigate the error this time, so as to head off a serious problem next time?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Please note that the machines used by this county actually have an internal paper trail. You're getting all riled up over nothing. Because there is a way to verify this election, and the county election board will do just that.
With one vote that wasn't counted among a town of 80, that's an error rate of 1.25%, based on population.
So if that error rate is taken nationally... the USA has about 300 million people, with a 1.25% error rate in vote counts, there could be as many as 4 million votes that are either lost or counted for an opponent if the same sort of problems can occur... 4 MILLION!
That's enough to sway the outcome of almost any national election.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!
NO freakin kidding.
We had the same thing happen in Arizona a while ago--the guy voted for himself, and his wife voted for him too.
Final count: Zero.
We don't even have electronic voting here.
I should point out that nothing came of it, either.
Latewire
They used the homeland security money that NY and Washington need less than Waldenburg Arkansas.
No, that's an error rate of at least 3%.
I live in a town of 100,000, but I drive through Waldenburg occasionally and all you would really notice if you drove through it is a gas station. It pretty much is just an intersection in the highway.
However, I am offended by the idea that an electronic voting machine is somehow overkill and wasted money for a town of 80 people. I guess when their equipment becomes obsolete by mandate that they will have to drive the 15 miles into a 'real' town or else be disenfranchised.
Is an optical paper scanner too much for 36 votes? I would say that it is by the logic presented here. Perhaps pieces of notebook paper stuffed into a fancy box with the word 'Ballots' written on the side with a fat sharpy.
That fancy computermitized technology is just too good for the small farming community of Waldenburg!
I can't believe how these companies can't even get something so simple to work. It's not that hard to record the vote in the database and move on to the next person.
Every type of measurement has an intrinsic error rate. E-voting is no exception.
And the cause of error is not necessarily programming error or malice. It could be that he simply made a mistake when voting, and didn't operate the machine properly.
We can't know what the error rate is from a single example like this. You would need to look at a larger set of statistics. Generally, I believe e-voting is considered to have a lower error rate than most older technologies. Remember Florida's pregnant chads!
You say it is is probably not an example of electronic voter fraud, but in fact you have zero data at this point to make that assertion.
That's because there is no further data beyond the statement of that candidate. As soon as election officials open the unit(s) up and check the paper tally, there will be real facts available. I just happen to think that in an election this small the error is most likely human error on the part of elections officials, or possibly the voter himself. It could also be a machine malfunction.
But organized fraud? Highly doubtful.
> Let's say there are 3 candidates - 2 conservative and one liberal.
> Let's say that 30% of people voted for each conservative and the
> remaining 40% voted for the liberal.
Sounds like you're talking about Nicaragua. Ortega, the ex-communist Sandinista leader, was just elected president with 38% of the vote, while his two conservative opponents won 29% and 26% respectively.
Then again, in Florida 2000 the Gore+Nader votes were significantly more than the Bush vote, not to mention that the Gore+Jewish Buchanan vote was also more than the Bush vote.
The judicial branch has decided enough elections, thank you.
Bullshit.
If we can create systems that reliably keep track of billions of dollars every day without losing any or giving it to the wrong person, then it should be no more difficult to create a system that can track a hundred million votes without losing any or giving them to the wrong person. It is, in fact, a trivial task to do - the only hard part is doing so in a way that is difficult for someone to mess up without evidence of tampering (intentional or otherwise).
EVERY time a voting machine - any machine - screws up in a visible manner, it's cause for alarm. I bet you'd be a little more concerned if this was an ATM that just shorted you a $20 bill.
=Smidge=
Indeed, and this is the case that will ultimately cause the democratic wins of both houses to be overturned.
Yes. And, in fact, I *did* say in my top post that verifying the paper count is appropriate, and within every comment reply.
Voting machines (or processes) will never reliably count one hundred million votes
What are you smoking? That's what computers do. When it's paper ballots counted by hand, I'll give a margin of error. When it's a computer with a database that's just adding one more record for every vote, there is zero margin of error. Either it works or it doesn't. Electronic voting should be perfectly accurate, unlike traditional ballots. That it's less accurate should be a great big flashing warning that Diebold and similar companies are doing something unfathomly evil and trying to muck around with American democracy.
As the bumper sticker says, "If you aren't completely appalled, you haven't been paying attention."
The issue isn't the error rate, it's the accountability.
How do you verify the votes? How do you determine the error rate if you can't verify the votes?
In this case there's a paper ballot as backup.
What about the systems that don't have that?
Voting machines (or processes) will never reliably count one hundred million votes. Or one hundred thousand. There is always a margin of error.
Why not? One hundred million can easily be represented in a 32-bit int, with bits to spare (use them for a checksum).
How would you feel about your bank or your credit card company saying something like "accounting machines (or processes) will never reliably count your balance, there's always a margin of error".
To a certain extent that is true -- people mistype entries, etc -- but you'd be pretty pissed if you called the bank on it and they said something like "ah, it's only a $9 error, the process isn't perfect" without offering to fix the problem. (Or even "hey, we only got the sign bit wrong, this isn't something to freak out over.")
-- Alastair
Maybe there is personally identifying or unique information attached to each vote? To insure no one votes twice? There might be a "ballot secrecy" issue at stake.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There's all this controversy surrounding voting machines, in fact, it's been proven they can be hacked and have some serious software glitches. At this point, there really isn't any real benefit to using a voting machine, so why the hell did we use them? It just makes it so freaking easy to steal an election.
Maybe he's a democrat: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/31/florida_te rminals_dont_cooperate/
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0 DE0DA103EF93AA25751C0A9609C8B63&n=Top%2FReference% 2FTimes%20Topics%2FPeople%2FB%2FBush%2C%20George%2 0W.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vie wArticle&code=20030715&articleId=106
May I suggest the right word (apart from all the obligatory black-box-voting indignation) that's accurate for this situation: loser! I used it to tag the article: seemed appropriate... ;-)
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
This discussion needs to STOP. Don't forget which party just swept to power! All you're doing is shaking faith in a system that finally elected Democrats! So what if there was hacking two years ago, and are you claiming the Republican hackers all of a sudden switched sides and cast bogus Democrat votes nationwide this year??
Save your complaints for when/if Republicans seize power again, and until then, SHUT UP YOU TURDS!
OK. But as long as you recognise that your statement is based solely on your axiomaticbelief that fraud is unlikely in U.S elections.
'' This machine possibly made 1 error out of a total of 36 votes. Since we don't know what actually caused the error, it is possible that this machine would make the same error for every 1/36 votes. ''
If the guy is saying the truth, then all we know is that _at least_ one vote was not counted correctly. Since 18 votes were counted for candidates A and B, you would need either 19 people who state that they voted for A, or 19 people who stated they voted for B, to _prove_ that another vote was counted wrong, but we don't have those 19 people.
So the correct version is: For one of the 36 votes cast we know whether it was right or wrong, and that vote was counted wrong. For the other 35 votes, we have no information. So _all_ votes we can verify were counted wrong. Those that we cannot verify, we don't know anything about, but we sure would want to know.
According to the actual article it says 8-9 other people claim to have voted for Wooten (the canidate who had 0 votes registered. Out of a town w/ a population of 80 (and with less than 50 people actually voting) that's over 20% error. Completely unacceptable
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2646802&CMP
Until there is a viable independantly managed standard, it's impossible for citizens to truly trust the outcome of elections. Given that fellow citizens have died to save our democracy, anything less that the utmost trust in our voting system is to show fallen the utmost disrespect.
Other countries have very strict voting rules. If the shennanigans on the HBO special were to have happened in any other true democracy, they would have been rounded up in election fraud arrests the next day. It's that serious.
but really, this is useless until we have a follow-up story. I mean, it's already been debated to death on the importance of voting machine accuracy. When will we find out *why* this happened?
I have a "quick test" that simulates billions of synaptic events. This "quick test" must be passed every time before I check in any changes to the program running the quick test. I am not satisfied if a single synaptic event is missed, unless I understand the reason that one (out of over a billion) synaptic event is different.
Barring fraud, why do assert that "Voting machines (or processes) will never reliably count one hundred million votes"? It's not exactly brain surgery (pun intended).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
But when scaling up a transaction to even just hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medium sized transaction, it becomes impossible to count _every_ dollar. It's just a statistical impossibility.
When confronted with such large numbers, it has become standard practice for accountants to concern themselves not with each individual dollar but with verifying flow for any particular transaction. That is, what matters is whether the balance is positive or negative, not specific dollars in the process.
Fixed that for you. Now how do you feel?
-- Alastair
I was taught that the three branches of of government were in place to avoid concentration of power. What I'm saing is that the judicial branch should have the power over elections since we obviously can't trust the legislative or the executive. Whatever else you're reading into it is in your mind not mine. Although, I do like Montana, it's a beautiful state !
Why do you emphasize every other word as if we can somehow hear your obnoxious cadence in our heads? Cool it Shatner, we don't read in the same voice you speak. (maddox)
If what you said wasn't true, it would be funny. Sad, very very sad.
The summary is poorly worded, when I first read it I thought there was some bizarre bug that meant the reason his vote wasn't counted was that he voted for himself. As it turns out the significance of him voting for himself is that he became aware of the problem because the knew there should be at least one vote for him, the one he cast himself.
About the article itself, it's comforting that there are paper ballots to check the record but I'm curious about the description:
"
"It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals," Payne said. "The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available."
"
I assume these paper ballots were easily viewable by the voters, otherwise they're next to useless.
I stole this Sig
. ..
I think we are all missing the bigger picture here though. Why would a town of only eighty people even need an electronic voting machine? "Every one raise you hand for the guy you want in office."
They should be mandatory. Every vote should be counted once in its home precinct and again at a randomly selected sister precinct that has compatible equipment. Then we'll see just how good our system works.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First of all, how do you know there's an internal paper trail? TFA does not mention it. All it says is "that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals". Secondly, if that paper trail was not visible to each person as he/she cast his/her vote, then it cannot disprove fraud or error.
As others have stated, when there's such an obvious error in such a small election, under what grounds can you believe that larger, more significant errors don't exist in larger elections, especially when statisticians have made such claims? We need verifiable paper trails.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
CNN's coverage of this story puts it under the 'offbeat news' category: [ http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/11/zero.votes. ap/index.html ], as if this is some colorful rustic joke.
/ 111106bzelectioncontinued.txt
Waldenburg isn't the only Arkansas mayoral race with odd results. In the town of Gateway, 199 votes were cast in a mayoral race for a city with only 122 residents. In Pea Ridge, 3997 votes were cast in a mayors race for a city with 3344 residents.
http://www.nwaonline.com/articles/2006/11/11/news
Gateway and Pea ridge use machines from Election Systems & Software. I don't know what machines were used in Waldenberg.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Computers are just not designed to accept input and increment numbers. Its hard enough to keep track of a couple numbers, but imagine how difficult it is for a computer to actually increment those numbers. This stuff is more science fiction than reality. Computers are just not ready for this type of task.
The last time I checked, George Washington and the rest of the "founding fathers" were in a militia when they fought the English.
It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!
What point? Votes are not counted all the time, and it is normal.
Let me make it REAL clear -- it is statistically IMPOSSIBLE to have a 100% accurate vote, 100% of the time. It WILL NOT EVER HAPPEN. You need to get over it and come back to reality.
We need to find ways to minimize inaccuracy, and understand what is "normal".
Keep in mind, as long as the accuracies are evenly distributed, they have minimal impact on the outcome. "Errors" are normal, and can be handled by the system. What needs to be watched is manipulation.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They have an internal paper trail eh? And what if it records the vote on the internal paper trail incorrectly?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
TFA doesn't mention any paper, it just says "that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals". Hopefully, that means the machine had a paper trail that each voter could see before casting his/her vote. Hopefully, but not likely. Maybe there's an internal paper trail. Maybe not.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Tasteless, totally unappropiated...
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
If you've never read ShrinkLits, you're cheating yourself.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
He's been reading up on the issue.
The U.S. voting system does not meet international mandated guidelines for a "democratic" election
Umm.. "mandated" by whom? Last I checked, the United States was a soverign nation and allowed to do whatever it wants within its own borders without having elections influenced by outside "international" bodies.
Can you come up with a citation, or are you talking out of your ass?
Who exactly is going to "mandate" something to the United States, and with what army are they going to back it up? I'm sure you're not speaking of the United Nations -- a political body so bogged down in paperwork and petty bickering that it makes Microsoft look like a nimble 90's tech startup.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Ah, I see you're a master of blaming others. I know a lot of people that could use your advice. I know the VP in charge of my project would love your skill in this department.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The Texas govoner race was the same. The democrat got ~31, the repub ~40.. the two independents got ~10, ~19.
The issue here is that not only was the vote count innaccurate, but there are only 80 residents of the town. From the article, only 36 residents voted in the mayoral election. 1 vote in 100M might be insigificant, but 1 in 36 most certainly is.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Simple: your typical white american can't read complex words like "Cthulhu", so this extra information about "some asian dude" was useful --- it explained how come that this particular poll-worker wasn't limited by the problems of the american educational system.
You should've seen it. He just pranced into the voting booth, pirouetted through the procedures, and waltzed out of there. Anyone could've had his vote for a song.
Or, perhaps, did you mean "ballot" and not "ballet"?
What the hell?! This is frickin' electronic voting, not a single vote should ever be lost. If it does, the system is flawed or rigged.
Circumcision is child abuse.
So imagine you're against current implementations electronic voting-- not a very farfetched proposition, especially around here in the Slashdot crowd. Imagine also that you live in a small town, where it's pretty easy to get your name officially on the ballot. Then, imagine you don't advertise, so nobody knows you're running, nobody sees your signs while they're making their decisions.
Here's the fun thing about secret ballots: You can't verify that our friend the candidate _isn't lying_. Want to try to put a dent in Diebold's credibility? Wander into town to vote, and vote for someone else. Then claim you -- of course! -- voted for yourself. When the votes are tallied and the 36 votes split for two candidates with no votes for you, the third party, pitch a fit. Even Podunk, Arkansas will find national coverage when you can "prove" the voting machines are fixed.
Except we don't have proof.
Now, I'm not saying the machines _aren't_ fixed-- but, honestly, who rigs the mayoral election for Podunk, Arkansas?
-F
interviewer: Kevin Phillips Bong, You polled no votes at all. Not a sausage. Bugger all. Are you at all disappointed with this performance?
Bong: Not at all. As I always say: Climb every mountain Ford every stream, Follow every by-way, Till you find your dream.
(Sings)
A dream that will last
All the love you can give
Every day of your life
For as long as you live.
All together now!
Climb every mountain
Ford every stream...
Are you taking a page from the BOFH and blaming neutrinos or something? Voting should be a deterministic process. Probability does not enter into the equation. Again, my program deals with far more events than this system, and I can (and do) easily verify that it has 0 errors out of billions of synaptic events.
If you're referring to the possibility that the "error resides between seat and keyboard", then I'll admit that's always a possibility, especially considering the butterfly ballot ballyhoo. It's highly unlikely that's the case here, especially considering that 8 or 9 other people have also said they voted for him.
There should be NO interaction between these voting machines. That just opens the door to hackers. No, the ONLY interaction should be between the voting machine and its parent tabulator. My code has similar interactions, when it is running in parallel, which it must do to pass the verification tests. Again, a single error in this situation is unacceptable.
Which is not the case here, so even if errors are acceptable there (and they're not), that has no bearing on this case.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Isn't that one of reasons that electronic voting is being promoted? I mean, as much as it sucks, it's sort of understandable, in the context of human error how one single vote could be miscounted. It is a whole lot more disturbing how a machine designed specifically for this task could err.
Nope. It is impossible to create any physical system that exists outside the boundaries of probability. Which means that there is always a margin of error. Always. Thermodynamics and all that.
.mov files of that interview available there.
However, there are specific reasons why the US system is particularly prone to error. Especially when dealing with large state and national races where differing regional elections laws, differing voting systems, and tabulation rules, make *extremely* accurate counting absolutely impossible. Which is why elections officials care more about outcomes than individual vote counts.
IIRC, Avi Rubin talked about the probability issue during his interview on C-SPAN. Here is his web page, there are links to
see http://www.afsa.org/fsj/feb01/carter01.cfm
We mandate the democratic election standards through aid funding to needy countries, yet we don't meet the same standard ourselves.
Go figure.
Now one thing that should be noted at this point is that, in a town of only 80 people, there may be a good number of people who have voted for him and are unwilling to acknowledge it for fear of personal retribution (this is why we have secret votes). If everybody who voted for him had to acknowledge their vote before the box got opened, then we'd be degraded to a soviet style voting system where every vote is done in public, the implicit threat of a political officer quietly taking note of everybody who votes 'incorrectly'.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Bullshit. You can hold me responsible for the end result once I have the power to decide what that is.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Except in this case there are paper ballots.
If paper ballots exist they can be easily verified and if the paper that went though the machine tallies what the machine says then it's not Dyebold's fault, it's someone else messing with the ballots or as you say an outright lie. So, in any case, Dyebold can be cleared ...
I'm not disputing that this happened, yet I'm definitely not taking your statement at face value.
sig? Oh, that sig...
Oh for mod points...
"Cthulhu" for Governor
Gotta get a "Don't blame me--I voted for Cthulhu!" bumper sticker.
I don't care for his stances on mind-control and human genocide (both pro), but he's good on family values. And if it means no gay marriage, well I guess I can accept a little civilization-crushing and waste-laying.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
This is not like a Windows Vista that you can release then fix. E-Voting deserves a "fix THEN release" policy, and if a problem is found after release, you pull the plug on the machines, sack everyone who green-lighted their usage, and don't use the system again until a 3-year-long commission has determined what went wrong. THIS IS SERIOUS STUFF.
Maybe the vote for Mayor was not the only election those machines were used for that day? Multiply 80 * the number of total elections, and you end up with a significantly larger potential number. Nevermind that only 36 or 37 people voted.
Unless there is a power glitch, or any one of a number of other statistically small possibilities. In this case, I'd accept that the system is flawed, unless they could demonstrate it was voter error. While they say "electronic voting machine", that is rather ambiguous and could mean any one of a number of things.
As far as "not one single vote", that isn't going to happen. There are just too many little things that could go wrong, and some of them eventually will.
The law [Vol 1. Section 3.2.1] states a test of 1 in 500,000 "ballot positions", per processing step is acceptable. They do not measure voters, but rather ballot positions. A ballot position is the number of candidates and the number of other votable issues on a ballot. Steps include things like the electronic recording; the paper trail; transferring data to jurisdiction HQ; etc.
For example, if there are 3 people running for mayor, that is 3 ballot positions per voter -- assuming no other races. If there were 7 bond issues (yes and no spaces), that is another 14 ballot positions. Add in things like other races, referendums, etc. and what looks like a small election can have 30-50 "ballot positions" per ballot. Multiple that times the number of voters then the number of steps and it adds up fast.
To be fair, the target is 1 in 10,000,000 and in an election this small, they should have gotten it right.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Fixed that for you. Now how do you feel?
Amused that someone modded that blather insightful. The difference here is that financial transactions have an audit trail and can be traced back to who paid what for every of 10 million transactions. Voting is necessarily secret, and that alone changes things radically. Never mind that in both cases, we have to depend on corruptible people to get things done.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Well, this last election I didn't, but the previous several elections, I have always written myself in for at least one un-opposed race, and I have YET to see it tallied anywhere. I think they mostly just throw away any ballots with write-ins, or with any of the races left blank. I don't know that for a fact, but this guy's in the article experience jibes with mine.
I also know that in the real world unless you are extremely rich and powerful it won't amount to a hill of beans if you go and complain about it, because 1)yes, reality is reality, paper ballot or electronic, you can't prove who you voted for to even have the complaint stand and 2) the goons in charge won't care anyway. Possibly with an all paper ballot you might be able to find it again, but with electronic? Handwriting recognition? How can any machine possibly instantly get it correct? if this was so we'd have much better quality handwriting input out there, and we don't, and I don't think these voting machine companies would throw away that tech just to make stupid voting machines. The write-in ballot is next to impossible with e-voting near as I can see, even from a theoretical angle. That they even offer that option is ludicrous.
Ah. There's the confusion. You said "international mandated," which made me think you were referencing an external force.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
I agree.
I live in a town of about 12,000 people. In each voting precinct, there are about 1200 registered voters. A few elections ago, one of the poll workers whom I knew told me after the election that I had received a write-in vote for City Council. I have no idea who voted for me (it was no one directly related to me), and my *one* vote was around 3000 short of the winner, but the vote was still counted and recorded none the less.
Counting every vote just seems like the proper thing to do - especially when there are so few votes to count.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I've taken several courses in thermodynamics and several courses in statistical mechanics. After all, I also have a degree in astrophysics, and I can honestly tell you that this isn't rocket science, either. ;) Simply put, I understand statistical variance quite well. However, deterministic processes are supposed to be deterministic. Sure, it's possible that a bit in a computer will randomly flip (hence the reference to neutrinos, which are usually the humorously blamed party), but if bits flipped that often, then I'd NEVER be able to get the same results in my program that requires more than a billion synaptic events. (Have I not mentioned this program before?)
Let me put it to you this way: if I drop an egg a million times, will you argue that statistics mandates that there's no way the egg will fall every time?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I call Bullshit. Yes, there is always a margin of error with everything. There is not a reason for margin of error for COUNTING up to 36, nor counting up to a MILLION. There is no excuse for it. DugUK
Roughly speaking, when you fill out your ballot, you can essentially say: "I want this candidate to win, but if they don't, I'd rather have X than Y". On counting, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated from the running, and their second preferences are distributed to the remaining candidates, until one has a clear majority. Needing to count third or later preferences is rare but can affect close races.
Ummm.. isn't the fact that the machines are ERROR-PRONE just as bad a fraud? In elections, wrong answers are just as damaging to the electoral process as fraud. The only difference is that some fat cat doesn't know he can celebrate until *after* the election is done, where with fraud he can start partying before it's even over. But the public gets screwed just the same.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
What, can't people in arkansas count, they need an electronic voting machine to count 80 votes? Or maybe the machine just reflects the local iq level?
Just on your power glitch and statistically small possibilities point: Why wouldn't you want UPS/generators mandated for voting machines? After all they wouldn't been needed for long, and what with voting being so important. And ECC memory used, or duplicate components?
Actually, the word here is scary.
If things go wrong with just 36 votes in a town of 80 people, what do you think this means for an entire country voting electronically?
home
You didn't RTFA, did you? The machines contain a roll of paper similar to what is used in a cash register. These are used to verify vote totals and then signed by the county elections commissioner prior to the Secretary of State certifying the state vote. Other, fully electronic, systems record that vote tallies upon a smart card. It is this unverifiable system that computer security experts like Avi Ruben have been so concerned about.
Note the problem with this system. If EVERY voter checks each vote recorded on paper, then a verifyable record exists, but it is inconvenient to verify each vote so I expect that few people do. A maliciously modified machine could slip in plenty of unnoticed "mistakes." Also, since the voting machine is sealed, there is no reason to believe that the total reported has any relationship to the total on the paper. Consider, for example, how many paper records were checked in this election? A significantly incorrect vote total could easily slip by. Random checks have been proposed, but not implemented. However, that only works if EVERY voter personally verifies EVERY vote they make -- and that is not a reasonable assumption.
Exactly. Either a ranked method, or approval voting, which I think would be less confusing to the general public (think, including dumb people), and therefore more easily accepted, although not quite as good a choice as a Condorcet method. Do you have any idea how we can begin to get people in general to think about this?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Many precincts are too small for generators to be practical, and UPS units also have a failure rate. What if, even though it was tested the week before, the generator fails on the day of the election? There is also the cost associated. Who is gonna pay for it all.
My main argument is this: there are acceptable error rates with non-electronic voting, why the hell are we so adamant that because they are "computer" based they should magically be 100% accurate and reliable? Hell, in all my years of experience with computers, that is the LAST thing I would expect. Yes, they can be minimized but this is the reason the big telecom equipment makers advertise 99.999% uptime and NOT 100% update. (Unpredictable] Shit happens.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Are you sure?
Maybe the PEBEVMAC
Ok, I'm a moron then.
What the hell is the difference between counting votes and tracking finances? Presuming its not down to misvoting on the voters' part, the error rate should be 0%.
DugUK
No, it said that in this case, "paper ballots WERE available", as in "if you prefer", not as in "mandatory".
Uh, no.
You're COUNTING. vote = vote + 1
You are not doing any calculations, which I agree may indroduce errors. You are counting. Of course the systems are not perfect because humans are involved, but the machines themselves should be able to fucking COUNT. It's not like they're counting particularly fast, either... each individual machine handles maybe one vote every 2 or 3 minutes.
If I vote for person A, then person A's vote count should increase by 1. There is NO acceptable scenario where that would not work. There just isn't.
But I'm letting you drag me into a semantics argument. Shame on me... the point is you're trying to make light of a fuckup that at the very least needs to be investigated to find out why and how it happened, not whether or not errors should exist at all.
The error needs to be investigated. Do not just say "oh well nothing's perfect" and try to write it off.
=Smidge=
Elections are about reaching a decision most people can live with. You will never get a cpunt that is free of error.
---which is why a successful politician learns to accept the close calls gracefully. He won't be rewarded (even by his firends) for introducing the uncertainty, expense, and delay of a recount.
Yeah, yeah in theory instructions can behave indeterminately due to random quantum events, but the odds of it happening are remote enough to be irrelevant for all intends and purposes. Write a program that repeatedly performs some simple math and let it run a few billion times. Then go ahead and tell me how many errors you get. Or I can tell you right now, you'll get 0. Run it a little longer, say until the heat death of the universe. You'll still probably get 0.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I guess I'm lost. Reading through that webpage all I saw was a writing by Jimmy Carter about the work done by he and his foundation. No where in his article did it speak to mandating anything. Setting that aside, it is completely different to set standards to receive aid in a country known for threatening voters with death in comparison to voting in the United States.
Funny, the Slashdot banner in this history reads "Politics for nerds. Your Vote Matters".
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Al
This gives us Al at 5, Bob at 7, and Chuck at 6. Chuck calls in help from his two friend, Dave and Ed. Now, they don't really have anything to offer, but Dave is blind and Ed is in a wheelchair, so everyone feels bad about putting them last. The election now comes to:- Al, Chuck, Dave, Ed, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Al
Chuck still comes out to six votes, but Al is now at seven, so Chuck wins the election. While this is an admittedly silly example, since there are more candidates than voters, it is an illustration that an unpopular third party candidate can still change the outcome of the election. In fact, there's a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) which specifically states that there is no completely fair voting scheme. The unpopular third part falls under the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" section. In order to eliminate this problem, you have to give up one of the other attributes. In practice, most people who truly fix the third party hole wind up with a system where you can cause a candidate to lose by voting for him.Nobody here is stupid enough to truly believe that because a computer does it, it is infallible. However, these absurdly rare occurrences you have listed are not what people talk about when these computer voting systems screw up. Power glitches and transmission errors are very very unlikely in a properly built system; or at least they can be dealt with via redundancy in the system. The point here is that either the system is poorly built (and in this case so poorly built that in a town of 80 people it can't manage to keep track of the votes which does not bode well for considerably larger elections of say 50 million) or there was tampering done to modify the vote counts. Either way, your defenses of the imperfect electronic system don't hold up. We either need to make the system less fallible than it appears to be currently or change to a different system.
Because a computer is a deterministic machine, where for any given input you will get certain output, and only that output, and nothing else (or your computer is broken.) Quantum computers are not like that, but we don't yet have them either.
There is absolutely no reason to NOT expect a 100% correct accounting of all votes cast. The "power loss" scenario doesn't hold water. The voting machine can write the vote into the Flash (and/or print it on a tape), read it back from the Flash, compare, and if all is well then it tells the voter that he is done and can go. If not, summon maintenance. How often banks miscount your money? How often your Visa card incorrectly charges you? How often your paycheck is wrong? Almost never, barring software errors. But a voting machine is so simple, it can be mathematically proven that the algorithm is correct (and it can be also easily tested.)
Whether he did this to create doubt or not is irrelevant. The fact that it is not a testable system makes it unacceptable.
It's also is quite remiminiscent of the "Hacking Democracy" video, where the machine was caught flipping votes in texas on video.
Apparently, you missed the point. Typical for Slashdotters but ... really.
... in other words, the tools to do the job.
... that's one reason.
Engineers will generally (if they're halfway competent) do the best job they can with the resources at their disposal. Fact is, the engineers themselves are a resource, a tool. In any technical organization, somebody in management is responsible for selecting the engineering staff and providing them with project goals, adequate resources, and the requisite guidance
Voting machines are big business. BIG business. These are not shoestring operations, which means there's plenty of money to go around to attract the best and the brightest. It doesn't matter whether management hired second and third string engineers, or hired high-level people and simply mismanaged them. Maybe they did get good people and received a good design, but failed to commit the QA resources to make sure it actually worked right. Whatever. The responsibility for bad design and bad implementation lies at the top. You know that as well as I do. That is why the people at the top make so much more money that the people doing the actual engineering. Well
Corporate management often says it wants the best possible product. Unfortunately, they rarely back up those words with the resources to achieve it. Then, when customers complain about the defective products the company has been manufacturing, the finger is immediately pointed at the engineers who designed them. And that's wrong: it's their manager who should be shot on the spot for being an incompetent, because only an incompetent would hire an incompetent, much less give him a position of responsibility.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Run several month long compute jobs on a plus-thousand node cluster (with the same data set) and get back to me when you discover exact reproducibility every time. There's always error. Always.
It's just that the error is usually so small nobody cares.
Let me make it REAL clear -- it is statistically IMPOSSIBLE to have a 100% accurate vote, 100% of the time.
If that were true (and I don't agree with you), it should also be impossible to have a less than 100% accuracy, 100% of the time, which is pretty much what we have seen. It should be (statistically speaking) 100% accurate in MOST places.
Yes, I agree that is a really small sample, so the 3% mentioned is not really accurate. Still, considering the many cases where the difference between 2 candidates was less than 1%, you really should not be so forgiving.
morcego
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Not geeky enough, sir!
Clearly, our Asian election official was aware of the cults within his ancestral homeland which worship the Cthulhu. Recall from The Call of Cthulhu:
"What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China ... There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific ... No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
Plainly our man had had some contact with this oriental cult of the appalling ancient Things, and had come - or his family had come - to America fleeing these nightmares. Now he is working at a polling station, and a man comes to him with a ballot, with the dread name of CTHULHU scrawled at the top. Small wonder he reacted as he did!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why?
When you add 2+2 on your cheap Taiwanese calculator, how often do you expect an answer different from '4'. Feel free to do this calculation as often as you like and get back to me with a percentage error rate. (errors in entry due to the numbers wearing off the buttons do not qualify.)
Now try something like a computer CPU. If you run several million simple integer additions, what percentage of those will be in error?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Many precincts are too small for generators to be practical, and UPS units also have a failure rate. What if, even though it was tested the week before, the generator fails on the day of the election? There is also the cost associated. Who is gonna pay for it all.
... fighting for the democracy ?
Wouldn't that be like
Sorry, I'm not an american, but I though you people didn't mind spending money while fighting for democracy. But maybe I misunderstood, and all that money is for fighting for something else.
morcego
The hell are you talking about? My vote never counted, I voted for republican representatives and we got democrats. The votes were tallied, we had 600,000 for some democrat and 500,000 for some republican, and the republican votes were ejected. They didn't give the democrat 6/11 voting credits and the republican 5/11 voting credits in the legislature or congress or anything.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
So then more power would be concentrated under the judicial branch by giving them the power over politics at the most basic levels. The formation of 3 branches of government was established so that no one branch could control government while power could still concentrate in one branch as has been seen in the past when the presidency under Roosevelt rose to overpower the rule of the legislative branch. I can see no real benefit that would outweigh the enormous costs the would be incurred by initiating a huge expansion of the judicial branch to oversee elections. Plus, I fail to see how moving the power over elections to the federal level would be an improvement over having it at the state level. At the state level, one can still make their voice heard whereas at the national level it is easier to ignore a "call from the wildnerness". If you don't like the way elections are held in your locality, you can easliy lodge a comlaint with the election commissioner. If that doesn't satisfy you, go higher to the county board or the State Atourney General. The way you propose is very remiscent of voting systems in countries where voting is mandatory and a freely excercised right. While the system we have doesn't always work the best all the time, I'd say it is much more preferred to a system that is highly regimented and overseen by some kind of overreaching Byzantine bureaucracy in a faraway location that makes it insular from the people.
var votes = new Array(); while (weAreVoting()) { if (validateVoter()) { var candidate = getVoterChoiceFromTouchScreen(); votes[candidate]++; } } sendResultsForSummation(votes);
I feel that the plan from Office Space was really quite cool.
In the town where this mayoral race took place it is very possible that the outcome would change. 8-9 people who told him personally that they would vote for him, himself and his wife... how many of those people had friends who might also vote for him? Why did the other two candidates still have a runoff?
Are you assuming that none of the other candidates votes were incorrectly tallied? Are you also assuming that none of Wooten's votes were incorrectly assigned to another candidate?
If Wooten truely had 9 supporters and the voting machines somehow misassigned all of those votes to another of the candidates this would force a runoff between the other two candidates even though they weren't even close (The official tally was 18 and 18).
"No, this incident is probably not an example of electronic voter fraud."
-- How do you mean this? The chances that a man thought he voted for himself but didn't are rather slim. Are you saying that incorrect results due to problems with the system (diebold) does not qualify as voter fraud?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
The US was not set up as a democracy. The US is supposed to be a constitutional republic. Unfortunately it is slowly turning into a democracy. I pity anyone who does not share beliefs with the mob and is foolish enough to express these views.
I did a quick google, I couldn't find it so you'll have to either think I'm a liar, go look for yourself or just believe me. Most people don't believe me so one of the other two look like your best option.
The last line in the article I did point to is telling but not the quote I was looking for.
In late-breaking Tuttle news, utility clerk Juanita Coffey has won the vote for the city pumpkin decorating contest. City manager Jerry A Taylor is quoted as saying:
It is important to note that there have been no allegations of voting irregularity, despite Jerry's 22 years of technical experience.
You will also be pleased to hear that unlike the progressive clamor across the rest of our great nation, the good folks in Tuttle, Oklahoma seem to have reddened their necks further and elected three more Republicans to the statehouse.
This is a fitting opportunity to remember the great Jerry A Taylor, so deserving of his $5000 pay rise for his legendary competence. I wonder what he is up to these days?
If you read the article, "at least eight or nine people" told him that they voted for him. Of course such claims aren't proof, but the situation certainly deserves investigation. A glitch can't lose eight or nine votes out of 36, plus his own. That would be around 25%. If such a glitch is even possible, it's hardly an acceptable error rate.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Can you explain the difference?
That byzantine bureaucracy works very very well in many countries.
Right now, I don't think I have ever personally witnessed an unrigged US election. I have very little confidence in this system.
I need to *know* that it can be verified.
Stick a human in there to punch to calculator buttons (or keyboard buttons) that few million times and you WILL have a noticeable error rate.
We aren't talking X==X++ here, there are several steps other than a simple increment where things can go wrong. PEBKAC is a huge variable that you are ignoring.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I, too, use MPI systems with PBS (and other) queues. OK, first of all, a confession: I do see (frequent) errors on these systems. However, the errors are ALWAYS of the catastrophic type for me. I.e., the program either fails to complete, or it gives me the correct results. (Caveat: all I can actually claim is that when it does complete, the results are always reasonable, and the few times I do check them against the known correct answer the results are always correct - UNLESS there's an error in the code that I've written.) Now, in an election with tens of thousands (I'm guessing) machines, to claim that catastrophic errors are a given is not too big of a claim. However, in most cases recovery from such errors should be possible IF a paper trail is being used. I'm assuming that no catastrophic error happened in this case, or else it would have been reported.
Secondly, if you have NEVER seen a very large job come back without some sort of error, then something is seriously wrong with your system. The majority of time I run jobs on the MPI system they come back without an error - even when I'm running a simulation with 100,000 neurons, a billion synapses, and trillions of synaptic events.
Are you sure? The article does not mention a paper trail. It mentions the alternative of paper ballots, and that they were going to open it up to verify the totals, but it did not mention paper trails.
Ditto. Sometimes, it's hard to fight the temptation to be nasty, especially if you haven't eaten dinner yet. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No, really, it's not funny. Stop modding it funny.
If I said "the sun is bright" would that be modded as funny?
In California a candidate must register as a write-in candidate. Votes for a non-registered write-in are not counted.
-- QED
They probably shouldn't be using negative numbers.
How does something like this happen? I can code a voting system in less then one day which will be 100% accurate. I don't understand how/why it is so hard for a Gov. to roll these things out. If they are worried then have inside people code the terminals. How hard is this? The ultimate worry in these systems is voter fraud but this probably happens 1000 fold on paper ballots as mays states do not require ID to vote. Simple solution - scan your ID you get to vote. print a receipt that you see go into a box and one that it gives you. end of story. Whomever in in-charge of these systems should be fired. This type of system is NOT that complicated.
Here's a starting point
That we consider money more important than who rules us?
-R
The ballots themselves, however, are still counted. The content of what you mark in the write-in field is not counted, yes, but the ballot is.
The votes are for candidates, not political leanings, so your example is a little strange. More people walked into the booth and said 'I want that guy' than they did for the other two. Approval or instant runoff or rank voting might well be an improvement, but I disagree that the one vote used wisely system is 'fundamentally flawed'.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Arrow's Imposibility Theorem is needlessly strict, to the point that it doesn't come close to invalidating these methods for real world use. Things like cyclic preferential paradoxes actually CAN happen in real human logic. So while they sound neat to talk about, it doesn't change the fact that alternate forms are much, much better than our current voting system.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20621 6&cid=16817476
It is impossible to create any physical system that exists outside the boundaries of probability.
Sure, but the accuracy of computers is far higher than you think. Your computer is calculating RAM addresses several million times every second. Get one such calculation wrong and the program crashes. Such crashes do happen, but it's extremely unusual. A computer has to run for a very long time to see even one such event. All the time calculating memory addresses several million times every single second.
There will be other errors, such as incorrect voter input, misplaced memory cards, and such. But as long as the computer does receive the instruction to increment the counter, the count should be quite accurate for many millions of votes.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Bullshit. You can hold me responsible for the end result once I have the power to decide what that is.
Build us a reliable, verfiable voting machine/system.
Go.
thank you
Easy - build a computer that generates paper ballots and puts them in a hopper after voter verification. The hopper is then put in a counting machine which behaves much like before because it is pretty much identical to what we already have. Note the very limited use of computers.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Lots of things other than power glitches can cause a system to crash and reboot. Voting machines write each vote to non-volatile storage so that even if they reboot, no votes are lost.
I'm hoping that the storage is write-once, and has a header signed by the poll workers when they certify that the totals are zero, then the votes, then a footer signed by the poll workers saying that the election is over. But I don't know that they do that.
Sure, but the accuracy of computers is far higher than you think. Your computer is calculating RAM addresses several million times every second. Get one such calculation wrong and the program crashes. Such crashes do happen, but it's extremely unusual.
Scale that up to something like a half million voting machines. Add the network (usually telephone modem) connection to one centralized tabulator (cluster) per state. Add in differing vote machine vendors, differing regional and state regulations, and anonymous voting.
It's not an easy solution. "Deterministic compute" deals with far more simple systems on a far smaller time scale. Run a large cluster or a single machine for hundreds of years and you'll see statistical noise within your compute results too.
That's even more obvious. If each candidate gets 100 votes in a town of 80 people someone will notice.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
X=X++ is interesting. I don't think it means what you think it means.
perl -e '$i=2; $i=$i++; print $i;'
2
I think its funny that people still think of america as a democracy. the rest of the world know that america only care about money and themselves and certainly are not a democracy. If it was, how did Bush win his first election? Why was the UN not involved? The number of scandals and corruption that takes places in PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE in the USA is frankly a scar on democracy. If african or middle eastern politics were like the USA then there would be an immediate worldwide outrage. However, because of the money involved in the USA the politicians get away with it. The real shame is, that the people who really want to make a difference are stopped from serving their country by the people who really run america; the rich. Unfortunately, some people still believe that America IS a democracy and that the little guy actually has a voice there.
The Democrats won in this election, there's nothing wrong with the voting machines, and there was no voter fraud either!
You're making up assumptions. I once saw an accountant spend two days tracking down an error of a few cents. Obviously the amount as such wasn't worth two days of work. But the discrepancy indicated that there was an error somewhere, and that was not acceptable. The fact that there was an error somewhere did matter quite a lot.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Means there's a lot less variables to track, as well.
And it's cute that banks lose small amounts of money...but you can bet your arse that if an ATM was mistracking money, there'd be an investigation as large as neccessary to find where things fubar'd, and in the end someone will be fired.
Why isn't that done with votes?
And of course the real question is why are voting machines blackboxes? Democracy only works if it is seen to be practiced...ie, if it is open and transparent. The mechanism of democracy (voting) needs to be that, almost per definition.
You know what? Strike the 'almost'.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Miscounting nine votes out of 36 is a ridiculously high error rate.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Why can't our voting machines work as well as 20-year-old cash register software?
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
The condorcet system is the best. Under which Al wins in both of your examples.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Actually, a hack like that was done by a Dutch security expert for HBO's Hacking Democracy. Unfortunately, was unable to find the gentleman's name on the website. However, he wrote a program that would sit on a smart card and execute upon insertion. This program then changed the machine vote count tallies, along with changing the recorded paper tally, and then erased itself. It was demonstrated on a standard Optical Scan Reader based system, one taken from a collection of certified machines sitting within a warehouse.
There is no doubt about feasibility of such a hack. The issue is scale of operation in this case, with a very small town and a local election at stake, vs. a hack that almost certainly would only be used (if ever - no evidence currently exists showing it has been) on a national scale.
I do not doubt this machine recorded in error. So, fine - determine the cause and fix it. There is a paper trail that - admittedly - could have been tampered with. In this case, so what?
If the sample size is less than 100, any attempt at putting a percentage figure on it is likely to be inaccurate. Let's say the machines are designed to operate at a 0.5% error rate and that we all agree that's a tolerable number. Using the logic that determines 1 in 36 is a '3% error rate', no voting machine used for less than 200 votes should have any errors.
That 1 missing vote from 36 could have been the 1 in a millionth vote the machine had ever taken that actually resulted in error. 3% error rate on a portion of an outcome does not extrapolate to 3% generally.
Run several month long compute jobs on a plus-thousand node cluster (with the same data set) and get back to me when you discover exact reproducibility every time. There's always error. Always.
Not if the last thing computed is always: * 0
How hard is it to count 36 votes? Did you read the article?
It's not like there were thousands of votes, there were 3 dozen.
Granted, you can't completely solve the problem of people who don't read any of the names or instructions and just click through everything as quickly as they can. But you can ask voters to confirm who they think they voted for. But good UI design is important, and apparently lacking in many electronic voting systems. That needs to be fixed too.
As far as the machine itself counting votes, it should be damn close to 100% accurate. Audit trails (internally and on voter-verified paper printouts), journaling filesystems, atomic file operations, stuff that any sensible database admin would demand and that competent programmers have been doing for years. In the worst possible case someone tripping over the power cable at the worst possible second should only result in ONE vote being lost, not one entire flashcard with thousands of votes. In the worst possible case a corrupted memory card should lead to a paper-tape vote count, NOT thousands of lost votes.
There's no good reason for the current level of voting issues. It's not rocket science.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
And considering there are three bugs in the expression you just wrote, it's amazing anything ever works at all.
Just to bring another point of view here, how do you know that he and his wife actually voted? Maybe he knew that he wasn't going to get any votes (or maybe he didn't campaign at all) and he didn't vote or voted for someone else so he could claim election fraud. Just a thought.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
80 votes? How about just a raising of hands at a town meeting followed by dancing and merriment?
Diebold's Accuvote TS machines have a history of failing the counted-as-cast test, starting with the NEGATIVE 16,022 votes awarded Al Gore in Volusia County's 2000 election. (At the time, Global Elections made the machines. Afterward, they were bought up by Diebold, who were instead infamous for their insecure ATM machines. Ironicly, Their "success" in the voting sector is selling more ATMs to bank chains such as 5th/3rd.)
According to the "HACKING DEMOCRACY" HBO Documentary, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Elections threw out the signed paper audit tapes used in the 2004 elections, despite the legal obligation to file them for 14 mounths after a presidential election. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting is seen retreiving the tapes from the election board's warehouse trash, with signatures, and it shows hunreds of discrepencies from the "official" tape they printed afresh for her.
In my own experiences here in Butler County Ohio, I have no confidence in the results of our elections: suspicous to say the least. This year's 2006 results deny every Democrat candidate any victory in each race, despite the larger state totals (including non-electronic voting counties) giving the win to a Democratic Governer, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Senator. But what makes the local results anomolous is that the House Representative an local offices were awarded to Republicans, and the county itself is largely a 'welfare county' whose largest City (Middletown) is founded on a failing steel industry. The disparity seems more closely tied to the voting machines than the voter demographics. Creepy.
The sun is bright. *crickets*
I think "international observers" is a more accurate term, since they judge the "fairness" of the election, even if they wanted to they don't have the power to regulate elections.
The idea espoused by the GP is to set up a bunch of public servants that use well understood principles and procedures to run a "fair election". The important part when setting up such an authority is to give them enough teeth to make them independent of political whims. It's not a new idea, it is already done for the reserve bank, weights and measures, and other essential bipartisan services. Australia has such a system and it works, they sent diebold packing when they tried peddling their paperless machines over here.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Umm, the old US-of-A really sucks in terms of democracy (Canada is doing far better), but do you actually know what's going on in some places within Africa? If african politics were like the USA, that would be a quantum leap forward for them.
1) Absolutely. Which is why this case might be important. It's an excellent "test" case.
2) I find it pretty cool. Unfortunately, we're no ways near as well funded as Blue Brain. Most of our funding comes from the NIH. In fact, I'm working on another grant (an SBIR) to NIH right now. What I do like is having about 100 (quality) CPUs at my disposal when I choose to launch a genetic algorithm spanning lots of possible "brain" configurations.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
How does he know that he cast a vote for himself? Depending on the type of machine, you not only have to select yourself, but you have to go to the end of the ballot and submit it.
Remember why we are in this situation. There were people in Florida who couldn't line up Al Gore with the hole to punch, instead punching the hole for Pat Buchanan. I'm not sure voting machines are any easier for voters to use than punch card voting tablets. Some people are going to have trouble operating any type of voting equipment. Haven't you ever bubbled the wrong bubble with a number 2 pencil?
Apart from the issue of the vote being secret, I think you have a great idea. Nothing should get in the way of a good town party !
In fact, there's a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [wikipedia.org]) which specifically states that there is no completely fair voting scheme.
;-)
Er, no, Arrow's Theorem doesn't "specifically state that there is no completely fair voting scheme". "Fair" is a moral term, and no mathematical theorem would say anything about that. What Arrow's Theorem says is that across 4 (?) criteria, which by the way most people consider fair, no voting system can satisfy them all.
You, however, felt the need to play up its significance and claim that it "specifically" says no voting system is "fair". But it doesn't say that. It says all voting systems have some aspect most people don't recognize as fair. Maybe you meant "basically" rather than "specifically"?
I bring this up, because as written, you're falsely construing what exactly mathematical theorems can demonstrate, and I don't want people to be mislead by your terminology, like when Charlie on Numb3rs explains stuff
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yes. That's called an undervote and is counted as such because you did not make an official selection for one of the races. Generally, if you opt to write in a candidate, what election officials will do is first set your ballot aside. Then they will count all the other votes. If, after tallying all the votes, the races are called outside the margin of error needed for any of your votes (that is, any vote within the races you voted), then they will set your ballot aside and certify the race.
Why should they manually count your ballot if they already know the outcome of the races? At least, that's the reasoning...
If the guy who runs the only bar in town asked me if I voted for him, I'd say "yes" regardless of who I voted for. It's a bit like when you Grandma asks if you like her fruitcake*. You just say "yes". *actually, my Grandmothers are all good cooks so this is a bad example!
have courage
It is fundamentally flawed in certain circumstances... like the one we are in right now. Now it wasn't setup to be like this but over the many years it has slowly grown this way. The idea that one vote used wisely only works for third parties when you have caps on spending low enough for (reasonable) 3rd parties to compete with it. However, any time a three party system could be applied to this method, you are in a state of instability, ie, it will always tend towards a 2 party system in the long run and stay there (at least with current election rules).
In a ranking system(instant runoff), or approval system, every person can vote their conscience and still have a backup who is of the party they lean towards. This type of voting tends to make the end results to prefer the most popular party when better alternatives are not there, but still gives the alternative candidates a chance when they are more popular than any given party. This method, even with unrestricted spending, could tend towards a multi-party system in a stable state.
Now, there may be things which could cause instability in the multi-party system that we are missing about a ranking system that would not reveal itself until many years down the road once the different parties figured all the little tricks and dynamics involved in that type of voting system. But you must address those problems as they come up, something that isn't being addressed with the current system.
People have been researching polling methods for hundreds of years, and the scholars mostly agree against a 1 vote used wisely system for the very reasons mentioned above. It works good for simple elections involving 2 people. But only run-off style elections allow a 3rd or 4th party to be involved while still accounting for the will of the people. That is why most local/non-partisan elections are run this way (but not instantly, but a second election)
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Just like with Victoria, the use of electronic voting is not mandated. The availability, however, is. I.e., that's the reason that a town of 80 must have electronic voting machines. Once you have the machines, those in charge are naturally going to encourage their use as "machines don't make mistakes" or "machines are impartial" or some other nonsense. I'll be keen to hear how your expectations play out (i.e., "that few people other than those who actually need to use one will"). Seriously, I will be keen to find out if you're right. If you are right, I (and presumably the majority of slashdot) will be pleasantly surprised. (I can't stress this enough - I am NOT being sarcastic here.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Just on your power glitch and statistically small possibilities point: Why wouldn't you want UPS/generators mandated for voting machines? After all they wouldn't been needed for long, and what with voting being so important. And ECC memory used, or duplicate components?
Next someone will argue the possibility of a cosmic ray hitting a transistor in the CPU, hence causing the possibility of a miscount.
Personally, I feel that all of this is a crock of BS. We can put men on the moon, we can put satellites with sensors on other planets, and outside of the solar system, we can shoot satellites to intercept meteors so that we can collect dust, and return that vehicle to Earth, all things basically involving counting, at it's most basic level... We we can have computer systems that offer 99.999% reliability and all of the above, but we can't count a goddamn ballot with 99.999% certainty?
What a joke.
When considering the properties of voting systems, the United States isn't special. In fact, if something would be sketchy in - say - Iraq it would be even more sketchy here in the USA because we should know better.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I can think of a few reasons why the machine might not report these results.
(1) any candidate that gets 2 votes reports as zero to avoid revealing a singleton voter which might reveal the vote of a member of the electorate
(2) as above but to avoid having to report vast number of candidates (the system may not make a distinctyion between the niber of voters and the number of candidates
(3) In small electorates only candidtes that get above teh "deposit" threshold are reported as having any votes.
A few facts from the incident in question might help to find other resons why there is nothing to see here.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
You know, and I know, that it is relatively easy. Hell...we have designed the perfect system 50 times here on /.
The problem is to get that "easy" system accepted and certified by the powers that be.
I think this gentleman may have stumbled upon an effective way for us to protest the crooked electronic voting system that our nation is being sold. You don't have to throw away your vote in all categories, but in one, insignificant race, vote for yourself. Let's see Diebold explain this away.
With a simple cellphone with a camera, we can create evidence that we did in fact vote for ourselves, too.
Unfortunately, here in the US it's our job to keep the system honest. Or maybe that's the beauty of the system and we just haven't been doing our jobs.
At least last Tuesday was a step in the right direction.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ranking mechanisms do give rise to paradoxes, but there are ways to resolve them.
Also, it's important to point out that it is not necessary to use rankings to improve the system. Approval Voting would be a big step in the right direction and you wouldn't even have to change the ballot. All you have to do is remove the needless "no overvoting" rule.
Obviously, there are at least two people who want to be mayor of Podunk, so it was probably one of them.
Well..... there was an interesting case in Florida a year or two ago in which the DUI breathalyzers were not open-source. Because of this a court found that they were not open to examination, in other words, there was no due process because the methods of its functionality was not public.
A fault was found in that it miscalculated a BAC several times and the court ordered the source code revealed. Therefore everyone in Florida who was prosecuted for a DUI with one of these devices has the validity of the charges in question.
I don't know the case name, but I am sure you can Google for more info.
Libertas in infinitum
Who said there was? Nobody is arguing that 36 votes are impossible to accurately count. There is a paper trail. So recount the paper trail and verify the vote totals. The point about margin of error had to do with a hundred millions votes counted across perhaps half a million voting machines.
I live in Arkansas, you condescending asshole. There are real people here that deserver every fucking right you do. A legitimate vote is one of them. If you think our rights are so unimportant, why don't you fork over a few of yours?
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Who said it was an acceptable error rate? Not a single commenter in this thread, including me, argues that this small an election represent enough sample to introduce margin of error. Again, there is a paper record. A county election official can recount this record and resolve the question.
Of course, any intelligent (SW) engineer with scruples/morals and an interest in the future of their career knows better than to touch the whole voting machine fiasco.
And knew this before anyone even seriously suggested creating/using such devices.
A good Software Engineer (a bad term, it's not really an engineering profession per se) looks at the full system, not a block of code, and anyone with decent cognitative abilities can see that electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem, heavily laden with dozens of major flaws and hundreds of minor ones. And all this could be seen before anyone even sat down to write the first block (probably a visual basic bodge-up to display a scren of buttons with photos judging by the apparent code quality in action).
I suspect Diebold (and the various other competing corporations) have teams for voting machines made up of the clueless, the incompetant and the amoral.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Was this guy even a registered candidate? If I voted for myself in the next general election (paper, electronic or telepathy) I too would register a zero vote count as I am not a registered candidate and in the UK I believe that is about a £500 deposit. Just a thought. I also love the fact that his wife didn't vote for him.
Wait a second this is all digital - THERE SHOULD NOT BE SAMPLING ERRORS!.
Statistics has nothing to do with this - or else you will find that 3+2 = 6 some times and 4 other times. On average you'd still get 5 but...
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
Are you suggesting the buttons and tally counters of a voting machine react according to some probabality curve such as stochastic?
Somehow that flies in the face of digital accuracy, code predictability, database integrity, system security, and application reliability, doesn't it?
We're talking about straight-forward button-press counting systems here, not some sort of complex interest accruals or tax filing analysis. There are no heuristics, there are no inference engines, and there is so little code required it would take a COMPLETE FREAKIN' MORON to field a computer program that can't count to 80 without screwing up!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You mean Instant-Runoff Voting? IRV has many of the same problems as plurality voting (our current system). It is slightly better, but not enough. I would either go with Approval voting, (easy to understand by the populace, as well as being quite robust) or one of the many Condorcet methods (more difficult to understand, but quite robust in general).
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I'd mod that that funny. Borderline troll though. Every programmer (except the kooky ones) know that there is no such thing as the sun. So take your jokes and theories about the supposed "day-star" elsewhere.
~X~
~X~
I am a voting anarcho-capitalist and I advocate voting for yourself as a way to vote none of the above. I do it, and I figure this is a great way to actually NOT waste you vote. If all the eligible non-voters voted for themselves, it would really show the State that there are a ton of people who don't like anyone -- neither evil.
If the 30-40% of eligible non-voters "won" over the winner of the candidate who got the majority of yes-voters, it would really turn things on its head. Imagine, a Republican getting 37% of the vote (winning), the Democrat getting 33% of the vote (loser) and the Unanimocracy voters getting 40% of "Other."
I'm a fan of that decision.
it is statistically IMPOSSIBLE to have a 100% accurate vote, 100% of the time.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, if there is a greater-than-zero chance of having an accurate vote any given election, and we're discussing a finite number of elections, then you're just plain incorrect -- there will be a greater-than-zero chance of them all being accurate. On the other hand, if we're discussing an infinite number of elections, then the chance that any given particular percentage will correspond to the proportion of accurate votes is zero no matter what percentage you choose -- that's basic integral calculus at work; in this latter case, your statement would be vacuously true (in other words, it is a meaningless truth).
why the hell are we so adamant that because they are "computer" based they should magically be 100% accurate and reliable?
I think most people are willing to acknowledge that it won't be 100% reliable.
That's why they want a voter-verified paper ballot as backup.
A system that isn't perfect is OK, 'cos that's reality.
A system that is far from perfect, and is designed to deny verification, is unacceptable.
This space intentionally left blank.
They should know from the rolls exactly how many people voted. It should match exactly with the number of votes tallied from the electronic voting system. If it does then his vote was actually given to another candidate. This would be even worse than simply dropping his vote for an unknown/unregistered write-in candidate.
Well, suppose Ronald and Ralph are conservatives, and Debbie is a liberal. All three are running. Now suppose that 60% of the populace has a conservative political stance. So, they are quite likely to agree with either Ronald or with Ralph on most issues, and quite unlikely to agree with Debbie on most issues, or at least on the hot ones for this particular campaign. The remaining 40% have liberal leanings, and so are quite likely to agree with Debbie, and quite unlikely to agree with Ronald or Ralph. That is, 60% of the people will vote for a conservative, and 40% will vote for a liberal. Now, Election day comes along. Debbie gets 40% of the vote, Ronald gets 34% of the vote, and Ralph gets 25% of the vote, and Lenny the libertarian gets 1%. So, more people walked into the voting booth and said "I want Debbie" than did for the other two. But, now 60% of the populace is unhappy because they wanted a conservative, and got a liberal.
Suppose that we had a series of three runoffs:
Debbie vs. Ronald: Debbie 40%, Ronald 60%. Ronald would win over Debbie.
Debbie vs. Ralph: Debbie 40%, Ralph 60%. Ralph would also win over Debbie. So either conservative is preferred over the liberal here.
Ronald vs. Ralph: Ronald 58%, Ralph 42%. Ronald wins over Ralph.
So Ronald wins both of his pairwise elections, and Debbie loses both of hers. The majority of voters prefer anyone over Debbie. But our current system elects Debbie. It ought to elect Ralph, who was preferred over every other candidate. But the fact that two candidates were fairly similar meant that they both lost, even though one of them should have won.
And look at poor Lenny. Actually, 10% of the people think he would make the best elected official, but they don't vote for him because that'd be "throwing away their vote". And they're right in this case, but not always! So the libertarian/green/ex-movie-star party can't gain any traction, because even if 40% (enough for a plurality, certainly!) of the people want that candidate, they all think they're throwing away their vote, and pick one of the established parties.
So to sum up, our system works great when there are only two choices. When you add a third, or more, then the system tends to pick the least liked candidate, rather than the most liked candidate. A system which tends to pick the least liked candidate sure seems fundamentally flawed to me!
This problem of not working with three candidates explains quite nicely why there have historically only ever been two strong political parties at once. Even before our current two parties existed, and we have had quite a nice number of parties in the US throughout history, there were generally only two at any one time. Also, the current system tends to favor those who are in large political parties. Since I'm not in favor of political parties on the whole, I consider a system which encourages parties to be fundamentally flawed as well. But naturally many people will not agree with me there.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Friggin' silly example.
2 69
If you have got an election with only three eligible voters and five candidates, of course things get messed up. And then you got a weird ranking system, too.
The multiple candidates model that I've seen (I believed they use it for some local elections in San Francisco) would do an instant runoff, like this: First tally the first hand picks. If there's no candidate with more than 50%, the one who got the least gets removed. Now, count the first hand votes again. Repeat procedure until one candidate with more than 50% is found.
Al wins the election right away, since he is the first hand pick of 2/3 of the voting population, no matter how many Daves and Eds are added to the lists.
Very elegant - it means that you can put your favorite guy first, the one where you'd be afraid to "waste your vote" on, and then put someone more "electable" further down on the list.
More here:
http://www.sfgov.org/site/election_page.asp?id=24
IRV is just an example I could get over in a couple of sentences, and it does improve the chances for the third party candidates. None of these methods are "perfect" anyway.
That we consider money [...] rules us?
>> Many precincts are too small for generators to be practical, and UPS units also have a failure rate. What if, even
... fighting for the democracy ?
>> though it was tested the week before, the generator fails on the day of the election? There is also the cost associated.
>> Who is gonna pay for it all.
> Wouldn't that be like
> Sorry, I'm not an american, but I though you people didn't mind spending money while fighting for democracy. But maybe
> I misunderstood, and all that money is for fighting for something else.
Sorry, but you're being naive. There's no way to ensure that a meteor or tornado doesn't strike, that a fire doesn't burn the building down, that the building doesn't plunge into a sinkhole, or that wild dogs don't kill everybody in the building and eat the computer.
Not likely scenarios. Neither is it likely that a well-designed computer system will fail. But they do occasionally. Hard drives fail, power supplies fail, memory fails, etc, etc, etc. Even if you go with redundant components the motherboard may crack, etc. If your objective is to create a voting machine that never fails you'll just spend billions of dollars and still only get 99.99999% availability.
So, be practical. Ensure that the system has good uptime (99.99%?), is extraordinarily difficult to hack, leaves a good audit trail, and that voting and auditing are an atomic action. That should be fine. And should be more valid than paper ballots.
You are wrong. Read the entry. Arrow's impossibility theorem does not say that there is not a perfect voting system; range voting does not fall under the set of systems in the proof, since it is not a ranked preference method, and thus may "break the rule".
"In voting systems, Arrow's impossibility theorem, or Arrow's paradox, demonstrates that no voting system based on ranked preferences can possibly meet a certain set of reasonable criteria when there are three or more options to choose from."
Here in Denmark we got more parties to vote for, granted it's mostly a twoish side, just a matter on how far left/right you wan't it. When you vote you either vote for a party or a person, the vote for a person gets counted towards the party, it's easy and it works. Ohh and we do the paper ballot thing, get the result within 24 hours.
This is why you should never post on Slashdot when you're upset (with "you" meaning "I"). It's been a pet peeve of mine that people treat the ranking system like some pancea for voting problems, so I got emotional and sloppy with my writing. Anyway, if anyone is still reading this thread, the most of the complaints which have been loged against my post are valid. Read up on the theorem for yourself and learn what it can and can't tell you. Looking it up for yourself is why we have an Internet.
(Actually, I've seen weird rolls. When GMing a Rolemaster game, I had the unfortunate luck to see a Black Reaver get slaughtered by a first level character... Ok, ok, there are those who could argue that greater undead/greater demon combos shouldn't be put against first level characters anyway, but they didn't HAVE to pick up the bright, sparkly, foot diameter gemstone...)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thank you for your ongoing devotion and support.
I think we should move to a system where we vote against the people we don't want in office. Vote against as many candidates as you like. The candidate with the least votes wins.
This gives people a good reason to vote for "third party" candidates as you could, for example, support both the Libertarian and Democratic candidates by voting against the Republican and any other candidates.
I think it would also give the politicians a much better view of the thought process of the voter, there's more expression possible with the ability to more accurately describe your preferences.
Being able to choose between a "positive" and a "negative" ballot could be interesting but would require some significant thought to totaling the votes.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Let's go do some research, and find out every individual elected to office via insecure voting machines. Attempt to find individuals only where a voting machine screwup could've changed the outcome of the election -- that is, if a person got 80% of the votes, and only 20% of the votes came from voting machine, assuming my math is right, the voting machines are irrelevant. However, given the same scenario, but 50% voting machines, the outcome could easily be affected.
Then let's find out every action they took (including their own votes, if they're in congress) which they're allowed to take because of their office.
Now, declare that they have not been elected, and treat all of their actions as null and void. You can cherrypick to some extent, of course -- if they enacted some leash laws, you're not required to buy a dog just to disobey. But it would send a powerful message if, when doing your taxes, you refuse to accept any tax breaks they enacted, and attempt to send in more than they want.
In otherwords, civil disobedience. Starts with bullshit laws, but we're now moving onto bullshit lawmakers. I don't want to spend another second in this corporatocracy. Take it back!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Was he on the ballot???
Ohio for one doesn't allow write-ins unless the person files a declaration of candidacy as a write in... but that's just signing a form. Probably different in other states, but YMMV.
This is horseshit. When a program produces one false answer, the problem is not that it "made a mistake" (like with humans). Thus, you cannot write off one error as statistically probable. You have to assume it is a fundamental issue which will repeat itself whenever the criteria to reproduce this bug exist. That could be small, or it could be large. You don't know until it's investigated. This is very troubling.
Let's say the machines are designed to operate at a 0.5% error rate and that we all agree that's a tolerable number. ... on an airplane with avionics good to 0.5%?
(As in, like dozens planes a day just dropping dead -- I bet there are more than 4800 commercial airplanes flying on every given day).
Paul B.
There is absolutely no PII on any US election ballot. You have to vote at a specific location and they cross your name off the list before they hand you a blank ballot. For absentee (or it's more complete form, vote-by-mail) there are two envelopes, the outer one has your info for validation that you only vote once, the inner one has no PII, just your ballot. The outer one is seperated from the inner one and they are not supposed to be connected to one another from that point on (all conspiracy theories aside).
There is still a possibility that my skeeming over all psot ehre does not report to be considered : it could be very well that indeed, he was an idiot, and he miscast his vote.
I am not saying he is, but before we all go mad frothing on the mouth about this, maybe the origin of the problem is far simpler and elss dark than most imagine here.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The system needs fixing.
1 vote in 100M might be insigificant, but 1 in 36 most certainly is.
I don't normally pull people up on grammar, but you just said that 1 vote in 36 is insignificant. Had you written "1 vote in 100m might not be significant..." then the end of the sentence would have had your intended meaning.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Rule #1 of Slashdot: If you ask some post not to be moderated funny, it will get moderated that way.
When a bank screws up a transaction, audits can track every penny to the point of failure and revert the process. In an election, your vote is anonymous; so the system is actually required to detach your vote from you, making it impossible to make an audit of every vote up to this point.
In my country, Ireland, anyone can observe the election counts.
All the political parties involved in an election will be watching to see what's marked on the ballots. Sure there is quibbling on a recount when poorly marked ballots come into play (we have STV, so people voting have to attempt to write legible numbers beside candidates), but that's a lot better than trusting some buggy machine.
Yet our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) calls it a "silly aul system" and wants us to use e-voting equipment that has been discounted already (it's the stuff those Dutch hackers showed up as being insecure). Plus last time I heard, they wanted to store vote results of general elections in a MS Access Database!!!
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
What's going on here? I can't believe how *quickly* my rights and privileges as a US citizen are being systematically stripped away. And now, as a tiny cog in a huge machine, I am about to lose the only power I had, my vote, even if it was often simply a choice between the lesser of two NWO-chosen-and-controlled evils. In the past I never gave thought to conspiracy theories, or worried about this kind of stuff, but the decline is happening so quickly and has so much mass that not all of it can be accidental. There's just too much to be accounted for with explanations that just don't fit. Some of those conspiracy theories must be correct. Which ones? Many of them?
0 371560078&q=the+money+masters&hl=en
5 4816686947&q=the+money+masters&hl=en7 3877500927&q=the+money+masters&hl=en
There are a few things that I think could really help, but if the voting machines are rigged, I have no way to express desire, and the people are no longer sovereign, the constitution is truly dead and we are slaves, and will soon be very poor slaves.
My thoughts on what could help:
1) Forget electronic voting. Even if the source was available for scrutiny, the machine could just be corrupted with tweaked source before being sent out to the polling locations.
2) Change the way votes are counted to eliminate the death grip of the two party system. A simple change in the way votes are counted would do this. We currently use a winner-take-all vote, where the guy/gal with the most votes wins. However, if we used "instant runoff voting" each voter would rank the candidates in order of preference, and the most preferred candidate would get the job. This would give independents a viable shot at office, and would get rid of the "lesser of two evils" and "throw away my vote" problems with the current system.
3) Take the power away from the banks that control everything. It's simple to do, and has been done before, for instance by Abraham Lincoln, and by Andrew Jackson. Our constitution gives congress the power to print money. Let Congress print the money, not a private bank! The Federal Reserve is not a part of the US government, but is a private company owned by private (unspecified) entities. When our government needs money, it borrows it from the Fed and in turn gives the Fed an IOU (in the form of a US Bond). The Fed prints money and gives it to the US Govt for the bond. What?!?! Yeah, that's right, that's how the Fed makes loans, it just prints some more money. And what happens when the Fed prints money? Two things, the government has to pay them back, with interest, because it's a loan. And second, there's more money in the system so inflation occurs which makes your money less valuable and so you have to pay more for the stuff you need and so basically you're paying a hidden tax. And who benefits from it all? These asshole private bankers! Crap! And you and I get shafted. The amazing thing is that this whole problem can be removed without causing any kind of crash by the US govt simply printing its own money and paying back the debt to the Fed using this new US Treasury money. Here's a link to a really long documentary on this, check it out:
This first link is a shortened version of a Video titled "The Money Masters."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=133946079
Or, if you want the full version, here are parts 1 and 2:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-87539344
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-26659157
people respond to positive alternatives. they need a platform of ideas, an agenda, that they can affirm within their own thinking as more in line with the way they see the world. people don't respond to simple kneejerk negativity. it provides no framework for people to organize under, and as such, has no creative force, and has no value for society
in other words, it is not good enough to say "i dislike xyz". you have to say "i have a better way than xyz" (and be able to coherently state that alterative, btw). then you can actually attract people to a cause. simply hating or disliking or negatively labelling someone else's cause isn't actually a valid cause itself. a real cause is proof positive: i have a belief, and i will work for it. but there are plenty of "causes" out there though that really are proof negative: denying someone else's belief. this is never the foundation for evolution in society. neither is it a foundation for revolution
it is in fact, a very teenager way of thinking: defining yourself in negative terms, in reaction to someone else's beliefs, usually adult society's beliefs. but luckily for us all, teenaged years are temporary, and teenagers grow up and join preexisitng causes or develop a way to elucidate a successful alternative proof positive cause of their own, and thereby add to society positively. but just rebelling in endless negativity means nothing. it's as old as time. some people never grow up, and remain teenagers ideologically their whole lives, stuck in pointless negativity, defining themselves in negative relation to someone else's beliefs, rather than successfully defining positive beliefs of their own. there are always malcontents. but unless they can articulate an attractive alternative agenda, they are simply the flotsam of jetsam of history: ultimately dead ends
so if you wish to reform a system, you have to have proof positive statements about how you would do things differently. simply proposing that you dislike someone or something isn't enough. it provides no focal point for people to coallesce around. so simply acting in this sort of atavist statement of negativity ultimately holds no value. for your "cause" or society, or anyone really
but then again, you're an anarchist, you want to destroy the system, not improve it... which means it kind of silly that you are even voting at all, since a real anarchist wouldn't have anything to do with system, and wouldn't be working through its structures like voting, that's for sure
and btw, your anarcho-capitalism itself is ultimately pointless and fruitless: the human need for society, the riches that come from societal structures, and the innate human psychological need for society and organization means that your anarchy is and always will be a pipe dream. it's simply incompatible with human nature and simple human social impulses. anarcho-capitalism is usually the stuff of starry eyed college students with too much philosophy text books under their belt and very little real life experience, and 40-something selfish men behind on their alimony payments reacting in anger as they realize for the first time in their lives they are part of something larger than themselves. all of whom need to just grow up a little
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Canada holds its federal elections using nothing more than hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots. The entire vote takes three hours, and in the most recent election the results were known in slightly under 24 hours. That's 14.8 million votes (out of 22.8 million registered voters). If we can manage it, I'm sure a town of eighty people can scrounge up a few people with the necessary numeracy skills to successfully count the ballots. For that matter, the richest nation on Earth ought to be able to put together an election that isn't laughably broken. Sure, it would require centralized management -- which admittedly makes many Americans collapse into blubbering, weeping heaps of anarchistic cowardice -- but Americans could at least have some confidence that their nation is indeed a democracy.
Unless there is a power glitch, or any one of a number of other statistically small possibilities
I hope the power glitch was a big one. One of the irregularities noted in the last election in Ohio, some of the voting machines were not charged the night before and had the batteries fail causing a search for paper ballots.
Maybe they used voting machines from another manufacture.
The truth shall set you free!
Sure you sacrifice anonymity, but you gain accuracy and accountability.
Anyone got a set of scales..?
Jerkface Johnson: _____O
Libby the liberal: ____O
ChangeIsBad Charlie: __O
Barbara BanItAll: _____O
Kevin the Commie: _____O
Procedure:
For the rest of the world, the above procedure works fine. Why are Americans the only people on the entire planet so goddam fucking stupid that they can consistently fuck it up? Is it something in the water? Some noxious chemical that literally rots the brain until check-boxes become an impenetrable mystery? Is it something to do with the schools? An educational program in which electrical-shock-aversion-therapy is used to induce an intense phobia of small circles with names next to them? For the love of God, what is wrong with this country?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many people have wondered what a village (yes, it's not a town, it's a village at that size!) of eighty souls is doing installing a voting machine. I want to know what the devil it's doing electing a Mayor. Surely you good people don't pay nearly enough taxes to warrant a civic offical for eighty people?
These machines get thousands of votes. What does it matter if one gets lost, statistically speaking? Wait...what do you mean only 36 people voted on it? Well, shit.
In other news, town of 80 has loads of spare cash for voting machine, commissioners too lazy to photocopy some ballots. Film at 11.
"Sorry, but you're being naive. There's no way to ensure that a meteor or tornado doesn't strike, that a fire doesn't burn the building down, that the building doesn't plunge into a sinkhole, or that wild dogs don't kill everybody in the building and eat the computer."
Fair enough if any of those events occuring I would be prepared to accept that the count may be incorrect.
However in the absence of all of these events I would expect the vote counting machine to be 100% accurate and capable of coping with some of the more likely problems which may affect it, e.g. faulty hardwear, loss of power, loss of communication ( if it needs to communicate remotely ).
There really is no excuse, or reason to accept as normal the loss of 1 in 36 votes. If the machines can't be made to work perfectly then it is likely down to bad design, leading me to wonder just what else in the machine isn't working or hasn't been tested properly.
I don't know if anyones ever noticed this but in the vast majority of cases computers don't just randomly decide to "lose my stuff, delete my files etc etc" if they do do this it's because they are badly programmed and cannot cope with what they are being expected to do. If you can only make a voting machine to a similar level of incompetence then there really is no excuse to use them and not just stick with the old manual system.
It's the same here too but it's simple to vote twice, the lists with the names on it are always typed in fairly large type and always open on the desk so you just need to glance at it and say the first name you see which isn't crossed off.
Why? How is it harder to keep track of a single value (i.e. one vote) than of a set (e.g. transaction id, amount of money, from account, to account, date/time, location). I might be showing my ignorance, but I assume the bank transaction would also be stored in multiple places which then have to be linked to each other.
I don't mean to be cheeky: I am honestly ignorant in this regard; I've never dealt with a database with more than a few hundred records. Do banks regularly call up customers and ask if they meant to make a particular transaction? Do customers regularly find a transaction wasn't registered? (I've never had that happen to me, but I never have more than two pages of transactions listed a month.)
Look out!
1 vote EVER is significent. Otherwise there's no point having a vote.
And with electronic machines it's not as if they're making math mistakes.
I'm pretty sure that the "blind" angle for our machines was primarily that - just an angle. As to whether or not the losing party can confirm they lost, it depends on what state they were in. Here in Virginia (where Webb beat Allen by 0.3% of the vote), there is no paper trail, so they cannot. Other states have saw the light, however, and have a verifiable paper trail. I really don't have a problem with electronic machines if they have a voter verifiable paper trail.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
How does anyone now who he actually voted for?
we should also go to a preference system as this two party system just means can never hit your own party where it counts without voting for the dark side.
When it is a candidate you wish to support, then vote or vote not. There is no try.
Not to take away from the other comments - it is of course a very serious matter when a vote is miscounted - but there is a potential explanation that is far more amusing. Perhaps the guy didn't bother to vote for himself after all, and he made the story up because he's embarrassed to admit it? Just a thought...
I am a programmer, and my apps have to be 100% correct. The customer (some army) does not accept less than 100% correctness. I can not say to the customer "look, the error rate is 3%, so for 100 times that you shoot the missile, 97 times the missile will hit the target, but it is gonna be 3 times that the missile will go elsewhere, even exploding right in the missile launcher". It is ridiculous...
I think chuck should have won, possibly both times.
He seemed to be the candidate that noone minded to much, and that a good choice for government if you ask me.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Ah, what'll it be this time, I wonder? Is it:
"I have a right to be outraged and by god, I am! Arrgh!"
"I am some asian dude, you insensitive clod!"
"I'm not a racist and I prove it by pointing fingers and bringing the issue up in every turn! Take that, racists!"
"I'm politically correct at all times! Nobody likes it but I'm still right and they are wrong! HA!"
Chill out. PC people annoy everyone, regardless of skin color.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
Alas for Slashdot.
May the Maths Be with you!
There is still a margin of error. A stray electron may have tunnelled into the machine at just the right moment to drop that vote. That said, I'm guessing that is not a large margin of error. Certainly not enough to expect incorrect addition of a single vote across the whole damn U.S. election.
Margin of error. Bah. Margins of error are for statistical analysis or empirical instrumentation... or other things I can't think of right now that are not electronically-tallied ballots.
Right. That would be exactly big brotherish decision that some politicians would want to have. Control should be local with the ability to appeal to more centralized authority. Wait... Isn't it what it is now?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
You don't want error prone or corrupt voting procedures... but you want to centralize voting?? That's nuts.
I live in a town of 300, about 150 people voted this election. I'd much rather have people I recognize and live with carefully counting those 150 paper ballots (with me watching) rather than my state or the US trying to run millions of ballots through counting machines, or mandating the same possibly corrupt electronic touchscreen machine for everyone, with almost NO transparency or accountability.
... get more training than the average voter. Even if you have software that is provably correct, some people will push the buttons wrong. Not even paper and pen can eliminate user error.
0% - Randy Wooten 30% - Person 1 20% - Person 2 505 - George Bush
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
I just do not understand this at all. How can e-voting have such high error rates, and such problems? The code responsible for these programs should not be complicated. It's basically just incrementing numbers based upon a selected candidate. Where is the complication? Maybe I'm just not meant to understand.
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
IRV improves the perception of a 3rd party's chances, but in the final analysis it's unlikely they'll actually win much more until they gain enough popularity to be one of the top two parties. As the parent said, IRV has many of the same problems as plurality voting; it's just more cleverly disguised.
Think about it: right now, everyone pretty much decides who the "important two" candidates are going to be beforehand (a runoff performed in the media and in public perception) and votes for one of those two. They do these because they intuitively understand that a single vote can only choose between two different options. Compare this to IRV, which simply makes that process explicit.
Let me illustrate. Let's say you have a Liberal, a Conservative, and a Moderate. L and C have the typical polarized campaign, whipping all their loyalists (of which there are many) into a frenzy. M has a small continent of people, but charts out a middle ground between the others. Both L and C candidates would obviously prefer M as a second-place choice than "that other guy". Yet because M has few first-place votes, he is dropped and we end up with an extremist winning. M, the concensus candidate, is the obvious "common sense" choice to the objective outsider. You can't throw away part of someone's ballot and expect to get "honest" results. Someone's preference of 2nd-place-guy over 3rd-place-guy is significant - you can't just throw that away!
Constitutionally Correct
That's just Approval Voting in reverse. The biggest problem with it (IMO) is that there is no specific definition of what the acceptability threshold is. For example, I might not like to see any of the candidates in office (they all suck) but given that one of them is going to win, I do have some preferences (ranking). Or maybe I'd approve of any of them (they're all good) but again I stilll have preferences. These are just the two extremes, but they illustrate the point.
Constitutionally Correct
Who is to decide it was frivolous? He might have been serious, which would constitute fraud if they ignored it.
I know i would be serious.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Have a third party called: "The Third Party". They have ONE mandate. Remove the two-party system and all of it's corruption.
I think the US must stop having elections driven by locals and have a federally mandated independant voting "authority" that answers only to the judicial branch.
The benefit of having locally-controlled elections is that municipalities are not forced to use voting mechanisms which are inappopriate for the task. Like, as you have complained about, spending money on an electronic voting machine for a town of 80 people. I'm not sure how your proposition to move control to the federal level would improve anything.
I'm also not sure how a federal voting authority could constitutionally answer only to the judicial branch and not to "the politicians". Should a federal law be passed establishing a single standard for all elections, it would necessarily fall upon Congress to determine what that standard is. The courts could advise, but they cannot write legislation.
Well, there's funny "haha that joke was funny", and there's "This chicken salad I found in the back of the fridge smells funny," funny.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes -
WTFM!
I think they did a shitty job of explaining how this hack worked in the movie. I don't know if they did that on purpose (out of fear of prosecution), or if they, themselves didn't really understand.
I think they ought to re-do this on Myth Busters, personally.
But the point is - I think how the guy did this was he hacked the USB Driver on the memory card device. From the standpoint of, even a technical person, who looks at the memory-card's file-system, what the Diebold representatives said (under oath) was true; there is no executable code on that card. But it's not true, as their 'hacker' proved in their test. If he can modify the data from the memory card during IO operations - then he can totally pwn the election. It's really kind of scary - but compared to all the other known vulnerabilities on various Diebold systems (most of which are fairly trivial), this hack is very technical, and might even require some special equipment.
From the audits the team did in TFM, the problems they found did not show this hack in action (certified tape differed from official totals) - and in order for THAT hack to work, you're relying on compliant election officials turning a blind eye to the fraud (which was readily apparent in the case they showed in the movie).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Poster asks:
Poster answers:
The voting machines were not mandated by the local municipality. They were put in place because the same election features races on a county, state, and federal level.
A federal "voting authority" could make things even more bureaucratic, and less sensitive to what is appropriate at individual polling places. In some cases, that would be a good thing. In some cases, it may not be so good.
It is too funny.
Just not funny-ha-ha.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Voting machines are big business. BIG business. These are not shoestring operations, which means there's plenty of money to go around to attract the best and the brightest.
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah
hahahahahahaha hahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah!
CEO's don't get rich by hiring the best and brightest. They get rich by scamming the board into giving them that money instead, and running the operation lean, and wining and dining government officials to standardize on their machines.
Why hire competent programmers when you can spend that money on a marble fountain for the garden in your front yard?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The "perfect system" we designed here sucks.
It lacks one vital component.
A salesman who is golfing buddies with a US Senator.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's been painless - it's laid out on a 3x2 foot white board with movable thin membrane buttons as such:As you cast your ballot by pressing the raised membrane (the bracketed area), a tactile click can be felt, a distinctive electronic noise can be heard and a green arrow illuminates, pointing to your selection. The boarder around each votable-area goes from bright white to a dimmer green, matching the arrow to indicate a choice as been made:At any time, you can press a BIG RED GLOWING BUTTON marked "Cast Ballot". The button is on the lower right hand side, not a part of the white board, and on a row of alpha numberic keys, serially arranged along with an LED readout for write-ins.
Pressing the Cast Ballot button will turn off the lights inside the voting booth, including the formerly illuminated white board (lit from both above and below). Outside the booth, yellow lights turn off and a poll worker must physically pull a lever to turn the machine back on, which physically increases an externally visable voter number and prints out a transaction recepit (the number with a '+' for accepted or '-' for not-accepted). If the poll worker and you see the print out with + agreeing with the new number, you've gotten now 2 seperate confirmations you vote was cast and scored.
The voter number correlates to the number of people having voted, not individual votes for any particular counter. Since you're privy to a voter number in the books which you see and the poll worker(s) don't, if the machine says 2042 when you approach, and you're voter #2043 of the day, at least the poll workers are keeping honest totals.
This sort of system may or may not be practical at all locations - my city, for example, has 18 precints with 3 machines each. The lines for each machine are broken up randomly each year by first letter of last name, and I would have to assume semi-load balanced based on registered voters as the lines always seem pretty equal. I went at the worst possible time to vote this year, around 5PM, and I was still out of there by 6PM - the lines were long, but moved fast even with all the overhead.
don't you Americans roll dice instead?
Your vote does not count. Why is there even any discussion about this? Is there anyone left who even slightly believes that the electronic voting machines accurately tally votes as cast?
It would seem it is time to change the discussion to what happens now that the vote has been taken from us.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
It would be great if we could check the results of write-in candidates. Are they reported anywhere? During the last presidential election I voted for Nader. I spelt the name of his running mate wrong, so as a write in I wondered how the vote had been counted. I could not find anywhere to go check if my mispelled write in had been counted. Anybody know if write ins are just thrown out by these voting machines? How would they handle misspellings?
I can't dispute your claim that you get computational errors in massive compute jobs regularly, although I'm skeptical that there aren't other causes of the differing results.
Either way, it's irrelevant to the discussion. The number of computations required to get an accurate national vote is smaller than the compute jobs you are running by several orders of magnitude. If the machines can't be coming up with perfect counts, that's unacceptable.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yeah, I would guess that the producers weren't technical enough to really understand what that guy was doing. It's possible there was a prosecution angle to it too. It was a cool documentary though.
:)
BTW: I loved that hahahahahaha post you did. Wuz wondering how you got it through the lameness filter. heh. So many angry responses to this thread, one could accuse me of inadvertent trolling. Actually, the mods did.
>>The U.S. voting system does not meet international mandated guidelines for a "democratic" election yet we say we are the "greatest democracy on earth", go figure ..
Yea, go figure. The idiots who don't realize we have a Republic and that a democracy is a very bad thing. But how many people think the USA is a democracy? I would guess half the USA thinks that.
Says something about public education in the USA, eh?
if it's voluntary no one will contribute. or people will get a sense of social injustice: i contribute all the time, and that asshole over there never contributes anything. therefore, it must be compulsory, or people will get away with injustices: benefitting from the common good, social structures that the group creates, but not contributing their fair share to it
like i said: it's a pipe dream. a scheme that works perfectly... if it weren't for that pesky thing called human nature
but don't let me stop you. history is riddled with failed utopian schemes. i don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to contribute to the heap of wishful thinking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Build us a reliable, verfiable voting machine/system.
...
Go
Actually, in the Real World[TM], what management orders is very slightly different:
Build us a reliable, verifable voting machine/system. It must run on MS Windows, and must be delivered 3 weeks from now. Go
The major problem here isn't really that it must run on Windows. It's that it must run on proprietary stuff that the programmers aren't allowed to examing in detail. When this is true, the programmer can't logically be held responsible for its correct behavior, since their code is vulnerable to whatever has been programmed into the invisible lower layers. MS Windows is the most common proprietary platform, but the same problem exists in any proprietary system.
With most important products such as transportation equipment, we wouldn't accept the engineers designing something without access to the detailed specs of all the components, and the ability to take things apart to the lowest level for testing. Would you drive (or fly in) a vehicle whose designers had no access to the inner workings of the components? But with software, we can and do intentionally hide the low-level details from the programmers. Software design "experts" even tout this as a desirable part of the design. People working at one "level" are routinely denied access to the details of other levels. It shouldn't be a puzzle to anyone why software turns out so unreliable.
As a programmer, I've often tracked a bug down to something in "the system" that didn't behave the way the docs seemed to say it would behave. Often the system component wasn't documented to the level of detail that I needed. When I ask what was going on, I've often been told "That's proprietary; we can't tell you." I've pointed out repeatedly that this effectively prevents me from building reliable software. The response of management is usually (in effect) that they'll blame me for the problems or the late delivery anyway. The decision to use that particular proprietary system has been made, and "can't be changed at this late date"; it's my job to deliver the software by the due date.
I conclude that people don't actually want software that works correctly. I'd also suggest that sales data clearly supports this conclusion.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Why the fuck can we not have E-Voting machines for those people that want to use the pieces of shit and then the same old paper ballots that we have used for thousands of years for the people that know they are pointless and crooked?
That's how it worked last week in this precinct. They had electronic voting machines, and also paper ballots. I didn't see anyone using the electronic machines. I was slightly tempted to use the machine, but I used a paper ballot, too. It was just too important to "send a message" to the politicians that some of us weren't happy with the way things were being run.
I'm still not sure the message got through, though. I did hear an excerpt of a George Bush speech in which he said that the voters were unhappy that the Iraq war hadn't been won yet. I'm not sure that was exactly the message that some of us were trying to get across.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
All of my slections won. Are you sure you did it right?
If you don't want any of them in office, then vote against all of them on the ballot.
If you wouldn't mind having any of them in office then don't vote against any of them, or vote for your favorite.
Basically on the ballot you'd have a choice: vote FOR one, or AGAINST as many as you like.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I agree, which was the point I was trying to make: the problem with electronic voting systems has less to do with the developers and engineers as it does with the crooks/idiots at the top.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe it's because our huge, dedicated QA group (it's about 4x the number of developers) tests the hell out of the software every time, before it's allowed out the door. In any project around the POS system, the QA phase is the longest part.
Or maybe it's because the software was carefully architected by some very smart people to perform reliably and robustly on (by today's standards) seriously underpowered hardware.
Or maybe because it's just votes, not money. As far as I'm concerned, it's disgusting.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
If you have got an election with only three eligible voters and five candidates, of course things get messed up.
Yes it was a simplified and silly example, but the point we has making is absolutely true. There is a mathematical proof that any possible voting system for more than three candidates *MUST* violate at least one "common sense" rule.
instant runoff
One of several violation of common sense in instant runoff is that you can cause your candidate to lose by voting FOR him.
The issue is that the sequence of eliminating candidates is fairly arbitrary, and that the final winner is extremly sensitive upon that elimination sequence. By voting for your preffered candidate you can get an elimination sequence that causes him to lose, whereas casting your vote for someone you hate can delay that bad candidate's elimination and change the entire elimination sequence in a way that causes your candidate to win. I'm not going to write up a simplified example to proove it, but I can get you a link to proove it if you doubt me. Voting for a candidate can make him lose.
Let me give a different example showing even better what is wrong with instant runoff. Imagine there are 10 special interest groups each running their own (rotten) special interest candidate, plus one (great) honest fair non-interest candidate that everyone likes and respects. Each person from each special interest group votes for their (rotten) special interest candidate in first place, and votes for the (great) non-intestest candidate in second place, and votes against the other 9 rotten special interest candidates.
What happens with instant runoff in that case? Ten different candidates each get about 10% first place votes and is hated by the other 90%. The obviosly best non-special-interest candidate gets EVERYONE'S second place vote and ZERO first place votes. Instant runoff eliminates the clearly BEST candidate in the very first round.
The only good thing about instant runoff is that it is better than our current simple plurality voting system. That is very faint praise, as simple plurality voting is almost the worst possible way to run a more-than-two-candidate election.
As I said earlier there is a mathematical proof that any possible voting system for more than three candidates *MUST* violate at least one "common sense" rule. However certain violations of common sense are far prefferable to certain other violations of common sense. Some election systems can elect a clearly wrong candidate, other election systems always get all clear cases right and only get "weird" when there is a genuine ambiguity over the best candidate. A genuine ambiguity is when (for example) two thirds of the population preffer Bush over Clinton AND two thirds preffer Clinon over Perot AND two thirds preffer Perot over Bush. A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. This situation is easy to see with three voters who rank the candidates as ABC, BCA, and CAB.
If we ever do manage to fix the election system, there's no way we should adopt instant runoff. If we manage the almost impossible task of changign the election system, we need to step directly to the best available system. Huge work has gone into the math theory of voting systems, and the best system is known as Condorcet. Condorcet always gets the right winner when there is a single logical winner, and then uses one of a number of possible rules to tie-break an A beats B beats C beats A loop. Voters vote in Condorcet in exactly the same rankings-method that they vote in instant runoff, it's just the post vote analysis that is a bit more sophisticated.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If I said "the sun is bright" would that be modded as funny?
Considering that the subject is politics, and "sun" is a homophone of (and trivial typo of) "son"...
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
heh - preview is your friend.
:)
First I tried all-caps.
Then all lc; rejected, but the lameness filter basically told me how to "fix" (ie. spoof the lameness filter) it, so I put in some spaces.
I'm taking a class in perl, so I'm learning all about trial-and-error methods of getting stuff to work
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I mean really, it's like the old Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin says he loves his haircut... because you never want to insult someone with sharp scissors at your neck. Except instead of scissors, this guy has beer/liquor he could potentially give you.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
who did you vote for?