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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.'"
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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?
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.)
Oh, the machines do exactly what they are supposed to do. It's whoever dictated what they were supposed to do that is at fault.
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'
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
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.
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?! 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.
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.
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.
I'm not disputing that this happened, yet I'm definitely not taking your statement at face value.
sig? Oh, that sig...
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"
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
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.)
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.
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
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.
Why?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
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.
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.
As a programmer, I say a voting machine should never eat a vote silently. Votes are easy math: cast_votes++
The machine should provide feedback that a vote has been accepted and counted, otherwise make it clear this did not happen. Somebody should at least pull out some simple unit testing. http://nunit.org/
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.
When presidential elections can give different results on a .5% error rate, then no, it is not a tolerable number.
Being a programmer too, I'd like to add that a bug that eats one vote will probably eat more.
Errors in digital systems are usually systematic errors that will occur again under the same circumstances. With the exception of intermittent hardware glitches: those are random but tend to grow more frequent as the bad part deteriorates further.
So once a voting machine is known to give false results, it should not be assumed that it was a one-time error. Debug it or go back to paper.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
Whaddya mean "loser" ? Assuming he did indeed vote for himself, I suggest he got one more vote than you did.
Pretty shoddy to argue that someone is a loser for making the effort to stand as a candidate in an election.
Democracy wins when people participate. Democracy loses when we sit at home and whine about the outcome, but don't bother to take part.