Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I would have to say that the first question you really ought to be asking is:
1) What caused this error, and could the problem be systemic?
Until you have answered that question adequately then you can't really say whether the error changed the outcome of the race. Perhaps it was a simple screw-up that just meant this single vote didn't get counted, but perhaps it was a systemic error that means that none of the counts are valid. Dismissing this until the nature of the error has been adequately determined is remarkably premature. It probably is nothing of consequence, but there is every reason to go to the trouble of finding out that that is the case.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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?
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
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.
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...
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
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
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."
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/
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