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.'"
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%.
So accuracy in counting votes only matters when it could change the outcome of an election? Bullshit.
Yup. That's how election officials do this sort of thing. In a case where so few votes are counted, one might reasonably argue: Why was there not an accurate tally? It's a good question, and one local election officials should investigate. But when scaling up an election to even just hundreds of thousands in a medium sized county election, it becomes impossible to count _every_ vote. It's just a statistical impossibility.
When confronted with such large numbers, it has become standard practice for election officials to concern themselves not with each individual vote, but with verifying outcomes for any particular race. That is, what matters is the outcome, not specific votes in the process.
Is that bad policy? I don't think so. Perhaps you disagree. *shrug*
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!
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__()
I feel like you just posted an apples to oranges argument. Nice try though (to you and every other moron in this thread who thinks that tracking finances is 100% analagous to tracking votes).
Actually, not even finances are tracked with a perfect margin of error. Banks lose money! They really do.
Banks are not concerned with small statistically insignificant sums lost or found across all accounts. Further, the banking system is not concerned with this. Banks are very concerned about sums which move into a single (or range of) accounts. That is, banks and their regulators (and auditors) care about fraud.
There is always a statistical variance between what accountants believe is stored across all accounts within a bank (or the banking system) vs. what might be counted at any one time. Banks lose and gain small amounts of money all the time!
This is just the same as counting votes in a large-scale national voting system. However, as others have noted, voting is significantly more complex. Unlike banks (and ATMs), voters expect total anonymity. Which, unlike accessing your bank account, means that determining the intent of the voter (as opposed to the intent of a bank customer) after the fact is next to impossible due to the lack of records. Even in the perfect scenario of a paper trail for every vote. This is why there are under and over votes in every election. Votes lost when it is clear that a voter did vote.
The only viable solution is to verify that the aggregate count is accurate to within the margin of error. Otherwise, demand a recount.
*shrug*
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.