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.'"
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.
FUZZY MATHssss
FUZZY MATHssss
FUZZY MATHsss
FUZZY MATHss
FUZZY MATHsss
FUZZY MATHwwww
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).
Yes, the county should take the voting machines apart and verify the printed tape count. No, this incident is probably not an example of electronic voter fraud.
Donald Duck demands a recount.
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
Mr. None-of-the-Above's vote didn't get counted!
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.
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!!
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
.. 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.'
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.
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
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.
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'
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!
> 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.
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?
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!
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?
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.
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.
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."
The Texas govoner race was the same. The democrat got ~31, the repub ~40.. the two independents got ~10, ~19.
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"?
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?
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.
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 ...
"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.
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'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?
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.
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?
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
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.
No, it said that in this case, "paper ballots WERE available", as in "if you prefer", not as in "mandatory".
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.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.
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.
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);
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?
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.
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?
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
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
thank you
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!
The condorcet system is the best. Under which Al wins in both of your examples.
Aw crap, ninjas!
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.
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.
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?
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."
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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?
>>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
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
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.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
who did you vote for?