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Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count
Catbeller writes "The AP is reporting that Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people) discovered that the electronic voting system hadn't registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him ... because he cast it himself. The Machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36." From the article: "Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said the issue had been discussed but no action taken yet. 'It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals,' Payne said. 'The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available.'"
Oops.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
about the article is that his wife was the one who told him he got zero votes. She asked him if he had voted for himself to make sure it was wrong....err, someone's going to be sleeping on the couch.
So he voted for himself, but his wife went to check the vote for him. Okay, so who did his WIFE vote for?!
Watch my YouTube atheist video blog (user NickGisburne2000) for arguments against religion
It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
It doesn't matter if it was abject fraud or not. Either way it needs to be determined why his vote wasn't counted, and then the issue needs to be fixed. Just because it's not intentional doesn't mean it's okay for votes to go AWOL.
this comment makes it sound like its his own fault as he didn't cast a paper vote: ...'The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available.'"
"Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said
WTF? Blame the guy for his own vote not being counted!!
It doesn't need to be fraud to be disturbing. It means the machines don't do their fundamental job, to wit, correctly counting votes. Even if nobody was trying to manipulate the vote, that should scare the hell out of you.
I put in a write in for a local office with a strange name. ANy idea where i could find the listings of write ins in MD? I checked the elections sites, but couldnt find anything.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If one vote was missing or applied to the wrong candidate, other votes could also be lost or shifted.
If other votes could, then enough votes to change the election could have.
It all starts with verifying a single vote.
Voting machines are rigged for the two-party system, who's really surprised here?
Care about privacy? Read this!
Which is why the country election commissioner should take the machine(s) apart and check the vote tape. It is only 36 votes, so it shouldn't be hard to do. I am simply pointing out that this example is more likely error than fraud.
Why? Don't they have first-graders who can help them count the votes?
I'm sorry, but who in their right mind would blow money on a voting machine for 80 votes.
Our election officials have gone mad !
I think I can tally 80 votes in less than 15 minutes so it's not as if "time to tally" is at issue.
Accuracy is certainly not at issue either.
I think the US must stop having elections driven by locals and have a federally mandated independant voting "authority" that answers only to the judicial branch. Politicians must not have any say in the way it is run and the legal standards must be very stringently applied.
The HBO special really did shock me more than I expected it to. Unless we have utmost confidence in our voting system, we will alienate our society.
Oh, while we are at it, we should also go to a preference system as this two party system just means can never hit your own party where it counts without voting for the dark side.
Had his vote, and the votes he assumes had been cast for him (because his friends said they did), he still wouldn't have received enough votes to win the election. Further, it's not clear he would have received even enough votes to change the *outcome* of the election (there will be a runoff due to two other candidates having won the same vote count).
As others have pointed out, who cares that he wouldn't have won? The votes should be accurate purely out of principle. Even if the leading candidate is winning with 99% of the votes and the losing candidate is 1 vote off, we must know what happened to that one vote so that the system can be improved.
However, in this case I think those missing votes certainly did change the outcome. The other two candidates got 18 votes each. If there are several votes missing for Wooten, which candidate got the benefit of those misplaced votes? This results in a runoff election on November 28th instead of declaring a clear winner already.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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."
If the machines cant do their fundamental job then the programmers need be shot because they are impersonators.
$candidates['candidate 1']++;
If there is one error on the machine, why would it not be possible for there to be more? In fact, it is possible that 20 of the votes were for him, which would mean that he won. Until the check this machine, and hopefully, several other machines from other areas are checked. If there is a failure, it needs to be determined if it is in one machine or is system wide.
What I want to know, is why is it that we are not spot checking ALL system across the nation? It strikes me that all systems should be checked. What is amazing is that all closed systems AND both major parties seem to fight this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the guy: A - Voted correctly B - Pressed the right button, not a slip of the finger to another candidate. They've all got printouts right? So comapre the 36 printouts with the 36 votes, and see if they match, easily done in such a small town. Also, 80 people and only 36 votes?
It's a trade secret, you can't look inside the voting machines.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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!
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.'
That's not meant to be funny. It's true. The software and insides of the machine are considered trade secrets, and nobody can look at either.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The system works fine. I voted for the other guy 18 times and each time the machines worked perfectly.
And the count came out correct. I don't see the problem.
Simple. Assume He's not crazy and he voted for himself. Then canidates X or Y should have one less vote. Vote counting is a zero sum result. Votes for X + Votes For Y + Votes for Z - Number of Votes == 0
Since the results had to pass this basic smell test, then one can figure one canidate has too many votes.
Your candidate won!!
Let's use the net to replicate all votes in real time, let's set an id onto each vote and trace its movements wherever it goes.
In fact it should be as easy as a mailing list of all votes!
http://leparlement.org/security
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?
Oh, the machines do exactly what they are supposed to do. It's whoever dictated what they were supposed to do that is at fault.
With one vote that wasn't counted among a town of 80, that's an error rate of 1.25%, based on population.
So if that error rate is taken nationally... the USA has about 300 million people, with a 1.25% error rate in vote counts, there could be as many as 4 million votes that are either lost or counted for an opponent if the same sort of problems can occur... 4 MILLION!
That's enough to sway the outcome of almost any national election.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!
NO freakin kidding.
We had the same thing happen in Arizona a while ago--the guy voted for himself, and his wife voted for him too.
Final count: Zero.
We don't even have electronic voting here.
I should point out that nothing came of it, either.
Latewire
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 when scaling up a transaction to even just hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medium sized transaction, it becomes impossible to count _every_ dollar. It's just a statistical impossibility.
When confronted with such large numbers, it has become standard practice for accountants to concern themselves not with each individual dollar but with verifying flow for any particular transaction. That is, what matters is whether the balance is positive or negative, not specific dollars in the process.
Fixed that for you. Now how do you feel?
-- Alastair
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?
They have an internal paper trail eh? And what if it records the vote on the internal paper trail incorrectly?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The issue here is that not only was the vote count innaccurate, but there are only 80 residents of the town. From the article, only 36 residents voted in the mayoral election. 1 vote in 100M might be insigificant, but 1 in 36 most certainly is.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
You should've seen it. He just pranced into the voting booth, pirouetted through the procedures, and waltzed out of there. Anyone could've had his vote for a song.
Or, perhaps, did you mean "ballot" and not "ballet"?
What the hell?! This is frickin' electronic voting, not a single vote should ever be lost. If it does, the system is flawed or rigged.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Isn't that one of reasons that electronic voting is being promoted? I mean, as much as it sucks, it's sort of understandable, in the context of human error how one single vote could be miscounted. It is a whole lot more disturbing how a machine designed specifically for this task could err.
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.
I'm not disputing that this happened, yet I'm definitely not taking your statement at face value.
sig? Oh, that sig...
Unless there is a power glitch, or any one of a number of other statistically small possibilities. In this case, I'd accept that the system is flawed, unless they could demonstrate it was voter error. While they say "electronic voting machine", that is rather ambiguous and could mean any one of a number of things.
As far as "not one single vote", that isn't going to happen. There are just too many little things that could go wrong, and some of them eventually will.
The law [Vol 1. Section 3.2.1] states a test of 1 in 500,000 "ballot positions", per processing step is acceptable. They do not measure voters, but rather ballot positions. A ballot position is the number of candidates and the number of other votable issues on a ballot. Steps include things like the electronic recording; the paper trail; transferring data to jurisdiction HQ; etc.
For example, if there are 3 people running for mayor, that is 3 ballot positions per voter -- assuming no other races. If there were 7 bond issues (yes and no spaces), that is another 14 ballot positions. Add in things like other races, referendums, etc. and what looks like a small election can have 30-50 "ballot positions" per ballot. Multiple that times the number of voters then the number of steps and it adds up fast.
To be fair, the target is 1 in 10,000,000 and in an election this small, they should have gotten it right.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I call Bullshit. Yes, there is always a margin of error with everything. There is not a reason for margin of error for COUNTING up to 36, nor counting up to a MILLION. There is no excuse for it. DugUK
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
Uh, no.
You're COUNTING. vote = vote + 1
You are not doing any calculations, which I agree may indroduce errors. You are counting. Of course the systems are not perfect because humans are involved, but the machines themselves should be able to fucking COUNT. It's not like they're counting particularly fast, either... each individual machine handles maybe one vote every 2 or 3 minutes.
If I vote for person A, then person A's vote count should increase by 1. There is NO acceptable scenario where that would not work. There just isn't.
But I'm letting you drag me into a semantics argument. Shame on me... the point is you're trying to make light of a fuckup that at the very least needs to be investigated to find out why and how it happened, not whether or not errors should exist at all.
The error needs to be investigated. Do not just say "oh well nothing's perfect" and try to write it off.
=Smidge=
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.
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Al
This gives us Al at 5, Bob at 7, and Chuck at 6. Chuck calls in help from his two friend, Dave and Ed. Now, they don't really have anything to offer, but Dave is blind and Ed is in a wheelchair, so everyone feels bad about putting them last. The election now comes to:- Al, Chuck, Dave, Ed, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Al
Chuck still comes out to six votes, but Al is now at seven, so Chuck wins the election. While this is an admittedly silly example, since there are more candidates than voters, it is an illustration that an unpopular third party candidate can still change the outcome of the election. In fact, there's a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) which specifically states that there is no completely fair voting scheme. The unpopular third part falls under the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" section. In order to eliminate this problem, you have to give up one of the other attributes. In practice, most people who truly fix the third party hole wind up with a system where you can cause a candidate to lose by voting for him.Nobody here is stupid enough to truly believe that because a computer does it, it is infallible. However, these absurdly rare occurrences you have listed are not what people talk about when these computer voting systems screw up. Power glitches and transmission errors are very very unlikely in a properly built system; or at least they can be dealt with via redundancy in the system. The point here is that either the system is poorly built (and in this case so poorly built that in a town of 80 people it can't manage to keep track of the votes which does not bode well for considerably larger elections of say 50 million) or there was tampering done to modify the vote counts. Either way, your defenses of the imperfect electronic system don't hold up. We either need to make the system less fallible than it appears to be currently or change to a different system.
Because a computer is a deterministic machine, where for any given input you will get certain output, and only that output, and nothing else (or your computer is broken.) Quantum computers are not like that, but we don't yet have them either.
There is absolutely no reason to NOT expect a 100% correct accounting of all votes cast. The "power loss" scenario doesn't hold water. The voting machine can write the vote into the Flash (and/or print it on a tape), read it back from the Flash, compare, and if all is well then it tells the voter that he is done and can go. If not, summon maintenance. How often banks miscount your money? How often your Visa card incorrectly charges you? How often your paycheck is wrong? Almost never, barring software errors. But a voting machine is so simple, it can be mathematically proven that the algorithm is correct (and it can be also easily tested.)
Apparently, you missed the point. Typical for Slashdotters but ... really.
... in other words, the tools to do the job.
... that's one reason.
Engineers will generally (if they're halfway competent) do the best job they can with the resources at their disposal. Fact is, the engineers themselves are a resource, a tool. In any technical organization, somebody in management is responsible for selecting the engineering staff and providing them with project goals, adequate resources, and the requisite guidance
Voting machines are big business. BIG business. These are not shoestring operations, which means there's plenty of money to go around to attract the best and the brightest. It doesn't matter whether management hired second and third string engineers, or hired high-level people and simply mismanaged them. Maybe they did get good people and received a good design, but failed to commit the QA resources to make sure it actually worked right. Whatever. The responsibility for bad design and bad implementation lies at the top. You know that as well as I do. That is why the people at the top make so much more money that the people doing the actual engineering. Well
Corporate management often says it wants the best possible product. Unfortunately, they rarely back up those words with the resources to achieve it. Then, when customers complain about the defective products the company has been manufacturing, the finger is immediately pointed at the engineers who designed them. And that's wrong: it's their manager who should be shot on the spot for being an incompetent, because only an incompetent would hire an incompetent, much less give him a position of responsibility.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Not geeky enough, sir!
Clearly, our Asian election official was aware of the cults within his ancestral homeland which worship the Cthulhu. Recall from The Call of Cthulhu:
"What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China ... There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific ... No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
Plainly our man had had some contact with this oriental cult of the appalling ancient Things, and had come - or his family had come - to America fleeing these nightmares. Now he is working at a polling station, and a man comes to him with a ballot, with the dread name of CTHULHU scrawled at the top. Small wonder he reacted as he did!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why?
When you add 2+2 on your cheap Taiwanese calculator, how often do you expect an answer different from '4'. Feel free to do this calculation as often as you like and get back to me with a percentage error rate. (errors in entry due to the numbers wearing off the buttons do not qualify.)
Now try something like a computer CPU. If you run several million simple integer additions, what percentage of those will be in error?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Many precincts are too small for generators to be practical, and UPS units also have a failure rate. What if, even though it was tested the week before, the generator fails on the day of the election? There is also the cost associated. Who is gonna pay for it all.
... fighting for the democracy ?
Wouldn't that be like
Sorry, I'm not an american, but I though you people didn't mind spending money while fighting for democracy. But maybe I misunderstood, and all that money is for fighting for something else.
morcego
In the town where this mayoral race took place it is very possible that the outcome would change. 8-9 people who told him personally that they would vote for him, himself and his wife... how many of those people had friends who might also vote for him? Why did the other two candidates still have a runoff?
Are you assuming that none of the other candidates votes were incorrectly tallied? Are you also assuming that none of Wooten's votes were incorrectly assigned to another candidate?
If Wooten truely had 9 supporters and the voting machines somehow misassigned all of those votes to another of the candidates this would force a runoff between the other two candidates even though they weren't even close (The official tally was 18 and 18).
"No, this incident is probably not an example of electronic voter fraud."
-- How do you mean this? The chances that a man thought he voted for himself but didn't are rather slim. Are you saying that incorrect results due to problems with the system (diebold) does not qualify as voter fraud?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
In late-breaking Tuttle news, utility clerk Juanita Coffey has won the vote for the city pumpkin decorating contest. City manager Jerry A Taylor is quoted as saying:
It is important to note that there have been no allegations of voting irregularity, despite Jerry's 22 years of technical experience.
You will also be pleased to hear that unlike the progressive clamor across the rest of our great nation, the good folks in Tuttle, Oklahoma seem to have reddened their necks further and elected three more Republicans to the statehouse.
This is a fitting opportunity to remember the great Jerry A Taylor, so deserving of his $5000 pay rise for his legendary competence. I wonder what he is up to these days?
If you read the article, "at least eight or nine people" told him that they voted for him. Of course such claims aren't proof, but the situation certainly deserves investigation. A glitch can't lose eight or nine votes out of 36, plus his own. That would be around 25%. If such a glitch is even possible, it's hardly an acceptable error rate.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
No, really, it's not funny. Stop modding it funny.
If I said "the sun is bright" would that be modded as funny?
Why?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
You're making up assumptions. I once saw an accountant spend two days tracking down an error of a few cents. Obviously the amount as such wasn't worth two days of work. But the discrepancy indicated that there was an error somewhere, and that was not acceptable. The fact that there was an error somewhere did matter quite a lot.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Means there's a lot less variables to track, as well.
And it's cute that banks lose small amounts of money...but you can bet your arse that if an ATM was mistracking money, there'd be an investigation as large as neccessary to find where things fubar'd, and in the end someone will be fired.
Why isn't that done with votes?
And of course the real question is why are voting machines blackboxes? Democracy only works if it is seen to be practiced...ie, if it is open and transparent. The mechanism of democracy (voting) needs to be that, almost per definition.
You know what? Strike the 'almost'.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Diebold's Accuvote TS machines have a history of failing the counted-as-cast test, starting with the NEGATIVE 16,022 votes awarded Al Gore in Volusia County's 2000 election. (At the time, Global Elections made the machines. Afterward, they were bought up by Diebold, who were instead infamous for their insecure ATM machines. Ironicly, Their "success" in the voting sector is selling more ATMs to bank chains such as 5th/3rd.)
According to the "HACKING DEMOCRACY" HBO Documentary, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Elections threw out the signed paper audit tapes used in the 2004 elections, despite the legal obligation to file them for 14 mounths after a presidential election. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting is seen retreiving the tapes from the election board's warehouse trash, with signatures, and it shows hunreds of discrepencies from the "official" tape they printed afresh for her.
In my own experiences here in Butler County Ohio, I have no confidence in the results of our elections: suspicous to say the least. This year's 2006 results deny every Democrat candidate any victory in each race, despite the larger state totals (including non-electronic voting counties) giving the win to a Democratic Governer, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Senator. But what makes the local results anomolous is that the House Representative an local offices were awarded to Republicans, and the county itself is largely a 'welfare county' whose largest City (Middletown) is founded on a failing steel industry. The disparity seems more closely tied to the voting machines than the voter demographics. Creepy.
The sun is bright. *crickets*
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.
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."
Wait a second this is all digital - THERE SHOULD NOT BE SAMPLING ERRORS!.
Statistics has nothing to do with this - or else you will find that 3+2 = 6 some times and 4 other times. On average you'd still get 5 but...
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
Are you suggesting the buttons and tally counters of a voting machine react according to some probabality curve such as stochastic?
Somehow that flies in the face of digital accuracy, code predictability, database integrity, system security, and application reliability, doesn't it?
We're talking about straight-forward button-press counting systems here, not some sort of complex interest accruals or tax filing analysis. There are no heuristics, there are no inference engines, and there is so little code required it would take a COMPLETE FREAKIN' MORON to field a computer program that can't count to 80 without screwing up!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
As a programmer, I say a voting machine should never eat a vote silently. Votes are easy math: cast_votes++
The machine should provide feedback that a vote has been accepted and counted, otherwise make it clear this did not happen. Somebody should at least pull out some simple unit testing. http://nunit.org/
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.
why the hell are we so adamant that because they are "computer" based they should magically be 100% accurate and reliable?
I think most people are willing to acknowledge that it won't be 100% reliable.
That's why they want a voter-verified paper ballot as backup.
A system that isn't perfect is OK, 'cos that's reality.
A system that is far from perfect, and is designed to deny verification, is unacceptable.
"Wooten got the news from his wife, Roxanne, who went to City Hall on Wednesday to see the election results. 'She saw my name with zero votes by it. She came home and asked me if I had voted for myself or not. I told her I did,' said Wooten, owner of a local bar."
The guy's wife didn't even vote for him.
When presidential elections can give different results on a .5% error rate, then no, it is not a tolerable number.
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
Was he on the ballot???
Ohio for one doesn't allow write-ins unless the person files a declaration of candidacy as a write in... but that's just signing a form. Probably different in other states, but YMMV.
Rule #1 of Slashdot: If you ask some post not to be moderated funny, it will get moderated that way.
Being a programmer too, I'd like to add that a bug that eats one vote will probably eat more.
Errors in digital systems are usually systematic errors that will occur again under the same circumstances. With the exception of intermittent hardware glitches: those are random but tend to grow more frequent as the bad part deteriorates further.
So once a voting machine is known to give false results, it should not be assumed that it was a one-time error. Debug it or go back to paper.
C - the footgun of programming languages
1 vote EVER is significent. Otherwise there's no point having a vote.
And with electronic machines it's not as if they're making math mistakes.
Can they?