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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.
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.
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."
In my state, at least, they only go to the trouble of reading and recording write-ins if there's a possibility they'd affect the outcome. So if any of the (regular) candidates on the ballot gets more votes than there are total write-ins, the write-ins for that office don't get recorded.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
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.
SOP in most places is to count the number of write-ins, but not the name of the candidate. If the number of write-ins is significant, they will go back and look for any trends in the names. Even if the vote goes 45-40-10 among named candidates and write-ins only account for 5%, they'll still look because if most of that 5% went for a single person, it could be newsworthy or insightful.
The actual, exact breakdown of the write-in names is usually not calculated (and therefore can't be released), except in presidential elections, where write-ins above a certain number (a relatively low threshold, at that--somewhere around 1000 IIRC) are counted and recorded.
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?
.. 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.
Your candidate won!!
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.
The issue here is that not only was the vote count innaccurate, but there are only 80 residents of the town. From the article, only 36 residents voted in the mayoral election. 1 vote in 100M might be insigificant, but 1 in 36 most certainly is.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
What the hell?! This is frickin' electronic voting, not a single vote should ever be lost. If it does, the system is flawed or rigged.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Isn't that one of reasons that electronic voting is being promoted? I mean, as much as it sucks, it's sort of understandable, in the context of human error how one single vote could be miscounted. It is a whole lot more disturbing how a machine designed specifically for this task could err.
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.
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
- 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.)
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 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?
No, really, it's not funny. Stop modding it funny.
If I said "the sun is bright" would that be modded as funny?
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.
Wait a second this is all digital - THERE SHOULD NOT BE SAMPLING ERRORS!.
Statistics has nothing to do with this - or else you will find that 3+2 = 6 some times and 4 other times. On average you'd still get 5 but...
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
As a programmer, I say a voting machine should never eat a vote silently. Votes are easy math: cast_votes++
The machine should provide feedback that a vote has been accepted and counted, otherwise make it clear this did not happen. Somebody should at least pull out some simple unit testing. http://nunit.org/
"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.
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
Can they?