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Florida to Scrap Touch Screen Voting?
AlHunt writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is calling on the Florida Legislature to spend $30M to replace the troublesome touch screen voting machines with an optical scan system that allows a voter to mark an oval next to a candidate's name before slipping a ballot into an electronic reader."
I think one is certainly due - faulty, unreliable equipment that failed to deliver as promised.
I think the problem is that the system is defrauded by the government itself *cough*bush*cough* with a paper system or a touch-screen system when the votes AREN'T TALLIED BY REAL PEOPLE.
Look at the scene in Fahrenheit 911 where they show a recount finding a whole stack of identical votes stuck together and inserted into the tallying system. Do you think pencil would rule that out? HUMAN COUNTING FIXES THAT.
People will not have confidence in the voting system for a very long time, dubya made sure of that.
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speaking of very long time
Ace
Remember the old punch-card machines coders used 30 years ago?
You could punch them out with a punching machine or with a single-hole punch, it didn't matter.
Do the same with ballots:
Let people fill in an optical scan ballot by hand OR give them a touch screen that will mark the ballot for them.
You get all the advantages of the touch-screen, including multiple languages, different ballots in the same polling place, accessibility for the blind and disabled, and more and you keep the advantages of optical-scan ballots, including a voter-verified paper ballot and a way to vote if the electricity goes out.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If it can be made to work reliably and securely, electronic voting is by far the best way to go as it offers the possibility of having a much more direct democracy instead of democracy-by-proxy as we have now.
Consider this. You only get one vote every few years, which is then supposed to show your support for every decision your elected representative makes. It would be much better if you could vote on all the major issues, such as major bills, decisions to start wars, etc. With a physical based voting system though, it would be all but impossible to do this as the amount of effort to collect votes is enormous - hence we have political representatives we vote for who act as proxies for our wishes, and hopefully make decisions that the majority of the people would wish for. As we all know, this is often not the case. (eg. Copyright extention)
Now that nearly everyone has a computer (in developed countries) or has easy access to one via internet cafe's, libraries, etc. then imagine what it would be like if you could directly vote (via te internet) on bills such as say, the patriot act or extending copyright, instead of having to depend on some guy to make that vote for you? Apart from anything else, it would take a lot of the current power away from special interest lobby groups (read:big business), as they would have to convince a large slice of the population on how to vote, instead of a small group of senators etc. You would still need a body of lawmakers to put forward bills and propositions, but the general public would have much greater control over the acceptance or rejection of those bills.
The challenge of course would be:
1) ensuring everyone only got one vote, (say, through the use of a hardware keygen or something) and
2) your votes remain anonymous. I don't personally believe this is as valuable as being able to vote on every bill, and would happily sacrifice a little theoretical anonymity for a more direct democracy.
There is no need to discuss your political leanings with poll workers so your point is... well, you don't have a point.
Everyone in the country should have filled out a scantron sheet by now. The technology is widespread and decades old. Filling in a little dot next to the one person you want to vote for is as simple as it gets.
Circling isn't (as) machine countable and since the boundaries for marking your vote aren't pre-defined there is room for interpretation after the fact. We don't want room for interpretation (hanging chad anyone?).
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Because another problem with the touch screens was that they frequently failed to work properly. So having it continue to print out the wrong answers wouldn't really have been that helpful.
I definitely agree with your point, but the fact is that ANY voting system will have potential areas of failure. However, the lower-tech the system is, the less likely that the error will be due to the technology (still leaves the possibility of voter error - that's unavoidable). The fill-in-the-bubble followed by an immediate scan by tried and true optical scanners to catch any obvious errors seems like one of the lowest-risk methods. The input device is something people of every age and background are familiar with - pencil and paper. The paper trail is the actual physical ballot that was marked (rather than a printout of what the computer THOUGHT you marked as is the case of the e-voting machines). There is no possiblity of tampering with the machine to get it to print a phony paper trail. And instead of having to buy a lot of machines to handle the many voters at each polling location, you only need one optical scanner with a backup or two just in case.
Seems like a no-brainer. My state wisely used the "Help America Vote Act" money to install this system of "electronic" voting. Election day went smooth as silk.
The counting of votes must be observed by humans. Since people can't see electrons moving, no electronic vote counting should ever take place.
I'm willing to wait for election results. Isn't that a worthwhile price for democracy?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
If the journal printer is hidden from public view, then there's no way to be sure that the printed vote matches your actual vote. If there is an observation window between the print head and the take-up spool, so you can see your vote before it winds up into the bowels of the machine, that's still not much better, and you don't know for sure your vote hasn't been changed. (Maybe if the take-up spool was wound printed-side-in, the whole mechanism could be made visible; but that doesn't preclude a second, concealed printer recording anything the manufacturer wants.) Your vote can potentially be traced back to you, since the journal roll is in strict chronological order. (Keeping multiple journal rolls, and having each vote written to a randomly-selected one, might be a way around this.) You can't be sure that the machine isn't printing additional votes while nobody is looking at it (especially if it's a thermal print head). You can't be sure that the paper already on the take-up spool before the first vote was cast, was blank. Lots of can't-be-sures.
Can you be sure that a simple ballot box was empty? Yes, if it was checked by representatives of all candidates (none of whom trust each other), sealed shut by the Returning Officer for the constituency in front of the candidates' representatives, and the seal was checked by the Presiding Officer at the polling station before cutting it open and putting the box into use. There is no way a paper can get into a ballot box except through the slot. Alternatively, use perspex boxes (which will still require pre-sealing); but this imposes a requirement for voters to fold their ballot papers text-side-in.
Receipts that the voter takes away are an even worse idea. What goes in the ballot box should stay in the ballot box, and there should be no record of it anywhere else. If you have a piece of paper about your person "proving" that you voted Conservative (although the machine, if it is rigged, might well have registered your vote as being for Labour), that can be used against you in various ways. Voter receipts, if issued, should not show the voter's choice, and should be available to abstainers (an abstention is still a valid vote). Thus a receipt would merely demonstrate entitlement to vote. But, since the only qualification for voting is reaching a certain age and the only disqualification from voting is death, such proof is redundant, since the voter need only prove that they are alive and over the age of maturity. Alternatively, receipts showing the voter's choice should be trivially forgeable, so that if (illegally, but it happens) challenged to show a vote for a particular party, one could demonstrate a vote for that party that could not be proven false. This also defeats the purpose of a receipt somewhat. Finally, the only way that take-away receipts could ever be of any use in recounting is if everyone brought their receipt to the Town Hall; it's next to impossible for this ever be made to work. Most will be lost or damaged. Not everyone will comply. The margin of error will be huge.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Voting machines are simpler, faster, easier and, given enough
honest thought, also safer against fraud and interpretation
mistakes. If you think paper records are less falsifiable just
put a paper-roll printer inside each voting machine, print on
it and let the voter see, through a small glass windoes, what
is printed for his vote in the serially numbered paper roll.
But there are other ways if you think enough.
One thing I wonder is whether cheaper voting transactions
could not change the way voters participate in government
decision (by allowing a greater number of public consultations).
Think about making your representatives guide you, not vote
for you.
Anyway, talking about personal experiences in other countries,
here in Brazil we have gone, several years ago, from paper ballots
to 100% electronic voting machines. It is *much* easier to
coordinate and execute, much faster for everyone involved (voting
lines are negligible even though voting is obligatory for 100% of
adults). There is no going back from that. And benchmark for
benchmark, one has to agree that the larger the pool of voters, the
harder the challenge of coordinating and counting. Classroom voting
is one thing, city voting another, country voting yet another.
Anyway, the population of Croatia is 4 Million. The population of
Brazil is 190 Million. The population of the US is 300 Million.
-Ricardo
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
http://www.mhall119.com
The biggest problem I've heard about the touch screen machines is that even if the voter DOES know what to do, the machine doesn't. For example, if the instruction says to touch the name of the candidate you wish to vote for, sometimes touching the name of Candidate A doesn't register as a selection, or worse registers as a selection for Candidate B. This has nothing to do with the intelligence of the voter. I'd rather have a voting machine that lets dumb people make mistakes, than one that prevents smart people from voting correctly.
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