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."

Comments

Will they ask ES&S for a refund?

[symbolic]

I think one is certainly due - faulty, unreliable equipment that failed to deliver as promised.

Re:Will they ask ES&S for a refund?

[SeaFox]

Are we talking about the voting equipment or the candidates on the ballot?

Re:Will they ask ES&S for a refund?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think one is certainly due - faulty, unreliable equipment that failed to deliver as promised."

You say this as if it were uncommon for a government contract.

+1 Sad.

Re:Will they ask ES&S for a refund?

[plover]

The difficulty is not in the machines, but in the very idea of the machines. It's all about the concept of "trust". Sure, the machines have some code just to paint a couple of boxes marked "John Jackson" and "Jack Johnson", and some more code to count button clicks. But how do you, the voter, know what happened in the mind of the machine? What assurance do you have that when you clicked "John Jackson" that the accumulators for Jack Johnson weren't accidentally or deliberately incremented? You have none.

The short answer is that without the machine producing a physical token (usually in the form of a printed receipt) representing your vote, you don't know. More importantly, you can't know. Any screen you can see assuring you that the machine is perfect can be faked. Promises that the code is perfect are based on inspections and testing, not mathematical proofs. Even if they were, how would you know that they weren't being faked? A bad guy could always replace the program with one of his own that paints a copy of the official "Seal of Assurance" screen.

There are some difficult-for-the-common-man-to-understand signature schemes that could offer more confidence that the program is honestly the one that is supposed to be present, but none of those are in place; even if they were, they can only provide assurance that the program is the one that was signed. They do not offer proof that the code actually works properly.

As I said, physical tokens are the only way to ensure the machines are working accurately. After the election, you count tokens and compare them to the accumulators. But if you have to go as far as producing and counting tokens, why not simply vote by token instead? It's worked for thousands of years, it's as cheap as a pencil and paper, and everybody capable of voting can understand it. You can even count the tokens by machine if you're in a hurry, as long as you can count them manually to prove the machines are honest.

There's a reason Americans vote in November but the politicians don't take office until January. It's to give time to count the votes and certify the elections. Nothing in our laws requires the T.V. news to inform us of the election results within 15 minutes of the polls closing. That's a fabrication that sprung up recently, and has nothing to do with democracy.

Re:God your nation's hilarious...

[kfg]

the richest country on earth, not to mention the world's shining example of democracy

What has Switzerland got to do with Florida?

KFG

Why not best of both worlds?

[davidwr]

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.

Electronic voting for a better democracy

[vivian]

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.

Re:Electronic voting for a better democracy

[vivian]

You raise some valid concerns, but lets look at them:
. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on?
Do you really hold your fellow countrymn in such low regard?
I agree that no-one is likely to have the right answers for all issues, but isn't that already the case with existing legislators? How often have we heard about bills being barely read before they are voted on, or questioned the knowledge of lawmakers on issues we hold dear - like so many technology oriented pieces of legislation (say, for spam laws)? Even the lawmakers aer not infallible, and I don't think that the public would do that much worse on voting on these issues themselves. Sure, there may be some poor decisions made, but they would be OUR poor decisions, not those thrust upon us by a small group who may have been unduly influenced by lobbyists etc. After a year or so of finding out that actually you can't have free schooling AND no tax, I think pople would start taking a lot more interest in the process, and start making more appropriate decisions.

If a politician tosses out a bill and says 'vote for it and you will get more money' while ignoring the costs, do you really think that enough people will vote against it?
I think that this is not as likely as you would think - for the same reason that we don't automatically vote for a politician that promises say, huge tax cuts or free money for everyone - there are enough voters who know that such promises are unfulfillable or unsustainable, so we don't vote that way.

The founding fathers didn't have everything right to start with - after all, they didnt think women were fit to vote at all (along with the rest of the world) , yet in the intervening time we have decided that mabey women can vote sensibly after all. One of the main resons you need so many intervening steps though, is the imposibility of collecting and counting votes by hand - you HAVE to have proxies when you don't have a means of hearing the voice of the people more often. This should no longer be the obstacle it was though, in this age of communications.

At the very least, even if we can't vote on every bill we should be able to directly show our support/non-support for a bill - electronic lobbying for the masses, if you will.

Re:Yeah sure.. can't break that.

[Excelcia]

Canada's last federal election used machine-read paper. A sheed of paper with circles you mark an X in. They are put in an envelope you can't see through, then given to the election official who feeds the paper into a reader. You get a green light if the machine was able to read your vote, at which point the paper is sucked into the lock box in case a manual recount is needed. If it didn't read it, it is spat back out and you are given the option of destroying the ballot and getting a new one.

A certain number of polling stations in each area randomly have their machines opened and their electronic count matched against a manual count. If they are off by one, the entire district is manually counted.

All in all, this is the best voting system I have ever seen. Quietly implemented, without a fuss. Designed by people who are more interested in an accurate, quick, efficient system than they are interested in partisan politics or winning contracts for their favourite corporation.

I love living here.

Re:Yeah sure.. can't break that.

[dfenstrate]

We do a very similar thing here in New Hampshire except you put the sheet in the scanner yourself and the election officials are nearby.

Eliminating the election official's handling of a marked ballot reduces the opportunity they have to mess with it. No sleight of hand tricks are even remotely possible.

Re:ACLU has sued for this kind of behavior before.

[Kadin2048]

As other people have pointed out, there is a compromise position: you could have electronic consoles to actually enter the vote, but which produce a paper receipt that's then put into a scanner to be counted. That way you get basically all the advantages of e-voting, with the benefits of optical-scan, but without having to have voters actually write anything on the cards. (Because, apparently, as a society we are incapable of writing and following simple instructions anymore. Not that this surprises me.)

Paperless voting was a huge mistake, but touchscreen voting itself wasn't a bad idea. There's no need to get rid of the things from this very expensive experiment that we apparently conducted that worked, just the parts that didn't.

I'm with GodinHell

[chocolatetrumpet]

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?