Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling

davecb writes "A California judge is likely to order a Berkeley city initiative back on the ballot because of local officials' mishandling of electronic voting machine data. A recount was not possible because the city failed to share necessary voting records, a violation of election laws. In a preliminary ruling Thursday, Judge Winifred Smith of the Alameda County Superior Court indicated she would nullify the defeat of a medical marijuana proposal in Berkeley in 2004 and order the measure put back on the ballot in a later election."

Comments

Good

[geekoid]

This should have been done in 2000
yes, I know it would have been expensive.

Why the euphemisms?

[seanadams.com]

The case points to the dangers of electronic voting systems, which make it harder to ensure fair elections, Luke said.

How about "make it relatively trivial to rig an election".

Failure of process on a Medical Marijuana bill?

[TheTranceFan]

What were they smoking?

Re:Medical marijuana bill defeted in Berkeley?

[ChatHuant]

That's unpossible!

For some reason the turn-out of pro voters was unexpectedly low.

Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape

[Cervantes]

I don't particularly buy the argument that electronic voting is somehow more or less difficult to tamper with than paper voting. Sure there is no guarantee that the hardware and software is protected and will truly offer a fair vote - but can you really say the same thing for paper? Remember those ballots have to go to a machine that counts them. That machine is not perfect - it is just as prone to error and manipulation as your electronic system. Of course with paper ballots you can resort to a manual recount but that is costly and time consuming. Moreover if you think electronic and mechanical counters are unreliable a human is a disaster. BZZZZZT. Sorry, but this was so wrong I had to respond.

Your mistake is an issue of scale. It's relatively easy to slip in one or two false paper ballots. It may not even be that hard to make the machine a little more picky when it comes to checking punchouts on the democrat side of the ballot. But there's backups, paper backups, that get checked and confirmed, even if at a small ratio. Someone watching the pile of ballots go through the machine can find it odd that mostly left-leaning candidates get kicked out as incomplete ballots. Little things can be snuck through easier.

But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.

Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.

Really, the 2000 Florida situation was unique, because a swing of a few votes either way made a huge difference. But at least ya'll could go back and CHECK. In '04 all you got was "here's the number, if you don't like it too bad". I'd rather have a few weeks of checking to make sure everythings fair, rather than an instant biased result with no appeal.

The scale of the flaws of electronic voting far outweigh the flaws of mechanical voting. With mechanical, a few votes can get screwed up. With electronic, a whole election can.

Re:Possibly.

[Original Replica]

There is only one ruling party right now.

We theoretically have a Republican party and a Democratic party, but they both take their cues and pull their members from Amercia ruling elite. For all of /.'s love of market forces let's look at who controls that:

In 2003, just 1% of all households -- those with after-tax incomes averaging $701,500 -- received 57.5% of all capital income, up from 40% in the early 1990s. On the other hand, the bottom 80% received only 12.6% of capital income, down by nearly half since 1983. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/we alth.html

Who is controlling corperations? The top 10% own 85% of the stock. So it should be obvious to everyone that this same small amount of the population would have the same level of control over the government. But everyone gets one vote you say. But who places our choices in front of us? If the choice is between aristocrat "A" and aristocrat "B", you still have and aristocrat in power when the "vote" is done. This non-choice shows itself in negitivity of the campaigns and the apathy of the voters. People have more interest in "American Idol" than the American government because they have more actual influence in the former.