Florida Literally Scraps Touch-Screen Voting

Kaseijin writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is getting his wish. The New York Times reports the state will replace touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan models by July 1, 2008 — the most aggressive timetable of any jurisdiciton rethinking this approach to voting. The touch-screen machines most likely will be sold to other jurisdictions or stripped for parts."

Comments

Translation:

[urcreepyneighbor]

sold to other jurisdictions We don't trust 'em, but you should!

Re:Translation:

[Pete LaGrange]

These should be returned to the manufacturer as unfit for intended purpose and a full refund extracted.

Re:Translation:

[lenski]

My favorite use for touchscreen ex-voting machines would be to drive a printer that generates human-readable ballots. Said ballots would be perfectly fine to count either by optical-scan readers or normal unaided humans.

Touchscreen "ballot printers" would go a long way toward eliminating overvotes and reducing undervotes (since a voter must be permitted to abstain from a particular race or issue).

As long as the Official Legal Ballot is durable and readable by unaided humans. The human can then manually scan his/her selections on the paper ballot before committing it to the official count. If the touchscreen system failed to record the voter's intent accurately, the voter can place the the machine-printed ballot in a rejection pile and fill in a paper ballot using manual methods (pencil, pen, etc.)

The point is that the voter must be able to audit his/her voting selections on the official legal record before committing it to the secure but open vote counting process.

Re:Translation:

[AuMatar]

The decision not to use highly insecure and completely unauditable machines to elect our leaders with? Yes, that decision should be forced an everyone.

Re:Translation:

[Kadin2048]

Uh, please give me one good reason why municipalities should be given the option of using highly insecure, no-physical-record, easily hacked "voting" machines in elections that influence the entire nation?

By your logic, we should allow states to allocate their delegates to the Electoral College by coin toss, cockfight, or single combat, if a bunch of political appointees in that state think it's a bright idea.

I think we should rigorously enforce some sort of minimum standard of quality for elections. Above and beyond that, sure, states can choose what brand and type of machines they want. But we all have an interest in making sure that elections are fair, unbiased, and transparent. Auditless electronic voting systems prohibit that by design, and for that reason they ought to be illegal. Leave them for supermarket taste-tests where they belong.

Re:Parts?

[rizzo320]

There's a version of linux for just about everything :-)

Auditing.

[headkase]

I'm stunned that in the first place a system that could not be 100% audited was allowed to be used in the first place! Seriously, even though politicians don't seem to give a damn what you think the voting process is supposed to be a key-stone of democracy. If you can't trust the ballots you can't trust the system. It's fundamental.

Paper?

[Froster]

Are paper ballots really that complicated? If there are multiple referendums or positions to be voted for, just use colour-coded ballots and ballot boxes. All this trouble with voting machines is just ridiculous.

As a Canadian, I've never voted with anything other than a paper ballot, and I have never had a reason to question the voting process as a result.

Much better idea

[WindBourne]

is to turn a few of them over to so of the crackers, reverse compile them, and lets see exactly how many bugs there are? In particular, I want to know, were the elections valid. For that reason, I suspect that the courts and the pubs will fight the idea of turning ANY of those over to an academians or crackers.