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All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
according to an announcement made by activist Bernie Ellis at the premier of David Earnhardt's film "Uncounted [The Movie]" all fifty states could be receiving subpoenas in the National Clean Election lawsuit. The documentary film, like the lawsuit, takes a look at the issue of voting machine failure and the need for a solid paper trail. "The lawsuit is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public. The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting machines to record and count the votes at each polling station, and allow tallying of votes by election officials outside the view of the general public."
I imagine this guy will be found in his Colorado cabin dead of a heart attack.
Simply vote, it prints your ballot, and you slip it in a box. You can verify your ballot was printed correctly, and they could have options to let you destroy your ballot if not, and reprint (or fill it out by hand)...
Or would that be too sensible?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
You can have electronic voting that doesn't suck.
It just has to have a paper trail, not reveal to outsiders who you voted for, and, y'know, not be backed with Microsoft Access.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Are the states actually facing the prospect of being sued here, or just being subpoenaed for information? My understanding is that states cannot be sued without their own consent; surely they wouldn't consent to this.[1] Can anyone else clarify this? [1]Cue the "...and don't call me Shirley" comments!
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
It doesn't matter how the vote is made, it matters who counts the votes. We've already seen that dubious vote counters had ignored and thrown out ballots in a previous documentary.
No, that would disenfranchise idiots.
That tag would fit very appropriately on this story. It's really hard to see anything other than complete incompetency in anyone who thinks that a black box e-voting machine is a good idea. There was an article related to this topic the other day, and someone posited the question "...what happens to my vote when I press that button?" The short answer is you can't. That's why I hope this lawsuit is successful. I think it has a real shot, as people are upset election practices. With the phone-jammings, hanging chads, etc. that Americans have endured the last two times around, transparency is on everybody's wishlist... at least for those who don't stand to benefit from electioneering and lucrative contracts that is.
I got a catholic block.
I have no problem with the idea of electronic voting machines but they should povide a paper trail and the source code for the machines should be made open for public inspection so that the public can be sure that when they vote for John Q. Public that the vote is recorded correctly.
The voting machine prints out Presidential runner X, but internally notes you voted for Presidential runner Y. That's been the general problem.
Let's face it. WHO can verify the voting of open voting machines? We can. We, computers savvy people who understand computers and who can test, probe and verify the mechanisms behind the machines. Joe Average cannot.
Joe Average can look at a vote, see the cross and verify that yes, whoever casted this vote voted for the person or party where the X is. That's the difference.
Yes, of course we trust us. But can we be trusted? Hey, of course we can, I know that, you know that but essentially, it's the same situation we have with closed source voting machines: An outsider does not know whether we, computer people, are to be trusted. Like we, as outsiders, stand in front of the makers of voting machines and question their trustworthyness, so will non-tech people stand in front of us and question ours.
The only way to have elections that cannot be questioned by anyone is to create a system that everyone can verify if they want to. And the only system is simply one that everyone can "read". So it's paper or nothing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You have handlers doing things like slightly damage ballots, so that they get invalidated... yeah, 1/1000, enough to swing a close election.
Computers count better than people do, otherwise, you would see calls for people to manually tally your bank balance...
This is my sig.
Awesome! Let's pretend the only solution to accountability issues in voting is to make the voting process so expensive that we can't afford to do it anymore! Way to go, America - it's nice to know that the extremists (and yes, extremists often = stupidest) are making policy once again. This is what happens when: (a) You aren't honest about the facts of the issue, in order to add weight to "your side"; and (b) You don't bother analyzing the costs/benefits and parameters of the problem before trying to solve it.
Will this stop another president that the american public didn't vote for from taking office? I highly doubt it, but it's a nice thought. What we need to do is eliminate the electoral college and just go with the popular vote. Imagine a country where the voice of the people actually counted for something.
-FataL
Sorry, I didn't make it clear - that's why it prints out the readable hard copies; those are used for the tally, not some internal copy on the system.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Or the paper and pen method... why introduce unnecessary mechanization? Occam's razor applies very well to voting. Simplicity is best.
I got a catholic block.
Maybe we could call in the UN to monitor the next round of elections?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The sick fascination with immediate results is what is causing this issue to begin with. Election results do not need to be available immediately. Taking a day or a week for counting is perfectly fine. For some reason though we need to have live coverage as the polls close to find out who wins. It really doesn't matter all that much.
Hey, if we're going to do e-voting, and you can't deny it forever, why not just have everyone vote one a week from their PCs on the actual issues and skip the (politicians) middle man?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Montana already has this, thanks to HB 297 which was passed in 2005. This bill requires a hand countable paper ballot, regardless of the voting method.
Between this and Montana recently telling the federal government that they can take their Real ID and shove it, Montana seems to be one of the top states for people who enjoy their rights.
It's about goddamned time.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In the question and answer period following the screening, an Iraq veteran said he had pledged to protect his country "from all enemies foreign and domestic" and viewed the issues of voting machines as a domestic threat to voters across the country.
It's very nice to hear of a soldier truly understanding the role of patriotism and protection in America these days. Well done, Sir.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
If you're going to be counting the votes by hand, what's the point of the voting machine then? You can accomplish the exact same thing with pen and paper.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He did say 'or fill it out by hand'
That strikes me as "pen and paper"
Last week in my county we had 160,000 people vote (not registered voters, people that voted) in which roughly 50 positions were open and I was eligible to vote for about 12 in my specific area. This was an off year election. Hand counting would take a while. Prior to computerized voting, we had mechanical machines made by (drum roll please) Diebold since at least the 70's.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
My state doesn't use electronic. We use a paper ballot that scans and is saved. Dur..!
For some people it's easier to fill out (think 2000 + hanging chads)
Personally, after the 2006 election, I'd rather use pen&paper than that horribly crappy Diebold software..
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Because buying and selling votes is illegal.
Seriously, this has been discussed to death in the security / crypto circles and there are *a lot* of really good ideas floating around. All that's really needed is a competitive process to select the best one... like the crypto community did with AES.
This problem is so solvable the current state is infuriating.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
After all, it shouldn't take a rocket scientist (or even a dim witted 3rd grader) to remember all of the "vote wrangling" that went on when various "human" counting systems were employed in Florida, Ohio, Iowa, etc over the last few general elections.
Because of course, a HUMAN would NEVER have any agenda at all when it comes to vote counting......
Oh wait........
Hanging Chad's anyone?
And note, this applies to BOTH sides equally, so if you desire to blame the "mean ole conservatives" or the "damn looney liberals",.....Don't.
It would be so that the form would always be filled out correctly, and only once.
What if someone wanted to change their vote midway through voting? They would probably end up scratching out the candidate they had voted for rather than request a replacement ballot as they are supposed to.
In this instance, the machine would act as a quick total verification (to allow the hand count to be quickly validated) as well as a type of file buffer, so that people could vote more clearly for whom they desired.
--
We have fill in the dots, and turn the ballot into the box, which presumably checks for errors, before beeping and accepting the ballot for storage. Count them as many times as needed, either by machine or hand.
Seems to me to work rather well.
They may be tamperable, and probably are, but I still like them. ...
I am biased as I lived here my whole life and am used to it.
Touch screens still don't seem good enough though.
If they look like bank ATM's
Paper does have a paper trail, it would be weird if it didn't, but it almost seems too low tech.
If hyperbole is used then I could compare it too etching on stone tablets; that would require a bit of insanity though.
Levers look simple just look across for the name/party and down for the position.
They also have remedies to prevent more than one vote at a time as well as partial votes.
Approval voting would be easy to implement.
In my opinion thesecond best after a more general range voting.
No FL recount would happen here.
I don't know why a printout at the end of the use cound be made.
Plus they have been tested for decades and have little problems.
Luckely NY will be using them for at least a few more years.
I could vote for a presedent, if any good ones, next year on them.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
I'm perfectly happy with the way voting works in Oregon.
You get your ballot in the mail, and fill in the little bubbles with a pencil or pen, just like the standardized tests we're all familiar with. You fold it up and seal it in a "secrecy envelope" which does not have any personally identifying marks. Then you seal that in another envelope which has your name, mailing address, and a barcode on it; this envelope must be signed. You can either mail it, or drop it off in a secure ballot box somewhere (such as at a public library). You can do this at your convenience, it doesn't have to be on election day.
As ballots are received, they're scanned, unopened, and the signature is compared to what the state has on file from your voter registration. If the signature doesn't match, they'll contact you. If they receive two ballots from the same person, they'll contact you. If you don't receive your ballot, they'll send you another one with a different color outer envelope, so if they receive two, they know to discard the original one.
Finally, on election night, the outer envelopes are opened and the inner envelopes are mixed together, then the inner envelopes are opened and counted. It's done by machine, but could be done by hand just as well (it'd just take longer). They get the results very quickly.
Everything is done in the presence of observers from different political parties and members of the public (I haven't volunteered for this yet, but I think I'll look into it next year). All the machines involved are tested with a known quantity of sample ballots to make sure they're working properly. If somebody tried to rig the election, people would see it. Recounts are not a problem.
The only problem with our system is that it doesn't prevent vote buying, because someone could watch you fill out your ballot, seal it, sign the envelope, and drop it in the mail, then pay you for voting the way they wanted. But so far this hasn't been an issue, and in general, most Oregonians won't stand for that sort of thing. We'd much rather accept that risk in exchange for the convenience of being able to vote how we want when we want, without trying to get to a polling place on election day.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Us tech nerds have had the answer forever, we just have to adapt it - Open Source.
But I don't mean "use OSS for the machines", I mean open-source the ACTUAL VOTES. How about this:
1) Voter votes on an electronic voting machine
2) Machine prints out a slip with their votes, and maybe a checksum/MD5 hash of the votes.
3) Voter verifies this on as many "neutral", 3rd party and/or official vote verification sites as possible, making the possibility of sabotage very slim since they can go to any one of these sites to see if any one of their vote counts are different. You can't hack 50 different servers in enough time to cover your tracks before someone sees that the vote counts are being screwed with.
Sure, it's an extra 30-60 seconds to go plug in the numbers, but....think about our current president and how much evidence is out there in the open that suggests that he is in office, making "decisions", with the possibility that he didn't even WIN the popular vote.
Give the power to the masses. Hierarchy just doesn't work here, because power corrupts.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Two advantages. It scales easily, and it is auditable. Braille ballots for the blind, and help for the handicapped. Everything original paper, with the right to be reviewed and recounted.
For some people it's easier to fill out (think 2000 + hanging chads)
However, chads are a prime example of overcomplicating matters. To create chads you need a punch machine.
A pen and paper would have been easier for many, and resulted in ballots that were easier to determine.
Personally, after the 2006 election, I'd rather use pen&paper than that horribly crappy Diebold software..
Agreed.
Personally, I think that any 'touch screen' voting machines should be nothing more than gloriously overengineered printing stations for handicapped ballot casting. IE you insert your ballot into the printer, make your choices, it prints your choices, you verify your choices and cast your ballot into the same box everyone's depositing their pen marked ballots. If you screw something up that you find after printing, you get another ballot, and the printed one goes into the spoiled bin.
I don't read AC A human right
This is really sooo simple folks. Everyone, especially the election folks, should be on-board with these types of demands. It's really not that difficult to do what the "Fair Elections" people want, unless you really ARE trying to manipulate the elections.
1) Demand that Diebold and all of the other voting machine folks print a receipt for every voter. This wouldn't be any more difficult than printing a receipt at the supermarket. You get to look at it, you put it into the basket on the way out. The paper becomes the "official" ballot always, the machine is just there to give quick results.
2) All the vote counting is redone at a central location, and EVERYONE can watch on the cable access channel or over streamed video. Want to watch 96 hours of vote counting from front to back? Sure, knock yourself out. The video feeds are provided the the cable franchise holders in every city to present on their networks on the usually blank city council channel. For those without a cable franchise for the city, you can simply lookup the video feeds on the internet.
The foot dragging on this issue is really starting to make me believe that the elections ARE being manipulated. All the horse-pucky form Diebold and the like about "too hard to make a printed tally".... Yeah, sure... And it's also too hard for cash machines and cash registers to print a receipt and verify that I've got funds before you give me cash...
As far as ballot counting, the infrastructure to let everyone watch is already there.
We just need to keep pushing until this gets done. I'm getting really tired of the 50.01% vs. 49.99% vote manipulation that's passing for "legal and fair" elections in this country. Making things look "close" is really the smoothest form of manipulation, I don't think anyone would believe the old Soviet style manipulation where the votes are always 98% for the party, but shaving just enough to make it 51-49 would be almost believable.
This really does need to get done NOW. No more fooling around, OSS voting machine code, printed receipt, video feeds of the counting and no more voter supression!
The problem is that bits can vanish without a trace - heck, nobody is sure they were there in the first place.
Atoms, however, are hard to dispose of - yes a paper trail gets counted too, but it's much harder to deny the physical reality.
A voter can verify his correct paper ballot went into a locked box, and observers can make sure the locked boxes are transported and the contents counted. If there is a question, it can be repeated with closer inspection.
When I touch the "vote!" box on a screen, I have no idea what happened next, and verification is difficult.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I can also file a lawsuit( in the USA) that would try to make Lolcats the official language of denmark, but that doesn't mean you have to make it a slashdot story.
1. Bad hand writing. 2. If it is done by your hand, then it is easier to forge. If it is done by computer, they can use special inks, paper, and maybe a confirmation bar code. 3. The electronic machine could do a 'pre count', so that while the official count is not till next day, you get something to report tonight. 4. The machine can also save a record of things like how many people voted in each district, providing another double check to prevent voter fraud. And it could even double check what district you are SUPPOSED to be in, and if you are in the wrong district tell you the proper place to go to. 5. Environmentally better as printed ballots can use less paper and ink. 6. A well done machine can remind you to vote for all things voted on, possibly explaining a 3 paragraph refererdum without wasting lots of paper and ink, or time for those that don't need the explanation.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
More Twoson than Cupertino
Unless Sangamon is the only sane county (well, we know every politician in Cook county is crooked; see our present Governor linving in Chicago despite the Illinois Constitutional mandate that he live in Springfield, and the previous governor living in PRISON) in Illinois, this lawsuit has no merit here.
The last two elections I voted on a touch screen, and was presented with a paper audit trail that I presented to the election judge, who put it in a ballot box.
Not every state has Diebold crap.
And it wouldn't matter if the machine used Access as a database (or even Excel. Since there's a paper trail you can always retabulate the results, by hand if need be.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
A paper trail just gets you a manual recount process that has a demonstrated error/uncertainty rate
greater than the percentage of votes by which George W Bush "won" his first presidency.
If you're going to have close elections like that, then with a human paper counting system you may
as well just call it, heads or tails, because that will be just as valid as the alleged "result."
Some kind of open-source hardware and software stack, top to bottom, using public key encryption and
digital signature techniques to allow verification that a ballot was counted in the result without revealing
how the ballot was actually voted, should be fine. Why is this so difficult to comprehend?
The idea that all competent mathematicians and computer geeks, who could vouch for the system and the
process and the result, are somehow all in favor of one side in an election and so would engage in a vast,
unanimous conspiracy to defraud the populace is so far fetched that anyone who believes it should
have their right to vote revoked anyway, because if the quality of decisions made by those they support
is anything like their own decision making prowess, we are all completely f**ked.
Oh yeah, we already are, I forgot.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The machine generated ballots can be used for initial counting estimates counted by machines. That will satisfy Americans' urgent need to instantly know who won after they each cast their vote. Those counts should not be legally binding. The ballots should be counted by hand for the officially binding count. In the event that there's any substantial differences, the state should automatically open a formal investigation into vote rigging. Which would deter that kind of rigging, so it would rarely be tried, and the investigations rarely begun.
There's no reason the official count can't take a few days to complete, even doublechecked by multiple counts. That kind of human responsibility for the counting is entirely consistent with the democracy we're populating with the votes.
--
make install -not war
Where I live, they use paper ballots with optical scanners. It's amazing how many of these get rejected and require them to be re-filled out because someone accidentally voted for the wrong candidate and thought they could just "cross it out" or somethign stupid like that.
The nice thing about printing the vote is that you get the electronic tally right away, so the world can know a "tentative" result by that evening, while a full count could take all night, or or maybe even a few days to certify.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Heck, a printed ballot could even have only the name of the selection; in a race between candidates X and Y, a vote for Y only has Y's name on the ballot; likewise for candidate X. That way there's only one name to look at on a ballot--the candidate selected by the voter.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
You combine the tallied results with the exit polls. Exit polls are not flawless, but are usually a relatively good indicator of how close the election was. If its a lopsided defeat then there is no reason to force the votes to be counted by hand. If its close, the votes can be recounted by hand.
' Now I suppose that system could be manipulated, for instance the exit poll data could be manipulated or a politician that lost could demand a recount even though they are pretty sure that they actually did lose, but I would be willing to bet that both of those would be somewhat self-limiting. If a politician/party is found to have manipulated the exit polls they probably won't be very popular(if they even won at all), and if a politician constantly calls for recounts that they know to be hopeless they wont' be very popular either.
Monstar L
Yes, but the problem here is that the machines are being designed and programed by said humans, and the rest of us are not allowed to see the design/program.
You can fix anything with duct tape and sticks.
If counters can see the vote on a ballot, they can work to spoil that ballot or ignore counting it. If what is printed is encrypted in some way they can't spoil it but then how do we trust that the encryption is accurate. So what I have come up with is (1) an encrypted paragraph of hex (EPoH) on a continuous tape coming out of the voting machine, (2) a simultaneous printout of EPoH on a receipt to the individual (that also prints out who/how they voted, and their generated-on-the-day voter ID). The vote then compares their EPoh with that of the tape (under glass so they can't touch/contaminate it) and walks away knowing that what they hold in their hand is the same as the printed record.
The next step is a generally available machine that can read the encryption. It would list the source code and key used, allowing independent verification of its integrity. It would be on a web site that allows you to type in your EPoH and then it displays how you voted. But it also notes that you, Voter ID xyz from District 54, voted for Ron Paul (for example). The site goes on to tally those who voluntarily type in their EPoH's. So, in contested ridings people can enter their EPoH and show that indeed 97,000 people voted for Ron Paul, not the 97 shown on CNN on election night.
I come here for the love
Voting machines can be programmed in as many languages as necessary. Keep on hand ballots for English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Braille (which could go to audio cues), oh, and large type varieties for people hard of seeing.
I personally think this aspect should be the primary reason to go with voting machines, with accuracy a second.
Right. Because, of course it's not the machines themselves that we worry about; it's the humans that program them, and we'd like to be able to see what they did, after they did program them.
And note, this applies to BOTH sides equally, so if you desire to blame the "mean ole conservatives" or the "damn looney liberals",.....Don't.Exactly! This isn't a liberal or conservative or Democratic Party or Republican Party issue. It's important for everybody that the vote counting should be open and above board, and that there should be not be grounds for doubt about whether the election was rigged. In fact, it's most important to the party that wins the election that the process should be transparent.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Where I vote in Massachusetts, we use a pen to fill in ovals next to each candidate for whom we wish to vote. If we wish to vote for a write-in candidate, we fill in a box next to an empty line, and fill in the name (and maybe address) on the blank line. We bring the ballot over to a box, state our name and address. If the list indicates that we have a valid name and have not previously voted in the current election, we slide the ballot into a box - which counts the ballot.
It is straight forward to use a machine to tally the votes. Similar machines tally scores on standardized tests. The ballots may be counted by hand. Typically it is only necessary to hand count write-in votes if the election is sufficiently close.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
This is actually the most sane and easy to implement solution I've heard of. The voting machines can be as nifty or (nearly) as insecure as you like, all they do is help speed up the filling out of an optically analyzable ballot. This ballot can be extremely clear, the machine then prints out the ballot which the person can double check before they submit it to the standard lockbox. From there you have a verifiable paper trail, with theoretically optimally filled out (most-easily machine readable) ballots, these can be fed in large batches into the scanners, which can be statistically sampled for verification purposes. Should the scan counters be buggy, or corrupted, you can always go back to the paper record, which incidentally, won't have the problem of hanging chads, no ambiguity would exist.
Gravity Sucks
There are approximately 170 million registered voters in the US. If only 50 million vote, and each ballot is counted by hand, and it takes 1 mintue to count and record one ballot that makes That is that is about 833,333 man hours to count the vote. Assuming two people to count one ballot, that is 1,666,667 man hours. Assuming you want to be able to do a recount, the count will have to be done in one month, that is 160 hours.
That is 10,416 people doing nothing but counting votes for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for one month. That figure does not include manager, organizers, support personnel, guards, transportation of the ballots, etc. And, remember, most of the jobs are only temp jobs lasting between one and three months.
Where will you get the workforce?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You can verify the code in an open source system, but it can still have its disk wiped or be disconnected from the backend server so that the votes don't count etc etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Each locality may have a different ballot, requiring different number of pages and not simple formatting. So, without computers to print the ballet on-site you have to have people format the ballots ahead of time and print them. This wastes paper and ink on extra ballets, and not to mention the logistic issues of getting the right number of ballots to the right polls, last minute changes because of courts, deaths, etc.
If you have a computer vote-selecting machine then you just ship blank paper that can be reused for the next election and only use the ink necessary. It uses less paper since only the votes placed are printed rather than all choices, and uses less ink. It's can be easier for handicapped and for instance the blind don't necessarily need to place their vote through a person as proxy. It also can reduce errors due to forgetting to vote for an office, multi votes, etc.
The vote-selecting machine is NOT the problem -- it's the vote-counting machine that is the problem. Currently these are the same thing, and that's why the 'voting machines' we have now are worthless. A vote-placing machine that prints out the choices followed by freely observable counting (whether by humans or by machine) is actually a much better system than plain paper and pencil.
For example, a vote-placing machine that prints out the ballot in "measure: choice\n..." format using a standard font can be tallied by machine and OCR -- as long observers get to see each vote and follow the tally. This removes simple math errors and could speed the process a lot while still allowing humans to verify the whole tallying process. Another key part is the observers knowing the final tally for their polling place and being able to verify this in the final count, which lists all polling places and their tallies.
Right now, wheree I vote, none of this is possible. No paper trails, and you cannot even watch the machine print out the final tally of votes unless you are 'randomly' selected as one of the few, ~10 people, who are 'allowed' to witness it. It's sickening.
The reason we don't trust e-Voting is because we don't trust IT. For that WE are at fault. We (those of us in the IT industry, and I'll assume the majority of /. readers are in that camp) have failed to govern ourselves like other professions have. Yes we are a new profession. Yes we've had explosive growth over the past 20 years. Yes we've done a lot of good over those years, both for productivity in general and in what kinds of things can be accomplished at all. We have however failed to become a respected profession. We have spent too much time trying to explain technology to non-technical people, and too little time making it work for them. We have failed because we've allowed the market to drive entrance into our profession rather than limiting entrance to qualified professionals. We have failed because there are non-technical people in our ranks.
Other professions such as Law, Medicine or even Accountants have an organization that not only lobbies for the benefit of the organization as a whole, but also limits entrance to new members. If it sounds like I'm trying to be elitist I am not - I'm trying to get to the same point that doctors and lawyers (and CPA's) have in their professions. You cannot practice law simply because you've passed an online multi-choice quiz, or five of them. You cannot practice medicine because you spent six months or two years at a 'medical' school. You have to be educated. You have to go through a process of review. You have to prove your worth. Why do we think IT is any different?
I've said this before on other posts - We need a guild. We need an organization that can vouch for our capabilities without being tied to a vendor. Do xray technologist in a hospital get a Certification from the xray machines vendor? Would you expect a tax layer in the state of Ohio to know something about taxes at the federal level, or in another state? If a CPA only knew how to perform work in Quick Books, would anyone hire them?
I see this article as a call to all technologists - know that your 'honeymoon' is nearing an end. We can choose to ignore that fact and eventually have our skills relegated to commodity status, or we can take action NOW and begin the effort to self regulate. We will be regulated, as this piece demonstrates. We only get to choose self regulation for a little longer, than we'll lose that option.
Which do you want to work under?
Dennis Dumont
While I agree that there are some serious issues with black box voting machines, haven't automated voting machines been around for a century or so? I don't think there ought to be a problem with using voting machines, but there must be a paper copy of every ballot which can be scrutinized.
How the heck does Switzerland deal with these things, since they are big on plebiscites and referenda? The excuse I hear constantly is that ballots in the States, particularly where initiatives end up on the ballot and where the election of various state and county officials are also often present as well is that ballots are quite enormous, and electronic voting makes it easier for voters to manage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I worked on the original release of voting machines from a company (not to be specified) and took part in the negotiations between several companies for merging in this industry. I am absolutely not surprised this is occurring. The FEC was so critical and ridiculous in their formalities that most time was spent documenting over and over and over again (punctuation is absolutely essential) and less time was spent on the actual architectures. In addition, I rarely saw security as the primary concern. They were more worried about it working for some guy without arms (the lowest common denominator) vs. what I and others felt were more credible concerns. Absolutely ridiculous. So do I trust Diebold as one example? No. But really I am more concerned about the knuckleheads developing Micro$oft interfacing software for tactical warfare for subs. That is a serious concern.
It takes 1 full minute to record and count a ballot? I think we can reasonably triple your estimate there and still be erring on the side of caution.
So we reduce your estimate... some 3000-odd people working full-time for a month, plus support infrastructure and personnel. That's not unfeasible at all. Not to mention that this is the way we've been doing it, with fair success, for the last couple hundred years, and heck, the percentage of Americans who vote used to be HIGHER than it is today.
Removing unreliable automation is a great way to eliminate the possibility of error. Luckily, nearly all humans are capable of reliable performance of repetitive tasks through thousands of repititions, as well as being free from bias. ... I wonder, thinking about the DSM-IV characterization of high-functioning autism, whether this couldn't turn into a way to get some kind of economic value from the nearly inexhaustible supply of people on the internet who claim to have Asperger's.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It doesn't have to be initially counted by hand, but at any stage of the process, the vote should be hand verifiable.
i.e. I vote, I can verify by hand that my ballot is correct, because for a few seconds, it is in my hand, until it goes to the box (meaning, the voting machine is one less avenue for screwing the election).
Later, they can go to a scantron style machine, and be tallied. If there is no contest about the election, then all is done, and nothing to worry about, but if the district/state/whatever has a contest against the election, then hand votes are still possible.
By the way, with your estimate of 10,416, that's 209 (rounding up) people per state, maybe 3-10 people per county. That's not so bad. Though, spreading it about a bit, larger states may have 500-1000 people, and counties may need from 2 people to 100, depending on population, but overall, it isn't a horribly bad number.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The two times I've been exit polled, I lied to the pollster.
I suspect many people feel the same way.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Oklahoma has been using the same electronic voting machines for about 20 years. When you vote, you get a paper ballot (or more than one, depending on the election). You use a sharpie to draw a line that completes an arrow pointing to your choice. You yourself take it to the scanner and slip it in (face down, face up, doesn't matter, and ballots are coded on the side so the machine can orient itself and tell what ballot it's looking at). The ballot then goes into a storage box beneath the scanner.
When polls close, the machines each print out a tape listing the various vote totals, the numbers of rejected ballots, etc. The ballot storage boxes beneath the scanners are removed and sealed, then stored in case a recount is necessary.
These machines offer a fast vote tally, and a paper trail if there's a problem.
Plus, Oklahoma has a centralized voting administration, so the machines are used statewide, and they're used for local elections as well. So it's completely uniform from county to county.
I think the issue here is accountability. Other countries have paper ballots and manage well enough, with the recounts only being triggered where there are exceedingly close results between two or more candidates. Yes, it isn't perfect doing it the "old fashioned" way, but at least the process was understood, and was not buried beneath a layer of proprietary, patent-shrouded mystery. At least a paper ballot represents a physical entity that can be scrutinized, accepted or dismissed on its own merits. An electronic system without a paper record is very much a black box.
I'm not one of the paranoid types who insists that Diebold must have been working to get conservative candidates elected. Let's remember that there are other forms of vote tampering out there, so it's not as if tossing out electronic voting machines will somehow mean that people won't try to rig elections. The issue is simply one of an adequate means of scrutinizing a ballot and ultimately being able to hold someone accountable if things go wrong.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Or the paper and pen method... why introduce unnecessary mechanization? Occam's razor applies very well to voting. Simplicity is best.
Yeah, the problem with that is that you have to read peoples' handwriting. Also, it's rare that we conduct single-race elections. Try writing your votes for President, Vice President, mayor, Senator, school board, local judge and two local budget referenda on a single piece of paper, in a way that someone can unequivocally decode.
The idea of machine entry with a paper receipt is that the machine validates your input and prints it in a standard form, before you drop it into the ballot box. No hanging chads, no illegible candidate names.
Exit polls are usually accurate, except when I disagree with the outcome then they're a clear sign of fraud.
Allowing open inspection of source code doesn't solve every possible problem or thwart every possible attack by infinitely clever criminals with arbitary resources, but it helps. It separates the problem into two problems, first: is the source code secure? Does it actually count the votes? and second: is the source code provided what is actually running on the machines? In fact, there are ways to test whether a particular source does is running on a particular machine (assuming you have the compiled source code as well as the raw source, and have physical access to the machines), and if you have the source code and can verify that it's not running on the machine that the vendor said it was running on, that alone would be grounds for suspicion.
In the way voting machine are currently purchased, the vendors can tell you that the source code is proprietary, and nobody is allowed to look at it, and if they do, they can't discuss it. Nobody can verify that it actually counts the votes. Nobody can look for holes, back doors, errors, trojans, stack overflows, or any kind of flaws whatsoever.
Vote counting should be transparent and verifiable. Proprietary vote counting algorithms should not be permitted at any stage in the process.
And, what exactly is it that they're claiming is proprietary anyway? What could possibly be proprietary about the algorithm "when a vote comes in for X, add one to the total for X"?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The problem is, how many ballot boxes are there in the US? How many in each state? In the end there must be some process to add all those counts from all the boxes to get a grand total. And there are many steps in between. How would you do it? Let's say each person who does that hand count from one box signs a paper containing the totals from that box, and that paper is countersigned by all the witnesses.
A piece of paper must be carried from one place to the other. How would you guard against someone switching envelopes? Who will be in charge of checking all those signatures to make sure it's the original count, or that the counting gets correctly transcribed to the next step when adding the totals? Who will check that all the additions were done correctly? "Oops, that would be 150 votes, not 1500"? How many witnesses would you need?
It may not be as easy to skew a hand counted election, but when the POTUS is being elected, do you think a fraudster will stop at "aww, that's too hard"? Electronic counting may be easier to fraud, but it's also much easier to audit, if done correctly.
Or the paper and pen method... why introduce unnecessary mechanization?
To eliminate error. There are noticable errors when you hand a person a pen and ask them to make a mark. See Florida and endless "chad" debates. With a computer and printed ballot, there is no confusion. When the vote is printed out with the full name of who you are voting for and no one else, it's not like you can miss it when looking it over. There can be scan-friendly features, but it would always come down to a real "recount" being done by hand and reading off the printed name on the ballot. That would speed up initial counting and have repeatable and reliable recounts.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm so weary of lawsuits. Can we bring a lawsuit to stop all of these ridiculous lawsuits?
Elections are a STATE issue and there should be nothing compelling any given state to do what another states chooses to do. We have another activist here that would presume to tell everyone in the country what to do. Screw that. The states should counter-sue this jack-ass and bankrupt him. He is wasting the money of every single taxpayer in the U.S.
As far as I am concerned, a state should be able to draw straws as part of their elections if that's how they want to do it. This moron Ellis, is really just trying to subvert our election process and nationalize it. This is BAD. Our election system was designed specifically to avoid nationalized voting.
The argument that computerized voting hides votes from the public is absurd. We just had a local election and all of the ballots were hidden from my view in a locked ballot box. What's new?
In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night.It is the story of how Univac predicted that Eisenhower would win by a landslide, and CBS news wouldn't report the results because they didn't believe in the machine, nor that Eisenhower would win by a landslide. I found the piece fascinating, and think it kind of pertains to now, over half a century later. History does indeed repeat itself, although I doubt it ever EXACTLY repeats itself.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm not sure the loss of security and reliability is worth the gain in speed.
With the Oval Office up for grabs, why not be sure we've elected the jerk correctly? A few days' wait isn't going to kill anyone.
Ballot boxes are a state level issue. Suing to force hand counting is the wrong approach. What business is it of New York's how California tallies its votes? In addition, suing before the fact is bizarre. Just because it isn't paper and pencil and hand counted doesn't mean a crime will be committed.
Lawsuits cause bad will. Really they do. Just ask anyone who has been sued. Suing all fifty states is just going to get fifty Secretaries of State pissed at you. Instead you should working with them to change to a more open and transparent system. Demonstrate to them how your preferred system will be more accurate and cheaper to administer.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Lets say we treat voting with the same care and encryption as a credit card account.
Your SS number is like the credit card number. You add in some confirmation information like your birth date and voting registration address.
You make a transaction that says you voted for Candidates X, Y, and Z. You then print out a receipt that shows you who you paid for, with a confirmation number. Each voting precinct is treated as a store, and required to keep a printed record of all transaction that happened that day, on top of the normal electronic backup.
And you can even set up an encrypted website that lets you check your account. You log in with you SS number and other info, and check to ensure that the candidates you voted for are right there to match the transaction you have on your receipt.
I'm saying that if we hired Visa, Mastercard, and Am Ex to make voting work the same as going to the grocery store, it would not only work but be secure, traceable, and accountable. If we treated credit card fraud the same as we treated voting fraud, then who knows... we might start getting the candidates we vote for.
This is what was used in the last USA election. Naturally many of the poorer households had little computer experience, and took longer than expected (surprised?) to vote, thus preventing many of the poorer(Democratic) voters from voting.
No Sir - I do not trust e-voting machine, unless the source is open code, and would print out an easily (machine+human)countable ticket+receipt showing for whom the vote was cast. Of course the fact that a staunch Republican donor (Wally O'Dell) who builds the machines, and was found to promise to deliver Republican votes, and was also found to have asked about ways to hack the machine, had machines that came delivered to polling sites with votes already cast for Republican candidates(Sorry it wasn't cleared from the factory), and produced negative votes for Gore (See Florida election)
..........FULL STOP.
I don't think candidates should be allowed to concede an election. An election isn't over until all the votes are counted and certified. period. If the candidate concedes before then, that should nullify the election as the voters were not choosing from the actual candidates. They were instead choosing between one person who wanted the job and another person who wanted to distract voters in some fashion.
I don't know...
man, I feel like mold.
That sounds horrible. Of course the media will make projections--based on exit polls. But the only vote tally announced should be the final certified count. Why would you want a system where a "tentative" result is announced before the final count? Just to add to any confusion?
Why do we need any result 5 minutes after the polls close? In the USA we're talking about 300 million people across 6 time zones plus absentee votes and service members around the world, (I know it isn't much compared to the geography of Russia or the population of India, but still) will the republic fall if SOP has us going to bed on election night without knowing the winner?
We made it through the 2000 election. The worst of that was not not knowing the outcome, but the back and forth over the outcome. Announcing a "tentative" result is an awful idea.
Keep on hand ballots for English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Braille (which could go to audio cues), oh, and large type varieties for people hard of seeing.
Should a non-citizen have the right to vote? I vote no. As you have to speak English to pass the test to become a US citizen, I see no need for other languages on the ballot in the US.
As to large print, before I had my operation (click the sig) I had trouble reading the ballot as I forgot my reading glasses. NOT having large print as the standard is stupid; unless you've had a CrystaLens implant, by the time you're 50 you need reading glasses, as everyone's focusing lens gets hard and won't focus.
You only need one ballot, in one language (French if you are in France, I guess you'ld need two languages in Canada) but one typeface - LARGE. The braile could be on all the ballots as well.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Because buying and selling votes is illegal.
I think you misunderstood. The voting machine takes your input, and prints out exactly one copy, which you then have to deposit in a box to have it counted. You don't get a receipt to take home with you, which would let you prove to a vote-buyer how you voted (though others have certainly suggested the receipt model in the past).
While I agree with helping the handicapped (blind, deaf, etc), I see no reason at ALL to print the ballots in any language but English!! A US citizen (only people allowed to vote, hopefully) should know how to read/speak English.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Except that this lawsuit is to outlaw ALL counting machines. Hand counting is expensive and less accurate, yet that is what these people insist on, nothing less. States are willing to change their systems if you work with them. Just don't be religiously dogmatic, refusing all compromises. Unwillingness to budge on hand counting only guarantees you a protracted and expensive fight.
I personally see nothing wrong with counting machines. Yet some of you act like Herman Hollerith was the instigator of a massive shadow conspiracy. The requirements for valid voting are few: 1) recountability; 2) certification; and 3) transparency. The off-the-shelf Diebold machines won't pass muster, but most of the tried and true optical and punch systems will.
Oh, and next time don't wait until two months before the primaries start. Sheesh.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Mechanical vote counters still require a paper or punchcard to do their job. That is the physical record.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Or were you trying to say that voting machines are complex...
Work Safe Porn
If counters can see the vote on a ballot, they can work to spoil that ballot or ignore counting it. If what is printed is encrypted in some way they can't spoil it but then how do we trust that the encryption is accurate.
The answer is, of course: do both. You can then have the computer line up all the ballots it thinks are for candidate A, and the human-readable parts confirmed by humans. Someone who doesn't like that I voted for candidate A could try scribbling on it or something to keep the computer from reading the encrypted part, but if it's on a continuous tape, it's not like they could make a vote from the middle of the tape disappear without being noticed.
Receipts though... those are still a bad idea.
Why not have the computer tally the votes, and the humans count the printed receipts to double-check the accuracy?
Agreed. We're currently counting our votes for the election here in Denmark. By hand. With a ballot about a meter long to hold all the parties and candidates. I stuck around at the polling station after close to watch the counting -- it's open to the public, and anyone can sign up to participate. When I left half an hour after close, the votes were just about all unfolded and perhaps 25% were through the first sorting (where the four largest parties are sorted out from the rest.
Mechanical voting is a cure that's worse than the disease. It's expensive, it adds ways things can break, and it obfuscates what's actually going on. Hand voting and hand counting scales very well, and in a real democracy, maximum openness is not just an advantage, but essential.
You can't arrest a computer, nor does it care if you dump water on it.
Computers (especially government bought ones) cost more than the volunteers and you can have double-blind inspired counting systems using humans without much added cost. You can also archive raw data for further review.
FYI: banks were run by humans for most their existence. Not everybody had an abacus. Its cheaper to use computers now; they still make errors. Aside from your absurd comparison, banks are a false analogy to this problem. THINK ABOUT IT while you READ your bank statement verifying how much you have in your account...(that was a free hint)
Furthermore, I can't believe some people think its too much work to count ballots by hand. Anybody who says that should be banned from voting because voting is too much work for their tiny brains. Oh, election results were not quickly known 'instantly' for most the country's existence and exit polls are reliable enough to use for initial results if you don't want to wait for official confirmation (they are actually used to point out corruption in other countries where 'conspiracies' are given rational consideration.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You can watch humans counting, as a hand count can be conducted in full public view of concerned citizens. You can't watch an electronic tally inside of a chip.
The point is, you can't trust the people involved with EITHER system, but only one of them lets you keep an eye on what those people are doing.
It doesn't have to be initially counted by hand, but at any stage of the process, the vote should be hand verifiable.
That is not what the lawsuit is demanding (or it wouldn't be suing ALL 50 states). The lawsuits demands hand counting. Period.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
When I vote I require a paper receipt that has an encrypted certificate of how I voted. I have the password for it which is also shared with the vote counters.
ANY citizen or group of citizens who are voting have the right to have their own independent vote counting. If anything is certain about elections is that they can be gamed by those in various positions of power. Simply take away those gaming possibilities and we have a verifiable voting system at the local level.
At anytime I can go to any web browser or vote counting location in my community and verify that my voting certificate was counted with the various votes that I cast. If there are any discrepancies they will be noted.
Even better is that as I vote my certificate is verified by ALL the online voting counting sites or more importantly the vote counting site of my choice.
Ensuring that my vote is counted is much more valuable than completely ensuing the privacy of my vote. Now some might complain about that, and some in the voting business have, but they miss the point, it's much better for a citizen to know their vote counted.
Of course there are ways to have anonymity as well with instant third (or Nth) independent watchers in real time before you even leave the voting booth.
ANY current system can be gamed. Take the elections in Canada for example. The paper ballots that supposedly provide anonymity are actually tagged with a serial number! The paper tears can be lined up with the tear on the tab with the serial number. Finger prints can be lifted and election officials eliminated leaving only the person who voted. The forms of course can have invisible serial numbers printed on them to make identification of who voted for what by the government clear and apparent - so much for anonymity of your vote - what's that sound, the boots of the government storm troopers coming for you since you didn't vote for them... Any voting system can be gamed. The key is to make sure that you vote was counted and that only votes by eligible voters were counted and that they were counted correctly. At anytime you can type your certificate in - which was copied to N independent voting repositories while you were still in the voting booth - and ensure that your vote was counted.
By the way, who the hell gave these people in government the right to form a government anyhow? All they did was rebel against the British (in the USA)? So force of arms is the only hold on power that these people have? Not a legitimate form of government to this sovereign individual - just another bunch of thugs imposing their values and rules in asymmetric ways upon hapless sheep.
Stand up and revoke your governments sovereign powers to attack other countries and commit murder and mass killings in your name. Send a letter today to all your elected officials telling them that you - as the sovereign they work for - hereby and forthwith withdraw their power to kill or tax in your name.
While you're at it send them a letter impeaching Bush and Cheney and other members of the government. If you government is really for and by the people then stand up and register your vote to impeach all your leaders who have lead you to this despicable war. A people's vote does not ever require the consent of approval of the government in power. No government is legitimate if they ignore the will of the people via a people's vote that can happen at anytime - the only proviso is that the people can't harm minorities with their votes.
Anyway you should know that your vote has been correctly counted before you leave the voting booth!
Uncounted [uncountedthemovie.com] is an explosive new documentary that shows how the election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2004 election led to even greater fraud in 2006 - and now looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 election. This controversial feature length film by Emmy award-winning director David Earnhardt examines in factual, logical, and yet startling terms how easy it is to change election outcomes and undermine election integrity across the U.S. Noted computer programmers, statisticians, journalists, and experienced election officials provide the irrefutable proof.
UNCOUNTED shares well documented stories about the spine-chilling disregard for the right to vote in America. In Florida, computer programmer Clint Curtis is directed by his boss to create software that will "flip" votes from one candidate to another. In Utah, County Clerk Bruce Funk is locked out of his office for raising questions about security flaws in electronic voting machines. Californian Steve Heller gets convicted of a felony after he leaks secret documents detailing illegal activities committed by a major voting machine company. And Tennessee entrepreneur, Athan Gibbs, finds verifiable voting a hard sell in America and dies before his dream of honest elections can be realized.
UNCOUNTED is a wakeup call to all Americans. Beyond increasing the public's awareness, the film inspires greater citizen involvement in fixing a broken electoral system. As we approach the decisive election of 2008, UNCOUNTED will change how you feel about the way votes are counted in America.
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"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
AFAIK Oregon ONLY has mail-in/drop-off ballots that are then hand counted and verified against signature cards.
Machines could make it easier to implement instant run-off voting too. I would love IRV or anything like if it meant getting more than two candidates on the ballot and abandoning primaries. I'm sure IRV can be done by hand too, but a voting machine could lend itself well to it. We just need to get Apple to do the interface. That might actually get out the youth vote for a change.
Great post!
A concession is not legally binding. If a candidate conceeds, and it is later discovered that that candidate won the election, he or she would still take office in January.
Hanging Chad's anyone?
hanging chad's WHAT?
And note, this applies to BOTH sides equally
There is less difference between the two wings of the Republicrat Party than there were between the different factions of the USSR's Communist party.
There are more than two sides. I try to NEVER vote for a Republicrat, as the Republicrats are all bought and paid for by the corporations. Rather than waste my vote on a candidate who consistantly votes against my beliefs and wishes (like the Bono Act, DMCA, Patriot Act, Bankrupcy reform, etc) I split my vote betweeen the Greens and the Libertarians. A vote for a Republicrat is a wasted vote.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
So use 3 people. 50, million votes at 1vote / min and 60$ / h = 50 million.
IMO 1 vote / min is vary slow and 60$/h for 3 people is on the high side but YMMV.
PS: I don't think there is any reasonable way for hand counting to cost more than 1$ / vote.
Am I missing something? New York doesn't even have electronic voting. They still use mechanical lever machines from the '50s.
I saw Hacking America. They tried to get copies of the official paper tapes from several elections and met a lot of problems and frustration getting it. In one case everything they requested under a FOIA request was found to be thrown in the garbage and they retrieved it all.
The problem I noticed watching this is the low brain power being exhibited by a lot of election officials and the like. Handling this stuff, electronic or not, is seriously complex work to keep track of that much material in that many places/warehouses and it's not being managed by people, at least in some areas, and likely the areas most in conflict, who have the skills to really deal wtih this. I don't know the solution, but think having smarter people at all levels of this process is required. Oh yeah, and counting software that can't be fooled by modifying a text file that is open to any user of the PC it's on. Come on, don't layer it on Windows, write your own damned voting OS to make it a touch harder to crack.
The two times I've been exit polled, I lied to the pollster.
Thanks for doing your part to help undermine democracy.
Simply refusing to answer their questions would have been sufficient.
The one-minute estimate is too low, not too high. In Canada and other countries that do hand counts, there are usually just one or two contests on the ballot. In the United States, there are typically an order of magnitude more. In Chicago in 2004 the ballot had 90 contests on it. So we're talking about more like 5-10 minutes per ballot. Hand counts would only be feasible if the number of contests were reduced or only some of the contests were counted by hand and the rest were counted by machine.
What we need to do is eliminate the electoral college and just go with the popular vote. Imagine a country where the voice of the people actually counted for something.
The electoral college is designed to punish candidates who appeal to a limited geographic region.
The only time the electoral college system makes any real difference is when the popular vote is close - then the number of states you won ends up making a difference.
The 2000 election is a good example. Al Gore won the popular vote by 0.5% - but Bush carried 9 more states, which earned him 5 more EC votes than Gore.
Is this a good system? I think so. It doesn't ignore "the voice of the people" - you elect the electors, and the system forces candidates to represent the entire country instead of just the East.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Short of allowing full public access to source code and other aspects, I still don't trust our elections.
The last time I voted the minature scanning machines on the box that did that tally. They obviously had them for your systems as well, as it'd reject spoiled ballots. There's not much of a step up from 'detect spoiled ballots' to 'go ahead and count the votes'. So you're still looking that the ballots are getting counted as they're cast.
I'm a big fan of 'trust but verify'. IE you trust the automatic box counter - but you run a random 10% of the boxes through a independent machine recount. Discrepencies are investigated. Then you hand count a different 1-10% of the boxes. Major discrepencies trigger bigger checks, up to and including a full recount by hand if necessary.
You still have the fun of making sure nobody's stuffing ballot boxes - an old tradition, but at least a tradition we have many safeguards against.
Of course, you independently add up the totals from all the boxes by several different methods, so it's difficult to impossible to jigger elections by not touching box counts - but district or even higher counts. The diebold system was bad this way - it reported it's overall tally from a seperate database than it did regional/box counts. Which would allow somebody to mess with the overall tally without changing any district's totals.
Oh yeah, and treat election fraud as it should be - a serious felony.
What I'm after is the best accuracy possible*, with the ability to audit at every level of the process.
* Machine counts, as long as the machine isn't defective or compromised are normally more accurate than hand counting.
I don't read AC A human right
From empirical data in the current Danish election, I can tell you that counting 8000 votes takes about 3 hours for 25 people, so 1 to 2 votes per minute, including having multiple people count each vote. If the votes are tallied in place rather than being moved, very little organization is needed. Rather than getting 200 people per state counting every day for a month, have ordinary volunteers count at the polling station. You'd need about 150.000 volunteers total, or 52 per county on average. Working three hours on election night. Is that really that difficult?
-Lars
A machine that takes user input and prints a readable ballot can take input from the voter in a variety of ways (e.g. by presenting the information in a variety of languages, and alternatives for the blind people and those with other disabilities), doing input validation to ensure the voter hasn't done something obviously dumb (e.g. voting for both Bush and Kerry). Also, it's very easy to randomize the order of the candidates for each voter, instead of randomizing the list the same way for everyone (as Oregon does) or randomizing the list in several different ways for random groups of voters (as California does).
You really don't think it's possible to make a computer that's easier to use than pencil and paper? And you call yourself a Slashdotter?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
In what way does this involve Oregon, which is a 100% Vote By Mail state?
I'm not really sure that 'voting machine fraud' applies here. I don't like the system itself, as it lends itself to even more fraud, but still...
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
To emphasize previous comments with a picture, Rick Jore lost in a 2004 race for the Montana House due to seven contested ballots. I personally prefer paper & pen, but it must be conceded that one advantage of electronic ballots is unambiguous interpretation of voter choice.
Paper trails are not enough. What is also needed is a verifiable counting procedures - or at the very least counting procedures that are difficult to tamper with. If you leave that up to a single machine (or a small number of machines all running the same code), then you have a very small target or even a single point of failure. Even worse, there is no way to look inside the machine and see how it is tallying votes. The only way to count votes fairly, is to have votes entered on paper, and then have them counted by many eyes and hands. This makes very difficult, due simply to the large number of people that must be involved with that tampering.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Of course you will have these machine printed ballots print all the vote selections in clearly readable text. But in addition to that, also include a copy of all the votes in bar code, along with a secure checksum. Before putting the ballot into the box, scan it on a verification machine. This machine performs optical character reading (OCR) of the text. It compares that to the bar code, and generates a checksum to compare as well. If anything is inconsistent, it reports an error so that vote can be done over. It should also put a red stamp on it. If the ballot is OK, it records an UN-official tally, sending that to a central site over a secure channel, for a master UN-official tally. The UN-official tally can be given to the media for public release right after all the polls close. They would be able to report 100% within seconds of closing (and get back to regular TV programming). In the mean time, the process to count the ballots officially begins. The ballots are shipped in their locked boxes to the central facility under armed guard, where they are counted again by machine scan. The ballots must be kept for the duration of the longest term of office voted in that election. They can be hand counted if ever needed.
Voters will also receive a receipt that prints the time and location of their vote, which ballot printing machine they used, and which vote scanning machine they used. That information plus the vote itself is then securely checksumed and that is printed numerically and in bar code. Every receipt is totally unique. The same info is on each ballot and is to be recorded during the official vote. The list of counted votes (using the same checksum as the receipt) shall be copied to a central computer that can be queried by receipt number to confirm that a vote was counted. The receipt shall NOT contain the actual votes.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The solution is to have pasty white Counting Monks raised from birth in dark cellars, trained in Numbers and names, no english, groomed only for counting votes without bias; to count the votes properly.
This is fine until the Counting Monks rise up against us, carving bar codes into our living flesh with their razor-sharp talons, until blood and chads run in the street.
Then you'll wish you'd opted for SkyNet instead.
-kgj
-kgj
This lawsuit will get nowhere. There is no County over a few thousand registered voters that will hand count everything. Machines are verifiable and will be used to rapidly count ballots no matter what. There is no going backwards on that topic. There aren't even enough people offering their time to help run the elections little own to help count.
It's a known fact that machines can more accurately & more rapidly count than humans. There is nothing wrong with paper ballots being counted by a machine. Anything beyond that may be questionable. Furthermore there is no possible chance of this lawsuit significantly changing the way we vote for our president in 2008.
Lastly, the federal government mandated & approved the electronic voting machines. This lawsuit cannot hit the states as the feds are the ones who made the states acquire the new electronic voting machines and decided which ones would be available for them to purchase.
"Direct Recording Electoral" systems, touch screen recording, etc. doesn't apply in the state of Oregon. Oregon doesn't have (and hasn't had for years) traditional election days. All voting in Oregon is done by mail. They send you a paper ballot; you mark the ballot and mail it back in. You can vote anytime after you receive the ballot (a couple of weeks before the election day); the ballot just has to reach the county office by election day. So unless the counties throw away the paper ballots, there is a paper trail. At least in our county the ballot is a "fill in the bubble" paper that's first read electronically; or is looked at manually in recounts.
Schemes like the one you propose don't work for the same reason communism didn't work. Even if many people agree that it could be the ideal solution, most people would rather stay at home and watch TV rather than participate personally in the political process. In the end, it's the political bosses who make all the decisions, independent of how the votes are counted. After all, those "volunteers" who check the counting at each station aren't just ordinary citizens like you and me, most of them are people who have been promised jobs if their candidate wins.
That is almost 2 ballots a minute. How many questions do you have on your ballots?
Last election we had about 65 questions per ballot. When we vote here, we vote for everything all at once. That means all local, state, and federal positions that are up for contest plus any local, state, and federal questions such as changes to laws.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
1. Bad hand writing
You don't have to write anything, just fill in a bubble.
2. If it is done by your hand, then it is easier to forge. If it is done by computer, they can use special inks, paper, and maybe a confirmation bar code.
I don't see why people can't use special pen and paper for a pen and paper ballot. How exactly would a confirmation bar code work and what would it confirm? That just sounds like hand waving to me.
3. The electronic machine could do a 'pre count', so that while the official count is not till next day, you get something to report tonight.
Why should we care whether the news outlets have anything to report? Accuracy is what matters.
5. Environmentally better as printed ballots can use less paper and ink.
Computers contain a lot of hazardous materials and use power to run. And since the only good designs use a paper intermediate anyway, I don't think you'll see any benefit here.
6. A well done machine can remind you to vote for all things voted on, possibly explaining a 3 paragraph refererdum without wasting lots of paper and ink, or time for those that don't need the explanation.
I don't think we need voting machines interpreting anything for the voters. Who writes those explanations? How do those explanations affect the results? Come to the booth prepared to vote. If you don't know enough to make a decision, abstain. Is that so hard?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ok, so where are you going to find 3-10 people to work 8 hours a day for a month counting votes in a county with a low population?
The problem is who is going to be available to make counting ballots a full time job for a month and how does one qualify them to the satisfaction of all parties. One will have to pair people by political affiliation, specifically no pair can be for the same candidate. Considering that those counting the ballots will have to be available all day, anyone with a full time job is out of the question.
Finding that many people who are qualified and who can devote that much time to what is essentially a temp job will not be as easy as you think. Imagine it as jury duty guarantied to last one month, possibly more.
Oh, and how do recounts get handled? Are new counting teams formed or do you get a whole new group of counters?
And if you want something really scary, imagine that you have to train the counters. Hanging/pregnant chads anyone?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Exactly. We're far too impatient of a society now a days, I remember at the last election (state) one of my friends looking up the results online as they were coming in. Personally I'd rather wait until I knew what was going on (one of the ballots he got really excited about looked to be winning, then fell slightly behind and failed, he had been cheering when it was up) rather than look silly when something changes.
If we really can't wait 3-4 days, not to mention 1-2, to find out who won one of the most important elections then that's a problem with us as a whole, not the 'slow' counting system.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
How many issues are on a ballot there?
Here in Tampa FL we had about 65 last election. I don't think anyone can count and record 65 items from a ballot in one minute, let alone 20 seconds.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
No paper or punchcard was used. There were wheels with numbers in the back/insided that were incrimented with each vote. No physical record.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Regardless of the benefits of the early tally, you're dead on about the number of ballots that are simply not marked correctly. By using a machine to catch such errors (HEY... WE DIDN'T REGISTER A VOTE BECAUSE YOU CROSSED OUT THE GUY YOU DIDN'T WANT INSTEAD OF FILLING IN THE OVAL FOR THE ONE YOU WANTED), you eliminate a huge number of questions about "voter intent," which is something that a hand count might not be able to definitively assess. This also includes from voting for more candidates than the contest allows, voting for the same person twice in a "Vote for Two" contest where that candidate is cross-filed, and other fun stuff (that varies from state to state).
There are a whole lot of things that pen and paper can't do, but the "let's go back to paper" crowd doesn't like to complicate matters with "real world" issues like that. Similarly, you have the whole issue of voter disenfranchisement for people with various accessibility needs, few of which are adequately addressed by non-electronic systems.
Tim
I agree - open source is certainly a necesary condition for any electronic voting machine. I'm just not convinced it is enough - particularly when the existing system isn't really broken. Well, at least not broken in a way that evoting can help with.
Paper ballots have been successfully tallied for hundreds of years, and by it's very nature this method is much harder to subvert on a large scale.
Off-Topic a bit, but I think all positions should allow for a vote of no-confidence for any of the runners. That way people don't have to vote for "the best of 2 evils".
If the tally of no-confidence votes is greater than the tally for any individual:
- A new election should be held within 3 months
- Candidates from the original election are disqualified from subsequent no-confidence elections.
- In the meantime, depending on the position, another qualified person will hold the acting title. Congress will determine who the acting positions are on the federal level, and each State and County will need to set up rules for determining this.
listen up kids. Machines are TOOLS. Nobody is arguing that a machine can count zeroes and ones faster and more accurately than a person.
Even deliberate fraud by one person (in a manual count) *must* cause less damage than one who has this tool:
update vote set candidate='my preference' where voter_state='florida' limit 35000;
And yes, in the case of banks, they DO perform a human audit when demanded.
Pen and paper can still be forged. The only corruption-free method of voting is to stand up and be counted.
My proposal: Everyone who supports the Republican candidate in the next election moves to Texas. Everyone else moves away from Texas. Then, when the election is over, and residents of the states have been counted, we'll know that our President is the unambiguous leader of these proud 49 states.
Occam's razor applies very well to voting
No, it doesn't. Occam's Razor applies to explanations of observed phenomena, not to methods of doing something.
Regardless of how you or I feel about support for multi-language, in most states the law stipulates a percentage of registered voters that require the state to support a given language. For example, in NY, depending on the town, you may have to support up to eight languages. In complex districts (that is, lots of school/town/county lines cris-crossing), it's a huge expenditure.
Even small states with English-only ballots spend (typically) seven figures just on ballot printing for various federal, state, and municipal elections. In larger states, getting the paper printed in the necessary languages, with all the correct names and wording checked and printed properly (and done on very short notice), is a logistical nightmare.
As for large print, consider NY, where the "full face" law requires you to present the entire ballot in such a way that you can see the whole thing at a glance. To do so in LARGE PRINT would require (for some of the NY ballots I've seen) poster board. Literally.
With that said, I'm a firm believer in paper, but would like to see the US make some changes in the way we typically generate that paper. What I'm not pushing for is mandatory hand-counting of that paper. I would prefer to see machine counting as an option for any locale that wants to use it, for whatever reason.
Tim
Oh Noes! Can't have that!
The EC is off-topic for this thread but I must point out that
The Electoral College can benefit those who appeal to a limited geographic region. If you have 1 candidate with nationwide appeal and candidates with regional appeal, the candidate with nationwide appeal can have a majority of the popular vote, carry 49% of most states, win outright in a few states, yet come in 3rd in the Electoral College vote.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is EXACTLY why people who aren't US citizens don't understand/appreciate the complexity of what goes on here, and why finding a "best" answer is so difficult.
Of course, adding to this is the issue that voting law is the realm of the states, and not the federal gov't (unless someone's civil rights are infringed upon), but that is as poorly understood as the relationship between the states and the Electoral College.
Cheers,
Tim
This doesn't count as a statistical study, but discusses how accurate
the count would have to have been in Florida to have a determinate result in
Bush v. Gore:
http://web.jhu.edu/president/articles/2000/wpnov00.html
Here is a claim by Washington State electoral officials that studies had shown
their elections to be 99.99 % accurate. Even if true, that represents
an error of 10,000 votes in a 100million voter federal election.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002185379_accuracy20m.html
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/office/osos_news.aspx?i=U4SQ5nub4drPOpM60107aQ%3D%3D
Note that the claimed accuracy is not enough to have determined the
Florida presidential vote in 2000.
Here's a typical Mexican election:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3344
More anecdotes:
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=MISCOUNT-ELECT-12-20-04&cat=AN
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
IRV is innately flawed, and the fix for it (any of the Condorcet methods) is too complicated to quickly explain - which is an unacceptable property for a voting system to be used in a democratic society. On the other hand, "first past the post" is also unacceptable.
The only acceptable answer that I've discovered is Approval Voting. It fixes the basic problems with first-past-the-post and IRV while being conceptually simpler than any of the ranked voting systems.
If you're not convinced because Approval Voting seems "odd", think about how it would work in a real election and consider what effect the strategies that people would suggest and use would have on election outcomes. I'd expect the results to be as good as could be expected from a voting system to elect a single person.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
hmmm.. interesting. Another similar take: a candidate has to be selected by more than 50% of the *eligible voters*. That means the candidate actually represents the majority of the electorate instead of the plurality of voters. Big difference. Of course you'd have to get people to actually vote in that case.
If you couple that with instant run-off it starts to look pretty good to me. Not only are you getting more voters involved, but you're also breaking the duopoly of the current two-party thing. We've got some locals just elected who are pushing instant run-off. Should be interesting.
man, I feel like mold.
Should get damn interesting
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
You're doing it wrong.
We hand-count our votes in the Massachusetts town I live in. The volunteers usually get the job done in about 5 hours.
You don't have a handful of people count the votes for the whole county, you have the polling station volunteers stay up until 10 or 11pm that night (or come back the next day) and count the votes.
This is democracy. If half a percent of the population needs to spend two days every couple years making it happen, so be it.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
When making decisions, there are frequently tradeoffs.
If people can't even be bothered to spend the time counting the votes for that many public officials, maybe we could do with less of them. That's certainly a much more legitimate option than throwing away the ability to trust election results at all.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
There's another problem with the barcode. How do you know it doesn't encode information that can be used to trace the voter? That could be something as simple as the exact time of your vote coupled with the ID of the voting machine. This information could then be used for vote buying (which is only really possible if the vote can be traced back to the voter).
Something else that comes to mind but which they may have dealt with: what if the printed vote is not what you intended? Is there a way to scrap your vote and "?REDO FROM START"?
And conveniently enough, I can use that system to buy your vote.
Before you enter the polling place, I promise to pay you $100 to vote for my candidate. I use your take-home receipt and password to verify that you voted the way I asked you to, and give you $100. Ta-da! Bought election.
The voting system should never provide anything to you that you can remove from the polling place. The possibility of vote-buying is far too great. If you're worried about corruption in tabulation, then that's handled by having the official vote count done in public, using open-source software and ballots that are both machine and human readable.
Remember the big fuss about election fraud in the 2004 elections?
Those complaints weren't about DRE voting machines, they were about optical scan vote counting systems.
Now, unlike DRE systems, it's *possible* to have a legitimate election with optical scan counting machines. The basic principle is that the partisan and independent observers need to observe the validity of a statistically-useful sample of the ballot counts. The mathematical requirements are non-trivial, and all of the participants need to understand them for the process to be valid. That didn't happen in Ohio in 2004.
Note how the observer requirement differs from a hand-counted election. With a hand count, *any* observer can personally understand that the count was performed correctly and the election was legitimate. With a statistically checked optical scan count, only someone with a college-level math background can be sure about the count, and then only if they were paying close attention to the details.
Requiring that people be statisticians to audit an election pretty strongly misses the point of democracy even if they're actually there and everything gets run correctly. In practice, the election officials in the United States can't even accomplish that. Seems to me that the proposal to require hand counts everywhere is pretty reasonable.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I've never heard of this. Concession, as far as I knew was the same as withdrawing from an election.
Bullish Machine Tzar
This didn't bother you? They went to all that effort to print a paper ballot with your vote on it, and then they made the actual "vote" part unreadable... and you "found this satisfying"?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Only those who want to steal elections are against photo IDs.
Why would 97,000 Canadians vote for Ron Paul?
96 hours? That's four days!
The TV News people are never going to let you go 4 days without announcing a result. Their rule is that the results have to be announced before people go to bed. They announced Gore as the winner in 2000 before midnight in the Midwest.
If you don't have results for them, they will announce the results from exit polls. That should be accurate enough, right? Because if you don't have a system that gives real results before midnight results will be announced anyway.
The elections were pretty fair to BEGIN with. Diebold and related companies have broken it and caused the election problems which this article is about. They should face responsibility for defrauding governments into unnecessarily wasting money on making our elections insecure.
Personally I don't need tenative results. I think that the desire for instant gratification and instant results is part of what has enabled the process to become subverted. I would rather wait for as long as it takes to be sure that the votes are being properly counted and are verifiable.
When you look at things like the VNS; what happened in 2000 and 2004 (regardless of who you voted for) you have to wonder.
Everyone should want fair and transparent elections - When people/organizations and governments try to force technological measures on the public when it is clear that there are numerous problems - to me that seems pretty cut and dried that they do NOT want fairness and transparency, they want control.
In my (and many other people's opinions) things are so fucked up in America now; and it's not like they got that way by accident. It's clear there is a trend of taking rights and transparent processes away from the people while at the same time imposing edicts and secrecy.
To put pen and paper in context, it costs $35,000 CAN for my city to run an election/referendum for 10,000 eligible voters. The last referendum we had, less than 20% of eligible votes turned out.
Not advocating either side but it adds some perspective.
How does lying to an exit pollster, who works for the media, "undermine democracy".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A printed ballot could have a barcode and be read by machine.
This give you automatic vote counting AND a full paper trail.
To keep the system in check, randomly chosen cards could be hand verified after the election to make sure the barcodes are correctly printed.
Maybe I should go out and patent this, just in case common sense breaks out somewhere.
No sig today...
But probably not as expensive as electing Bush once.
Exactly. Here in Canada we still use 'rustic' voting methods. When you arrive at your polling station you identify yourself and receive a paper ballot. The candidate's names and party affiliations are listed on the left. A circle where you mark your 'X' is lined up next to the names on the right. Mark your 'x' and drop in the ballot box. No fuss, no muss, no scandals over disenfranchisement or voter fraud. Plus, even though ballots are counted manually, we still know who our new government is before we go to bed that night...
Support the mob or mysteriously disappear.
Withdrawing from an election after the ballot is printed also has no legal effect. You still win the election if you get the most votes.
Good way to go. Double blind, one official public vote tally, one independent (who, non-profit "Open Community/Government" foundation) public vote tally, you pass your vote through both systems (where/how?), both systems generate an ecopy (for prelim-results) and hardcopy for (hand count) official public record, all ecopy and hand-count should match, and you keep (for your comfort/faith) the original vote receipt.
..., because we do not have a democracy. We have an oligarchy/plutocracy like Russia and China.
... other than propaganda for USA freedom mythology it has been a waste of time. Maybe ... it is why many in the USA do not vote ....
Oh, it could never happen
HOWEVER, if it does happen, I will start voting again. For the past few decades
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I lie to exit pollers, too.
I do it because the exit pollsters (the mainstream media) have been undermining democracy by manipulating elections at least since I was old enough to recognize it.
Exit polls allegedly serve one purpose: so that competing media organizations can project the outcome of an election before the votes are counted. But, doing so has been shown to affect the outcome of elections that close after projections are announced.
The media certainly has the right to do this. But, it's irresponsible. And it's not difficult to deduce a particular media outlet's bias by observing the timing of their projections.
I see it as my opportunity for payback: I lie to them once every two years, they lie to me the rest of the time.
Or would that be too sensible?
No, it would be ineffably stupid. Any scheme that allows you to take your finished ballot, or a copy of it, outside the polling place is a sure way to vote-buying or monitoring by others in a position of power.
why does everything have to be so complicated? In Australia we get the candidate names on a piece of paper with big boxes next to each name. We simply write numbers 1-whatever indicating our preferences. If you're too stupid to work that out each party also hands out "how to vote" cards. The votes are counted by hand at the end of the election.
Since you don't have a preferential system in USA it should be even easier, all you need to do is tick a box. Even the voters of Florida should be able to handle that one.
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
The republic died decades ago if not over a century ago, the US is trying to hang on in the same fashion as the content cartels.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
That's everyone's favorite solution. But it ignores a rather basic fact: it's possible to forge paper ballots too. After all, people were stealing elections long before voting machines were invented.
True, the paper ballots give you a way to doublecheck the results. But if the paper ballots and the electronic count don't agree, which one do you believe?
Of course, there are ways to safeguard paper ballots that have been worked out over many years. But they all boil down to one thing: make ballot counting process as open as possible, so that nobody has a chance to cheat. And you can do that with electronic voting much more easily than you can do it with paper ballots. You just have to make sure that everything about your voting system — hardware designs, software source, data transmission, handling procedures — is out in the open for anybody to see.
The big problem is that voting technology vendors want to keep their proprietary technology proprietary, and that's just not going to work. Probably the only solution is for the government, either the federal government or a consortium of state governments, to actually design the systems, with the private sector restricting itself to manufacturing and support.
One of the few things that the Utah legislature got from Diebold was the insistance upon a paper audit trail that is voter-verified when you cast your ballot.
These are still the same Diebold machines that have caused problems in California and elsewhere, but when you cast your ballot, a paper version of the ballot is produced that you can review as a voter. A "grocery store" printer (essentially the same thing that prints out your receipt at an ATM.... I wonder where they got that one?) prints out your ballot showing each race and the candidate that you voted for... including a "write in" candidate if you choose to go that route. As a voter, you have to explicitly press spots on the voting booth (it is a touch screen user interface) that says formally that you have reviewed the paper audit trail and that the votes recorded on that paper version match your preference. If you indicate that there is an error, the printer marked the ballot as "spoiled" and lets you go back and change your votes, reprinting a new ballot for you again. Or you can then involve a precinct voting judge to get involved in the process if you want to try another machine.
Utah also allows you to "vote provisionally" with a hand-written paper ballot if you think computers are full of fraud, and have them counted by hand the old-fashion way if you want. Mind you, while the votes are put in the same box as those from challenged voters (if somebody questions the citizenship of the voter, and the ballot is "put aside" while the citizenship is reviewed), but at the time the votes are counted, those who refuse to have their votes counted by computer are counted on the night of the election. Generally this amounts to about 1% of the total votes, so it isn't a huge problem.
My only complaint about the Utah voter system is that the paper audit trail is not actually used to determine the vote totals unless a formal recount is requested. The state Lt. Governor's office (who in Utah is in charge of the election process) only does a 1% random sampling inspection to verify the paper audit trail if there isn't a recount. There is still room for voting fraud on the local level, but that is nothing new. And there are checks and verification steps that would require the cooperation of every single election judge involved (of multiple political parties) to perform that sort of voting fraud. The use of computers is immaterial to the outcome of that sort of fraud.
From what I see this idiot who is filing the lawsuit here is talking about, he is going to have a very hard time making it stick in Utah, and will likely face barratry charges as well for even filing this lawsuit in Utah. Especially if he does it in "all 50 states". I hope he rethinks this approach and instead goes after a specific instance of where he thinks potential voting fraud may actually be occurring, due to the lack of a paper trail.
This may also be just a PR stunt as a threat of a lawsuit.... which may also have legal consequences as well if he doesn't follow through and actually file. My money is on the pure PR stunt, and no actual action is going to happen.
As an Aussie I second that. Diebold and others have tried to get Australia to use their election rigging systems, fortunately it seems that our electoral commission actually does know a thing or two about counting votes in a transparent and fully accountable manner. As for speed, elections are held on a Saturday and the public usually have a result that night or the next day.
As for TFA they are absolutely correct: A machine that prints your ballot is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your ballot is at best a waste of money
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
hmmm.. interesting. Another similar take: a candidate has to be selected by more than 50% of the *eligible voters*. That means the candidate actually represents the majority of the electorate instead of the plurality of voters. Big difference. Of course you'd have to get people to actually vote in that case.
The problem with this would be that you'd end up with chaos far too often as nobody can pull in enough voters for it to matter. Unless you want to make voting mandatory.
A majority of those motivated enough to haul themselves into a polling place is sufficient, though I agree on some sort of instant run-off system.
I don't read AC A human right
The voting machine can print out a nice clean ballot, using an easily readable & OCReable font, and presenting ONLY those choices that the voter made.
You can also provide specialized voting machines that provide support for the disabled, but which still generate the nice clean ballot that can be counted with all of the other ballots generated by non-disabled folks.
Using a machine to print the ballots can provide some decent benefits. It's when you use machines to do the counting which cause the main breakdown in a trustworthy voting scheme.
The votes are counted by hand at the end of the election.
One of my arguments is that a properly operating optical system is more accurate than hand counting. Besides, we don't have the volunteership necessary in many areas, or the finances, to conduct a 100% handcount.
If you're too stupid to work that out each party also hands out "how to vote" cards.
In most municipalities you don't even need that in the states. They're nice enough to mark (D) or (R) next to all the names.
Of course, I'm also of the opinion that if you're too stupid(or mad) to mark the form correctly, it's correctly a spoiled ballet and shouldn't count. After all, I'm talking about a system used in schools for various tests.
We simply write numbers 1-whatever indicating our preferences.
What about people like my grandfather? He has a disorder where his hands shake uncontrollably. Your average person is going to have a difficult time telling the difference between a 1 and a 2, much less something like a 1 and a 7.
Look - I'm advocating using pen and paper for the most part - with electronic 'voting' machines being used by the disabled to help fill out the ballot.
We might also be getting distracted a bit - but at least in the USA, your typical presidential election also has you voting for your representative, a 50-50 of voting for a senator, in addition to state level elections like governor, local representatives, even city mayor, school board, judges, multiple propositions, etc...
Last election I had over a hundred items to vote on - that's part of the reason I find electronic counting, properly audited, to be more accurate and cheaper than hand counting.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, you know, he had to concede, there was a chance the wrong Skull & Bones member might get in. How are you going to establish a royal family when a Prince can't even continue his fathers legacy, or a Queen supplant her King?
Simply vote, it prints your ballot, and you slip it in a box.
Such a thing exists. It is used in voting jurisdictions which use scantron ballots. Individuals who have disabilities or general issues filling out the scantron use the Automark instead to complete their ballot, and then drop it in the box.
Essentially, your proposal is to have everyone fill out their ballot using the Automark. As far as I know, no jurisdiction does it, but by all means, we've got the technology.
You mean just like socialist evil Venezuela did? But that then proves that elections were fair... that keeps people like evil scumbag Chavez in power legitimately :( /sarcasm
You're nothing; like me.
No, your solution isn't going to work. Votes can be bought now - you don't need a receipt to verify a vote - so that is a bogus argument anyhow. Besides there are ways around that too if you put your thinking cap on.
Whether or not you can "buy a vote" is completely relevant regardless. What is more important is that republican agents can't get their candidates elected with faked votes as they did in Ohio and Florida.
What is important is that voters can verify that the count is correct and valid.
What is more important is that EVERY voter can verify that the vote count is correct and valid.
That's the way towards a secure election.
Any vote that doesn't let me and every voter verify the vote (in the voting booth and later on) is an invalid election as the counters can NOT be trusted. This was demonstrated with the two stolen elections by Bush.
Electronic voting is about the only method less reliable than the punch card ballots of Floridian infamy. And I'm surprised someone hasn't responded to you that Canadians manage to hand count all of their ballots in all of their elections quickly, honestly and accurately.
You can never thwart every attack by infinitely clever criminals, but you can take security measures that are well established for paper voting and reimplement them. Not only opening source code but having it verifiable at runtime by various partisan third parties would seem an obvious first step to legitimate electronic voting. This would necessitate a second layer of open source runtime analysis tools unless experts were available across parties for all electorates, but again these can be independently verified if open. Unfortunately this creates an infinite regression - how to verify the verification tools. To minimise this issue, instituting a manual count using printouts with the existing processes alongside should be mandatory, and no final count given until the physical record is thoroughly scrutinised by human eyes.
Pen and paper can still be forged.
Not really. It would take a large conspiracy to swing an election.
The only corruption-free method of voting is to stand up and be counted.
Uh, no. You need anonymous voting so voters can't be bribed/pressured to vote a certain way.
Can anyone honestly vote on 65 issues?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You don't write out "Hillary Clinton" or "Rudy Giuliani" on your ballot, you put an X next to their names. You screw up, just ask for a new ballot, and your old one is shredded in front of you plus an election official from each party.
This is not true. Voter suppression is a Republican tactic, and it has been used by them in elections since 2000. It has not been used to any meaningful amount by Democrats since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
Here is one current Republican voter suppression tactic: voter caging, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_caging. From the Wikipedia article:
The RNC got caught doing this in 2000, and they were sued and lost, so they signed a consent decree.Meanwhile the RNC has moved on to other vote suppression measures: Voter ID. You have to show a pictue ID to vote.
Here are some stats (from From http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/058739.php).
# 21.8% of black Indiana voters do not have access to a valid photo ID (compared to 15.8% of white Indiana voters - a 6 point gap).
# When non-registered eligible voter responses are included - the gap widens. 28.3% of eligible black voters in the State of Indiana to not have valid photo ID (compared to 16.8% of eligible voting age white Indiana residents - a gap of 11.5 percent).
# The study found what it termed "a curvilinear pattern (similar to an upside down U-curve)" in the relationship between age and access to valid ID - younger voters and older voters were both less likely to have valid ID compared to voters in the middle categories. 22% of voters 18-34 did not have ID, nor did 19.4% over the age of 70. (compared to 16.2% of Indiana voters age 35-54 without valid ID and 14.1% for 55-69 year olds).
# 21% of Indiana registered voters with only a high school diploma did not have valid ID (compared to 11.5% of Indiana voters who have completed college - a gap of 9.5%).
# Those with valid ID are much more likely to be Republicans than those who do not have valid ID. Among registered voters with proper ID, 41.6% are registered Republicans, 32.5% are Democrats.
Republicans are opposed to the fundamentals of Democratic government, including free and fair voting. When you claim that "this applies to BOTH sides equally" you are either factually incorrect or you are lying. At this point if you support this administration, or any of the Republican candidates, you are attacking our constitutional form of government. If you don't want to support a Democrat, fine. You can be an independent. But don't have any pretenses: Republicans hate voting, and they hate real democracy.
And, pray tell, why do we have this fetish for knowing the winner five minutes after the polls close? I find it more interesting when we don't know right away. The real reason for this? It's all media driven. The sooner that the networks and local stations can announce the winner, the sooner they can turn away from that small bit of public service programming that they provide (and which, rating-wise, is a snooze, because so many people are politically disengaged) and get right back on the profit trail. I'm so glad the media have been so successful in convincing so many of my fellow citizens that close races and late results are a disaster. We don't want the public to be distracted from important news like where Brittney Spears showed her cooch this week, after all.
That is all.
NY state polling workers get paid $15 per, from experience. 15 hours with no break! It kinda sucks.
sconeu wrote:
Cool. But now you need to explain why, back in 2004, unusual numbers of people started lying to pollsters in a particular way, in patterns that correlate with (a) battle ground states (b) the presence of Republican governors, and so on.
I don't say that you can't construct some such hypothetical after the fact, but no one would've predicted that behavior before the fact.
Myself, I think 2004 was a first in history: large-scale, automated voting fraud.
So they can include that with in the suit, either that or force a election day public holiday, a true celebration of democracy, and eminently appropriate. Of course the rich and greedy will loathe the idea, otherwise people might get the foolish idea that elections are actually about giving the majority of people a choice rather than just a misinformed, mislead and betrayed minority.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It's more complicated than that. What type of printing system are you going to use? Will it print to a non-accessible role of paper or to a paper ballot that may then be deposited in the ballot box? Will it use thermal paper (which degrades quickly, but is inexpensive) or some other solution? I've pointed out the complexities involved before.
It should suffice to say that a system that only accounts for security or verifiability of the votes would actually be unacceptable.
P.S. To the hand-written paper-ballot (Australian ballot) wing nuts out there: your proposed solution is completely unworkable because it fails to account for reality.
P.P.S. To the Diebold wing nuts out there: People like the idea of paper trails because they want to know that there vote is being counted without having to trust you.
I am not a lawyer. This post does not constitute any form of legal advice.
It is interesting that the "voting machine problem" is at the vertex of a lot of ideas and assertions that have the status of myth.
Myth - a governent can't design and build a robust, accurate and verifyable voting system. They will encumber the process with too much documentation or they wlll allow a design with design terms omitted.
Myth a private company (like Diebold) can't build a robust, accurate and auditable voting machine. They will knock out some chicken poop menu and script gadget that can be tweaked before the election and boguesd after the vote.
Now if you take these two myths and hold them in your mind together, there begins to emerge some huge propositions and problems.
One proposition I see is: Why in the past two presidential elections did it seem like the more momemtous the difference between the two candidates the margin of popular vote between the candidates got smaller?
Check me on this: The margin of victory narrowed between the Democratic and Republican candidates as the days to election day dwindled.
The narrowness of the election victory in many places created many opportunities where small scale vote fraud and deployment of technicalities flipped the electoral vote.
The discussion of election mechanics taking place here is an attempt to mechanically resolve a really basic problem with democracy, the guy you didn't vote for gets elected.
What could we do to the election process itself to improve the assessment and judgments preceding the vote? Presently we need a voting system that is auditable to 1 vote in a billion.
Peter Drucker has written books on how to select a qualified chief executive. Why can't we implement some of those good ideas in selecting a President? Why do we still have "Swift boating" as a major component of the presidential selection process?
How might we better understand the founding fathers rather ambivalent approach to voting itself? They took pains to slow down the feedback loops with a long term for the presidency, staggered terms for senators, and no national vote at all on referendum items.
One cause of quality problems in the voting system is we don't do it often enough with full auditing and quality control. The founding fathers put that time delay into the voting system design.
From cybernetics, feedback theory and 200 years of development as a nation how might we guardedly implement more and more frequent elections to bring about "more democracy'?
On the concern about accuracy in elections, note that voters of the United States reelected the presently sitting president. What would it mean if we had a vote with 1:1billion count accuracy now? What it means is the 48% of losing voters have to credit the winner with the opportunities of the office. So the winners want a mathematically accurate count so they can claim the entire electorate's approbation.
Looking at elections involving the current president, his second victory came to him because during wars voters choose continuity. Roosevelt's second and third victories were wartime continuity decisions. Hmm, how about Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson? Were those also wartime continuity presidents?
So, is the election accuracy problem a technical manifestation of the anxiety we are feeling as a nation? We have the biggest military in the world, projecting force every day on every ocean and on most continents. There is this deep uncertainty that is repeatedly being invoked to keep repeatedly choosing "the slightly more conservative - slightly more aggressive - slightly more nationalistic" leadership. As we slide down a slope to the swamp of empire.
The paradox of the democratic election process is we keep wedging ourselves gradually into a set of policies favoring empire. Gee, like Athens in the Peloponesian wars?
By basing it on states won, we say that a small state (Rhode Island, for instance) is equally important, on the whole, to the vote as a big state (Cali?). This seems great, but then we look at the fact that the population of Tiny State is say, 3 units of population, and Big State has, say, 12 units.
(I don't know population statistics, but Rhode Island has way fewer people than Cali.)
We say that:
3 units of people = 12 units of people
because:
1 state = 1 state.
By calling Bigstate and Smallstate equal points to each state being a separate entity. Not necessarily wrong, but the UNITED States is meant to be based on raw people, not geographic regions. The problem is that, inevitably, candidates campaign in Bigstate so they get the 12 units. Smallstate is better in a state-votes system: Fewer people, same number of votes. Bigstate is better in a people-votes system: same travel, more votes. We, as voters, are forced to hope that whichever system we use will bypass these shortcuts and work as it should on paper. What all this means is that either way (state-votes or people-votes) there are shortcuts. Fixing the system is either eliminating the shortcuts, or finding a system without them.
In agreement with the parent and to address a number of points that have come up in the discussion so far:
Here in South Africa we use a system of paper ballots. You vote for a national party representative and a provincial party representative. We have 10+ different parties you can vote for depending on how many are registired in a given year or area. We have 11 offical languages so all ballots are available in all 11 languages. The ballots are hand counted but tabulated and counted up using a computer system.
This is in a third world African country and yet we generally now the full results the next afternoon or evening (after the voting day which is a public holiday). While the elections aren't completely free of possible election fraud and shenannigans we manage to have a free, fair and timeous election.
It kinda boggles the mind that it can't be (or won't be) done in the USA.
In my country, it is considered fair play for a loser to acknoledge the poll result as soon as the vote is over when the result estimates show a clear enough hierarchy, but such a statement has absolutely no effect on the official result counting and publication. Theorically, a candidate can say a loser speach on sunday evening and be officialy declared winner monday morning.
The most important requirement is that
the system must be understood by the majority of the people
so that they can trust the system deep down in their heart.
There is no way anybody could explain this cryptographic system
to more than 0.01% of the people in anything other than saying
"trust us elite few, we know it works"
and
"trust us elite few when we tell you that we have not rigged the system"
This is very poor system, no matter how technically fancy it might be
and especially because it is to fancy technically.
Iraqis, we invaded your country. Now you can have a flawed voting system just like us :-)
Wasn't that worth the thousands of deaths and instability?
Those complaints weren't about DRE voting machines, they were about optical scan vote counting systems.
Inaccurate generalization. There were plenty of complaints about DRE machines, particularly in Ohio. Now, the complaints may have been misdirected, but you statement is incorrect here.
Note how the observer requirement differs from a hand-counted election. With a hand count, *any* observer can personally understand that the count was performed correctly and the election was legitimate. With a statistically checked optical scan count, only someone with a college-level math background can be sure about the count, and then only if they were paying close attention to the details.
The back up for optical scan is to hand count the votes. Problem solved well as much as hand counting ever solves problems. One isn't "required" to be a statistician though someone needs to be to understand the flaws in hand counting.
States elect the president and the vote determines the state's results. States could fix the "big block" problem with proportional allocation of electoral college votes. They don't do that because the party in power, say in California or New York, doesn't want to give up their safe votes. It's not the constitution that is the problem. Its the fact that neither political party wants to give up their advantages.
Concession is nothing more than congratulating your opponent on his or her win. It has no legal standing, if you want to withdraw from an election, you have to do more than call your opponent and wish them luck.
Al Gore conceded to GWB a few hours after counting had begun in 2000, based upon initial reports that showed Bush winning in Florida, amongst other places. When it became clear that Florida was still up for grabs, he called Bush again withdrawing the concession, leading to Bush saying something that lead Gore to famously reply "Well, there's no need to get all snippy over it."
Theoretically a candidate could ask his or her electors to vote for his or her opponent, but given the electors meet weeks after the election, it's improbable the candidate would not know what the outcome of the election was by that time. I believe some states would even penalize electors who follow such instructions anyway.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I guess it's a good thing the topic had digressed to discussing an ideal solution for voting problems, rather than the lawsuit then, isn't it?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
what part of that said that you could take it out of the voting place? You destroy any unused ballots and put the correct one in the box where the ballots are stored?
Might I suggest reading comprehension?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I don't really care of the voting machines are mechanical or digital, as long as their designs and any code on them is a matter of public record. I also really don't care how they collect the vote.
What I do care about is that after I vote, I get a printed receipt with a confirmation number. I can then either call a phone line or log in to the internet and verify that confirmation number with the government and CONFIRM ABSOLUTELY the details of my vote by having the system display it back to me.
This confirmation number is used to trace all aspects of the vote in the system. It changes with every vote and every election and is never linked to a person's name or identity in any way. This is the ONLY way we will ever be able to catch voting fraud.
Give us that check and balance, and then give us Condorcet voting, and our election woes will be put to rest forever.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
Are you a statistician or something? I've read up on the various Condorcet methods, and there seem to be pros and cons, but to my layman understanding it didn't seem excessively complicated, particularly the classic IVR (Shulze?) where the candidate with the fewest votes is removed, and his/her votes removed from the pool, causing anyone who chose that person as their first choice to now elevate their second choice to first position, and run the numbers over and over until someone has 50+1. The confusion seems to be the methods that include an initial round where they do almost a round robin comparison. I wrote a prog to generate random voting patterns and then progress through the repeated elimination stages, and I could not figure out what type of anomaly would have to occur for there to be a problem, aside from a true tie or circular paradox, which doesn't seem any more likely than a tie in a two candidate race. Do you know offhand where I could read up on the specific problems with it?
was designed to fulfill all those requirements. You have to compare either actual e-voting systems to actual paper systems, or you have to compare potential features of e-voting systems with potential features of paper systems. I don't think they're any different.
Why couldn't a paper ballot system also provide the same features, if they were important? For example, you could put a serial number on each ballot, which the voter would note; he could then specify a PIN on the ballot and then log on to the election web site and enter the serial number and PIN to see how his vote was tabulated. Presuming this is something we wanted.
The fundamental flaw of all electronic systems is that they can NEVER actually be audited without breaching voter confidentiality. Auditing fundamentally requires independent sources of information. You can check that a system appears internally consistent, and that is all. A clever and comprehensive enough attempt to cheat will foil any internal consistency check. You need an independent data source, such as a paper ballot, or an affidavit by a voter that the vote he cast was improperly tabulated. The latter case is far from perfect for many reasons, not the least is that you don't know if the voter is lying in his affidavit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Same here in Germany. Although they're experimenting with different kinds of "electronic voting" as well.
hmmm a day when you don't otherwise work if you're say a teacher. 15 hours at 15$ is $225 dollars to sit around and watch people vote. And, yes, they do get bathroom breaks they are not chained to their chairs.
FWIW the polls in every district (MN / NY) I have ever lived in are dead until at least noon! and not 'busy' until 3, given they close at 9 thats 6 really hard hours of work..
This only matters if a hand count actually occurs. If an automatic count occurs and there's *any question* of a full hand count not also occurring, all the problems of automatic counting apply.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Have you ever attended a vote counting personally? I understand you discord but the issue with voting machines is the process of a paper trail was scrapped for any number of reasons (cost). A paper trail allows these votes to be recounted is necessary.
I am a plaintiff of NCEL. NCEL was started by the "We The People Foundation". http://wethepeoplefoundation.org/. We are in the process of serving the papers to my state, and posting the video to the public. More will come soon.
It is imperative that we return to paper ballots, and they be counted in front of the public who voted. Machines are not to be trusted, especially when they are proprietary, created by a private company, and who's owner stated that "he is dedicated to helping the president get elected".
"Its not who votes that counts. Its who counts the votes." - Joseph Stalin
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
Its a shame that David Earnhardt went out of his way to make his movie a partisan hit piece on Republicans instead of an honest and unbiased look at the problems of "black box voting".
... to bad he just told half his audience to fuck off.
... and there are just as many Democrat politicians that would cheat at the drop of a hat.
This is an issue that transcends the politics of the moment, and he does have some important things to say
Despite what most of you Democrats desperately seem to want to believe, Republicans are just as interested in honest and fair elections as you are
Actually, it's all one ballot. The instructions are printed in English on one side, French on the other, and there's ONE selection list, with the name, the affiliation in both languages, AND in the case of the recent referendum, a separate ballot done in a similar manner. No need for multiple ballots or anything of the sort; just one simple ballot in both languages. And since the majority of Canadians are used to dealing with official government writing done in both languages, we can successfully ignore the language we don't speak. No need for alternate ballots, as everyone in Canada is supposed to at least read either English or French, and if you can't, well tough shit for you.
Cynical Idealist
This is "Instant Runoff Voting", which isn't a Condorcet method. This doesn't solve the "spoiler effect" from first-past-the-post system. It doesn't show up quite as quickly, but it still shows up and favors a two-party system. See the discussion here: http://minguo.info/election_methods/irv/
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
If you're in the wrong district, you shouldn't be able to get close enough to touch the machine, and even if you could, the machine shouldn't be able to tell you the proper place to go, because it should have no idea who you are.
Identification and voting are and should be two completely separate matters. You go in, identify who you are and are verified as a registered voter, and usually sign a book, you are then given credentials that identifies you as a registered voter in the proper district who has yet to vote, nothing more (often something as simple as a colored card). You then proceed to vote, turning in your credentials in the process, you are identified only as a registered voter not an individual. No one should ever be able to determine how you voted, as this could lead to vote buying, intimidation, etc.
It would be fairly simple if you could have a database of voters, and when you vote, your ballot was tied to a voter id of some sort, then votes not linked to a proper voter id would be invalid, multiple votes linked to the same voter id would also be invalid. Voters could verify after the election that their vote was counted actually what they voted for, the problem is if there is any way for an individual vote to be tracked to an individual voter, then somehow, someway, it will be abused, people are people there's no way around this.
This is why ATM's can be trustworthy but completely electronic voting cannot. With an ATM, there's checks and balances, if there is an error, you have a receipt and a bank statement to verify the ATM's actions. If the ATM thinks it dispensed cash and it didn't this can be verified by reviewing the security camera. But with voting there's no way to fix a mistake (without re-voting which would have even bigger issues). A good vote must be a clear, permanent, highly tamper evident item, there's no way that any electronic/magnetic storage system could fit such a requirement, without adding on checks and balances that would compromise the rest of the process.
Too bad we don't have the balls you folks do!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
P.S. To the hand-written paper-ballot (Australian ballot) wing nuts out there: your proposed solution is completely unworkable because it fails to account for reality.
Well, you didn't explain what you meant by that, but ftr, that's what Canada uses and it seems to work for them.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2003/pulpit_20031211_000795.html
My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are crazy, and they are right.
Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers," are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?
The 2002-2003 budget for Elections Canada is just over $57 million U.S. dollars, or $1.81 per Canadian citizen. It is extremely hard to get an equivalent per-citizen figure for U.S. elections, but trust me, it is a LOT higher. This week, San Francisco held a runoff mayoral election that cost $2.5 million, or $3.27 per citizen of the city. And this was for just one election, not a whole year of them.
We are spending $3.9 billion or $10 per citizen for new voting machines. Canada just prints ballots.
I agree that conceding should be illegal.
Especially since Kerry never intended to win even from the get go. He just served as a utility to push out the other possible candidates so that Bush would be elected another term.
You could tell it was intentional because he never called for investigations into the voting fraud that went on and was very quick to concede.
They're one in the same. Whether they're in cahoots or not is one thing, but what happened makes it very obvious that SOMETHING of that sort went on.
Gore never asked for a full recount. He asked for a recount in three counties. Three counties that happened to go heavily for Gore. It was quite obvious that what he wanted was to win by sneaky statistics:
Assume: a certain percentage, small but embarrassing, of votes fail to register for whatever reason.
Result: distribution of missed votes will follow the distribution of registered votes.
Recount result: As long as the hand recount is more accurate than the original machine count, they will register some fraction (up to 100%) of the missed votes in roughly the same proportion as the machine count, just more.
If you just recount a few heavily-something counties, you'll get more additional total votes in one party than the other. Averaging this into the statewide machine vote is irresponsible and takes advantage of the fact that many people do not understand statistics. Florida, being a "lottery state" actually runs ad campaigns mocking people who do understand statistics.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The counting machine is not an evil, stop treating it as such. If there is a challenge to a county's or results, then THAT county can have a hand recount. But to suggest that every county must have a hand count in every instance is extreme.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Did you read my post?
Optical-scan style counting machines as used in practice are contrary to the spirit of democracy, since they prevent layman observers from being able to personally understand if an election they watch is legitimate or fraudulent. It very well may be possible to design procedures that work around this problem, but without such procedures automatically counting paper ballots is only marginally better than electronic-ballots - and completely unacceptable compared to manually counted paper ballots.
Every participant in an election needs to be able to have personal confidence that the procedures being used are legitimate, and complex electronics backed with statistical sampling techniques that election officials can claim ignorance of simply don't meet that requirement. There are just too many ways to alter something just enough to change the outcome or destroy some required mathematical property without altering it enough for even an observer with the proper background to to notice - what hope does some supermarket clerk who's observing the counting process have of noticing a statistical attack?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
You don't write out "Hillary Clinton" or "Rudy Giuliani" on your ballot, you put an X next to their names. You screw up, just ask for a new ballot, and your old one is shredded in front of you plus an election official from each party.
Sure. But, do you recall all of the problems in the 2000 Florida election? What if your X is really big, and it strays into a neighboring box? What if your X mark is very faint, and can't be read clearly? What if you mis-read the ballot, and put the X on the wrong line, as happened with the famed Palm Beach "butterfly ballot"?
You also then have nearly no chance for mechanical counting of the ballots, and you have the opportunity for large errors in the human counting the ballots, instead of the human voting them.
The advantage of machine voting with a printed receipt is that, like in any good program, your input is validated at entry time, and you get a chance to fix any errors before it's too late.
Except you still have the option to hand count, if for some reason the automatic counts don't satisfy the courts. That's why hand counting remains a back up for optical scan.
All you're doing is changing the attack requirement from "make the vote counting machines count wrong" to "make the vote counting machines count wrong and make sure there's no hand recount". If having no hand recount is the standard procedure then you haven't gained much - and the resulting system certainly isn't trustworthy enough to rely on for non-trivial elections.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
2. Confirmation bar codes are basically a public-private key system. Each ballot gets a bar code generated at vote time, specific for the voting site. It uses two sets of public-private keys, one for the hour that the vote was cast and another for the location. This way it is VERY hard to generate a bunch of valid fake ballots, and if the private keys are created each hour from scratch, that means that it is physically IMPOSSIBLE to create a bunch of fake ballots before the actual vote. If you print them up before hand, then people can steal/copy them.
3. Sorry that you don't see the benefit of publicity around the voting procedures. Most of the rest of the world does. Also, if the machines say one thing then the actual vote says another, guess what you fool, you have evidence of fraud. Even if the paper ballots are correct, we STILL want to know that the fraud was attempted. Or don't you care about fraud?
5. A well desigend machine is over the long term environmentally superior to doing things by hand. If you don't see that, then you are VERY ignorant about environmental matters.
6. Yes your idea is too hard. 90% of the people do not come prepared to vote. Most people are NOT familiar with all the issues, especially some tiny little school bond issue that did not get national attention. The explanations are easily done by both sides. I.E. The people trying to vote yes get to give their explanation and the people trying to vote no get to give their explanation. This ALREADY happens, at least in California and NY.
Stop trying to demand that the voter be "perfect", and make the voting proccess available to ALL who can legally vote.
Basically you sound like an ivory tower scientist living in a bubble, saying "there is nothing wrong with the machine, it is the PEOPLE that need to get better."
Perhaps you want to insist that cars remove break lights, because hey, if the other drivers are paying attention they should SEE you slowing and stopping.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Regarding scrapping votes in case the printout was wrong there was a way to do that. You had the chance to evaluate the tape before accepting it and closing out the voting session. I didn't try it so don't know if it wiped it out somehow. Of course, the tapes could be accurate and the stored data not. There's just no way to tell.
Sure. But, do you recall all of the problems in the 2000 Florida election?
Sure I do. With hanging chads. Not written ballots. The other potential issues you mention have not been problems of any significance for countries like Canada or countries in Europe. They have less problems, not more.