Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad

phorest writes "One would have thought the choice of Ohio lawmakers to move away from Diebold touch-screen voting terminals would be welcomed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Instead, the group is warning the elections board that their alternative might be illegal under state laws. 'The main dispute is whether a central optical scan of ballots at the board's headquarters downtown would result in votes not being counted on ballots that are incorrectly filled out. The ACLU believes the intent of election law is to ensure voters can be notified immediately of a voting error and be able to make a second-chance vote.'"

Comments

You'd think ...

[BrianRoach]

That voting just simply couldn't be this complicated. ::shaking head::

- Roach

Re:You'd think ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't the candidates just roshambo for it or something?

Re:You'd think ...

[gfxguy]

No matter what method is selected, someone will whine about it.

Re:You'd think ...

[Buran]

What's wrong with the method that worked fine for years that no one (at least not enough to get into the press) complained about? Making everything electronic isn't the answer to everything.

Re:You'd think ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not. the powers that be WANT it this complicated because complicated means it's easier to RIG it.

It blows my mind that amercians are not up in arms over this.

WHAT THE FARK IS WRONG WITH PUTTING A GOD DAMNED X IN A BOX? it works in almost every other country on this planet.

nobody really gives a crap if we know 3 seconds after polls close who won, tell me a month later after they all are HAND COUNTED 3 times by 3 seperate parties.

elections are not complicated, only those that want to rig it and control the outcome will make it complex.

Re:You'd think ...

[aichpvee]

You'd think that if the purpose were not to make it easy to commit election fraud, and you'd be right. If only the world were that good a place.

Re:You'd think ...

[KillerCow]

They complained about it in Florida.

Re:You'd think ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A cynic would say that it isn't actually complicated. Only the incredibly confused and dumb can mess up filling out a ballot. A cynic would also say that perhaps these same people tend to vote for a certain party...and that certain party also tends to support certain groups that complain of such things.

Re:You'd think ...

[gfxguy]

Which method is that? Every method had people complaining about it, from fill-in-the-dot optical scan cards (like this one) to butterfly ballots (like Florida) to machines that were supposed to fix the butterfly "dimpled but not fully popped out" problem (like the voting booths where you flip the switches and pull the big handle down to punch your ballot). They were all "rigged" or subject to interpretation or something.

The only other alternative is the "check this box" kind, which requires human counting (again subject to rigging) and takes ages to count. Now, I can wait a day - even a week, for my election results, but with a large turnout it would take even longer than that, and then there'd be less time to certify and recount if there was a problem.

Again, people complain every single election; maybe you don't remember it, maybe sometimes it's worse than others. There's nothing new here, it's happened since the dawn of... uh... electing... things.

Re:You'd think ...

[Buran]

Was it exactly the same system, though? (this is a serious question) - also, since states are separate from one another, Ohio wouldn't be affected by Florida anyhow.

Re:You'd think ...

[Buran]

Oh there will be some complaints about any system for anything, but then again we didn't get the big hissyfits until, say, the Diebold e-voting fuss. It was all minor stuff. Now, when e-voting has been proven over and over to be a cause of trouble, we're rushing to implement it, and then when more problems are found, we ... try to keep e-voting?

Better to stuck with the system that wasn't anywhere near as controversial.

Re:You'd think ...

[andruk]

How are the politicians supposed to rig the results then? Who do you think is making the decisions to use Diebold in the first place? Politicians pretty much count on Americans being...stupid, which proved correct in Florida. This isn't any different; how many lay (read: non-technical-don't-read-slashdot) people know, or care, about how exactly they vote?

Fucking pigs...the politicians, I mean.

Re:You'd think ...

[palegray.net]

Voting as a concept never has been complicated. However, you have to consider the fact that a huge portion of the American voting public cannot name:

1. The Vice President

2. The Speaker of the House

3. Their own state governor.

4. Any member of Congress.

When this is your voting public, how do you expect them to (a) understand, or (b) work up the gumption to care about voting issues? To most people, something's not an issue if they don't see it on headline news at 6.

Re:You'd think ...

[iocat]

I actualy RTFA (well, I didn't, but I read the summary pretty closely) and I think the deal is this. In San Francisco, as an example, you make a very black line across a thingee to mark your choice (it's idiot proof). Then you stick it in a machine, which just checks it (at least) for being filled out correctly (didn't vote for two people for president, etc.). I'm not 100% sure if it actually tallies a vote. If the machine discovers you filled the ballot out wrong, they should revoke your voting privledge for being a total moron, but in fact it spits it out to give you another chance.

In Ohio, they don't want to have to have those checking machines at the voting place, just at the HQ. The ACLU is all "wahwahwah, morons must be given a second chance," but honestly, it's just lip flapping, IMHO. Honestly, if you can't fill out a scantron form, you don't deserve to have your vote counted.

Re:You'd think ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmmn.... lt me see where I live (in Canada) we use optical recognition at all our polling stations. You fill out your ballot and then they scan it ... if ther is a problem, it spits it out and you do another, if not it stores it incase a recount is needed, then there is a physical papertrail.

Re:You'd think ...

[Sique]

The Florida voting system hat those lever machines that try to cut holes into the ballot to count them later with an electromechanical reader, a system created and first used for public census, invented by Hermann Hollerith and base for IBMs rise to power.

One problem was that hundreds and thousands of those ballots hat the cut off paper still dangling on it, or that some were only slightly cut, but at several places (as if the voter had a second thought and pulled another lever, but none of them consequently enough).

The main arguments against paper-and-pencil-voting seem to be:

1) The ballots can't be counted fast enough for the Late News to report the results.
2) People with disabilities such as blind people need help to vote and can't check the results themselves.

Argument 1) doesn't hold in my humble opinion. I would rather like to have correct results than early reported ones. Being able to watch the count was in my own country (the former East Germany) the base for all later convictions of Voting Fraud for the leading figures of the former communist government. Also some other frauds (like the one during the voting for the town council of Dachau near Munich) were detected because people were able to compare their own counting results from the public count with the ones later reported by the Voting Commission.

Argument 2) raises a valid point, because Braille printed ballots are much larger than normal prints, and some german towns have already ballots printed on half a square meter of paper. Printing them additionally with Braille further would increase them. On the other hand it was allowed anyway to just cut out that part of the ballot with the votes one had casted and throw everything else in a shredder. So this is still possible.

Re:You'd think ...

[Frantix]

Actually if you're referring to the old dial machines which were used for many years, yes it was quite easy to "rig". I think the past 2 Presidential elections have garnered more scrutiny and as with technology, the internet continues to increase the dose of news you get about something whether it's completely accurate or not. I'm sure the problems with Diebold in Cuyahoga county this past election also puts the Ohio SOS on edge for the 2008 Presidential election. I had some involvement in this but can't say anything about results...don't care to deal with disclosure agreements. None of the systems (which is easy to see from articles from California to Ohio) are 100% reliable and having had the chance to work a lot with various equipment, I think scanners are about as close as you get to marking the "X" as someone else had said they wanted. I think the ability to act maliciously is there for anything, you're not going to get around that even with marking "X"... Someone has to count that X and while it may be 99% reliable, it's not full-proof. I also think that some officials are looking for the impossibility of a full-proof system at some point you have to rely on humans. The other part most people are missing is reliability, it's not just about someone being malicious. Does the platform hold votes reliably, can votes be lost from neglect (not intentional), etc? It's overall integrity and not just looking at if an election can be "stolen".

Re:You'd think ...

[arose]

The only other alternative is the "check this box" kind, which requires human counting (again subject to rigging) and takes ages to count.

Properly done human counting is very hard to rig, allow whoever wants to to watch the process to do so. It also scales very well, we get quite accurate results sometime at night and the final results don't take so long either, should be the same if you don't mess with the voter to counter ratio.

Re:You'd think ...

[vertinox]

Now, I can wait a day - even a week, for my election results,

So if they can't count the votes in a week, its OK to have someone in power who stole the election? And to top it off, how about someone who puts lives in harms way because they are the commander in chief?

Seriously, I'd be fine waiting for a month or two and maybe even longer to determine who is correctly elected president of the United States.

Secondly, if it was done by hand you have to remember only 50,000,000 people voted in 2004 for the presidential election. If you were to hand count the votes by an official. If an official was responsible for counting 1000 votes then you would only need 50,000 people nation wide helping out.

Which means you'd only need 1,000 officials per state which is a drop in the bucket.

Of course it wouldn't work exactly like that... California, NY, and Texas would need a great deal of vote counters and RI and Alaska would not, but vote counting by hand would not be that difficult if you distributed it correctly. You wouldn't need a month, but at the most 2 weeks and I think the wait is worth it.

The problem is that most Americans are impatient, but don't realize the election affects them for the next four years.

Re:You'd think ...

[ajs318]

Stop right there: your failure mode originates in the fact that one device marks the ballot paper, and another device counts the votes -- but only if the ballot papers were properly marked in the first place. You could introduce an intermediate device to check that the ballot paper is correctly marked, but then you have introduced another failure mode whereby the pre-checker falsely indicates that a ballot paper which will be rejected by the counter is OK. Do you see where this is going? Please tell me how any of this is better than the manual counting practised in much of the world.

As for disabled people, the simplest method is just to allow them to take in a carer of their own choosing (so, presumably whom they trust) to help them cast their vote.

Re:You'd think ...

[natedubbya]

I can name all those, does that mean I get two votes?

My favorite election quote comes from the greatest show ever, Third Rock From The Sun. It's something along the lines of...

"You mean your vote counts the same as mine?!? But I'm smarter than you!"

Re:You'd think ...

[palegray.net]

I can name all those, does that mean I get two votes? Sadly, no. In my opinion, it does bestow upon you a certain responsibility to try to educate those around you. I believe that with greater knowledge or intellectual capacity comes an increased burden of responsibility to help those around us. The 3rd rock reference did put a smile on my face, though :).

Re:You'd think ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If an official was responsible for counting 1000 votes then you would only need 50,000 people nation wide helping out.

Counting 1000 votes carefully should only take a single person about an hour, maybe 90 minutes. Integrating counts between 50,000 people, with a well-defined tree, should only take about 2 hours. Therefore a manual hand count organized properly could still finish in 3-4 hours, and would scale logarithmically with the number of people voting. This is quite efficient, and hardly warrants all the fears people have about it taking weeks or months.

Re:You'd think ...

[InternetVoting]

First, I think you're a little mixed up about your terminology. Lever machines are mechanical voting systems that have nothing to do with paper. Punch card voting systems are what you're taking about. They're essentially a booklet with holes next to candidate names. Voters take a spike and stick it through the hole, "punching," a standard paper computer punch card.

Your first argument is not entirely accurate. No one is suggesting that fraud is acceptable if the results are fast.

As for your second argument, there is a pretty common misconception that all blind people can read braille. At least in the U.S. by far the majority of the sight impaired cannot. Also, there are many other disabilities that have nothing to do with sight that prevent people from using paper ballots.

The actual main argument against "paper-and-pencil-voting" is the difficulty and cost involved with complex paper balloting. The U.S. is fairly unique globally for running very few elections combining all races at once and voting on many more offices and resolutions that most other nations. These offices vary greatly based on geographic region causing a single region to have hundreds if not thousands of variations of ballot combinations. Yes in the U.S. we have one ballot for everything, not separate ballots. For only a primary election one region in Florida had 1,500 ballot variations. This only gets more complex with increased populations.
Other than accessibility, the primary benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.

Re:You'd think ...

[PitaBred]

I get to go first!

Re:You'd think ...

[wwejason]

The problem with Ohio voting is that the systems used are different for each county. The county board of elections chooses what they want to use, presents it to the state, and it gets implemented if the state approves. - Here in Cincinnati (Hamilton County), we use paper ballots. You color in the big box with a pen next to your pick. When you are done, you insert the ballot sheet into an optical scanner which scans it and collects. It shows a green checkmark and a "Thank you for voting" screen if it is ok. If there is a problem, you see a red "X" and then you can call over one of the little old ladies that sit at the table.

Re:You'd think ...

[stinerman]

Are you an American? I ask because you don't seem to understand how our electoral processes work.

1) We vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Our congress isn't seated until January 3rd, about 2 months later. We could conceivably wait that long for results to be in. Presidential electors vote on the first Monday after the first Wednesday in December, so those results would need to be in slightly faster. Of course, both of these dates could be changed by law to allow for slowness in counting.

2) The popular vote doesn't matter. Having corrupt officials spread out over the country doesn't help you. Having corrupt officials concentrated in swing states does help you. One could arguably say this happened in 2004. In my home state of Ohio, our Secretary of State (the chief elections officer) was also a co-Chair of President Bush's campaign. So the guy in charge of counting the votes was on a candidate's payroll. At the very least, it was a huge conflict of interest.

That being said, I think they should take as long as is needed to count the votes and get the count right. Exit polls give a decent idea of who won all but the closest of elections.

Simple = Better

[Goalie_Ca]

In canada we have a piece of paper with a check box for each candidate. They manually count it and results are known by the end of the evening. Recounts are done by the next day. Not expensive, not confusing, it leaves a paper trail, and it is as physically secure as any computer box could ever get.

Re:Simple = Better

[idiotnot]

And Ohio, alone, has a third of Canada's population. In large precincts, this is becoming impractical, if not impossible. I'm sure it'd work in smaller cities in the US, too.

They use the optical scan ballots where I used to vote (I just moved last month), and they're very easy to use, and very accurate.

Re:Simple = Better

[flyingfsck]

It scales perfectly with population count. India is the world's largest democracy and they still use mostly paper ballots.

Re:Simple = Better

[fm6]

Any process scales if you don't care about the quality of the result. Vote rigging is rampant in India, and all that hand-counting is often blamed.

There's also the slight difference in the cost of labor in India versus the U.S.

Re:Simple = Better

[zestyping]

This is why that doesn't work (in general) in the United States.

http://vote.nist.gov/ballots/il_chicago_20041102_01.pdf

One ballot = 90 contests.

Re:Simple = Better

[locokamil]

Proof plz, kthxbai.

Re:Simple = Better

[iabervon]

That system is essentially what the ACLU is complaining about: if a ballot is unclear, there's no way to allow the voter to try again. The advantage of optical scan machines in the polling places is that they reject unclear ballots when the voter tries to cast them, so the voter can cast a replacement. The physical ballots, after they're scanned and accepted, go into a box and can be recounted by humans if necessary.

Ohio wants to do the scanning in a central location, which is approximately equivalent to counting them manually in the central location, so far as it really matters, because the scanners will never count a ballot that humans wouldn't argue over.

Re:Simple = Better

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. The larger the population base, the larger the more people you have available to count ballots. Actually, Canada is probably one of the worst case scenarios as far as manual ballot counting goes. Think about it, vast territory, very scarcely populated outside a dense southern strip of land. In those scarcely populated locations you probably need a relatively speaking large number of polling station to cover a given number of inhabitants because of the very large distances.

On the other hand, in a place like NY, it's great. Yes, you have lots of people, but so concentrated that you can setup a large number of polling stations... and it each would still cover more poeple over a much smaller area than in most of Canada. It'd be much easier to find volunteers, and it would be much cheaper per capita.

As someone else was stating, it scales very well, and works well in India with a very high population (and pop. density). Low population density would be the only thing going against this poling method, and as we've seen, it works well even in Canada. Therefore, all the sophisticated thingamagigs are only a gimmick for some people to cash in.

(an yes, despite the remote areas an all, we know who won the elections by the evening of the voting day in Canada... with the manual counting and all).

Re:Simple = Better

[ChromaticDragon]

Could you please cite a current reference for your statement.

It seems either out-of-date or simply false. I don't believe they've used hand-counting for a while now.

Indeed, India seems to have got a better handle of this than we do in many ways:

Indian voting machines

Their system isn't without issues. But it seems to have handled fraud rather well. Furthermore, it's a rather interesting that they have electronic voting, instead of computerized voting which is what the US seems to get stuck with.

Re:Simple = Better

[SydShamino]

I really don't mean to flame, but every single voting issue thread attracts at least one post from someone explaining how Canada votes, and how simple it is, and how the U.S. could just do it the same way. Most of the time this post gets modded up insightful.

About half the time, someone responds, explaining how U.S. elections are more complicated than those in Canada, because U.S. elections usually feature a dozen or more separate items to vote on; in addition to national elections (up to three at a time), there can be a dozen state, county, and municipal elections, plus votes on city propositions, bond packages, and constitutional amendments (almost every year in Texas). It's simply not possible to count all of this quickly and accurately by hand in one day.

To this post, someone from Canada usually responds, asking why we have to vote on all that stuff, and wondering why we don't let our elected officials decide some of that for us.

To which someone else responds, pointing out that our system of government doesn't work the same as Canada's; once we elect someone we are pretty much stuck with them for two, four, or six years, so if our officials start doing things we don't like, we don't have the opportunity to call new elections and replace them. We also only have two viable political parties, so it's less likely that we agree with our elected representatives on every issue. Thus, we like to have a chance to directly vote on more items than most other countries. Also, to increase the likelihood of high voter turnout, we combine elections to minimize the number of election days. In Texas, I believe there can only be three election days a year: the March primaries (if needed), and the May and November general elections.

------

So, in summary, this concept and its responses have been beaten to death. If you feel the same way I do, do as I will and start modding all "Canada votes like this, why doesn't the U.S., too?" redundant.

Re:Simple = Better

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also the slight difference in the cost of labor in India versus the U.S. Therefore the obvious solution is to use paper ballots and outsource the vote counting to India.

Re:Simple = Better

[fm6]

I don't argue with cats!

Re:Simple = Better

[fm6]

I stand corrected. Please note that I was replying to a guy who cited India as proof that hard counting scales.

Re:Simple = Better

[Roger W Moore]

We have the same system in the UK and it works fine for higher population densities (200 times that of Canada) just fine. From what I understand of the US system it was perfect for coping with the communication system of the 18th century but come on guys it's the 21st century now! In fact I think the US system was actually best summed up by one of your past presidents (Carter IIRC) who stated that if a dictatorship adopted the US system it would not be recognised as fully democratic by the UN.

Re:Simple = Better

[TheSkyIsPurple]

> We also only have two viable political parties, so it's less likely that we agree with our elected representatives on every issue.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one...
With 2 parties, they winners had to compromise with lots of people in order to get elected, so you end up not so much with "the favorite" person, but the "least unfavorite"... the one who is likely to piss the fewest people off.
With 10 parties, you don't have to compromise as much, so you end up with someone who will piss more people off more severely.

Re:Simple = Better

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we did exactly that for about, oh I dont know, 200 years...

Heres the difference:

Because we have a "federalized" government, it means each state (and sometimes county) casts, collects, and counts each vote differently than the next. The real problem was never with the paper ballot system as a whole, it was just with the paper ballots for certain states. Therefore electronic voting machines, though sometimes convenient, aren't really attacking the problem.

Oh and plus, paper ballots don't "Scale Perfectly," because as the population increases, your error rate increases (yes, the RATE increases, not just the total amount of errors) So while Canada might only have an error rate of 0.5-1% of ballots cast, the US will may have an error rate of 1-3% of ballots cast, and India even more. Combine that with the non-standardized methods of vote collection, and its easy to understand why people are freaking out about this next election.

(On a side note, the non-standardized way in which votes are cast and collected actually helps prevent voter fraud. By having each district count votes, then toss the totals to the state, it means that MANY many more people are involved in the counting process than any other democracy on earth. Therefore in order to "fraud" an election, a candidate would have to bribe/buy an incredibly LARGE amount of people...people who take their job as vote counters very seriously.)

Re:Simple = Better

[thatskinnyguy]

What? Like the Electoral College? I totally agree with you Bond. The population of the United States has never elected a President thanks to the current system of elections. That's why I'm abstaining from voting this year.

Re:Simple = Better

[can56]

"once we elect someone we are pretty much stuck with them for two, four, or six years, so if our officials start doing things we don't like, we don't have the opportunity to call new elections and replace them."

Do you believe that Canadians have the opportunity to boot elected officials we don't like at any time??

Narf

Re:Simple = Better

[dryeo]

I didn't actually DL the pdf, 8 MBs on dialup is just too much. Still if the ballot is that big and has 90 separate contests on it how the hell are people supposed to make an informed choice, I mean 90 informed choices?

Re:Simple = Better

[FailedTheTuringTest]

If you have more people who can vote, you have more people who can count. You can even use political party volunteers under adversarial conditions. Counting ballots is a simple problem that breaks down well into manageable chunks and scales well, as long as the citizens of the country in question can count higher than their number of fingers and toes.

They use the optical scan ballots where I used to vote (I just moved last month), and they're very easy to use, and very accurate.

How do you know how accurate they are?

Re:Simple = Better

[InternetVoting]

How incredibly inaccurate. India went all electronic in 2004.

Prior to that, they had a long history of electronic voting:
Since 1998, the Election Commission ) has increasingly used Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in polling places. In 2003, all state elections and by-elections were held using EVMs. Encouraged by this the Commission has decided to use only EVMs for the Lok Sabha (Lower House) election in 2004. EVMs were used throughout India with a voter population of about 672 million. Nearly 700'000 polling stations spread over 35 states and Union territories were equipped with EVMs to elect the 543 representatives to the Lok Sabha and 697 representatives to four state assemblies of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa and Sikkim. Over one million EVMs were used in these elections

Re:Simple = Better

[SydShamino]

With 10 parties, and a parliment style government where each party gets their percentage share of elected officials, the compromise still has to happen. But in this case, my elected official would be more like me, and so I know that, even if he has to compromise on one law, on the next he'll be right back to representing my interests.

With only two parties, the compromise was made by me a year and a half ago when I voted, and then I have to accept years worth of bad decisions on many issues because I have no ability to control their outcome. Unless, of course, we make sure I get a direct vote on the decision in some complicated general election.

There's a big difference between having to form a consensus on every issue, versus having the "same old same old" make decisions knowing there's no real opposition represented in the governing body.*

* Note: I don't think Republicans and Democrats are all the same. There are very key differences that make me vote one way versus the other. But in some other key things, their opinions seem way too close together.

Re:Simple = Better

[SydShamino]

Well, if your prime minister or whatever starts trying to direct things in ways that your representative - you know the guy who can actually closely represent your views - doesn't like, along with enough other representatives, then they can give a vote of no confidence and new elections are called.

Or does it not work that way in Canada?

Re:Ohio's alternative:

[Brian Gordon]

What, vote?

Oh Please....

[idiotnot]

If that's the standard, then every method used is probably illegal. How can a voter verify he pulled the correct level? Handwritten ballots can't be relied upon, either.

Optical scans have historically been regarded as the best, and practically everyone who went to school since 1960 has filled out a scantron sheet.

The ACLU is a bit off base here, IMO.

Off topic....the "Related Links" this time were interesting.

Compare prices on YRO Products

What, exactly is a YRO product?

Re:Oh Please....

[Brian Gordon]

Two options: one two.

Re:Oh Please....

[reboot246]

Since when has the ACLU been on base? Until they are in favor of some form of voter ID, I'll ignore everything the ACLU says.

If optical scanners aren't reliable, then maybe my old test scores really were higher. :)

Re:Oh Please....

[Kilz]

Im an election judge in cook county IL. We have touch screens and paper ballots. When a voter fills out the paper ballot it is feed into a scanner that checks for errors like no votes in a race, or to many people voted in a race. The scanner returns the ballot on error. The voter is told that there may be a problem with the ballot and asked if they want a new ballot. If they want a new ballot, the old one gets SPOILED written in big letters on it and placed in the spoiled ballot envelope. If they dont want a new ballot , the ballot is reinserted and any races with to many votes or no votes in a race may not be counted in that race. The rest of the votes on it are counted.

Re:Oh Please....

[Punt3r]

As I understand it, the issue is not in the failure rate of optical scanning, but in the proposed process to scan them in a centralized location, rather than scanning them at the polling location as the voter submits their ballot.

If the machine rejects the ballot as the voter submits it, they have a chance to correct any errors or issues related to their submission. If the machine rejects the ballot later in the day, they have no such opportunity.

The ACLU, in this case, seems to just be trying to make sure every ballot is actually counted.

Re:Oh Please....

[guabah]

From a State Election Commision commercial

It's not your SAT.

It's not your Horse Racing ticket

It's your ballot for the Republican primary of 2000

Yes, in Puerto Rico we use paper ballots just fine, except for the Republicans who used Optical scans in their primary, and Bush won.

Re:Oh Please....

[v1]

I think what would make a nice system if they wanted to go electronic is some method by which the voting resuls were electronically transmitted to a central counting location, and that every voter had a "confirmation number" of sorts receipt on their ballot, that they could take home and punch in on a web page along with say, their ssn, that hashes to their ballot, allowing them to look up and verify their ballot. This would allow people to verify that their votes were counted, which is not something the current system allows. Technically, this could be taken a step further with auditors making random additional votes (that would be removed from the tally because they would be identifiable by their hash) which would help insure all votes were counted.

But then I assume this is one of those things that they won't consider because it would make too much sense and be hard for anyone to abuse.

Re:Oh Please....

[Anonymous Coward]

Voter ID is a scam to prevent the poor from voting. Period. If the Republicans who support voter ID laws were serious, they'd just adopt a finger-dipping policy like in the third world. But the fact is, voting fraud on the precinct level (as opposed to what happened in 2000) simply isn't a problem in this country.

Re:Oh Please....

[Anonymous Coward]

well, because then you could sell your vote

Re:Oh Please....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. People who are against voter ID are, by default, supporting voter fraud. And, whether you believe it or not, voter fraud at ALL levels is a serious problem in this country.

Retirees who move to another state routinely vote in their new home in person, and by absentee in their former home state. The dead routinely vote all over the country. Illegals vote in every election. Some people vote twice. Etc. Etc. Etc.

You're not serious enough about the issue to even debate with. Go drink your Kool-Aid.

Re:Oh Please....

[ajs318]

Allowing voters to "look up" how "their vote" was counted is a perfect smokescreen for a vote-rigging system. Besides which, it misses a point:

It's not how your vote was counted that makes the difference. It's how everyone else's vote was counted that makes the difference. Since you cannot know how everyone else voted, you cannot be sure that the result is correct. Most people's social networks are smaller than the margin for error; so even if you checked up your friends' and families' votes, they could all be shown "correctly" and the final result could still be wrong because all the votes that you don't get to see are more than enough to swamp the ones that you do get to see.

Also, any attempt to show people how they voted after the election opens up possibilities for voter coercion.

Re:Oh Please....

[ajs318]

And now, the rest of it ..... it was half past two and I had to get to the shops.

Suppose the voting goes something like this:

1. Conservative
2. Labour
3. Conservative
4. Liberal Democrat
5. Conservative
6. Conservative
7. Green
8. Labour
9. Liberal Democrat
10. Independent
11. BNP
12. Conservative
13. Labour
14. Green
15. Conservative
16. Independent
17. Liberal Democrat
18. Conservative
19. Labour
20. Green

This gives us an actual result of: Conservative, 7; Labour, 4 (11); Liberal Democrat, 3 (14); Green, 3 (17); Indie, 2 (19); BNP, 1 (20). But the result is declared as: Labour, 7; Conservative, 5 (12); Green, 3 (15); Liberal Democrat, 2 (17); BNP, 2 (19); Indie, 1 (20). Each of the 20 people has a code which they can enter into a computer to look at their vote. They see the "correct" result -- the person they actually voted for -- and assume everything is OK. But none of them know how any of the other 19 voted, and the codes are hard enough to guess that any attempt would be spotted and dealt with (meaning The Authorities would be on you like a ton of bricks, and you would be up on a charge of Treason) before any harm could be done. To prove the election was rigged, you would have to uncover at least six Conservative votes -- and you'd sure as shit be in the back of a Black Mariah before you'd found the second.

There is a way to defeat that, and that is to have all the actual candidates fully aware of how many votes were cast for each one: Show the actual ballot papers, marked and checked by the voters to their own satisfaction, to the candidates and have them count them by hand. It has to be every single ballot paper, not just a "representative" sample, because things can get hidden in the numbers. And it has to be the actual candidates, because the natural animosity and distrust between them precludes any cheating.

Re:Oh Please....

[denbesten]

This would allow someone to prove how they voted to a third party. This is undesirable because it enables selling one's vote or forcing someone to vote a certain way. This is why anonymity is one of the tenants of a good election system.

Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[Opportunist]

Paper - pen - checkbox - count

What the hell is wrong with that system? It's in effect in nearly every other country. What is so terribly different in the US that this system won't work as flawlessly as it works everywhere else? Pardon the blunt question, but is it too hard to find enough people intelligent enough to effing count slips of paper?

What the hell is the deal about it all? We're wasting billions of dollars every year on worthless junk, flying our politicians around to pointless debates and toilet seats to boot. I don't think spending a few bucks to get good ol' paper elections done, which are tried, proven and simply and plainly working, is going to break the budget's back!

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[flyingfsck]

The problem is that USAsians votes on every gawddamm thing on the same day. The rest of the world has the good sense to have separate ballots for separate levels of government.

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[hedwards]

I believe that the issue is that it doesn't work flawlessly everywhere else.

Here in WA we are about to move to completely absentee voting sometime in the next year or so. The system that we use is similar to a scantron. We fill in the generously sized square with a sharpy, and the ballot is then mailed into the elections office where it is scanned and stored until at least the time when the election is certified.

It works well over all.

The problem though is that it is virtually impossible to know that a given ballot has been received, and I think that it would be great if there were some system to check up on it to make sure that it was received.

The ballots themselves are simple enough to use, the problems arise because we can now, after many decades, only vote for one party in the primaries, and have to use two layers of envelope when sending them in. As well as the Republican parties complaints that roughly 0.2% claimed fraud rate. I had to crunch that myself, but its similar to the actual percentage. In my opinion, getting it that low is sufficient for a legitimate election result.

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[lemaymd]

Well, we should be able to improve on paper ballots by permitting people to audit their own ballots, as in the schemes designed by Chaum and Neff.

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[Frosty Piss]

Paper - pen - checkbox - count

What the hell is wrong with that system?

Paper ballots are soooo... last century.

And among a significant percentage of the US population, especially those in charge of huge piles of public money, everything is always "better" when done with technology. And did I mention the huge pile of money these people have to spend? Everybody likes new toys!

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reason we cannot have separate ballots, even if we do vote for multiple things on the same day. Instead of receiving one monstrous;y complicated ballot, we could receive a stack of much simpler ballots - say one for president, one for congress, one for state offices, one for local offices, one for propositions. That's just one idea, and there are many variations on that theme that could potentially work.

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[anagama]

I'm in WA and I really miss going to the polling place. Doing it by mail feels like I'm mailing off a bill and I'm really bothered that I have no idea whether it arrives. I've been dropping my ballots off at the courthouse but that just isn't the same.

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[Opportunist]

New = better is the same balony that old = better is.

There are things that need no improvement. They are already good enough, and the "improvement" often is none. For reference, see XP and Vista.

And the money thing... isn't there a sizable debt to take care of? I know, nobody likes paying bills and paying off that mortgage is less fun than buying a new computer, but some things just have to be done.

Why do we have such irresponsible politicians these days?

Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all?

[aussie_a]

The problem is that USAsians votes on every gawddamm thing on the same day. What about USAfrican-Americans? Or USAmerican Natives?

Second Chance Vote?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this? Kindergarten?

My vote didn't register! I wanna do-over, I'm telling!

Here's how to do it:

1. Standardized PAPER ballot
2. 1 Writing Instrument (Pen, indelible ink)
3. 1 "X" in a clearly printed circle , beside the candidate's name
4. Hand Count (with appropriate 'adult' supervision, the ballots.

That's how it's done. Can't make a simple X? you shouldn't be voting.

Optical scan per precinct

[HeraldMage]

they should do an optical scanner per precinct. Virginia does this and they work very well, they're not expensive (certainly when compared to the touch screen ones), they still collect the paper trail that can be audited (the actual ballot), they can verify you didn't overvote, or have any ambiguity in what you filled out...the problem the ACLU sees here is a valid one: if the ballots are all hauled away first, then scanned, then you find the ballot has a stray mark or an overvote and you have to reject it. If it happens in the precinct the election officer can spoil the ballot and give the voter a new one to try again.

Re:Optical scan per precinct

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it happens in the precinct the election officer can spoil the ballot"

Problem with that is the election official would then have access to the ballot as the vote was being cast. The voting process would no longer have any confidentiality involved. Even if the precinct optical scanners had a way to notify, real-time, of a spoiled ballot without the election official being privvy to what was marked, the ACLU would still bitch that the confidentiality of one's vote had been compromised.

Yes, there are overvotes on paper ballots, here in TX, they are discarded.
Yes, some people are too stupid to understand scantron sheets.
I would imagine that there are probably people too stupid to understand check boxes as well.

If one does not follow proper procedures, one's vote may not be counted, regardless the method of casting the ballot. Where I am at, our voters use the Ivotronics voting machines, (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5165), and if they leave the poll site without casting their ballot, we, the election officials, are required by law to cancel the ballot rather than casting it for them. In 4 years of being a precinct judge, I've had to cancel around 1 dozen ballots for that reason. We try to catch the voter before he/she leaves, but that doesn't always happen. Fortunately, most of my cancelled ballots have been because someone chose the wrong language, or the screen on the voting machine needed recalibrated, and they got new ballots.

No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[circletimessquare]

it is a seriously dumb idea. increases attack vectors, makes something that is inherently transparent opaque

paper

pencil

optical scanner

end of fucking problem

really

i expect this wisdom to enter the brain of bureaucrats everywhere sometime around 2050

hopefully we won't be a theocracy or fascism by then, hastened along by malignant voting schemes

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[fm6]

paper

pencil

optical scanner

end of fucking problem

Sigh. Everyone points to paper ballots as a guarantee that votes will be properly counted. May I point out that rigged elections predate electronic voting by many centuries?

Ok, so your hybrid system allows you to double check. But when do you double check? If we can't trust the electronic system (and if we did, what's the point in having a dead tree backup?) then you end up with the loser demanding a hand count every time. So you might as well do it by hand to begin with. Except that's too expensive.

It doesn't even matter what process you use to count ballots. What matters is that the process occur out in the open. It's as easy to do that with electronic voting as with paper ballots. Easier even, because it's easier to track the workflow. Harder to repeat the 1960 voting in Chicago, where the ballot boxes took a suspicious amount of time in transit.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[Lumpy]

i expect this wisdom to enter the brain of bureaucrats everywhere sometime around 2050

You sir are an Optimist.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I don't think anyone claims that using paper ballots is a sure-fire guarantee that fraud won't take place. But electronic voting machines make fraud easier, and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. With paper ballots, you have to have a much larger number of people in on the scheme to change a large number of votes and cover your tracks afterward.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[fm6]

With paper ballots, you have to have a much larger number of people in on the scheme to change a large number of votes and cover your tracks afterward.

Only because you have a lot of people monitoring the process. Give me 5 minutes alone with a ballot box, and I promise you a surprising shift in votes for that precinct. But there are a ton of people who are busy making sure I don't get that 5 minutes.

By the same token, you can design an electronic voting system so that every step is an open book. And I promise you that a zillion geeks and computer scientist will have nothing better to do than spend hours picking nits with your system. This is a level of double-checking no paper system can claim.

Any system is trustworthy to the degree that it is transparent.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[klevenstein]

We have that exact system in New Mexico.

After 2004, we formed a voter advocacy group in NM to study the problem.

Now, if you don't think this is a crucial issue for the future of our government (and consequentially, your entire future in this country), you haven't been paying attention.

We studied the various systems, looked for vulnerabilities, and came up with a legislative proposal that resulted in this system. We educated Governor Richards about it, and got it implemented in time to use it for the 2006 elections.

It works.

You cannot game this system without an unprecedented conspiracy, and even then, it would certainly be discovered. We also have random accuracy checks to track if anything weird is happening, and this is a critical part of the system. A certain political party that I won't name (but it's initials are GOP) doesn't like real voting to happen, and they tried to block it, but to no avail. It passed our Democratic-led legislature with flying colors.

You might think I'm just writing this to toot my horn. That would be wrong. I'm trying to show that citizens can do something if they work at it. None of us were getting paid or getting any benefits other than good elections in our state.

Get involved, if you care about the future of democratic government, which is essentially America's future.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[klevenstein]

To be clear, the system we chose is:

paper with numerical ID the voter takes it to the scanner and inserts it (with assistance right at hand) the scanner gives an error code if there is a problem access to the the scanner's storage is physically tamper-proof sealed the memory chip is physically tamper-proof sealed automatic random audits are performed by hand on 5% of the scanners' results (versus the paper) to verify accuracy

This system was studied by a team of data security experts, and the probability of undetected tampering is very, very close to zero.

Check out these sites, and get involved, especially if you are in one of the 6 remaining states with no VVPR (Voter-Verified Paper Record) requirement and no audit requirement:

http://www.votersunite.org/info/newmexicoaudits.asp
http://www.uvotenm.org/leg.html
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Five minutes alone with a ballot box, and you can change the count for that ballot box; it may be enough to change the results for the precinct (or it may not) but it probably won't be enough to throw a statewide election. Five minutes (or much less) of entering commands to an electronic voting system, and you damn sure can change the results of a statewide election, and furthermore, you can do it in a way that leaves no physical evidence. The "every step is an open book" and the "zillion geeks and computer scientist [who] have nothing better to do than spend hours picking nits with your system" idea is a red herring, since electronic voting systems aren't designed that way and probably never will be. They're all proprietary, with the inner workings protected as a trade secret, and given the insane state of US IP law and corporate/governmental mutual backscratching, that's not going to change.

The most reasonable assumption is that at some point, no matter what voting system you use, someone will compromise it at some point, so the best thing to do is design the system so that the least damage will result. Paper ballots fit this requirement much better than electronic systems do.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[laron]

>Give me 5 minutes alone with a ballot box, and I promise you a surprising shift in votes for that precinct.

And why on earth should you ever be alone with the ballot box? Not to mention that the box should be locked and sealed anyway.

After the last voter has voted and the polling station closes, you dump the ballots on a large table and start counting. Everyone is allowed to stay and watch: party representatives, concerned citizens, international observers...
You can even add a surveillance camera or three.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[SagSaw]

If we can't trust the electronic system (and if we did, what's the point in having a dead tree backup?) then you end up with the loser demanding a hand count every time.

It's real simple:

1. The machine counts the votes.
   
2. For some fraction of the ballots, a human verifies that the machine correctly counted the votes. This should catch any systematic error, whether due to fraud or misconfiguration.
   
3. If the outcome is uncertain, either due to a tight race or due to errors detected with the manually-verified ballots, all ballots are counted by hand.
4. The ballots then get stored in a nice, safe place.
   

If somebody (the press, interested citizens, one of the candidates, etc) wants a further recount, they are more then welcome to examine the ballots, at their own expense, after the election.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[onemorechip]

The article is not about electronic voting. It's about an optical-scan voting system that is implemented in a way that may not comply with state law (something that it is up to a court to decide).

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[fm6]

Basically you're saying "fraud is inevitable, so let's minimize it's effects." I think the top priority should be detecting fraud. And an electronic system is a lot easier to audit than a paper one.

About your sig. I assume you gave HT a free review copy. Me, I followed your link, read your free chapters, and said, "ok, this is pretty good, even if the portrayal of Dan Quayle is a little over the top. Maybe I'll buy a copy. Wait a minute. Thirty five dollars. Never mind!"

I think that's going to be the dominant response, no matter how much you plug the book. Rather than an on-demand press, you might consider ebooks.

Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever.

[aussie_a]

So you might as well do it by hand to begin with. Except that's too expensive. Freedom isn't cheap. The soldiers who participated in the American Revolution knew that and still fought for it anyway.

better idea

[ILuvRamen]

Why don't they just make a little box where you press some buttons (BUTTONS, NOT TOUCH SCREEN!) and it prints you a filled out ballot with Scantron abilities. It wipes its memory after it prints and you drop your ballot in the ballot box. Then they scan em in later with a scantron machine which would basically be 100% accuracy since they were all printed on the same paper from the same printer model in the same way. And there's your paper trail. It'd be like 3x faster and unhackable since it's still paper based.

Re:better idea

[crosson]

Government Official: You mean all the added expenditure associated with e-voting, with none of the negative publicity? I'm sold.

Persistent need to leave holes

[Anonymous Coward]

The US elections managers seem to have a chronic and persistent need to leave loopholes in whatever systems that they use that enable easy fraud.

Why?

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[smittyoneeach]

Well, because putting the code out in plain sight for general review simply doesn't work, as revealed by such diasters as GCC, the apache httpd, and the linux kernel.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Why do we even need "code"? My aunt works at the town hall of a small town of about 600 people, when election time comes around they fill out a piece of paper and it goes into a wooden box. When the voting is over, an official counts the ballots by hand. I'm pretty sure we've been voting since before we had computers, but I did go to public schools I could be wrong... why not check out what we did 30-50 years ago and.. well, do that?

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[Anonymous Coward]

My aunt works at the town hall of a small town of about 600 people, when election time comes around they fill out a piece of paper and it goes into a wooden box. When the voting is over, an official counts the ballots by hand. That sounds great for a small town of about 600 people. But there are hundreds of millions of potential voters and most of them don't live in small towns. Yeah, I know, most of them don't vote either, but, hey, at least give them the chance.

btw--sexwithanimals@gmail.com--if I may ask, WTF??!?

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[smittyoneeach]

Dammit man: if she ain't broke, fix her until she's tits up!

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

It works for more than 600 people, and I'm sure there's no county in the US that has 600 million people in it.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut that number in half and add a few million. Ugh.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[FailedTheTuringTest]

That sounds great for a small town of about 600 people. But there are hundreds of millions of potential voters

As with many large problems, this is addressed in actual elections by breaking the problem down into pieces of manageable size. These happen to be around the size that the AC mentioned. In Canada, "polling divisions" average 352 people each. In Afghanistan, it's 600 people per polling station.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Per COUNTY? What county in the US has over 300 million people? The COUNTRY has that many, but we can break it up into counties and 'voting districts.' Oh wait, we already do.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[MatB]

60 million people in the UK, works for us, always has done. A bunch of politicians keep trying to change things to electronic counting, never popular, it was trialed last May in Scotland and there was a bit of a mess, but at least all the votes were counted within district.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[bigpat]

Why do we even need "code"? My aunt works at the town hall of a small town of about 600 people, when election time comes around they fill out a piece of paper and it goes into a wooden box. When the voting is over, an official counts the ballots by hand. I'm pretty sure we've been voting since before we had computers, but I did go to public schools I could be wrong... why not check out what we did 30-50 years ago and.. well, do that? I suspect most people reading what you wrote will say to themselves 'How quaint, only 600 people' and then move on, but they may lose the point that maybe the government shouldn't be trying to scale the polling places to handle more than a relatively small number of people at the precinct level. If States simply capped the size of a polling place to handle a few thousand registered voters, then a lot of these problems go away and you just need to worry about finding volunteers to staff the polling places (which could be made an obligation like jury service). How many more elections do we have to see where large population centers are effectively disenfranchised by hours long waits at polling places which try to "serve" tens of thousands of voters on election day. My polling place serves under 4000 registered voters (with much fewer that actually vote) with optical scan paper ballots. With a realistically manageable number of people there are never serious waits to vote and people are in and out in a few minutes.

Cap the number of registered voters allowed per precinct per election worker and per actual polling station and eliminate the inequalities and bullshit. Eliminate the publicly paid for partisan primaries if you want to save money.

Seems like a simple management principle to me, don't manufacture efficiencies of scale at the expense of the quality of what you are trying to do. In other words, treat people like people and not like just another cog in the wheel.

Re:Persistent need to leave holes

[InternetVoting]

Well, for the majority of the country "30-50 years ago" voters we're voting on mechanical "lever machines" with no paper involved. Many places used those machines for close to a century. For tiny towns like the one your aunt works in, pretty much any voting method would be fine. It would be ideal to have at least an accessible option for those that can't independently vote a paper ballot. Though you might also want to consider a clear ballot box rather than a wooden one. Historically wooden boxes often had false bottoms

The benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.

Other options?

[throatmonster]

Do whatever the hell you want with electronic voting machines. Then make them print out your f'ing ballot, in whatever language you prefer. This gives the voter the ability to cross-check selections ("second chance?!?") before turning in the ballot, and leaves a scanable paper trail for recounts and other verification. You only get to turn in one ballot, and once you've turned one in, you're done - no whining or crying that you didn't do it right.

Bullshit

[Senjutsu]

And Ohio, alone, has a third of Canada's population. In large precincts, this is becoming impractical, if not impossible. I'm sure it'd work in smaller cities in the US, too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is complete and utter bullshit. Ohio has fewer total voters than Ontario, but paper ballots work in Ontario. Ohio's largest city by metropolitan population, Cleveland, has a population of 2,114,155, doesn't hold a candle to the metropolitan population of Toronto, 5,555,912, and yet paper ballots work in Toronto. Paper ballots work. They work in small populations, and they work in big populations. This "abloo abloo abloo the US alone is too big for paper ballots" meme needs to die. It's utter bullshit.

Re:Bullshit

[rtb61]

It is the very definition of modern corporate marketing. Computerised voting is only needed to inflate the profit margins of politically biased corporations. The unimaginably stupid idea of second chance voting is ludicrous. Voting is meant to be secret and anonymous but some corporate slug comes up the the marketing bull shit of checking peoples votes, which is inherently the most anti-democratic obscene idea.

Corrupting election based upon manual systems requires a huge amount of effort and in countries where there is even a minimum of honest election auditing, more often than not, gets found out and the anti-democracy offenders get prosecuted.

Electronic voting allows for the mass corruption of elections and is most often supported by corporate executives for exactly that reason.

Re:Bullshit

[danhs7]

We have much more complex ballots in the United States than elsewhere.

In Canada, voters only have 1 decision: their representative for parliament.

In the United States, ballots can have, literally, dozens of choices. Presidential, senate, house of representatives, propositions, and various local elected officials. All of which adds up to dozens of options.

Hand counting so many options would be much more complex than in a country like Canada.

Zestyping (see grandparent) described this in his dissertation: http://zestyping.livejournal.com/234617.html.

Daniel

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit.

Australia has complex ballots as well - potentially far more complex than yours. We do use manually-counted paper ballots. We deal with it by breaking them up into separate ballot papers, which are counted separately, and indeed into separate elections as well. So we have separate federal, state, and occasionally even local elections, along with separate referendums where required.

A federal election has two separate ballot papers. One for electing the local member of parliament, and one for the senate.

In the case of the MP ballot, all voters are required to cast a vote for each candidate, in order of preference. That means that this ballot contains a list of around ten candidates, numbered starting from 1 for the first choice. This is the simplest of the two.

Here is what it looks like

The senate ballot contains a list of everyone running for a senate seat. There are two options - vote for a single party and use their choices for the rest of the senate seats, or number each runner in order of preference.

Here is that one looks like. Bear in mind that the real one is much larger, and has many more options than that sample.

Every citizen is required to vote. Voter turnout is therefore somewhere higher than 99%. Since everyone must vote, we have a system designed to make every vote count. In the case of the MPs, your vote eventually ends up going to one of the two major parties anyway - as each candidate is eliminated, their votes are reallocated according to voter preference. In the case of the senate, the guy with the most votes gets a seat, and their votes are reallocated among the remaining candidates according to voter preferences, and this repeats until all candidates are eliminated.

This is all done manually.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Last i checked that was what? 20% of the total population of Canada? And Cleveland is less than 1% of the US population.
The way I see it, we in Ohio are just guinea pigs for the rest of the country with crap like this.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

All due respect, you have no idea what a typical American general election ballot looks like, much less a primary election ballot. The sample you provided is absurdly simple relative to the multi-district ballots that are typical of American elections.

Re:Bullshit

[InternetVoting]

Elections in Canada are very different to those in the United States. Canadians are likely to be voting for a single office (or very few) and likely never combined with referenda. In the U.S. It is standard to be voting for dozens of offices and issues. These offices vary greatly based on geographic region causing a single region to have hundreds if not thousands of variations of ballot combinations. Yes in the U.S. we have one ballot for everything, not separate ballots. For only a primary election one region in Florida had 1,500 ballot variations. This only gets more complex with increased populations.

Thanks for you intellectual input, but this just isn't as simple as you think it is.

Re:Bullshit

[JimBobJoe]

So we have separate federal, state, and occasionally even local elections, along with separate referendums where required.

A significant difference. They tend to be grouped together here.

Let's do *one* thing right.

[bogaboga]

Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad

For God's sake, let us as Americans, do just one thing right before the year is out. This year has been dogged by negative news from A to Z. I certainly need a break.

Re:Let's do *one* thing right.

[ScrewMaster]

For God's sake, let us as Americans, do just one thing right before the year is out. This year has been dogged by negative news from A to Z. I certainly need a break.

I got laid last week. Does that (ahem) count?

Re:Let's do *one* thing right.

[sound vision]

I scored some (high quality) meth and hydrocodone tonight. Certainly that attests to the resourcefulness of American drug dealers?

Re:Let's do *one* thing right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'm 29, and I've never had sex. So your progress gets canceled out I'm afraid

I guess I'm not pulling my own weight as an American am I? :P haha

Get the facts

[gskouby]

First - the title is sort of misleading. This is not state wide. This is in one county - Cuyahoga. Their elections are a mess and they are grasping at straws.
Second, the one thing that electronic voting equipment does really well is informing the voter of "stupid" errors. If you have voted for more than one candidate in one race it can complain at the voter and force him/her to fix the error immediately. If you fill out a paper ballot and vote for two candidates in the same race the error won't get discovered until the vote is in the process of being counted. At that point there is no way of telling what the true vote is and the voter's vote doesn't get counted. There is not supposed to be a minimum IQ for participating in a democracy - though maybe there should be.

Re:Get the facts

[avandesande]

Well it would seem to be a good idea to use the machine to help people verify their votes, and once satisfied submit them to be count by hand.

no doritos for me

[Anonymous Coward]

the world is shit because people are sober,
follow bill hicks' instructions in rant in e minor on how to free your mind

10 years ago called they want their tech back

[davidwr]

Well before the fiasco of 2000, I voted in a precinct that had a local optical-ballot counter.

You filled in an optical-scan ballot and put it in the machine.

If the machine detected an over-vote or a spoiled ballot it spit it out. This was a clue to check your ballot for errors.

If you insisted on voting that way anyways there was a manual override.

It didn't care about undervotes, it rightly counted those as abstentions.

At the end of the day, the election judge turned a key and it spit out an unofficial total for that precinct.

All the ballots and machines went to a local or county counting location where the ballots were officially removed from the machines and officially counted.

It was easy to compare the official and unofficial counts to spot for irregularities.

Very simple very easy very quick very accurate. The only thing missing was machine-assisted voting for those who couldn't read or mark an optical ballot.

Re:10 years ago called they want their tech back

[Bartab]

The only thing missing was machine-assisted voting for those who couldn't read

At some point we, as a society, just need to step up to the reality that illiterates don't matter. It's irrelevant if you can't read because you're retarded, or just because you don't care to learn. You don't know enough to intelligently vote, and most everybody doesn't really care if you get to or not. Just some loud and shrill people like to scream about things at the top of their voice. The what doesn't matter nearly as much as the screaming.

Note: Blind people -can- read, it's called braille. Of course their illiteracy rate is massive. See above.

Re:10 years ago called they want their tech back

[Phroggy]

You misunderstood. Let me clarify:

The only thing missing was machine-assisted voting for those who couldn't read [an optical ballot] or mark an optical ballot. He wasn't talking about illiterates. Blind people can't fill out a Scantron form, but they can use a computer with an audio or Braille interface which can fill out a Scantron sheet for them. He was saying the system he used didn't have this, but it could easily be added, and everything would work great (except that blind people couldn't verify their printed ballots before casting them, but they're a small enough minority that I wouldn't consider this to be a serious problem - not because blind people aren't important, but because a large enough percentage of the general population would be able to verify their ballots that any systemic problems would surely be caught.

To help explain why the issue is complicated:

[zestyping]

Elections are not simple, much as we might like them to be so.

Keep these points in mind:

• Ballots in the U. S. typically have dozens of contests -- sometimes 60, 70, or more contests. Hand counting is significantly less practical in the U. S. than in say Canada, where your ballot is just a vote for a single candidate in a single contest.
• Electronic voting has real security risks. Most folks here know that already. The risks can be big.
• Electronic voting has real potential advantages. The number of undervotes, overvotes, and otherwise spoiled ballots is considerable and significant. We are talking about millions of votes here. Voters really do make more errors when they vote on punchcards or on centrally scanned paper ballots -- and these errors disproportionately affect poorer and less educated voters. Precinct-based scanning prevents overvoting (voters find out immediately if their ballot is improperly marked, and can try again). DREs prevent overvoting and also have the potential to significantly reduce error rates by warning the voter of skipped contests, giving better instructions, and supporting more languages. DREs also have unique advantages for disabled voters.

It is not inconceivable that switching to central-count optical scanning could actually leave Ohio worse off than DREs, depending on your assumptions about the frequency of voter errors and the magnitude of security risks. There are many factors involved.

At the moment, my favourite is precinct-based optical scanning (paper-based, simple, with immediate feedback to voters) or paper ballots printed by a computerized voting interface (all the advantages of computerized vote entry -- IF the UI is well designed, without losing the verifiability and auditability of paper).

lawsuits

[ArchieBunker]

If the US govt implemented this idea then everyone who was illiterate or born without arms would sue under the disability act.

Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[gordguide]

" ... The ACLU believes the intent of election law is to ensure voters can be notified immediately of a voting error and be able to make a second-chance vote. ..."

Okay, either this is a rather new thing the lawmakers came up with for No-I-Give-Up-Tell-Me reasons, or it's a poorly crafted law with unintended consequences, or the ACLU is reading a lot into the legislation that simply doesn't exist. One thing I know, however, is a vote is a vote, in any nation on Earth. Second chances are strictly disallowed. Period. So, what does the ACLU want, really?

Does "voting error" mean something besides what I think it means? How, exactly, can there be a voting error in the first place? The voter votes. Done. The voter "made a mistake?" Same answer: "Done. Try better next time, sir."

Is someone saying a voting error refers to something the elector does not do? That it is somehow built into the system? Or even possible? I mean, I know what Election Fraud is. I know why Elections always have audit trails. I know that no elector can change his or her vote, even while the election is still ongoing. That's the way all elections work, everywhere they take them seriously.

What possible error can there be? Why am I not also reading stories in the news with the phrases "tar and feathers" and "run out of town on a rail" in them?

Re:Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

How, exactly, can there be a voting error in the first place? The voter votes. Done. The voter "made a mistake?" Same answer: "Done. Try better next time, sir."

Voting error usually means that there was some problem, technical or otherwise, that prevented the voter from communicating the vote to the tabulator. This can be as sinister as intentionally losing ballots that vote for an opposing party. It can also be as benign as the voter accidentally checking one box, erasing it, and checking another box, and the OCR machine has trouble reading it. Basically, the ACLU wants the ballots scanned in such a way as a mechanical problem that causes the ballot not to be read to lead to the ballot being destroyed, and the voter given a new one. Or, in other words, scanned on the way out of th polling place.

Lastly, there are many forms of voting that allow people to change their votes as the voting is ongoing. However, these are iterative contests, such as run-offs. The only reason not to allow someone to change their vote at any time over election day is the possibility (110%) of fraud and abuse of the system.

Re:Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[10101001 10101001]

1. Create a voting machine that reads any press to the touchscreen 60 times per second.
2. For the first choice, put a low ranking candidate of one party on the right side.
3. For every other choice, put the second party's candidate on the right side.
4. Win most of the elections.

One can do it this blatently. Or, one can make the process confusing enough that the voting process is not apparent (switching the side a party's candidate resides on, using different sized portraits/fonts, physical wear causing one side to become more pressure insensitive over time causing non-votes), allowing for intentional or unintentionally manipulation of an election. All the ACLU wants is for people to be able to vote in a way that (1) they're confident that they voted for who they chose and (2) they actually voted for who they chose.

Re:Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote in Wisconsin using optical scanners. Once, the ballot I used had a small rip in the corner. This prevented the scanner from correctly processing the ballot. The scanner rejected it, the poll workers gave me a new ballot and marked the first as invalid, I re-voted and this time my vote counted.

Send the ballots to a centralized location and such immediate feedback isn't available and I never know my ballot doesn't count. Send a batch of such ruined ballots to a precinct that votes predominantly one way and you can disenfranchise your opposition.

Re:Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[techno-vampire]

Voting error usually means that there was some problem, technical or otherwise, that prevented the voter from communicating the vote to the tabulator.

And this, right here, is yet another reason to ignore the ACLU. There's already a perfectly good term for this: "spoiled ballot." It's been in use, probably, for well over a century. There's no reason, other than stupidity, to invent such an unintuitive term as "second chance" to replace the current, well-understood one of "spoiled ballot." Proof, if such were needed, that the ACLU is completely out of touch with reality.

Re:Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

"spoiled ballot." It's been in use, probably, for well over a century.

I never heard that term before. I had heard the term voter error before. Also, all the news used the term "voter error" in 2000.

Re:Okay, I know this is America, but ...

[techno-vampire]

The precinct instructions here in California refer to spoiled ballots and how to handle them. The voter is entitled to three tries to Get It Right if needed, and spoiled ballots are retained until the polls close and are sent back to the district.

Ultimately, here's the problem ...

[ScrewMaster]

the powers-that-be (corporate or governmental, take your pick) don't trust us, We the People, to count our votes inaccurately enough for them.

Confidentiality can be maintained

[davidwr]

If the ballot-counting machine is in the precinct and it immediately rejects unreadable and over-voted ballots, the voter can ask to have it spoiled.

If the spoiling procedure preserves confidentiality then there is no problem.

One way to do this is for the voter to put the ballot in an envelope with a see-through hole big enough to see the ballot's serial number. The election official writes down the serial number in an official log and the voter initials it. The sealed envelope is put in a secure location. Unless there is an irregularity, all spoiled ballots are later destroyed unseen. The "voter initials it" fraud-prevention step can be eliminated if privacy is deemed more important than fraud prevention.

Cyncial response

[davidwr]

Greedy Elected Official: You mean a cheap, reliable system that won't have to be replaced every few years, drying up campaign contributions by companies who want a piece of the action? I'll never let it happen!

My letter to the ACLU

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I've been an ACLU member for years, and I was just about to renew my membership when this came up. Here's what I sent them:

===

The Associated Press reports today that the ACLU is pressing Cuyahoga County, Ohio, not to go through with a planned switch from electronic voting machines to optical-scan paper ballots. This is a terrible position to take, and it is honestly enough to make me question whether or not I should renew my membership for the year.

While I appreciate the ACLU's hard work for voting rights in many areas, the simple fact is that electronic voting machines may be the single most pressing problem our electoral system faces. They are by their very nature unaccountable and amenable to large-scale election fraud. Any move to abandon these machines (which are manufactured and operated almost exclusively by private companies with right-wing ties) should be applauded, not suppressed. This is an issue of particular note in Ohio, given that electronic voting machine fraud in that state in 2004 may well have been responsible for the outcome of that year's Presidential race, with its terrible consequences for our nation.

I sincerely hope that the ACLU will reverse its position on this case and take a strong stand in favor of paper ballots. Silence on this issue is a barely acceptable position for America's leading civil rights organization; supporting the wrong side in this battle is not acceptable at all, to me and I suspect to many other people who have supported the ACLU for years. If the ACLU persists in opposing the planned Cuyahoga County move, I will regretfully conclude that I can no longer support this great organization.

Re:My letter to the ACLU

[onemorechip]

They aren't taking a pro-electronic voting position. They are challenging a new system that they think does not comply with state law. They have taken the position of requiring a paper trail when touch-screen voting systems are used. Their concern here (if it is correctly placed; I'm not familiar enough with the law and circumstances in Ohio) seems consistent with their earlier positions.

Re:My letter to the ACLU

[JimBobJoe]

This is an issue of particular note in Ohio, given that electronic voting machine fraud in that state in 2004 may well have been responsible for the outcome of that year's Presidential race

While there may have been problem with the 2004 Ohio vote, electronic machines were not the cause because they weren't used.

In 2004 70% of Ohio counties had punch cards, the rest had scantron, and about 3 or 4 had old style "Shouptronic" machines. Ohio counties did not start adopting DREs until 2005.

Why the obligation to force people to vote?

[eagl]

If you are too stupid to fill out the ballot correctly, or more likely so damn lazy that you didn't bother to figure out how to fill it out correctly, why is the state under an obligation to FORCE you to change your vote? It's not an IQ test, and even the infamous florida butterfly ballots were figured out correctly by the vast majority of voters. So when a good faith effort is made to ensure that the ballots are reasonably easy to fill out correctly, why is the state under any obligation to change what the "voter" has done with their ballot?

Freedom to vote also (in my opinion) means freedom to NOT vote, and filling out a ballot incorrectly is the same thing as not voting. There are plenty of measures out there to help voters fill out ballots correctly, including small armies of volunteer election officials at the voting stations who's sole reason for existence is to help people vote. If people insist on filling out the ballots incorrectly in spite of all the efforts being made to help them vote, why do we still have a further obligation to force these people to CHANGE THEIR VOTE? After all, a no-vote is just as legitimate a position as a vote.

Ballot machines should be limited to printing

[Joce640k]

Ballot machines should be limited to printing out a card with the votes clearly displayed and a big barcode at the bottom.

No networking, no outside connections, no storage of information, just a printer and a stack of cards.

This gets you electronic counting, full paper trail, accountability, etc.

Of course the politicians may actually be eyeing up the possibilities for cheating when there's no audit trail....

One thng you need: software freedom

[jbn-o]

It's not that difficult. But people in positions of political power are disincentivized from doing the right thing. This includes talking to technical people who advocate for free software voting machines so that we can end up with machines that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots which are stored for manual counting and are built on a free software system so that the county/state can get programmers they can trust when things don't work correctly. Having a choice of proprietors is just picking your monopolist and then hoping they'll do what you want when the contract is signed.

Instead of spending millions on a new proprietary system that will not adequately address local needs issues (and thus cause great embarrassment for the clerks who chose them), they could spend money (even with other states and counties) developing voting machines they can maintain and inspect as much as they like. Counties and states can purchase the required black box testing themselves, they don't need ES&S, Diebold, etc. to do this for them.

In this particular case, the ACLU's fear—voters not being immediately notified that their ballots are invalid—can be dealt with by a computer which scans (but doesn't count) their paper voter-verified ballot. Not only can most voters have an opportunity to read their paper ballot, they could plug in a pair of headphones into the computer and have the computer read them their ballot back and then determine if that comports with their intended vote. Then after this proofing (human and/or computer) each voter has a reasonable expectation that their ballot is valid and accurately reflects their intention.

I was part of the appointed group that recommended a set of voting machines for Champaign County, Illinois' elected County Board. Due to some not-completely-honest measures about only hearing from "approved" vendors, and a bunch of poor choices, I was pushed into picking the least-worst which happened to be a set of ES&S machines (one scanned and/or produced a paper voter-verifiable ballot, the other counted that paper ballot and physically retained it in a locked cabinet). Champaign County ended up with ES&S machines, only one of which had been approved for use by the state (in the state's bound-to-be-bullshit testing regime). The hurdles to overcome aren't ridiculously difficult. It will be hard to get some people to understand that it's beneficial to have local control over the voting machine so the machines can be reprogrammed to meet local needs (including changing the software to accommodate non-first-past-the-post voting, and generally fixing bugs or adding enhancements a county decides they want after the voting hardware contract is signed).

One thing that would really help (nothing like the power of a good example) is a free software voting machine that works just like the ES&S paper ballot scanning machines. These machines have a remarkably simple interface, good and adjustable voice, clear display, and headphone jacks. But these machines run on proprietary software which ES&S isn't willing to relicense (despite being their customer). So you're stuck with them for "support" and that means hoping they'll share your county's idea of what your voting system should do.

Egad. Voting machines are peanuts.

[Fantastic Lad]

Let's see now. . .

If you are a high ranking manager for the Dark Side then here are several realities which color every last one of your actions and decisions. . .

1. You are a psychopathic creature who looks human but who doesn't grasp the concept of compassion.

2. Destruction and misery are your bread and butter on a very fundamental level. It's an addiction.

3. The Earth is in for a big change. It may include sudden glacial rebounding, (if the Gulf Stream cuts out, most of Europe will be under ice), cometary impacts and war.

4. Underground tunnels and bases are your ace in the hole.

5. Hm. Except when you come up for air, who's going to polish your shoes and grow your crops? You need to keep some of those cattle-people alive.

6. Cattle-people are the enemy. If the masses find out that you're a psychological deviant, they're going to take away all your privileges and probably put you in prison for ever and ever. So they cannot be allowed to accumulate knowledge or power. You must keep them at each other's throats, keep them scrabbling in a fear-filled environment. --But you still need them to polish your shoes and grow your crops, so it's really all very annoying. You hate them but you need them. The big kill-off will require careful management.

7. You hate Jews and Blacks and Asians. You don't know why exactly, but you do. It's programmed in. --Anyway, if 97% of the population has to be culled, then it would be prudent to make sure you include all of the 'undesirables' among that percentage.

8. Republican or Democrat? Democratic elections? Voting machines? Oh please. The preparations for this phase of human history have been under way for thousands of years. The social management has been highly successful and the people of the world live in almost total ignorance. The changes will come whether we want them or not. The only two questions are, "How uncomfortable is it all going to be, and will the Light Side or the Dark Side rule the planet after the dust settles?"

The way to avoid disaster is not actually that hard. It involves living in the opposite way the system wants you to live in every respect. Fearlessly following your inner guidance system, (the one which isn't linked to basic animal instincts, and which isn't driven by fear of want.)

-FL

Define democracy.

[palegray.net]

"Democracy is a system of government whereby the people get no better than they deserve."

Yes, democracy is the best system of government available. Still, the question isn't one of "is the general population aware of voting issues", it's "does the general population actually care about voting issues"... That question leads to some pretty depressing answers.

Re:Define democracy.

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Still, the question isn't one of "is the general population aware of voting issues", it's "does the general population actually care about voting issues"... That question leads to some pretty depressing answers.

Why's it depressing? It's not like anyone cares.

Seriously though, that seems to be one of the most common criticism that people have about democracy: that other people don't care about the same issues they do.

Re:Define democracy.

[palegray.net]

Wrong. One of the most common criticisms of modern democracy is the simple fact that people don't care about anything. When it's time to vote, I tell everyone I know to vote for someone. I urge people to read everything they can get their hands on about all the candidates and issues. I would much rather have people I know vote for someone I hate than have them not vote at all. Apathy is the mother of all screwups.

Re:Define democracy.

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

One of the most common criticisms of modern democracy is the simple fact that people don't care about anything.

I think you'll find that most people will start to care once they're rubbed the wrong way. As it stands, many are quite content with their life the way it is, and have been content with most (if not all) the leaders passing through their offices. They have no motivation to make any issues out of anything because democracy has already succeeded for them. This doesn't mean they don't care, that they aren't a political force, because if anybody does anything to jeopardise their lifestyle, they will care, and their wrath will be terrible.

Concur

[happyslayer]

I was in the same position: Asked to come in as a technical consultant to look over the proposals for the electronic voting system to be used.

Again, it was "least deficient" when I made my final recommendation. ES&S at least tried to look like they were supplying a system that following the boilerplate RFP (Request for Proposals, a govt term meaning "I want a system to do this; waddaya got?"). One item that particularly stood out was the following:

• RFP specified a three-tier database system. (For non-geeks, it means that the database and front-end GUI were separated by a third system that "translates" between what the user wants and what the system supplies.)
• ES&S stated that theirs was a three-tier database system with "blah-blah-blah".
• Diebold stated that their system was a "two-tier, three-tier, or n-tier system" depending upon the customer's setup.

Now, this is a geeky point of contention, but to me, it said that Diebold's marketing folks were just throwing in crap to make it sound like they were fulfilling the requirement. I recommended that Diebold should not be used because of their marketing double-speak.

(To finish up, I was told by the Election Board that they were already bound to a solution if they wanted funding: "If we don't buy the system the state wants, we won't get the funds to do the upgrade at all, and we will not be in compliance." Being that this was on Kenneth Blackwell's watch as Secretary of State, I wasn't surprised, only mildly disappointed.)

But, bad purchase aside, Scioto County, OH now uses optical scanners at each of the polling places. The voter gets immediate feedback on problems, and this point of contention never came up. (*chuckle* Not even going to touch all the other problems...)

As an Ohioan, my first question would be "What the fsck is going on up in Cleveland?!?" But, as a voter in these times, I am, again, only mildly disappointed.

If somebody can't fill the ballot out correctly...

[mi]

... I am not sure, we benefit from their opinion anyway.

Now, even the smartest people can make an accidental mistake, but there will not be a pattern — a disproportional number of accidental mistakes among supporters of a particular candidate or party.

If, on the other hand, the disqualifying mistakes are due to wider-spread illiteracy, then, maybe, it is a good thing, that those votes aren't counted?..

Yes, I am for discounting the stupid people's votes...

The only problem is, without the system telling a voter upfront: this is incorrect and your vote will be ignored, unless you fix it, the potential for some perfectly valid votes being fraudulently discarded later on increases...

this has been studied to death by experts,

[klevenstein]

and the only thing you need besides the voter-verified paper is a minimum of 5% automatically-triggered random audits.

We have it in New Mexico because we formed a voter group, studied it with experts, formulated the desired system, and made it happen.
http://www.votersunite.org/info/newmexicoaudits.asp
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
http://www.uvotenm.org/

Here's an idea for machines

[computerman413]

Instead of a touch screen, perhaps there could be an electronic voting machine that has a row of buttons on each side of the screen, like an ATM. This could eliminate those inaccuracies. As for machine tampering, perhaps each machine should be reporting votes back in real time. That way, it would be hard to stuff a box, as multiple votes within a very small timeframe could raise a red flag. I definitely don't trust optical scanning, having been burned by it a couple of times on exams while in college.

Attention-Deficit Disorder

[Atmchicago]

It's simply not possible to count all of this quickly and accurately by hand in one day.

Who said it has to be all finished in one day? Give them two weeks and let them do it correctly. The problem is we are all obsessed with finding out the results within 24 hours, as though it were a sporting event or something. In order to garner the most advertising revenue, the television networks have turned politics into a spectator sport that takes place every four years, like the Olympics. People apparently no longer have the attention span of even a lizard.

Re:Attention-Deficit Disorder

[pizzach]

Mod parent up. There were plenty of people who had posted earlier that they wouldn't mind waiting about two weeks for results. On another note, having the counting slowed to two weeks destroys the effects of live counting by the networks on the people who still haven't voted yet.

Re:Attention-Deficit Disorder

[JimBobJoe]

Who said it has to be all finished in one day?

No one actually. I believe few care.

The problem is finding all the people required to stick around and count ballots, which is a more than boring task.

Re:Attention-Deficit Disorder

[josh82]

Damn right.

Alternatively, it might be better to have a two (or more)-tiered counting system: count the ballots for the governorship (or whatever) immediately as per any other normal election (like that in Canada), but then take your sweet time counting up all the votes on subsidiary ballot initiatives.

Re:Attention-Deficit Disorder

[SydShamino]

Well said.

Vote fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Any system, other than an open paper ballot, can be fixed. Vote fraud, yet another infringement on our rights by the gov't. Add it to the ever-growing list of violations:
They violate the 1st Amendment by opening mail, caging demonstrators and banning books like "America Deceived" from Amazon.
They violate the 2nd Amendment by confiscating guns during Katrina.
They violate the 4th Amendment by conducting warrant-less wiretaps.
They violate the 5th and 6th Amendment by suspending habeas corpus.
They violate the 8th Amendment by torturing.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting 2 illegal wars based on lies and on behalf of a foriegn gov't.
Support Dr. Ron Paul and save us all.
Last link (unless Google Books caves to the gov't and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)

Australia posts their software on the Internet

[tompoe]

So, if all electronic voting systems were required to use Open Source software, the voters' right to vote would be returned. The U.S. would have electronic voting systems that enabled public scrutiny, and the ability to detect all but the most sophisticated undetectable manipulation of the vote count. Such a requirement would send those who might want to control our elections back to the drawing board. But, knowing that, one has to wonder why we chose to ignore the Australian approach, and instead, put a system in place that guarantees crude but undetectable manipulation of the vote count will be almost automatic. Not to mention the obscene costs to taxpayers to purchase proprietary voting machines.

Re:Australia posts their software on the Internet

[ajs318]

So, if all electronic voting systems were required to use Open Source software, the voters' right to vote would be returned. The U.S. would have electronic voting systems that enabled public scrutiny, and the ability to detect all but the most sophisticated undetectable manipulation of the vote count.

No. The problem will not go away just because you are using Open Source software, because you are not going nearly far enough.

At the end of the day, there are still only a minority of people who are in a position to scrutinise the process {and anyway, they don't know for certain that the software they scrutinised is the software that is loaded into the machines}.

Pencil and paper and manual counting are universally comprehensible. There's nothing scientific involved; every single voter can understand the system and its failure modes. And without that universal comprehensibility, democracy dies; because ultimately you cannot trust what you do not understand.

Re:Australia posts their software on the Internet

[FailedTheTuringTest]

Well said! Current systems already distance too many people from participating in their own governance. Democracy should not be a black box.

Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

First, if you can't do your civic responsibility and vote correctly, why should it count?

Second, votes are supposed to be anonymous and untracable, how is a bad ballot supposed to be traced to the voter who cast it? Duh. Hi, we're the vote police, we'd like to talk to you about your ballot from last November.

Corrupshen?

[rice_burners_suck]

They should make up a voting machine that no matter who you vote for, it elects the more corrupt candidate. That would be good for this country. We need more corrpution. No thats' not a typo. Corrpution iz a word.

Re:Corrupshen?

[sethstorm]

Diebold would have prior patents on that. That already happened, twice.

Speaking as someone of such state...

[sethstorm]

When manufacturing got driven out of here by globalization, our main industry (of the remaining residents unable to leave) is now shifted to corruption. The next following is cleaning out mistakes left by Reagan. This isn't a surprise.

irresponsible technophilia

[circletimessquare]

# of attack vectors:

electronic > mechanical > paper

beginning and end of discussion. all other observations you can make fall secondary to this overriding observation and do not modify or reverse it

we should always use paper. forever. in all countries

faith in the democratic process is not something you want to mess with simply because computers are neat-o

# of attack vectors:

[circletimessquare]

electronic > mechanical > paper

voting is not a problem that needs to be solved better. the K.I.S.S. prinniple is something all programmers can appreciate: keep it simple stupid

please lose your technophilia on this question of voting, faith in democracy is way too important in this world

electronic, mechanical even, merely represents a more complicated way to do something

unnecessarily

with marginal benefits outweighed by serious problems

Fraud proof?

[nem75]

"It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes."

Old Stalin was not the first and not the last to know this. It doesn't matter what kind of elaborate systems you think up to make elections fraud proof - in the end there will always be successful efforts to change the results, no matter what you do.

So you might as well stay with the pen & paper method. At least there the evidence of fraud is a bit harder to get rid of then opposed to changing some numbers in a machine.

What the fuck is wrong with you people?

[ajs318]

Simple solution:

Count the fucking ballots by fucking hand in the fucking polling station in the fucking presence of the fucking candidates.

There is no machinery, therefore no systemic failure modes that are not universally comprehensible. By definition, none of the candidates trust each other; so they'll all be watching extra-hard in case anyone else makes a mistake. There are more than one person there, so disputes can be resolved easily: if a majority cannot agree that a ballot is correctly filled, it is rejected. No ballots can get lost because they stayed in the polling station the whole time. The process can be parallelised in each polling station, so the final result is available as soon as the slowest count is completed.

I'm missing something here...

[KeithH]

I just don't get it. In Canada, we use computers to tabulate paper ballots. The results are available in time for the 10pm news. Why do jurisdictions in the United States insist on presenting the voter with a computer screen?

When did marking an X become too difficult?

Re:I'm missing something here...

[ibsteve2u]

The manipulation of paper ballots requires entirely too much work to redistribute precinct results in a fashion random enough to avoid unduly upsetting the exit pollsters.

We wouldn't be Republicans if we wanted to pay overtime, now would we?

Re:I'm missing something here...

[KeithH]

With at least some of our elections, there is no "manipulation of paper ballots" unless there is a recount or an audit. The ballots are read by computers. No, they are not punch cards. It seems like a fair, fast, and safe system to me.

Re:I'm missing something here...

[ibsteve2u]

I was too subtle in my sarcasm, perhaps - or unduly optimistic.

It is a lot easier to manipulate election results that are read into and stored by computers before they are delivered via e-pipes that various Federal agencies interface with in the name of "Homeland Security".

In comparison to hand-counted paper ballots.

You can be a lot more subtle in how you manipulate an election if you can access returns from everywhere simultaneously. Stuffing the ballot box precinct by precinct is primitive by comparison.

Has anyone here actually ever voted?

[missing000]

We use precincts to divide these large numbers into manageable units, like the 600 person town cited above.

There are very simple manual fixes to the system, but that largely ignores the other problems with the American voting system, namely the lack of run-off features which encourage voting for a likable candidate rather than a perceived front-runner.

What I rather like as a fix however is a system like the British have used for a long time where the party in the majority elects a representative to lead them. Much more democratic and less subject to manipulation in general.

Unfortunately this kind of change will require a rather substantial constitutional amendment, not likely to happen unless you do start voting and actually demand a change.

I don't get it

[jbarr]

"The main dispute is whether a central optical scan of ballots at the board's headquarters downtown would result in votes not being counted on ballots that are incorrectly filled out. The ACLU believes the intent of election law is to ensure voters can be notified immediately of a voting error and be able to make a second-chance vote."

Why are we pandering to people who can't or won't follow instructions properly? Part of the election process should be a concise, accurate explanation to the voters how to vote. If a voter make a mistake before the vote is cast, then he should have the opportunity to correct it. But once it is cast, he must live with his decision. We all want to ensure accountability in the election process, but why are we so unwilling to hold voters accountable for their actions?

Interesting!!

[listen_to_blogs]

"a central optical scan of ballots at the board's headquarters downtown would result in votes not being counted on ballots that are incorrectly filled out." ==> An 'incorrectly filled out' ballot should not be counted by definition, right???? listen_to_slashdot