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 ...

[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 ...

[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 ...

[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.

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:Simple = Better

[flyingfsck]

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

[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.

[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.

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: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: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.

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.

Re:Simple = Better

[fm6]

I don't argue with cats!