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NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods
dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."
Just curious since I can't vote - but is there legal room that allows it?
What about disabled people that for some reason can't use a voting machine - what are their options?
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Unfortunately, being an absentee voter doesn't really guarantee you much more of a paper trail - not only is the anonymity protocol violated (there's no way to make sure people aren't forcing or bribing you to vote a certain way), but there is also no way for the counters to make sure all of the absentee votes make it to the counting table (or whether they have been selectively pruned).
Also, many places use the optical scanning machines to sum up the absentee ballots, then add the votes to the database of the central tabulator machine being used to count the votes from the balloting machines.
That being said, at least the paper is existing somewhere at some point (and the voter has had a chance to look at it), so it could be looked at as a marginally better process than the paperless machines. Absentee balloting is just the best of a bad process though.
I understand the need for machines which make it easier for disabled people to vote, but the only "safe" machine is a machine which just marks ballots in a human-readable manner. The machine can ensure that ballots aren't created in an invalid state (multiple candidates when only one is allowed), and that non-vote selections are explicit (voter must choose 'none of the above' to proceed). The machine then prints the ballot in a human readable form and makes it available to the voter. The voter inspects it and either places it in the ballot box, or takes it to another machine which reads the ballot and makes the selections apparent to the voter (think vision impaired voter needing the ballot to be 'read' to them) and then after they confirm the ballot is accurate, places it in the ballot box.
This still doesn't deal with the fact the many voters will vote without making 'hard' selections. Candidates at the top of the ballot get a 'bump' just by their position. There are other ways which a machine could subtlety influence an election, as well as marking some percentage of the ballots "erroneously" in hopes that voters wouldn't inspect the ballots closely and find the errors.
In short, accurate elections with anonymous, non-voter-provable (to prevent blackmail/vote purchasing) votes are hard, but since they are the basis for our system of government, we need to do the work to do it right.
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My country uses paper ballots that are marked by pen, and optically scanned by the human eye. I don't see any reason why we need machines at all. Votes are counted so fast. That they had to make a law that results couldn't be reported before all polling stations were closed, because they believed the people on the west coast were being influence by the results from the east coast.
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