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."

Comments

Absentee Vote!

[rthille]

In California, you can be an Permanent Absentee Voter, which guarantees a paper trail for your vote. I deliver mine directly to the County Registrar of Voters, but I believe you can drop them off an any polling place, or mail them, though they have to arrive by the deadline, postmark does not count.

Re:Absentee Vote!

[mOdQuArK!]

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.

Software standards are just terrible, complicated

[compumike]

I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly, making systems that crash under normal usage conditions. But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things! Keep it simple and they might have done much better. Why base something like this off of Windows CE? How many megahertz do I need to do a voting machine? Seriously, all of this extra hardware and software means more abstraction (which is considered a good thing in the computer science world), but it also means more abstractions that can be misinterpreted and misused. For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.

--
Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.

The only "safe" voting machine is a ballot marker.

[rthille]

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.

I don't understand what's wrong

[youthoftoday]

Now, I'm not a US citizen, but the way I see it, Company X convinced officials A and B to buy these machines. The machines were bought, company X was paid by the taxpayer, officials A and B were paid by company X, the board, employees and shareholders of company X were paid. The voting machines went wrong so more money will have to be spent on them.

Who cares about right and wrong? Rich people and public officials made themselves some money.

Surely an American dream. What could be more perfect?

i am no luddite

[circletimessquare]

i am also no technofetishist

sometimes, more tech thrown at a problem makes it worse, not better

there is no compelling argument, NO COMPELLING ARGUMENT to use anything more than

1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner

there is however, with electronic voting, AND mechanical voting something else:

1. increased number of attack vectors
2. loss of transparency in the voting process, and therefore mistrust in democratic results, and lingering lack of faith in government

the only arguments for electornic voting are:

1. kickbacks to officials
2. increased business for a business that shouldn't exist

no electronic voting. ever. anywhere

accepting it means that people will begin to erode their fatih in democracy

if they can't see it, smell it touch it, they won't trust it

once again:

1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner

anything else represents an eroding faith in democracy