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Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
whoever57 writes "Ed Felten is showing a scan of the summary from a Sequoia voting machine used in New Jersey. According to the paper record, the vote tallies don't add up — the total number of Republican ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Republican primary and the total number of Democratic ballots does not match the number of votes cast in the Democratic primary. Felten has a number of discussions about the problems facing evoting, up to and including a semi-threatening email from Sequoia itself."
Update: 03/20 23:30 GMT by J : Later today, Felten added an update in which he analyzes Sequoia's explanation. He has questions, comments, and a demand.
As Felten made clear in the article, it's not the size of the discrepancy that's the issue, but the fact that it's there at all. You'd expect this sort of minor error from humans, but the machine turning out this discrepancy is a dead giveaway that something is fundamentally wrong with its inner workings. If we could examine said inner workings, we could determine the cause of this bizzare behavior, but actually knowing what is going on inside their machines is something Sequoia is bound and determined to prevent. One can't help but wonder why, given what we've just seen...
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Well, bring on the lawsuit from Sequoia I guess. Hopefully the ACLU & EFF will help Dr. Felten with his legal fees.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I love the double-standard here. The government wants to invade the privacy of it's citizens (discussed several times over on these very forums) and one of the typical responses is "Well, if you don't have anything to hide...".
But when an independant third party wants to verify that an important piece of hardware used in our political process can actually do the very simple math that it's required to do, the corporation who produces is has laws that it can throw in one's face to prevent verification of data. Shouldn't someone be pressing Sequoia with the "if you don't have anything to hide..." mantra?
Does anyone else here see the obvious double-standard that we've created for ourselves?
The readout on a screen seems like a simple data display problem. Perhaps the programmer did something stupid like:
print array.lastIndex.indexNum
instead of
print array.count
The real concern here is not that it has a bug. All software has bugs. The concern is over what kind of QA was performed to guarantee our votes. If such a simple and obvious test case was not performed, how on earth are we to feel good about this machine?
Both tallies are out by 1 count. Could it be the one is counting from zero and the other from one?
:)
Actually, the Republican tally was heavy one vote, while the Democratic tally was light one vote. Thus, your proposed explanation doesn't wash.
On the bright side at least the error will vanish as the number of votes approaches infinity
That's assuming that the error is due to the cause you postulated, which cannot be the case.
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On the whole of it, I have a big problem with the "Winner takes all" system anyway, with the majority giving the power to a handful to beat up on us all. Not even getting into how the Republicans and the Democrats systemically shuts out all other parties.
But if we are going to have voting, at least make it fair. Give equal time to ALL parties, not just the D-R club, and use paper ballots under tight security. At least make "Democracy" less of a joke than it already is.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
One counter started at Zero, the other at One? ...These kind of bugs are written all the time. ...Of course, this is why the software should be OSS. The more eyeballs, the more people running in debug mode just to play around and have fun, the more people slicing and dicing the source code, the better.
It's hard to believe this is even an issue. The problem is that the people making voting machines (like Diebold) come from Banking sectors, where privacy and private, proprietary systems are the modus operandi.
Seems to me a good way to fix this would be to get some high-profile Non-Profs and top-brand CS schools (I'm thinking MIT, Apache Foundation, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, etc) all working together to gather some grant money, build the hardware and software solutions, open everything up for scrutiny, and produce a working product.
We can wave our arms over what somebody SHOULD build, but if we had a compelling alternative ready to go, it'd be a lot easier to pressure governments to do the right thing.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
How is intentionally preventing auditing of the basic method of democracy anything less than treason? The Board of Directors should be jailed forever for condoning this activity by the Company's lawers.
Had your uncle tried to vote he would have needed to sign the voting register. Physical possession of a ballot does not mean they get to cast it.
And that's exactly the way it's worked in every locality I've ever voted in, provide full name and address, workers cross name off list, get ballot. I'm not buying the GP's story.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
We can conduct trillions of dollars of business electronically
If those trillions of dollars had to be transacted via "secret ballot", I'm pretty sure that hundreds of billions of them would have disappeared. Somehow it's a lot harder to write error-free code when you know that nobody's going to be able to do something as simple as checking their bank statements to catch your errors.
I call bs on this. Every single election I've voted in (5 so far, in Maryland and Massachusetts) your name had to be on a list, and was marked off that list when you voted. There's simply no way someone who isn't registered to vote could have voted. While it's possible an illegal alien could be registered to vote, it would be a short matter of time before INS tracked them down that way. I think your uncle was having a double laugh - at both the incompetence and gullibility of Americans. You fell for it. I prefer to believe that than you're knowingly trying to shift focus form this very real issue to the phantom issue of illegal aliens (oooooo! scary!) usurping the rights of naturalized citizens.
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