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The Cost of Electronic Voting
Wired's Threat Level blog is reporting on an analysis of the cost of electronic voting compared to traditional methods of vote tallying. A group named SaveOurVotes examined Maryland's budget allocations for elections during their switch from optical scanners to touch screens, and found that contrary to official claims, the cost was higher for e-voting (PDF) — much higher.
"Prior to purchasing the touch-screen machines, about 19 of Maryland's 24 voting districts used optical-scan machines. SaveOurVotes examined those counties and compared the cost of the optical-scan equipment they previously used to the touch-screen machines they were forced to buy. The cost for most counties in this category increased 179 percent per voter on average. In at least one county, the cost increased 866 percent per voter — from a total cost of about $22,000 in 2001 to $266,000 in 2007."
Black box voting has been insecure and cost more. Let's hope this stops it.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
The article claims that you need 10 touch screen machines to replace a single optical reader device. I have a few questions about that...
1. Why do we need touch screen - what is wrong with a mouse. Even the most retarded computerphobic morons can figure out how to use a mouse in 60 secs.
2. Use some sort of remote desktop/web service to accomplish this. Buy the cheapest thin clients possible to connect to a "server" that could be run by a P4 2ghz computer at each site.
3. Even better than #2, create a web service for each county - again reducing the amount of equipment.
4. Extrapolate #3 even further. Hire cheap techs for each county to ensure they have internet connectivity - State runs the servers.
It isn't the electronic voting... it is how they implemented it. It doesn't take a genius to realize that $3000 computers to perform basic calculations is overspending. I wonder how much the servers cost?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
I don't understand why then U.S. is so keen on using electronic counting. I mean even optical scanners are quite a system. What speaks against a letting volunteers count the vote like in lots of other countries? It sure is at least as safe as electronic voting, much cheaper and not that much slower.
The USA is rich. Rich enough to spend trillions in choosing the governments of other countries.
;) ). Otherwise you get too many people not accepting the results. In which case it becomes a big waste of time (and often lives).
So it should be able to afford a good voting system. Nothing like the diebold crap.
Manual vote counting and counter-checking can be easily parallelizable. The more voters you have, the more vote counters and observers you should be able to recruit.
It is MUCH harder to tamper with paper ballots. You might be able to do a few areas, but to do it all while the other parties have people watching is hard.
With most electronic voting systems, 3rd parties can't watch the "counting" easily. If you have an e-voting system where 3rd parties can watch easily and it's verifiable, it'll probably cost more in the end.
So what if you have to wait a few hours before you get the results?
Lastly, Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be _SEEN_ to be fair (enough
The real shame of this is that electronic voting should be cheaper and more secure but Dibold's flawed equipment and business model has given a bad name to the whole concept. While it's true that electronic voting requires more equipment, this equipment should be cheaper. Ten $200 terminals should cost less to purchase and maintain than one specialty machine. Yes, $200 is a reasonable price if free software was used and a free software for voting can easily be written if it's not already available. Instead, Dibold passed on the "commodity" software model, complete with the upgrade treadmill, insecurity and lack of transparency.
No need to worry about educating people on how to use the machine (either for voting or setup), and the paper trail is built in.
Of course, you can still mess with things if the layout of the ballot is inherently flawed (butterfly ballots in 2000, anyone, although with a pen chads aren't a problem), but at least the mechanism itself shouldn't be in question.
you dont mind spending 9-12 months following a political campaign
but you (well the media) want the result instantly ?
who doesn't mind waiting 3 days to count paper votes by hand ? what difference does it make to your lives that it cant wait less than a week ?
evoting is only attractive to governments people because it can be hacked easily and more importantly without trace (ram is good like that) no pesky tonnes of paper to dispose of in a ditch
good idea of course in theory (like fusion) but it just wont work in practice
it is all of them. The fact that ALL of the mainstreams are trying hard to hide their code and their hardware says a lot about them. Yet, none of it is proprietary. There just is nothing that they do that subject to a patent. What is needed is for states to INSIST on buying ONLY open systems (i.e. all code is open to be seen) AND closed hardware (i.e. no accessable usb ports, etc). All of this is easily doable and all should be cheap. But we both agree.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What I worry about is that the existing hardware was "Designed for Windows" so that it might not be possible to fix with free software. System hardware should be chosen based on the availability of free software driver support. The smallest binary blob should be rejected because it can conceal malice.
The highest cost of non free electronic voting is an easily thrown election.
Too bad Democrat voters are too stupid to use the optically scanned ballots.
...if there really is something to bible revelation mention of the stone image of the beast.
Of course the beast is man and the image is his invention of computers.
But its stuff like this you have to wonder how in the hell did it ever come about this spending huge amounts of money on a different way of voting?
And a way that just is not so secure, but rather easy to manipulate.
Hmmm, so I bet it was an electronic vote that "forced" purchase and use of such systems???
But one thing is for sure, its another strike against the machines and those promoting their use.
Thug.
Insert your favorite quote about statistics here...
I glanced at the article and didn't see any useful data, so I paged through the pdf. There's some stuff in there that I don't understand and could cause some major problems with their statistics.
1) They appear to be comparing projected costs of optical scanners with actual costs of touchscreen machines. The PDF shows a 7 year lifespan of the original optical machine purchase, amortized over the first five years with zero additional purchases for that 7 year period, only warranty repairs. I sincerely doubt that there were zero additional purchases.
2) Can't they hire the same project managers for the touchscreen rollout as for the optical? People management is people management, no real difference.
3) Warehousing costs - aren't they storing the equipment at a state run facility? No reason why there should be a huge capital payment associated with that.
4) Transportaion costs fluctuate wildly on the touchscreen actual costs page, but are unwaveringly cheap on the optical page. The same equipment would always have to be moved to the same place, so I don't see that assumption as valid.
5) Voter outreach is 2x more for touchscreen as it is for the optical assumptions. I don't see how that cost would be different.
6) I don't see a line item for absentee ballot printing on the optical page at all.
7) I call BS on the statement that 10 touchscreens are needed for the job of a single optical scanner. Why would a county be willing to have a single optical scanner during an election? What if it failed? Those people wouldn't be able to vote that day? I think 2-3 is a more legitimate answer to account for quick processing and/or machine failures.
8) What exactly are the optional services that Diebold provides that account for almost $28M. That's a third of the overall total cost. There's no breakdown of what the services are, so there's no way to compare them with line items on the optical scanner costs.
They're comparing apples to oranges here with the projected costs of optical. It's simply not a fair comparison. And then not listing what those services are that almost singlehandedly account for the entire difference in cost between optical and touchscreen is ludicrous. If you take that line item out since there is no equivalent line item on the optical sheet, you have $67.5M for touchscreen and $52.4M for optical. Even using the listed number of $95M for touchscreen, that's still a little less than 2x the cost of optical. How exactly did they arrive at a 10 fold increase statistic?
I'm sure that the touchscreens are more expensive than opticals at first. Same thing when companies were first rolling out desktop computers to their workforce a couple decades ago. They understand that it cost a lot of money and a lot of lost productivity, but they also knew that they would reap huge rewards in additional productivity in the long run.
Now that said - let's find some other electronic voting firm to spend our next $100M with instead of Diebold.
They had to buy new stuff. And even the article admits some of the money went to training. This isn't necessarily an indication that the higher costs are inherent, just that switching to something new has an initial cost. It would make more sense to see how the costs changed over, e.g., 10 year periods than just after the new technology was introduced.
Personally I think the higher cost would be justified if it led to an increase in democracy. As another poster mentioned, the US is a rich country. If there are demonstrable benefits to the new technology, I would bias in favour of it, even at increased cost.
The big problem, of course, is that the machines are not only expensive, but terrible. They seem to be a step backwards in democracy, not forwards. I live in Canada where we use pencil-and-paper ballots and they work beautifully for our purposes. I can't imagine switching to anything electronic at this point, as it would surely be a step backwards.
I lived in Carroll County, Maryland when the change to electronic voting occurred, and after years of optical scan voting, many people I knew were confused by the move to e-voting. Our system had always worked fine, was simple and easy to understand, and had a paper trail. All you needed was a marker, a sheet of paper with spaces to fill in, and bam, you voted. I'm shocked to see that the state's push for e-voting inflated the cost of voting in Carroll County from $22k to over $200k! That is simply unacceptable.
There's no good reason for evoting machines to cost between $15,000 and $30,000 per precinctper precinct because the "booths" cost $3,000 each. The equipment costs are now one tenth that and the difference represents the tremendous overhead cost of doing things the non free way. For all of that, I've read that Dibold never made much money of these things and wants out of the business.
Who's going to pay your buck-o-five? You are, multiple times.The larger costs are security and reliability problems that's gotten these overpriced machines banned despite sunken costs. Voters were willing to pay the price when they were lied to and they are willing to lick their wounds and get rid of the things now. It would be nice if the same machines could be fixed with free software.
But that is why I prefer to also see paper kicked out, which builds in redundancy. Me? I prefer an open machine combined with paper to prevent voter fraud.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What about outsourcing the counting of votes to a cheaper country?
Has anyone from the open source community tried to write secure software for this? I suspect that it may not be possible(thus no one is trying) but has there ever been a real, open, reviewable effort to try? Maybe the real answer is that the problem is insolvable thus the only "solutions" are ones that cannot be verified (closed source, proprietary etc). Personally the whole idea gives me the creeps. Everything I have read shows that this whole idea is bad. What I find amazing is that very smart people whose whole careers rely on putting computers to good use are the ones who most strongly recommend that computer systems in this arena are bad. In any case I just wonder if there ever has been an open effort to provide software/hardware combination that those security experts would agree upon. I have seen requirements for voter verified paper trail etc, but are there any open systems out there that meet these requirements?
... their government for overspending. If in court we can prove that the people in charge were lobbied into doing things an expensive way or were simply uninformed, then we deserve our tax dollars back. The government should be the last to innovate, and this is just another example where people doing things the old way get caught trying to do something they don't know how to do.
How about cuttings costs per vote by 500 dollars and then paying us to vote. I predict the turnout to be over 90%. That is democracy for you.
How many times am I gonna have to fill out the slashdot poll?
The human interface on these voting machines is designed to obscure your actions not improve anything. My fair Commonwealth previously used mechanical tallying machines where you could see all of your choices after you made them. You could de-select and re-select choices up until you pulled the commit lever.
The linear nature of touch screens is exactly the way not to provide an overview of your actions. For precisely the reasons that fast food drive-through ordering has been aided on both sides of the interaction by visual confirmation screens (which don't require that you hold a bunch of non-sequential information in your head), the new machines were designed to affirmatively obscure your prior decisions.
She has been doing the best reporting on this issue.
Not commenting on whether this is a good idea to begin with (as a million others have already pointed out, even the optical system might not be one), but theis bit of news basically boils down to "new tech is more expensive than old tech".
I think I'll wait until 11. For the film.
And that accounting doesn't even include the costs of recounting contested ballots. Since the paperless voting can't really count them at all, the costs of the extensive circumstantial forensics are either extremely high, or have to be counted as the costs of leaving the ballot unprovable at all. Which costs can be extremely high, perhaps higher than the entire budget controlled by the people "elected".
--
make install -not war
If it becomes too expensive, let's just content ourselves with the rigged (s)elections we've become so accustomed to...
Perhaps an American /. reader can explain to the rest of us why you use machines at all? I don't mean just electronic voting, I mean all its predecessors - pulling levers, "butterfly ballots", punch cards and their infamous hanging chads.
In the middle of that 35-day recount thing in 2000, the Canadian electorate finished their (six week, from declaration of the election to the vote) national election with a vote that was over in 24 hours, from first poll open to last vote counted. The mechanism: pencil and paper.
I once volunteered for a local political party in a provincial election to "scrutineer" the ballots. It looked awfully foolproof to me, as all the scrutineers from all the parties watched each vote being counted in each box, some of us keeping our own tallies as they were added up. We were done in an hour or less.
Needless to say, the ratio of ballots to humans in the room was in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. We just employ a lot of humans in our elections, paid and volunteer. Few of our neighbourhood polling stations record more than 1000 ballots, and they have 3-4 employees, plus "N" volunteer scrutineers, depending on the number of parties running.
So why doesn't America just do that, is it the money? Somebody gave me the opinion that it's because Americans vote for so many offices - judges, DA's, sheriffs, local officials at the same time as federal. That this all came from previous centuries, farmers having to walk 10 miles to vote, so they only wanted to do it once every four years, and then register 25 votes at that time, making it hard to do on paper.
That didn't fly with me. Farmers have to come to town every week or three for supplies and so forth anyway. And if you want to vote for 25 offices instead of trusting one elected party to appoint them all, what's wrong with realizing that has COSTS and paying for more people to count them by hand with scrutineers from the campaigns watching every piece of paper go by? To turn around the old phrase, you can't take your choice without paying your money.
The paid human time (the N scrutineers are volunteers) to count one vote on paper is a second or so. One penny at $36.00 per hour, even, and most elections temporary staff are retirees making half that, giving you two seconds to the penny. Isn't counting one vote worth one penny to you? (Needless to say, the piece of paper is way under a penny, and the cost of the metal boxes is amortized over 20 elections; the high school gyms are free to use.)
I'm not saying the total cost of our elections is a penny per vote, that's the incremental cost of the counting process. We probably spend a buck per vote or more on the whole thing, organizing the operation, paying the permanent staff at Elections Canada to hire the retirees, print the ballots, etc. But the difference between having everybody pull a lever on some complicated counting machine or just putting an X on paper and putting it in a box, after all the setup is done, can't be over a penny per vote as far as I can see.
Something that confuses me a little bit: Surely the optical-scanner machines are also "electronic"? Surely they also tabulate votes in some automated way? So what are we talking about here? Diebold et al are pushing for an upgrade ... why, exactly?
Breakfast served all day!
The whole issue here has to do with perception. In other words, the voting public needs to feel that the count actually does represent the will of the voters that voted on that day. And the money that was spent in researching, developing, buying and using the new machines was spent due to a perception that, in the year 2000, the end result of the vote did not accurately portray the will of the voters that voted in the Presidential election.
Now, quite frankly, many of the issues were blown out of proportion with respect to reality. The Media (and I was present in the reportage) breathlessly told us that we had a "Constitutional Crisis" on our hands. A Constitutional Crisis is where there is no language in our Constitution to handle something. And there is plenty of language in the Constitution with respect to the selection of a President.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress...
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.
What this means is that the States choose the President. So when the Supreme Court stepped into the fray, the Supreme Court was in immediate violation of the Constitution. I suppose that was a Constitutional Crisis.
Had the State of Florida failed to choose electors in a timely way, the US Congress could have ignored the Florida vote. Any partial vote could have been disqualified and if there was a tie in the electoral vote, the House of Representatives would have chosen the President.
Instead, we had butterfly ballots, punch cards and methods of tallying votes (by machine) that were antiquated. And the vote was so close in that election that the public perceived that there may have been vote-rigging through the use of machinery that was outdated and, perhaps, rigged.
Immediately, companies went out and offered to make machines that would allow for really quick tallying of votes and there is nothing as fast at tallying votes as an electronic system. But many of these systems did not offer any kind of an audit trail, which is something that is opposed by the current Republican Administration. They argued that any time you recount a machine-counted result, the result of the hand count is suspect as human emotions get involved in the count. Of course, there is no recount unless there are observers from all participating political parties present according to law.
Many localities have new systems. And still, the vote can be rigged, as it always has been able to be rigged in the past. But since the public is inclined to think that the vote can be easily rigged or is easily rigged, we'll continue to spend money trying to fix the problem in the interest of trying to satisfy the majority of voters who no longer trust the voting systems we have.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I got to sit in on a lecture by a high ranking official from the US DOE. His opinion was that paper production was the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the United States. One of his pet projects could turn it around into a net producer of electricity but the mills were not interested and considered the equipment dangerous. Here's a reputable source of information that pegs paper production at 12% of US electricity consumption.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
However, by now, everyone on
If trust can be solved, aren't there advantages to e-voting that may be worth the cost?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
"... why ..."
To allow the powerful to control the vote, of course.
What other answer is there?
Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? WTF is with this reference of costs that increased X percent per voter? If the overall cost increased by X percent, then the percentage increase in cost per voter will be exactly the same. In this context, the article seems to be stating that the costs in one county of $22,000/$266,000 in 2001/2007 are per-voter costs, when these obviously are total costs for the county. Is the references to increases 'per voter' supposed to make an obviously serious issue sound somehow more serious?
Yeah, cryptography. That way no one can tell who was actually elected except the government.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool.
I don't see how that is any less secure and worse than traditional paper ballots - it seems, in fact, much better to me. The voter gets visual confirmation of their vote, there are no chads of any sort to worry about, the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have gotten them right. Yes, there could be viruses and crap, but I don't see how any virus could get around the visual confirmation by the voter. The only way I can see that it would cause problems is if it tweaked the results enough that there was no suspicion, so that no manual recount would take place - no worse than any other system.
I call FUD on the e-vote-phobia, at least in King County. The system is well-designed and works as well if not better than the traditional paper methods.
*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
You do realize that watching people code is significantly harder than watching people count?
(I'm not talking just orders of magnitude.)
Code, compile, link, burn ROMs, assemble hardware, etc. Coding is probably the most intractable problem, though.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You don't need the complexity of a game video card or a momentum sensing input device to hide back doors and other bad stuff, although, yes, the more complex the driver the more places to hide things.
(Cue Ken Thompson's little games with libraries used by the compilers.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
We can have electronic voter assistance for voters who need assistance and find electronics less scary than human assistance without the need for trying to shoe-horn electronics into the whole system.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
End-to-end verification by an expert means that we are at the mercy of the expert. What is so hard to see about that?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I assume you're overstating your case to be emphatic. However, ...
...
A single post is not what we call a conversation.
A second account, well, sometimes you don't want to put your employer at too much risk for what you say, even if you are posting from home, after hours. More than two accounts seems like going to a lot of trouble, I'll admit.
Batting ideas back and forth can be a game, but I find the ideas themselves to be just as important as the players (or the play).
If one guy wants to try to play all the bases and the outfield against me while I play with a full team,
hmm. I guess he'd have to be pretty good to make it an interesting game.
Never mind, I don't think I had anything important to say here, anyway.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
That's crazy, if not illegal.
I mean, talk about man-in-the-middle and what-have-you.
Absentee balloting is one thing, but you need people present as much as possible, when the votes are cast.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I tend not to pay a whole lot of attention to the news. Despite (or because of?) this I've noticed a few times when certain subjects seem to go from "no issue" or "backburner" to national attention without any apparent good reason to do so. The electronic voting machine thing is one of them.
My guess is that in these situations there's someone pulling the strings behind the scenes to precipitate these events. Diebold et al. stand to make a lot of money off these things, obviously, so it wouldn't be surprising if they were the ones to originally spread the idea of the need for electronic voting.
Another time I've noticed this phenomenon is with the 2004/2006(?) elections, with the gay marriage amendment and immigration issues. Suddenly during a (surprise surprise) election year, this big divisive wedge issue pops up with no seeming reason, and of course it's the Republicans and their propaganda machine getting people riled up, and of course news about it dies down again after the election. On that note, wouldn't surprise me if the electronic voting was pushed by the Republicans too, what with the Diebold president being a big supporter of them and all. "Diebold's current CEO Walden "Wally" O'Dell... is on record stating that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President" this year."
Print the ballots using a font that can be scanned optically. Eliminate the bar code.
Several years ago, I was thinking basically the same thing, but then I remembered how checks have those funny numbers at the bottom. OCR can be really accurate if you can specify a good font in advance.
I have also considered that encrypted barcode could provide a check against someone trying to forge ballots, but then I remember the serial number problem. Serial numbers open a back door to determining who voted how if someone can record who voted when. (Randomized serial numbers can close the backdoor to a large extent, but I'm not sure it helps.) Anything a human can't read on a ballot is a potential place to hide a serial number. We want as little fancy printed stuff on the ballot as possible.
Anyway, the bubble chart ballot is easily verified by humans, machines, and manual counting judge. It takes more ink and more paper than just printing the voter's choice at the time of the vote, but it also doesn't require printers to be serviced during the vote.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The cost doesn't matter if the value added is less than zero.
The e-voting machines have resulted in a second term for the world's most visible terrorist, and they've wasted countless man-millenia as everyone discussed, debated or idly witnessed the chaos surrounding voting fraud. Hell I don't even LIVE in the U.S. and I watched a "documentary" about how easy it is to screw with the Diebold counting machines. That's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back, all because of one messed up government and its conveniently incompetent equipment contractor.
If you really want to tally the cost of something, you have to look at _everything_. The up-front dollar amount is nothing compared to the thousands of people that had to deal with these broken machines and learn how to use them, along with the millions who had to waste yet more brain cells on this dead-end gadget. How about the increased difficulty to implement a working e-voting solution due to voter reluctance ? That's a tough one!
cp reality speculation
vi speculation
diff reality speculation
Yeap, not easy to estimate the net impact of any change on your whole concept of reality. The e-voting fiasco's true cost cannot be quantified, though in the grand scheme of things it's a small line-item.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Do you understand the serial number problem?
Watch who goes in the booth when.
Compare that to the votes on the spool.
Now, if there is a particular person that you want to be able to intimidate about his vote, you can find out what he voted.
Of course, you say that I'm being paranoid. Working in a large county maybe hides the issue from you, but many polling places where I have been a voting judge have had so few voters that I could probably have memorized their names and the order they voted, had I been inclined to do so.
(And I get modded tin-foil-hat when I remind people that electronic equipment leaks radio, and that there are known ways to monitor both keyboards and screens via the radio noise. No, that's black helicopter stuff, no use bringing that up.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
is a different problem when it comes to voting.
I posted above about the serial number problem. See if you can figure it out without peeking.
That should get you started. Then take a fresh look at the theoretical advantages, look for implementation issues and the like.
(And you might want to consider, for example, whether a person in the voting booth wants the machine to pop up a dialog:
"It looks like you forgot to vote for your county commissioner: Are you sure you want to skip that?"
Heh. We would hope, anyway, that the programmer wouldn't use "Accept/Retry/Deny?")
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Electronic voting is black box voting and it will cost us our democracy. This claim might sound too simple, but in my opinion it is true. Electronic voting is not auditable by the public and without this it is worthless.
Let me say to you...
even here in Brazil ( a so called "3rd world country") we have 100% of the votes eletronic... why? our ellections show results in (maximum) 2 days!
no recount, no robbery, no tricks... even natives from amazon forest was able to vote, and you still use paper?
the cost is that high because you americans always wants a fancy thing, with touch screens, and so on... make it simple like us, a screen that shows the candidates, a big keyboard with numbers (yes, like a phone, this way blind people can vote too) and ta-da! easy like throwing bombs... i can't imagine why you didn't figured that out.
anyway, while you discuss this kind of senseless stuff, we have everything ready, so BUY IT... and hang the motha***** who convinced you to use this expensive system you use now!
Excuse me, but this entire article is BS if the numbers in the summary are any indication.
Even if the worst case county's rate of 866% increase was seen across the board,
the new cost would be $22K * 9.66 = $213K != $266K
Doesn't anybody check these things?
Morons.
Thanks! Good to hear that it's at least possible for electronic to be cheaper than paper. Canada may switch one day, but the US experience will, I hope, make us very shy of the move.
...I can see people have to quit calling you a 3rd-world country. There's a real need to uplift a lot of Brazil to the higher income standards of your middle/upper classes, but that's just a matter of time, now. Time and rural education.
And after a look at your income distribution on gapminder.org (see my presentation about cheap new computers and world development at
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc - Brazil shows up around slide #48
Thanks for writing!
There are two apparently conflicting principles here.
One is that there needs to be a significant, if not majority, section of the population who are brave enough to vote their conscience even if they are killed, beat up, or fired for it. (You do need more who are brave during civil war.)
The other is that, unless the problems are really, really bad, it's usually better to work through the system than go to the revolution mode. In such times, people need room and time to think without others being able to criticize every thought. That's what the anonymous vote is really necessary for.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Unless you quietly warned the granddaughter to keep her voice down. (And you would have been doing the wrong job if you had said or done anything else.)
Although, you might suppose it was staged, that the grandmother had asked the granddaughter to say that while she actually voted for someone else.
If you could see what buttons were being pushed, you should have moved the machines.
I was a judge once when we handed out ballots with serial numbers, in non-random order. As I recall, we had a sign-in book and everyone signed-in in order. I didn't raise a fuss on election day because I knew there was nothing to be done that wouldn't require just postponing the election, and I hadn't realized the problems during the training. One thing that helped, we had three sign-in books, so the record of order wasn't perfect. I arranged with the other judges to pull the ballots of the pads in somewhat random order, as well.
The next election I judged (same place) had the voters signing-in on the voter list itself, so that no record of order remained. We had three copies of the list, to avoid a bottleneck. I think, also, the ballots were loose, so we could shuffle them, so that order was broken within the ballot pack.
No system can correct for improper training of election judges, or for their failure to understand or do their duty.
In small precincts, where everyone is friendly and no one is going to fire someone for voting wrong, sure, it doesn't matter. Until someone gets fired right after an election and doesn't like the stated reason.
Sure, you can make the vote iron-clad accurate if you are willing to sacrifice anonymity, but it doesn't take a computer to do it. It just takes everyone being brave enough to vote their conscience even though everyone can see their vote. Well, not just brave enough, but conscience enough of his or her reactions to peer pressure to be able to cancel the effects of what other people will think while they mull over the decisions.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.