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States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines
Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.
I don't know about the machines in other states but the ones we used here in florida would with a few simple mods make pretty good digital text books for for the schools, there touch screen with a good clear easy to read display just load up some math, language, history books or whatever.
I don't like these machines either, and am glad they're gone.
But before you all go out into the street to dance, let me remind everyone that those paper ballots aren't exactly hand counted... those too are counted by... say it with me: ELECTRONIC machines. They have software. They are connected to a network. They have to store their results on media at some point.
It doesn't make one "bit" of difference whether a vote is tallied as a bit, or a missing (or hanging) chad... the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I realize this is a joke but one has to wonder... wouldn't this be a great opportunity for the open source community to figure out how to salvage the hardware on these machines by replacing the software with something Open and less prone to errors?
Collector's Edition
1) Novelty themed restaurant, where you place your order by "voting".
Slightly offtopic:
In Amsterdam we used to have a bar called the "stock"-bar where the price of items was (inversely) determined in real time by the number of people ordering it.
Pretty nice idea, but people ended up drinking a lot filthy "exotic" drinks. I guess that doesn't invite people to come back...
Is there any problem with the actual voting machine _hardware_? I thought it was generally the software that was troublesome, in large part because it wasn't simple and public domain.
How hard would it be for one of these counties to write new software on their own? Is there really anything more to it than a window with a list of names, a radiobox by each, and a button saying "Yes, this is my final choice" which increments a counter by 1? It seems like it would take all of 5 minutes to write that up in your language of choice, and another 5 minutes to explain the 10 lines of code it would take to the state election board. It just isn't that hard a problem.
I really liked the old mechanical lever machines we used to have in Connecticut (up until the last election). It made it feel like you were really voting.
Another question is, why does a company who make ATM machines which don't lose a cent in millions of transactions and have a paper trail fail to do the same for voting machines?
Don't forget this wonderful youtube clip:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UvEuqYyDoE
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
The voting machine hardware has problems, too. For example, you can change the software on them without anyone noticing.
Without going into details, there are many very difficult problems in making a working electronic voting system. Presenting radio buttons and using the result to increment counters is the tiniest fraction of what needs to be done.
Incidentally, the mechanical lever systems bear the same major problem as electronic voting systems: they can be undetectably modified.
I think they should give them to the College students as a pet project they would earn bonus points if they can find out how fraud was carried out, along with proof. Would even be a extra grade if they can find out which state / county used that particular box too.
I can dream damn it!
The optical readers can be easily hacked as has been definitively demonstrated to anybody with eyes. Go to the big Free Documentary Website, and watch "Hacking Democracy" again if you missed it the first time on HBO.
There is simply a situation of rampant criminal negligence being perpetrated all across the states. The Right Wing way of doing things is to chin-jut at and ignore the law when it doesn't suit them and then lie about it afterwards. They do it again and again and again, and being caught once or made to feel shame for being a shit doesn't work; they're like the little bully/problem kid in kindergarten. You have to MAKE them follow the rules because they're petulant kids with no sense of responsibility. And I'm not talking about Republicans. (Though, I would imagine these days that there are few real people left in the Republican party.) I'm talking about the brain-damage victims; you know the type I mean.
There is broad proof of discarded paper records of votes which the documentarians dug out of trash bins and manually counted to discover that, 'Yes' election fraud is entirely real. But so what? With responsible people, being caught is enough to fix the problem. With problem kids, they shrug at you and say, "Yeah, SO?" And since these twerps are in offices both high and low, nothing has been done.
The skinny: The data cards which plug into the optical readers are brought to and from the voting site by corporate monkeys for the voting machine companies, and it was demonstrated that the cards can be easily made to fudge election results just by doing a prior hack to them. Simple as pie. That, along with a few other big cons can indeed destroy an election.
Oh, and please don't point out that in a couple of highlighted cases of, "But Billy did it too and he didn't get in trouble", like in Canada where the voting slant was delivered to the Left. . . That stuff is totally irrelevant. Even a Right Wing ADD turd can think up the idea to rig an inconsequential election the other way to have something to point to in an effort to confuse the issue surrounding his own treason.
The only way to put an Obama in office, (because the illegal voting slant certainly isn't going to favor him), is to turn out in unanticipated numbers so that the hack is overwhelmed. This is what happened when the Democrats took Congress; there was demonstrable voting fraud, but just not enough. What a world!
-FL