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Voting Machines Routinely Failing Nationwide
palegray.net writes "Voting machines in several critical swing states are causing major problems for voters. A Government Accountability Office report and Common Cause election study [PDF] has concluded that major issues identified in the last presidential election have not been corrected, nor have election officials been notified of the problems. How long can we afford to trust our elections to black box voting practices? From the article: 'In Colorado, 20,000 left polling places without voting in 2006 because of crashed computer registration machines and long lines. And this election day, Colorado will have another new registration system.'"
Maybe it would just be easier to bribe Diebold more than whoever is holding their leash now? Saves all that pesky trouble of actually fixing the problem.
voters have been routinely failing nationwide for years.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
FTA:
""We're seeing a lot of problems where people are being kicked off the data base rolls if their name is on as Alex as opposed to Alexander or they've put a middle initial in there name and it's not there," said Susan"
It sounds like these problems could have been avoided if the system was designed properly in the first place. Whoever was contracted for this should be made to solve the problem for providing a product that clearly lacked testing.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
How long can we afford to trust our elections to black box voting practices?
Classic bigotry on Slashdot. I believe the correct phrase is "African-American box", thank you very much.
Paper. Pencil. Manual count. Done.
I love tech as much as the next geek. It's my life, and my living. But sometimes, the better solutions are the simpler ones.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
This is a company that makes ATMs, right? If their money was at stake, I'd wager they'd suddenly become rather reliable.
Never underestimate the power of liberal white guilt.
As long as my guy wins, who cares right?
How about we fix this problem a few years instead of a few weeks before the next major election? This is further proof that voting needs to be standardized in order to uphold the virtues of our 'democracy.' Otherwise any election can be rigged, and we will end up with another hanging chad fiasco or Diebold epic failure.
it's not too late to fix many of these problems. Although many states don't have the laws on the books to require some safeguards, they can act now to make sure that there are enough back up ballots at the polls, workers are properly trained and there are enough poll workers on election day.
Why does this exact same scenario happen every 4 years? Haven't we learned ANYTHING?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
OMG! Zombies!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Also, when are we going to be able to vote on the internets? You'd think they could work that out by now, right? Maybe the real reason we can't vote by internet is because the politicians know that it would increase the vote of the well-connected (and usually liberal) student population, and they really don't want to do that,...
How can law makers think that it is OK to buy and deploy unproven, closed-source devices to measure elections? There is no other segment of our society that would allow such a mission critical piece of technology to be deployed without independent or redundant systems. My electric tea kettle has been more rigorously tested by third parties than these voting machines.
The only reasons I can come up with are these: 1. The senators are deaf, dumb and can't hear our collective screams or 2. Appreciate the uncertainty that electronic voting machines provide. I believe both could be true varying degrees for most of our representatives. We have certainly all been screaming enough that they should have heard us by now.
What can we do? I've written to my representatives only to get a form letter back acknowledging their sincere concern for my "issue". When I lived in Colorado, I insisted on voting by mail. At least vote-by-mail provided a physically countable ballot. Unfortunately, in the 2004 election, my county clerk FORGOT to mail out a chunk of ballots and I had to vote by fax because I was out of the country. Perhaps the absolute worst way I could possibly vote other than a touch screen.
If you are afflicted by touch screen voting, I suggest registering to vote by mail. At least then there's a chance that some real person will really count your ballot and really record the proper vote. Seems like only a chance these days though.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
Why don't we just go with a web based voting system. Everyone could vote from home. Surely noone could figure out how to break that. Ooh, how about american idol style. And the candidate you vote for could send you a personalized message back asking for more donations.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
Here are the choices, vote for one. Whoever gets the vote ads to a total.
How hard can that possibly be to implement?
First of all, and this has been said a hundred times already, it is not difficult to make a voting software program that is secure, collects and counts votes. Fairly simple programming, no ports on the machine, no additional software like virus/spyware needed, etc...
And secondly, with failure after failure of this system, lets go back to the big booth with the buttons and all that other stuff. I've only used it once since I could vote, but that was always considered 100% accurate.
I prefer the fill in the bubble method, it is pretty hard to mess up, but after a local election I'm getting skeptical of those. I knew the mayor that got voted out and allegedly they randomized the ballots for who appears on the top. Now what I remember about OCR testing is you have to send a master through to determine scoring, so you could be voting for the person in spot 2, but the OCR is programmed to count that as spot 1. Hmmm...maybe I should have told the mayor that.
Strangely enough, the last armed revolt against the government in the US was in Athens, Tn. in *1946*. The cause? Voting issues...
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1985/2/1985_2_72.shtml
Not that I am advocating it, but it will be interesting to see just how PO'd folks will get...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
better handled manually. Anatomy of a Credibility Meltdownâ"Revisiting the Voting Machine Controversy
I guess the USA just has to follow its standard practice of problem solving and nationalize all the voting machine companies. Yes, that'll do it...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
+1 ... funny :-)
on a related note i have a feeling 99% of the time it's user error anyways
It mattereth not much as the nominating process has been privatized as well.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The majority of the people who vote think that they are making a real choice. They believe that Tweedledee or Tweedledum are, in fact, meaningfully different. It's true! They saw it on television.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Why has an organization not filed a lawsuit against the states that agree to use the known failed machines? The EFF just filed against G.W. Is this something that can not be addressed legally?
love the taste, hate the texture
It is vitally important that people write letters - actual paper letters, with a stamp - to their MPs, Congressmen or equivalent. MAKE NOISE.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Some people have stated that we need an open source voting software, and we do, but can you imagine how it will go over when Sean Hannity begins claiming that anyone can go to the website the night before the election and change the software to vote for their candidate? It doesn't matter if it's not true, bigger lies are repeated every single day, in politics. We would need a limited-access open source project, in which the general public has read-only access, but any changes must be made by a limited group of people who are either well-known well-trusted public figures, or representatives of organizations.
If we paid several different organizations to spare a programmer or two to collaborate on the job, and required them to keep it available via subversion, then we might be able to get something done. From a technical standpoint, it probably will not work better, but, politically speaking, we would need to have some public figures to hold accountable.
That's what we use, and the paper ballots are stored in sealed boxes in case we feel the need to do a manual recount.
Unlike those third-world states listed in TFA
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Obama is running with a promise to change America, talking up liberalism, while Bush is actually the biggest liberal this country has had -EVER-. Democrats 100 years of liberal activism, from a financial perspective, pales completely compared to Bush's federal takeover of the entire US mortgage market. I'm looking at drudgereport and I'm just stunned.... I'm almost really drawing a blank trying to imagine what Obama could do that could actually be more socialist then the government absorbing the largest financial part of the USA economy. 8 years of supporting Bush and I wind up getting the biggest liberal in human history. Just reminds me of a scene in Lord of the Rings, when the king says shortly before the battle of Helms Deep "How did it come to this."
This is my sig.
Now your vote didn't matter.
Over here in the UK we have a bit of paper with everyone's names in a grid next to a box.
You put a X in the box next to the MP you're voting for.
Tricky, no?
So only wealthy land owners have a say in the election. Hmmm..
Do you listen to Michael Savage?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Conservatives are intelligent enough to realize that the emotion of guilt (as opposed to guilty in a court of law) is not a basis for good national policy.
Why not? Half of all voters barely know what month it is. The other half would rather blog about it.
It's not a bug -- it's a feature.
Sincerely,
Diebold and the GOP
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
I was going to take my oldest daughter to the polls with me (want to instill civic duty in her), but have decided instead to vote via mail. All of the counties are pushing for vote by mail, knowing that at most only 10-15% will do that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I voted in the county where I was registered, a largely agricultural county. Not wealthy by any means.
They had dozens of machines *and* paper ballots; the wait was maybe ten seconds for all the people wearing cowboy hats and driving pickup trucks.
My girlfriend voted in Denver county, in a precinct near the lowest-income area of Denver. Well, I should say she *tried* to vote there because they did *not* have any paper ballots, and they had about the same number of electronic voting machines as the place where I'd voted (20-ish) for a precinct with 20x as many people as mine. And the machines crashed, and kept crashing.
This pattern seems to have been repeated all across the Colorado Front Range, where 80% of the population lives: the rural low-income areas and the high-income areas had plenty of voting machines, the urban low-income areas had a small fraction as many, and those kept crashing repeatedly throughout the day.
It's hard to avoid noticing that the distribution of machines had very low correlation with population or income, but quite high correlation with the political tendencies of the precincts.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If they really wanted to bail out the mortgage market, let the borrowers buy back their OWN DEBT FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!!!! I know I would, in a heart-beat.
Ah, but you can. That's what "making debt liquid means".
I mean, check this out. If you absolutely don't pay your credit cards, some will sue you, they call you a lot, send you off to collections, and just torment you, but... they have no real collateral so they can't do jack.
Eventually after, you sit on it for like a year, they will come around and give you an offer to close the account and it's gonna be cheap.
In the case of mortgages, if you wanted to be a bit crazy, once this bill passes, you could just blow off your payments for two months and demand a lower rate. You should actually be able to get it because this bailout package assumes that houses are basically worthless but in any case if you are flipped on your mortgage, you are now holding ALL of the cards and the bank has very few. What are they going to do, take a worthless house? Reposess a TV? Of course not.
After this legislation passes, anyone who owes a debt of any kind, who tries to pay all of it, is just a fool. The taxpayer is on the hook for all of it anyway, and the banks can then just unload anyone that doesn't pay it back.
I'm telling you, it's the biggest transferrance of wealth from rich to poor - EVER. Now, I'm not one that wants to punish the rich with higher tax rates.. I like the rich. I want to be one myself. But, by the same token, I see no reason to have the federal government trying to stop the rich from being stupid with their money. If they want to do something stupid with their money, its their right... we should want to be ahead in line when they do it, and there's nothing wrong with it. That's all fair and good.
This is my sig.
From the Secretary of State's website, http://sos.mt.gov/ELB/Voting_Tech.asp
"Depending on where they live, Montana's paper ballots may be counted in two ways: hand count or with paper ballot optical scan tabulators. Either way ALL Montanans vote on a paper ballot."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If voters can not have faith in the system of elections, then the voters cannot have faith in their government.
More importantly:
If the LOSERS can not have faith in the system of elections, they may convince themselves that they have enough support to reverse the result by force.
The real purpose of elections is not some kind of fairness. It is to head off civil war by convincing the losers of the election that they'd lose the war too. Thus the perception of fair elections is stabilizing and the perception of massive cheating destabilizing.
For this purpose it's OK to come out wrong if the election is very close. But if it is perceived that the election was so badly off that it reversed a landslide, it doesn't just lose its stabilizing effect: It becomes actively destabilizing, causing the losers to believe that a war to reverse it is not just possible, but justified.
Of course the easiest way to create the perception of fair elections is for the elections to actually BE fair and to be fair in a way that is VISIBLE and can be CHECKED.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's simple. The machine needs to give a printed receipt stating what vote you cast and who you cast it for.
For instance, if you are the 330th person to vote on that machine, the receipt would read:
Vote #: 330
Candidate voted for: Bill Clinton
I want some verifiable proof I voted!
This could then be compared to exit polls and we would again trust our voting system.
As an exercise, I usually try to mentally calculate the total cost of my purchases when shopping. Ten years ago, I'd find an error (usually error in list price vs ring-up price) every other shopping trip. If it was significant and not in my favor I'd have it corrected.
I'd say the error rate is down to about 1 in 10 trips. Of course that could just be a sign of my mental degredation.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
major issues identified in the last presidential election have not been corrected, ... How long can we afford to trust our elections to black box voting practices?
No longer.
The downside to identifying the vulnerabilities: If they aren't fixed there are now a LOT of people who can exploit them. In politics there are plenty of people who will.
So regardless of whether there was cheating before there will be cheating now - including cheating by others than those who could (and perhaps did) when the particular holes were not yet public knowledge.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Realized just after hitting "submit":
We are about to (or perhaps just did) cross the threshold where elections can be stolen by scriptkiddies.
Next step is dueling gangs and tampering software that protects itself against other tampering software...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I fear that there such opposition to having a black president in the USA, I would think it is obvious to everyone why these supposed situations are coming to light. If they see that someone like Obama might actually stand a chance of winning, they pull the plug on States that had a Digital ballot, that was a majority for Obama.
I am not racist by far, but I tend to see things a little to big picture sometimes, and this is what I see....
I always said the best person for president today would be Oprah, she is a woman, black and actually cares about the people... I would vote for Oprah if I were American, and she was running...!!
Voters could demand alternative methods. One already exists as absentee voting. One need not be absent in order to use it. However, the results of that come too late to make a difference. Politicians are aware that alternative methods exist and could manipulate availability of them to their own ends. See, for example http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/4/1/5/2/p41525_index.html
Since the last presidential election went to court, I think politicians are hoping future elections will be decided that way. That often means the best lawyers wins, as well as manipulating whether or not the case gets heard by a court sympathetic to them.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
So short of complaining to slashdot how much I can't believe McCain was elected president by 100% of Americans how can the average Joe get this fixed? I'd say a great first couple of steps is to 1. Call or go down to your Town Hall and make 100% sure you are eligible and registered to vote. After hearing so many stories about Republican volunteers independently challenging voters as they reach the poll you really can't be too sure. Make sure you are all set for the election, and better yet, bring proof with you to the poll. 2. While you are on the phone with your town hall / election office why not find out if they are using electronic machines and see if they are actually being verified. Remember, this is Your election. You want your vote to count, so let them know how important it is to you. Ask questions, be informed, challenge flakey answers. 3. We've all heard of jerks on voting day saying you Need to show ID to vote or the like. You Should Not have to bring ID (maybe in some states) but .... you have to ask yourself, do you want to vote or cause a scene. Usually they are mutually exclusive as some people have found out (being arrested). Why not have your election office / official in your cell's contact list for the day. It's a quick thing to step outside and make sure the right people are told that the few are doing illegal things and or hurting the voting process in your precinct. Worst comes to worst, you can show some ID and get your vote in. Fix the mistakes when you aren't on a deadline (to vote).
4. Oh, and make sure you know what the extra ballot questions are. I personally know people that have gone and voted on the extra questions not really know anything about them. :P
By being a smarter voter maybe crap like this will stop.
-Peace!
No great insight AFAIK. Trivially obvious if one pays attention. Apparently that doesn't apply to most. Also people seem to interpret the obvious reality as they are told to as well, hence our invasion of Iraq to retaliate for the crimes of a group of Saudi nationals (Wahabis actually, their gov't won't avow any support.) &c. &c....
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Okay so maybe I'm biased, everyone I've personally worked with seemed pretty dedicated to getting everything right and counting it square. We maybe put a little bit of faith in the goodwill of our fellows too. I've looked at the seals and such on our optical scanners, and could not discern any apparent vulnerabilities, but I don't really have the skill to hot-wire a late model car now either. We do expend a lot of effort in keeping an audit trail, and as I've mentioned, our paper ballots are sealed up and available for a manual count if some question arises. I count it an egregious lack of common sense that secure and open software is not used. We should be able to openly audit the software as well. No one asked me how to set it up. OTOH I'm guessing that simple pin-headed greed is the motivation for any obfuscation and/or complication. Trade secrets. Pffft... I stand by my statement that we don't gratuitously disenfranchise our voters. I've done this in three different counties of California since 1981, and my precincts have never challenged a voter's elegibility or even had a line longer than maybe fifteen minutes at the worst rush. Historically, I haven't heard of voter fraud being a time-honored tradition here like Chicago, or Missippi, or Louisiana,(...) but considering the general levels of corruption I saw in Los Angeles, maybe I'd give them some extra scrutiny.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
That should restore everyone's faith in the system.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Shoulda been moderated. Bread and circuses, eh? Good points. The last thing I want is a bunch of true believers taking to the streets.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
My understanding is that the error rate is pretty comparable for all the counting systems. Have you ever tried sorting and counting a thousand hand marked ballots? A hard day's night is what that is, volunteers wanted.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Okay, so you wrote the parent. I'm referring to your suggestion that some people's votes should carry more weight, or for that matter, some people aren't qualified to vote. I submit G.W. Bush as prima fascia evidence that you are correct. However, you are advocating a position on a slippery slope, which we have only recently vacated. I used to advocate mandatory voter education, until I came to accept the futility of that concept. We're talking monolingual Americans here, okay? Welcome to the Tyranny of the Majority. Adapt and survive.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It's funny how we worry about the whole in our roof only when it's raining.
Watch the 2007 HBO documentary called "Hacking Democracy".
A real eye-opener, all about Diebold's antics.
http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/
Among other things, they showed that you can change the result of a count by altering the contents of the memory card itself.