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The State of Electronic Voting In the 2008 US Elections
Geek Satire writes "Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately. The 2008 US elections have avoided many well-known problems of the 2004 and 2000 elections, but many problems remain. O'Reilly News interviewed Dr. Barbara Simons, advisor to the Federal Election Assistance Commission, to review electronic voting in the 2008 US elections, discussing the physical security of storing and maintaining election machines, the move from electronic back to paper ballots, and why open source voting machines don't necessarily solve problems of bugs, backdoors, and audits."
Was there ever a time when you could guarantee that every vote counted?
I am hoping with an all Democrat government we will get a "Help America Vote" act that actually helps America vote.
It's a shame we have to wait until a party comes to power that benefits from better voting for the government to fix the problem.
Am I the only one that is completely confused by how difficult it seems to be to make an electronic voting machine and have it actually work?
Was there ever a time when you could guarantee that every vote counted?
Sure.
It's easy as pie when the number of votes per polling place is small.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
When the only electable candidates are those chosen by the mainstream media, and controlled by special interests, I would say most emphatically that voting or democracy doesn't "work". Voting machines should be the least of our worries when it comes to the integrity of our political system.
In my poor benighted country we lack the technological sophistication of the mighty US of A, so we are forced to mark our votes on small pieces of paper called ballots. The poll clerk checks your ID, crosses your name off a list and hands you a ballot. On this ballot are printed in no particular order the name and party affiliation of the candidates. Next to each name is a circle. You place an x in the circle for the candidate of your choice. Then you go back to the poll clerk who places your ballot in the ballot box. If you mess up your ballot he will give you a new one.
Each candidate is allowed to have an observer at each polling place, and at the counting of the ballots. This system is fairly simple, fairly transparent, and all the votes get counted. It also scales well (more voters = more polling places). Why do you need electronic voting or voting machines or anything else besides a paper ballot and a pencil. I'm honestly curious why this wouldn't work in the US.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
a) As someone who's counted votes at a small location before, no. Easier, maybe, but you can't be sure that things are counted properly unless you have no more than about 100 total ballots. You'll certainly be able to get close enough that there's a clear winner though. But mistakes get very easy to make very quickly, especially with an activity as repetitive as sorting paper.
b) Small polling locations rule out malice how? Not only would it be trivially easy to swap sides of a few ballots, but it would be just as easy to attribute it to carelessness in the event that it was discovered. Especially when there are a bunch of senior citizens counting alongside you
I'd trust the reliability of the Scantron-style ballots long before something hand-counted. Touchscreens - only if there's a paper trail (preferably one that's easily read by both machines and humans, which is easy enough).
Writing safe-to-use software for electronic machines isn't overly complicated, given sufficient oversight both in terms of accountability and physical security around the machines that will run it.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
"Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately."
God, not this fallacy again! Why do so many otherwise intelligent people think that as long as their own personal ballot got counted then all is well? Don't they realize that 1000 fake voters in swing state X can mean that their own vote, whether counted or not, is moot?
It doesn't matter so much that you could guarantee that as much as the fact that it was on paper and you could recount if you weren't sure.
so then just increase the volunteer-to-voter ratio. but i still don't think that provides a guarantee against election fraud.
between the voting location and each county's ballot-tabulating location ballots can be "lost"/"misplaced." and even if a ballot arrives at the tabulation building, there's no guarantee that the machine will correctly count the ballot, or that it'll even be fed into the machine. even if they're hand counted, human error or deliberate fraud could still cause votes to be miscounted. and between the county and state bureaucracy the numbers can be manipulated once again. each time the tabulation results are reported up the government bureaucratic hierarchy, you have new people handling the election results, which introduces yet more opportunities for tampering and manipulation of the figures.
you could monitor the ballot counters with surveillance cameras and review them after the election, but that's still only a limited guarantee that a vote is correctly counted. the best thing to do is for the final tabulation results to be uploaded to an online server so that each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants. this puts the responsibility for assuring that each vote is counted into the hands of whoever cast the ballot. it also establishes more public oversight over the electorial process.
Correct. It's important not only that voters have faith in the system, but also that the system actually has a good record of counting votes. And that is a difficult task.
I think that having individuals check on their vote might work, but I don't see how you could do that and retain anonymous voting. I mean, you could retain anonymous voting and just let them check, but it would be nigh impossible for them to prove that their vote was counted incorrectly.
A blog about stuff.
WORST... IDEA... EVER. I do not want to live in a country ruled by porn sites. It would be more interesting at first, but would quickly become disgusting.
Grandpa McCancerFace? Wow, ageism and insensitivity to a very serious disease in one pretty package. Mods, please hammer the parent poster to the ground; that kind of rhetoric is no different than calling Obama President Negro.
There is a difference between votes not being counted(which is very bad; but mostly avoidable with the right safeguards) and votes being irrelevant to the outcome(which is virtually certain in any real-world situation). The whole electoral college aspect makes that especially noticeable; but it would occur slightly more subtly in pure popular voting as well.
If you have x votes for candidate one and y votes for candidate two, and candidate one is winning by x-y votes, the last (x-y)-1 votes you count will be irrelevant to the outcome. Even if they were all for candidate two, candidate one would still be the winner. That isn't disenfranchisement, it's just simple, unavoidable, arithmetic. In practice, since polling is fairly accurate, you can usually safely extend this to situations where the outstanding votes could change the outcome; but are virtually certain not to(this is why counting continues, and why media calls are occasionally wrong).
Because of the electoral college, the fact that the US votes on several different time zones, and the fact that states are called at different rates depending on their closeness and the efficiency of their electoral apparatus, the process can look and feel unfair to the last to be counted; but that isn't actually the case. The election would turn out the same way no matter which order you counted the votes in, it's just that in practice, states usually come in in a particular order, and you can usually determine the result from partial information.
That won't work. If I can find out how I voted, then somebody else can also. It's important that can't happen.
And it still doesn't solve the problem of actually knowing the vote was counted. You know it was saved correctly, but there's nothing stopping the software from disregarding the saved ballot and computing the results some other way.
Maybe not
> each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants
Unfortunately this opens up the possibility of vote-buying/manipulation.
Touchscreens - only if there's a paper trail (preferably one that's easily read by both machines and humans, which is easy enough).
Maybe not as easy as you think. Watch the videos; they've come up with some very clever ways that the voting machines can tamper with the paper trail.
I'd much rather use scantron cards, so that my paper trail can't be messed with. But there's a couple extra precautions I'd still like to see implemented:
1) Counting the ballots by hand should be mandatory. In fact, the people counting the ballots should have no access to the voting machine tally, lest they feel lazy and simply agree with the voting machine.
2) The voters should be required to feed the paper ballot into the machine themselves, to ensure that none of the vote counters are maliciously "losing" any of the voter's ballots. The design of the machine would also have to ensure that it couldn't maliciously spit out the paper ballot after the voter has walked away.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.