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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?
Yup, things are much worse now.
It to be that you could guarantee that your vote would count--so long as you were a rich, white, male landowner.
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.
Forget electronic voting, let's abandon democracy altogether, and start up "Internetocracy", where all major political decisions are voted on by slashdotters and Internet trolls! Want to bomb Iraq? Let's make a slashdot poll, and see if we should do it! I nominate Cowboy Neil as a viable solution to improving our economy.
My vote was paperless. I have no idea if my vote was recorded properly or if it wasn't manipulated in some way after the fact. The only indication I have that it wasn't was the fact that the race was really close and several republicans lost seats largely due to "straight ticket" voting. (many people are hating republicans you know)
One thing will help stop some election fraud -- aggressive criminal prosecution.
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?
I'm damn happy that Obama won.
But if you look at the Popular vote it was 53% Obama vs 46% McCain. While that is a large gap, it's certainly not large enough to say McCain could never have won.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/
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!
can someone explain the problem with electronic voting to me? i only know some basic LISP but i am pretty sure i could write something that allows me to enter custom candidate names and then tally's votes and prints a receipt... ...and what is the deal with misaligned touch screens, etc. why not just us a mouse and cursor?
always mosh clockwise
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.
NY had a real easy process this time, remarkably like last time and the time before, etcetera, etcetera. Thanks to much effort on the part of Voting System vendors, we now have these Big Honkin' (tm) Sequoia Machines (thankfully not in use in my county). They were sitting in the corner, while the Good Old (tm) Mechanical, no-power-required just kept chugging along, processing votes without a hitch. As usual.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Anyone happen to catch the election returns? I haven't been able to find anything on the internet how it ended... :p
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.
Sure. It's easy, really.
"Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
-Terrry Pratchett
How small would they have to be? My precinct has only 813 registered voters. Supposedly, 644 of them voted. How could I possibly know? Personally poll each of them?
Electronic voting has bigger problems than TFA mentions... (FYI, the preceding link contains flash/video.)
You say that but I think some people would rather not count all the rich land owning votes coming from Hollywood if they could avoid those.
E-voting is flawed but let's not get sucked up into all the conspiracy theories.
Surprisingly his constituents appear to be following in his footsteps and not calling for endless recounts or crying about being marginalized as citizens.
Well, I think that's only suprising if you're somehow sure that any whining about voting errors stems from being a poor loser, not legitimate voting concerns. Also if you ignore the margin that Obama won by. I'm sure there were voting inconsistencies out there that may have potentially decreased the number of votes McCain got, but you could not make the case that swung the election. Conversely, the 2000 election you could although we won't get into that again here.
I think they would have had some issue if it looked like it actually made a difference.
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?
Money. Basically, they are cheap SOB's who have sworn to "help the GOP get elected". Not kidding. Diebold is a big supporter of the GOP.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"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.
The electronic voting machines in New Jersey could be hacked in about seven minutes. The journal describes aspects of this election which make it different from most recent elections and includes a pro-con debate of the Electoral College. -------------- Sally The Best Social Bookmarking
The problem with electronic voting is this: Voting needs to be anonymous, otherwise you have people being coerced into selling their vote (aka "vote the way we say and bring us the receipt or you're fired"). But if it is anonymous, how can you be sure your vote was counted correctly? The computer can display the person you voted for, while recording a vote for somebody else. You can't give them a receipt or any way for them to verify their vote that they can take with them, because then it isn't anonymous anymore. The only way to make an electronic voting system work in a way that the voter can prove that their vote is registered properly is to print a piece of paper and have that piece of paper be considered the actual vote, while the computer is used for a "fast count" only. The voter can then verify that the correct data is on the receipt (except for blind people, unless you make a braille printer and have somebody counting who can read braille).
I voted for DRE-700
load "$",8,1
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.
One way to tell if someone's opinion is overly influenced by political bias is if their conclusions change when the party/political label changes. I'd suggest some people try those glasses on around here occasionally.
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.
What about "losing" boxes of ballots from precincts known to vote predominantly for the opposing party? How does low votes per polling place help with that?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately."
How stupid can the summary possibly be? Your belief has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is true.
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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.
I live in a red state... probably the most red of them all. In fact, it was the third state called - you got it - oklahokma. Every district... red.
That being said, we have lots of republicans mainly because that's what their parents are, or church has told them to be.
My polling place was a church
On the side outside it says "Make sure you pray before your cast your vote." You can take that however you like. I walk in, on my lunch break, to cast a vote towards the popular vote as I know where I live it counts for nothing, and fill out the form. It is one of those "connect the line" charts.
Let me set a mood first... There is a woman around 90 years old who is reading the paper to validate people are who they say they are. This woman cannot see my face on my drivers license - she didn't even look, even though, for some reason it said "Check identification" on the line where I signed.
I over looked that
I take my form over to my cardboard booth and connect the dots
I take my form over to the machine to put it in... it looks like it is from the 60's and could probably survive a nuclear blast.
There is a red light on the machine. There are two statements on the machine.
"If the light is red, the machine is busy, please wait for it to turn green."
"If the light is green, please insert your ballot.
After waiting about 2 minutes with an impatient look on my face, a woman in her 70's comes over and in a very decrepit and very "talked down to" tone of voice she says... For the sake of my fingers, she will be Decrepit Old Lady - or DOL
DOL - "go ahead and put your ballot in, they looked at it this morning and said the light is just stuck on and will work just fine"
Me - "Ok, but is there some sort of way that I can tell who I voted for - I see some receipt looking things there coming out of the machine, will that give me my results?"
DOL - "If the machine makes a beep your vote has been counted." Me - "For some reason I highly doubt that, but given the record of this state, my vote doesn't count for much anyways. I can assure you my cantor would be very aburpt if I had to wait one second to vote"
DOL - "If the machine makes the noise, your vote is counted"
Me - "Again, I doubt that"
And I put my ballot in. Nothing got printed, the machine just made a noise. I think the moral here is:
If you leave the ignorant in charge, then whoever "fixes" the polling machine has complete control over your vote.
Ok, i'm done... Sorry for making it that long.
Despite what you are made to believe, America is not a true democracy. You are given few choices by media, by powerful conglomerates and whatever you can think of and you vote for the lesser of evil. Which one of the candidates your hear fell 100% in-line I'd like to ask you. I voted McCain but hate his "Call it a banana" speech on illegal immigration. But the alternate candidate, i.e., NObama, was much worse in my opinion. Yes I know I could write my vote in but how many of us really do this ? There is no point. And Cynthia McKinney, the screaming black idiot woman from Atlanta for president ??? C'mon, you've got to be kidding me.
After getting this off my chest, I voted in Northern Mexico for intents and purposes. My voting place had 2 electronic voting machines erect in the middle of the voting room. As any geek at heart, I asked the guy who were trying to hand me the forms what these computers are for. HE said, they are for electronic voting but it takes too long of a time to vote on these. I kinda suggested that I want to do that regardless and he said they are already broken. I dunno if he spoke the truth or just to convey me to mark my vote on paper and not to deal with me if the machine somehow crashes or something but as I waitied in the line for about 10 minutes and as long as it took me to fill in my vote, I have not seen anyone voting electronically.
Somebody long before me, made a comment that India nailed this electronic voting with big success years ago. I have one comment about that: When 90% of the population is barely literate to understand what they are voting for, I don't think they have as much worry that the votes may be tampered with. In US, we all know what a joke Diebold machines are and no serious investment in making voting software open source so that the regular Joe the programmer can understand about it and inform justness of it to the masses. Idon;t think this e-voting will happen in my life time and I am just in my forties, not planning to die anytime soon.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Well I can say here in AR things were MUCH improved this time around. Here in '04 they had the electronic only vote machines and half of them were down. This time they had new machines that not only had a large,easy to use touchscreen that asked for confirmation to ensure that you didn't make a mistake in your choice,but it also printed a large easy to read ballot that scrolled up the side as you voted. They then took not only your electronic vote(with this large cartridge device) but they also put your freshly printed ballot in the ballot box in case there was any contested results.
But what really impressed me was how the party officials on all sides went out of there way to make sure everyone got to vote. They had a dem,a repub,and a green party official there to oversee the results,and while I was in line I saw several ahead of me who had gone to the wrong precinct. Instead of making them go and try to find the right place one of the party officials would ask them where they had voted last and would get on their cell and get it squared away so they could vote there. If they had registered for the first time and for some reason didn't show in the roll they were asked a few simple questions and then they loaded a provisional ballot on the machine. Very orderly,friendly and polite. This time it was truly a pleasure to vote.
Oh and we FINALLY got a lotto passed! Yippee! Free college tuition!!! And our money stays here instead of going to Tunica!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
like she says: there "can" still be malicious code... but it is so much less damned likely in open source than in closed source, AND when it does show up, it tends to get found and corrected right away.
So, open source is not perfect, but it comes a hell of a lot closer to perfect than closed source will ever be.
um, what?
bugs are the result of human error, which occurs whether you're depending on programmers or 50-year-old polling station volunteers. open source e-voting machines facilitate public oversight to catch bugs/flaws in the voting machine software. closed source e-voting machines prevent people from analyzing the code that's counting their votes. that means bugs are much less likely to be caught/fixed.
backdoors, like deliberate voter suppression/election fraud, will always be a potential risk. that's why OSS is necessary. again, open source means there is a means for vigilant members of the public to scrutinize the code and ensure there are no back doors. no matter how good of a programmer the perpetrator is, you can't hide a backdoor forever in open source software. the more eyes that are on the source code, the sooner the backdoor will be found.
with something as important as e-voting software, you can bet there'll be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of programmers, security analysts, code auditors, software testers, etc. pouring over every line of that code. compare that to the broken code-auditing system that the diebold machines went through, where the flaws with the system weren't discovered until the source code was leaked, discovered by a sleuthing citizen, and finally delivered into the hands of competent programmers to be analyzed.
--what the hell does that even mean? begging the question is not "analysis" no matter how confidently you repeat your non-sequiturs. unless you are advocating security through obscurity (and an honor system for the programmers), how is perpetual debugging/auditing and public oversight a "major security risk"? are Google's servers being hacked into by the hundreds because they're all running linux? is SELinux being used by the NSA & DoD because open source means backdoors and other security risks "can't be dealt with"?
maybe take some courses on information security/secure coding before spewing out this verbal diarrhea. in fact, take philosophy 101 while you're at it and learn at least basic informal fallacies. then maybe you'll be able to participate in online discussions without wasting people's time with specious arguments full of gaping holes in logic.
As someone who greatly misses the old style giant mechanical voting machines I call bullshit if you think there was any way you knew, postively, that they had counted your vote correctly or at all.
Voting machines should be the least of our worries when it comes to the integrity of our political system.
Oh, quit your whining - you have a choice between Democratic OR Republican!
This is actually quite simple - wherever you have several trillion dollars to hand out to the 'best' taker, there will be corruption. If you want to get the corruption out of Washington, you have to get the money out of Washington. It'll never happen any other way; no matter how many regulations they throw up, people will find ways around them. Humans are greedy and smart - well, except the politicians who think they're smarter than everybody else.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I would disagree with the thread's premise that we've avoided the issues of 2000 and 2004. These issues are still going on, this time in Minnesota. Senator Norm Coleman was ahead of Al Franken by over 700 votes when all the votes were counted on the 4th, and EVERY DAY his lead is getting eroded, and the recount hasn't even started yet. Somehow Minnesota precincts keep finding "missed ballots" for Franken, and the current lead has now shrunk to 288 votes. Every single "lost vote" found so far has gone to Franken, and not one to Coleman. That is exceedingly suspicious, especially given the fact that they use optical scanners in that state, and bad ballots are instantly rejected when the voter tries to cast them, giving the voter a chance to do a new one correctly. This isn't hanging chad Florida, but it is very likely fraud.
Additionally, you have widespread reports of people getting to vote without being asked to show any identification, you have black panthers with nightsticks patrolling Philedelphia polling places... voting really is an absolute joke these days.
I do believe Obama actually won the presidential election based on the huge margins, but most races are much closer than that, and it's really impossible to have any confidence in any close races anymore. And with black panthers in the polling places, I worry that eventually we won't even be able to trust the big wins either.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
We in the US have no national ID (or "mark of the beast", as many would call it). So we can never be sure which of us are actually entitled to vote.
Our constitution, in its infinite wisdom, gives state legislatures control over elections. So uniformity is effectively prohibited.
But don't worry, eventually we'll get so FUBARed that Canada will stroll in and fix all that for us.
I think everyone who is interested in electronic voting should take a look at this website. This group was originally just a bunch of computer scientists trying to apply theory to practice. In my opinion, they succeeded quite well, and I wish more people had heard of them.
Scantegrity.org
I'm very sorry he got 1 term. He was doing sketchy things from pretty early on.
/. it would have gotten -5 troll and now would get +5 insightful.)
Oh and 1 "news" site totally pegged what his administration was going to do.
This was written January 2001.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784
(I bet if that article was posted eight years ago on
Makes me want to laugh or cry.
well, each voter can be given a receipt with a ballot ID printed on it. that way voters can just input their ballot ID into the web form to check if their vote was correctly counted. of course, if your vote wasn't correctly counted, then you'd still have to identify yourself and lose voter anonymity somewhat. but it's better than not having a vote. and your corrected ballot will still be anonymous.
this would all be a lot easier/simpler if we had online electronic voting. you log-in, you place your vote(s), you get your confirmation #, and your virtual ballot is immediately tabulated and the election results updated in real-time. and you can also immediately check to see if your e-ballot was correctly tabulated using your confirmation number. no bureaucratic or logistical delays.
perhaps someone should develop an open source online voting system. first it can be put through some trial runs in municipal elections. and after a year or two, once the system has proven itself, it can be pushed up the governmental/administrative hierarchy and implemented at state level. and one or two years later, if there aren't any problems, it can be introduced at the federal level.
using an open source development model, and by implementing new features at the municipal level first and gradually pushing them up the chain of government, it would be possible to safely implement online electronic voting and move our nation slowly but steadily towards a direct, participatory democracy where individuals have much greater involvement in government and a real say in public policy.
this kind of risk management would allow us to safely implement (eventually) regular broad-based referendums for policy-making at the federal level. since the bi-partisan system clearly doesn't work, and the federal government no longer represents the interests of the people. things like net neutrality, gay marriage rights, stem cell research, government surveillance, etc. would be better voted on by the public than by the political aristocracy, whom have proven that they can no longer be trusted to protect in public interest.
foreign policy & international relations would still be handled by political leaders, but domestic policy issues that affect the day to day lives of ordinary people should be decided by the public. if our congressmen don't have the time to read the bills they pass into law, that's O.K. we'll read them and vote on them instead. increasing public involvement in the "democratic" process would make Americans less politically indifferent and perhaps cure the social apathy that plagues our society. if people actually have a say in government, and have real political power, then they'll be more likely to take an active interest in current issues.
Number the ballots sequentially, and have them printed by a central authority that puts anti-counterfeiting measures on the ballots.
When a voter arrives, grab a ballot at random (shuffled deck) and issue it for punch card voting.
At the end of the day, you know how many people voted due to the log book. You know how many ballots you should have. You know which number ballots were issued (but not to which voters to preserve anonymity).
This makes it harder to lose ballots because each step of the way up knows how many ballots there should be, and ballots can't be swapped for different ones.
Oh, and one more thing; lets take computers out of the process, and go back to electric vote counting. No logic, no smarts, just a system that counts how many times a hole goes by. Easily verified, difficult to tamper with in a way that is not discovered, and reliable.
Hollerith did it right, and that was 100 years ago. :)
Will you say the same 4 years from now with a new Bin Laden's threat and George W. Bush Jr. Jr. saying "we have to fight terrorism..."? US Karma, conservatism...
http://twitter.com/bash_history
It is worth noting, for those interested in electronic voting and vote security that Barb Simons is credited in the effort to get the ACM to set their policy on electronic voting. Just as importantly the helped to move the League of Women Voters from their pro-DRE stance on electronic voting to the new SARA stance which calls for auditability and recountability.
I found her comments on Open Source in the article quite insightful too. Not that I am against it but t isn't a security panacea.
I agree with your argument that casting votes for multiple offices and legislative initiatives lends itself to electronic tabulation. Your argument that population is prohibitive to paper based voting is not, however, considering that the vote tallies from the major population centers of Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, etc. are available around the same time as the tallies from lesser populated areas in the same time zone.
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
Not that anybody likes CS theory; Computer Science is actually well suited for dealing with voting issues!
This including recommending the BAN of computers on security grounds.
Human vote counting systems can be developed (and even simulated and tested.) CS work on distributed systems could be useful (or at least prove impossibility of finding ideal solutions.)
Math nuts have been working on voting systems that beat the silly 2 party mess. Voters understand reality show/web ratings as well as Olympic ratings they can vote by ranking.
Me, I think a simple hand count of subsets (randomly defined) TWICE and then a repeat on sets that do not match would work reasonably well.
While we are at it, new problems could be proposed, such as limitations on redistricting instead of developing algs to maximize a party's influence at the expense of sensible district boundaries. Could be something as simple as limiting districts to 5 sided polygons or equal area (doesn't have to be easy to solve; you know parties will spend money on maximization software, the key is to make that less useful to them.)
Other issues such as digitally signing ballots (which would be a good idea as a method for validation of money; naturally, not 'fool' proof but better than the easy to duplicate stuff that exists now... They can clean $5 and reprint $100 bills from it and fool most places.)
Going a little off topic; I'd like to see a representation study showing what ratios are most effective for communicating with your rep. The foolish USA capped the rep count long ago - its not like the reps would be any less effective if there were more of them (at least it would cost more to bribe and lobby them.)
General rules or guidelines as well, like saying that power should be proportional to how diffuse the representation is, etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
> 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.
I actually don't get what the problem with voting machines are. It seems to me that all problems could be solved if it printed the votes for the voters review, then the paper goes into a separate sealed container that is asisiated with a voting machine. If there is suspicion of errors, the container, which is tied to the particular voting machine can be reviewed and counted manually to ensure that the votes from that machine is the same as the paperbackup. If in the national system each voting machine has an id, you can always go back an test the results. Tie that to a system of random review and you have a perfectly untamperable system. Only way to alter a vote would be to alter the centrally stored system and destroy local backup, which is a lot of work to do on a large enough scale that it would actually matter.
Also, in this system open or closed source dos not matter since the voter can review the vote after it is out of the machine.
www.aleo.no
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.
Well actually, i think it DOES work! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia - It's a way smaller country than the USA, but that's the benefit actually on this type of project.
Another complicating factor is that the United States is a federation of 50 independent state governments. The states run their own elections, with very little input or control by the federal government. The actual elections themselves are administered by the dozens of local boards of election within each state.
So, that's 50 sets of voting rules, written by 50 state legislatures, adjudicated by 50 state courts overseeing dozens of local boards of election each.
People from outside the US often think of America as a single people with a single form of government, and that's really only partially true.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
...(both sides did run negative campaigns to a degree)...
To a degree?
I don't know about where you live, but here in northern Virginia, the only campaigning I saw or heard was negative. McCain's seemed to be primarily fear-mongering and Obama's seemed to be primarily "McCain is bad because he's just like Bush." But that's typical of campaigning here. It's extraordinarily rare to see anything but smear campaigns here.
I'm sure that both sides had a few positive advertisements, but I never saw them. The only positive campaign message I ever saw was Obama's acceptance speech (to me it felt more like a campaign speech than an acceptance speech).
End of line..
From the interview with Dr. Simons:
"You know I've heard people make claims that various elections have been stolen on these machines. It's a difficult--it's not a claim I would make because I think it's risky to make a claim when you can't prove it nor would I say that no elections have ever been stolen on these machines as some other people claim because you can't prove that either. And I think the problem is when we find ourselves in the situation where we can neither prove nor disprove that the election was--would be tabulated--recorded and tabulated and what we need to do is move to systems where we can prove things. And I think that's what we have to do and the fact that the 2008 Presidential election has not been contested the way that for example the 2000 election was contested doesn't mean we're out of the woods. There will be other contested races as we're seeing in Minnesota although there they're going to count it and there we will find out."
I think she's got this spot on. We need to move to system where one can prove the result. Once we can prove that a machine count and a human count produce the same result, it doesn't matter what's inside the "black box". We know it's producing the right outcome, so we can trust it.
As far as I know, none of the voting systems and procedures we have now -- optical scan included -- are designed around this concept of proof.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
No, not in Virginia. Each party running for office can send a select number of observers, the candidates themselves can observe (but only for a short amount of time), and the media can come in and take pictures. The orderliness of the polling place is extremely well-protected in Virginia law. The poll workers are even given limited police powers -- including the power to put someone under a form of house arrest for up to 24 hours -- to guard the polling place, if need be.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
This was just an exploit of crappy programming and an ineffective paper log on Sequoia's part and not an indication that the principle of a paper trail is flawed. For instance, in the case when the voter leaves before actually casting their vote and it is then voided could easily be avoided by making the voter aware that their vote hasn't been cast until X. If they don't bother to ensure that X happens, it's their fault. It's equivalent to handing your ballot to someone without staying to watch them drop it in the machine. If that is still too complicated for people, there can still be an optional paper equivalent.
Indeed. The scantron machines have been in service for voting for well over 20 years now. High "squish" factors in filling in the circle(The machines I worked on would read a single dot in the circle, but kick back if it overvoted always) are great. The real problem that is coming is from the digital-scanning ones. See the sig if you care.
import system.cool.Sig;
Those big old machines were reassuring just because they were, well, big and old. I agree with you, it was just faith that they were recording and counting votes reliably.
We use fill-in-the-oval and the voter sticks it into the scanning machine. Straightforward, if you're accustomed to tests (and I for one don't mind if that introduces a slight bias). Being now accustomed to the dour TSA, poll workers were surprisingly light-hearted on Tuesday, one suggested the scanner was actually a shredder.
The Obama campaign had a voter-tracking system where a volunteer (technically, a poll 'challenger') listened for the names of voters then entered those listed on their sheets into a phone- or web-based system. In theory, this could have helped identify irregularities but in practice, the system crashed. Nevertheless, the manual tracking could be reconciled with precinct results.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
Still McCain, despite his supporters, ran an honest campaign and honorably conceded the election to his opponent. Surprisingly his constituents appear to be following in his footsteps and not calling for endless recounts or crying about being marginalized as citizens.
It seems pretty obvious to me why - it's not like 2000 or 2004 where flipping a single swing state could change the results. The margin is high enough that the losing side simply isn't going to be able to cheat enough to win (and get away with it), and in the winner-takes-all system there is no point in cheating not enough to win. Not saying that there aren't incidents of cheating from both sides, but overall that seems to have slowed down the flurry of endless recounts and lawsuits, at least this time around.
How is it possible for a felon convicted on 7 charges and who was trailing by 22% to win the election?
You can't handle the truth.
I think the problem here is how we're looking at the problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with a paper ballot. Given the right format it can be easily counted (electronically) and gives you the ability to easily audit the result. The problem is the interface to the ballot. Using pecil or what have you is prone to errors and can pose problems. So why not create an electronic interface that creates a filled out ballot that can be double checked by the voter. Why is this so hard?
Yes its a large enough gap to say McCain could not win. It doesn't matter if it was 53% to 46%, the college was projected to be an Obama victory by over 100 votes. That is very close to insurmountable. The use of the popular vote has zero outcome for the Presidential vote and is not relevant. The same college that helped Bush's campaign helped Obama secure an early victory.
Voting isn't a mess everywhere in the US.
I was a pollworker here in LA this year. The Inkavote system used, which is standardized across the entire county, is pretty close to what you describe: ID check (for new voters), cross your name off the list, get a ballot, etc. The only refinement is that we have a machine that checks to see if there are any obvious errors on the ballot: Ink where it shouldn't be, overvote (more than one vote in a race), or the ballot is entirely blank. This machine only validates, it does NOT count votes. Actual counting is done later at the ballot collection center.
The entire process is completely open and anyone who wants to observe may do so, from the moment we start setting up the polling place to when we finish taking it all down.
Of course the system isn't perfect, but it sure seems to work pretty well. Pollworking was actually quite fun since so many people were so enthusiastic about voting, especially in this election.
I'm a software engineer but I have to say the thought of using a computer for voting completely creeps me out.
I can't say I think every ballot got counted in this election cycle. I'd feel better if I knew for sure, but I'm fairly certain that most of my ballots were counted. That's better than previous years...