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Voting Drops 83 Percent In All-Digital Election
For the first time ever, Oahu residents had to use their phones or computers to vote with some surprising results. 7,300 people voted this year, compared to 44,000 people the previous year, a drop of about 83 percent. "It is disappointing, compared to two years ago. This is the first time there is no paper ballot to speak of. So again, this is a huge change and I know that, and given the budget, this is a best that we could do," said Joan Manke of the city Neighborhood Commission. She added that voters obviously did not know about or did not embrace the changes.
We need more all-digital elections. I don't trust people who are not intelligent enough to use a computer to be informed enough to vote in my jurisdiction.
7,300 people voted this year, compared to 44,000 people the previous year, a drop of about 83 percent.
If all you're concerned about is number of votes, put each candidate on prime time television belting out the worst songs they can think of. Then instruct viewers to vote with their cell phones. Don't forget to charge them 99 cents a call and limit them to 10 votes ... the populace seems to love that.
Granted, they might not be the best candidate for the position, there will be 10 million votes and you'll have a $9.9 million surplus to decide what to do with. On top of that, your elected official will be able to sing "Oops, I Did It Again" by Britney Spears whenever they screw anything up.
My work here is dung.
Not a real big loss. After all, democracy doesn't really work anyway, just like all those other systems of government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oahu.
Or they had just heard about how abysmally inaccurate previous all-digital elections had been and figured, "why bother?" I can't say that I blame them. I would probably have a similar attitude. What's the point of voting if you have no faith in the accuracy of the results?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Did they do any polling or anything to figure out why that was? Were people just not able to figure out electronic voting? If so the problem should go away after a couple election cycles. It would be more worrisome if there's some kind of innate apathy to a voting process that doesn't involve getting out of the house and doing something.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The elderly are the largest voting population and few of them own a computer nevertheless know how to use one. They pretty much didn't allow a majority of voters vote because they didn't know how.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Unfortunately this is really bad for the propagating of voting technology. They definitely needed to be more prepared before adopting this method.
Now get universal promotion.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I'd love to see the age demographics on who voted/didn't vote in this election. Is it unreasonable to expect that only the 18-25 year old's were able to even achieve a quorum among their age group?
I can see the fnords!
... when your Democracy has no physical accountability.
Or was that 1 guy cracking the system and voting 7300 times?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Technology brings us many things, but we lose things in the process. Take for example, before TV, people were much more social.
By removing an actual place to vote, the mental association of a "voting place" is removed. That doesn't mean that e-voting is bad, it just means that there's a ways to go before it works as well as paper voting does.
The best cure for this "problem" is to link e-voting with traditionally paper voting locations. Smooth transitions are best, and not transitions that are all or nothing.
Mental inertia is a force to be understood and accounted for, not shrugged off.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
I suspect the feeling is that any election taking place over the net or the phone system is so easily hackable as to become laughable.
There is no changeable paper trail for this, contrary to the trend nationally to require same.
How long till botnets on the island (or elsewhere) start selling election stealing services?
Ok, now expect the defenders telling us this is all impossible and calling me a Luddite in 3, 2, 1...
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Give them a couple of years and the digital ballot stuffing software will get better. The voter numbers should be waaaay up.
The city cut its expenses in half by using computers and phone technology by Everyone Counts.
"This is the future for presidential elections, general elections, primary elections, all the way," Everyone Counts consultant Bob Watada said.
Watada is the former Campaign Spending Commission director.
Whoa! Conflict of interest much?
1) Con city into using Company A
2) Sign fat contract with Company A
3) Hold election (sweep massive FAIL under rug)
4) Profit
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
83% fewer votes were counted.
That might means 83% fewer voters, which is a significant loss of confidence, or it could mean 83% of the votes were lost.
Either way, I'd say the system is a failure.
I vote for the guy that will increase taxes and cut spending. My parents and grandparents vote for the guy that decreases taxes and increases spending.
Clearly, someone is wrong. Maybe I should blame my high school algebra teacher.
.. TFS says they were allowing voting by phone. Personally, I'd like to see them discount anything coming in from your typical slack-jawed cellphone addicted cretin. Either that or require them to enter the whole name of the candidate to get rid of the lol crowd.
Election Day is traditionally a social event - it brings a neighborhood, a community together. The girl scouts will have baked goods on sale. There will time to meet and talk with friends. Kids will get their first taste of "voting" on their own. For seniors it is a matter of pride that they still have the wit and will and strength to participate. These things are important in a democracy.
Insecure and I miss the fun of showing up. In my state for the primary we did a caucus which was load and disorganized. I loved it. Not choreographed or controlled. Total chaos. As true democracy should be.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Did anybody think that the drop in voters might be because of the lack of a presidential election. There is always a huge difference in the voter turn out when the election is in an off year. Now to compare it correctly you would have to wait till the next pres. election and see what the turn out is to get the correct numbers on how electronic voting is going. For the nay sayers, this was a great year for it. The stats prove it, but not really. The lack of numbers shows it is because of the lack of a pres. election. - - "If you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Rush
This is the first time there is no paper ballot to speak of.
Then what makes them so certain that there were only 7,300 people who voted?
A paper trail is SUPPOSED to have a certain level of inconvenience. That's part of its value. Generally speaking, the more automation a voting system has, the higher the potential for fraud.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Maybe the software undercounted by 83 percent.
... maybe the numbers are off because there is no ballot stuffing and dead people voting as in prior elections... I'm just sayin...
An Internet based vote is way more cost-effective and easy to setup and conduct than a paper one.
This kind of technology will become the norm.
It will permit consultation of populations on a much more frequent basis.
The security issues are solvable through use of open-source standards, and clever
encryption schemes, that can be verified by thousands of independent
programmers and mathematicians.
Admittedly we don't have the level of techno-scrutiny we need on these things yet,
but it will come.
The bigger problem with democracy is how to educate people so they can maintain a
relatively rational and independent opinion in the face of media carpet-mindbombing
campaigns, and how we motivate people to believe that their opinion matters.
Stupidity and apathy. That's what we have to fight for for democracy.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
or we could fight AGAINST the stupidity and apathy I suppose. :-)
The nefarious forces of entrenched hierarchy fighting to increase the general level of stupidity and apathy
need no assistance.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I recall reading an article in the local paper that voter turnout dropped hugely in the most recent California elections. I also recall reading a similar article the next day in the LA Times how voter turnout in LA County also dropped hugely. The whole voter turnout decreasing trend seems to be fairly common throughout the United States these days. Couple that with the ever-popular 'tea party protests' that we have recently seen in the country in which numerous voters are conglomerating and denouncing the government system as a whole and I think you could make a pretty strong case that the drop in the number of votes/voters is not attributable solely to the use of electronic voting instruments. I don't doubt it has had some, and likely even a significant, effect. But I think it would be worth noting that Americans in general seem to have gotten tired of voting. After all, why bother casting a vote when every single candidate elected seems to participate in a general, "who can suck the most" contest. I don't encourage apathy in the populace, but maybe we could try implementing some election system reforms like a, "Choose to withhold my vote from all available candidates" box on ballots. That way we could at least declaratively (yes, I think I made that word up) say that we don't like any of the choices, rather than just not voting and having 'experts' debate the causes of such apathy....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Another study showed that 17% of voters had no fingers, thus can't do anything digitally.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
"She added that voters obviously . . . did not embrace the changes."
No shit, Sherlock. Now get back to work on a system people can TRUST.
Report back here when you've finished.
last year was a presidential election, that surely affects the numbers
paper voting: cheap
electronic voting: expensive
paper voting: 10x attack vectors to corrupt it
electronic voting: 1,000x attack vectors to corrupt it
the richest, most advanced, technophilic nation and the poorest most backwards nation should all vote the same way: paper ballot
anything else is simply paying more $ just for more ways to corrupt the vote. a democracy is based on legitimacy of the vote. if you cast doubt on that legitimacy, if there is any taint in the process of voting, and electronic voting allows for myriad more ways to do just that, then you destroy people's faith in their own government
this is not a joke, please stop with the electronic voting. its downright dangerous as it threatens the legitimacy of elected officials in the eyes of the people due to its black box nature: votes go in, leader comes out, who the fuck knows what kind of sausage is in the middle
yes, you can still fuck around with stacks of paper with checkmarks on them and mess with the vote thataways. but in a lot less ways, and a lot less opaquely, and you need a lot of cooperation and hard work. one well-placed hacker can change millions of votes in untraceable ways in milliseconds with electronic voting
in the case of close elections, you have ballots to fall back on that many human eyes can see and hold in their hands and tally for themselves. what do you have with electronic voting? a bunch of bits of doubtful provenance on a hard disk and some easily corruptible bureaucrat saying "trust me". fuck that. i'd rather a close vote take 3 months to tally on paper than a 3 second tally of votes of a black box nature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
was that those 7,300 votes were all cast by the same person.
This side up.
I would consider this change to be so drastic that I would demand an investigation to determine if this vote was fair and accurate. Dropping some? Ok, fair enough. But saving half the money to get what, 1/6 of the votes?
Not a savings at all.
And this is the first I've heard of this election. I had no idea this was happening. My guess is that too few people knew about the election in the first place, and that it was just a failure to advertise it properly.
the democratic process has been discontinued due to lack of interest & lethargy
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Call me a Luddite, but elections should be done exclusively with optical scan ballots--either in person or by mail-in absentee. This is the way it is in counties like mine that didn't fall for the touchscreen scam.
For voters with disabilities, a computer equipped with headphones and a keypad should allow them to make choices that wind up printing a real, marked ballot, which they can feed into the precinct scanner.
All software used in the scanners, ADA computers, and central tabulators should be 100% open source.
All election ballots--and ballots used in tests to certify voting equipment--should be retained indefinitely in a secure storage area with fire sprinklers. This takes up a lot less space than one might think.
I've noted before that the paper ballot system IS open to voter coercion--an employer could force their employees to request absentee ballots, sign the affidavits, and turn them in. Thing is, doing this would be very logistically difficult, and the boss would wind up in prison.
So let's say we allow voting by phone or Web. Now we're talking about easier voter coercion:
Your Boss: "If you like your job, you'll give me your username and password to the elections system and let me vote for you."
Besides, what respectable electronic voting system for Oahu (population 900,000) would not register at least 1,200,000 votes ?
Nullius in verba
68,000 people thought they voted.
Why should someone have to pay for technology in order to vote?
/., you should already be aware of all the security implications involved with voting-by-wire.
I (and you, apparently) am fortunate enough to have both phone and Internet access, but there are many citizens who don't. Homeless people have the right to vote, too, without having to seek out some technological proxy.
If this ever hits my area, I'll look forward to writing off my Internet access and computer costs when I do my taxes.
Finally, if you're "intelligent" enough to hang around
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Listening to the stories of Hawaii, It sounds like most of the local population is barely making a living.
Hawaii is an expensive place to live and computers haven't quite supplanted the Television. One could argue that TV still isn't ubiquitous in the US, however I would wager that there are far more households with televisions than there are with computers.
So another possible reason is that people may not have the means to vote electronically.
I am perfectly fine to pay for the gas and take the time to go vote.
If I have to goto an internet cafe and pay to do it once I get there, I might be less inclined.
Sure there is the library but I don't think that a couple of terminals at the public library are really going to pick up the slack.
Not saying this is why there were fewer votes, a simple look at the demographics of who voted would go quite far in helping to answer the question though.
look at any budget for any electronic voting system in the world
now compare it to the voting process budget for swaziland
the more secure paper ballot voting process for swaziland
too many people are embracing a less secure more expensive way to vote out of nothing more than technophilia, rather than a coherent understanding of the requirements for the voting system, and how paper satisfies those requirements better, more cheaply, more securely
OCR the shit if you want your results fast. but you better have that paper backup, and no, sorry, printout doesn't cut it security wise: paper first, THEN tallying
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if that doesn't satisfy them, then fuck them. they have to wait. a little patience for a valid election is obviously better than immediate shoddy results
besides, all those "obama wins!" 9 pm announcements on voting day are projections, not hard returns. so nothing changes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So...
a) what was the election FOR?
b) how can you compare the voter turnout for a year with ZERO federal representation ballots against the damn 2008 election!??!?!
These seem like awfully rudimentary questions to ask if you're writing this story.
As a resident of Oahu (and by that a citizen of the city and county of Honolulu,) I only vaguely remember hearing that there was an election at all, and everything I heard about it would be that applicable voters would receive vote-by-mail cards. Upon asking four coworkers around me, none of them had known that there even was an election. It might be that we're just cooped up in a lab, but I think the problem was the failure to get the word out this year, not the method of voting. Also, the election was for the city's "Neighborhood Board" election. I have a hard time believing that the people that DID know could give a rat's ass, considering Hawaii's voter turnout percentiles for major elections.
One possibility being that rampant paper-ballot-stuffing was curtailed and that the vote count now is closer to real?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I am a computer scientist, PhD, and if I had to vote electronically for the elections I would disobey the law (elections aren't optional in Europe and failure to appear is punishable with one or two years in prison): I would refuse to cast a vote, because as a computer scientist I know very well how computers (don't) work, especially when under the control of vested interests.
I personally would abstain from such an election on principle alone. It is impossible to _guarantee_ that your vote will be kept anonymous.
[The only way to guarantee such a thing would be to require people to pick up single use digital keys printed on paper from a physical location and use these as login credentials. Even then, you'd have to vote using a digital proxy or from an internet cafe, all of which undermines the so called "convenience" of an all digital election].
Who knows what kind of unprovable inconveniences might befall you if you vote for the guy who ends up losing? (if not now, in the future once a political machine figures out how to exploit such information...)
For a democracy to work, Secret ballots should be secret and marked on hard, tangible, non-electronic paper.
Not that I don't believe the mechanism they used hurt their numbers, just that it might not have been the only cause.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
What I want to know is: how can the party that lost be sure that the system just didn't delete a lot of votes?
Voting system using pieces of paper:
1) each person gets listed on a piece of paper
2) each person puts another piece of paper with the vote on in a box
3) at the same time your name is marked on the first list
4) when the voting period is over the vote papers in the box are counted
Anyone interested in upholding democratic values may overview the process and it doesn't require much intelligence to understand if something is wrong in the process.
Voting system using computers:
1) someone claims that there is a program that you can vote on
2) people press buttons and do stuff with some program that may or may not be that same program
3) after the voting period is over someone claims a result
Not even people that believe that they are knowledgeable in the technology used are allowed to overview even parts of the process since it's secret and the less knowledgeable have no clue whatsoever. Also bear in mind that a chain is never stronger than the weakest link which in this case may even be a spreadsheet file and a person trying to cut and paste vote counts together.
Lets see, presidential election with Obama on the ticket, vs election with the mayor on the ticket. Hmmm hard choice, nobody really cares about a mayor. We have 44k registered voters here and 67% voted last year for the president, and this year's city council elections only 2% voted.
The people running this election missed the point and thus all the benefits of internet voting. The name of the game is turnout. For that you need to give the electorate the widest array of simple options. First, there wasn't much simple about the solution provided by the UK\Australian company (Everyone Counts) that supplied the internet voting software. The voting system, even with the drastically low turnout was overwhelmed and slow response times and timeouts. Further the system used a java applet as a security solution, which just adds to the incompatibility problems.
The largest folly with this election though is that they forced internet voting on the electorate. Internet voting is about giving people additional options, not restricting them. The bottom line is crap technology and poor decisions can kill any project.
All new technologies take a long time to start up. Internet voting saves paper, not to mention ballot counting time. The sheer ease of use for computer owners will make up for the high error potential- after all, who notices who runs our country? Besides the citizens. And the strongly US-linked international economy.
#Computers do not appreciate sarcasm
"1. Everyone already has a voter registration number, make sure they know it."
didja happen to notice the hoopla over a national id card over the last few years? no one's going to oppose a new national id system, naaah
"2. Decentralize the vote. Each "polling station" creates a flat file that has the voter id and what they voted for. Make it available for anyone to download."
oh ok, so now i can see who my neighbor voted for? oh, i can't, it hides identity? ok then, where's the protection against dirty tricks in this scheme again?
"3. Next have a regional/district "polling station" where the flat file is uploaded. The flat file is audited again here. Also the aggregate file is also made available to the public."
oh ok, because we all know underpaid, borderline capable "uncorruptible" government bureaucrats are paragons of integrity and virtue. if they say "trust me" i should trust them. pfffffffffft
"4. Continue the pooling of votes to whatever level is needed, national, global, whatever."
yeah, and how about we do this with paper, and make it therefore CHEAPER and MORE SECURE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I believe that a PKI-based ballot receipt kept in escrow may an adequate solution. In other words, at the simplest level, the e-voter receives a receipt, which does not contain the information on how they voted, but can be supplied to the system at a later date, where it will allow them to check their ballot. There is also a mathematical way to verify that that ballot contributed one vote's worth to the result, through hashing technology.
Of course, receipts are a problem as long as we have unequal power relationships, such as the mullah or husband demanding to see the vote.
So you probably just go with you get a receipt that you can use to verify that your vote made into the final tally, via a math algorithm that
can be verified by as many wonks as you want.
I think the real problem is that people don't trust geeks, no matter how many of them would attest en mass to the correctness of an algorithm or a result.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?