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.

Comments

Finally

[Suiggy]

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.

Re:Finally

[gubers33]

There is a large part of the population who don't know how to use a computer, but are extremely intelligent and informed. The only person some people don't know how to use a computer is because they were around far before computers and never learned to use them. AKA The elderly.

Re:Finally

[Daniel_Staal]

The advantage voting machines and paper ballots have isn't that they can't be rigged, it's that they are easier to audit. Auditing an electronic vote requires that the audit trail was built in in the first place, and that the auditors are tech people of skill equal to or greater than the people who created the system in the first place.

Auditing a paper ballot can be done by anyone who managed to pass math through middle school. (Assuming the ballot wasn't designed by idiots. And even then it only takes a little more skill to decide how to handle edge cases.)

Re:Finally

[Arancaytar]

In before Rick Astley becomes President of Oahu. :)

Re:Finally

[dov_0]

the vast majority of people (yes even old folk!) know how to fucking using a computer these days. it isnt 1988

But many otherwise very intelligent people find that they cannot understand them. Sometimes it's just that they have no confidence with computers or believe that they cannot use them. In other cases perhaps the need or the interest has never been there. Most people, even very intelligent people, have a 'blind spot' - a subject or activity they find difficult or even mind-numbingly overwhelming.

Eg. I can read and write in ancient Hebrew and Greek, was described as 'brilliant' while studying and am often asked for help in various areas due to my ability to just pick things up on the run and teach/explain/do whatever is required. When I started my own business however I ran into my nemesis. Accounting. It took me over a month to get my head around the basics. Longer still to start to understand my accounting software. Don't know if I'll ever get past the basics with it cos I seriously find it hard to understand.

So I don't give people who don't understand computers a hard time. Most people can send emails and write a text document. Surfing the web is also pretty common. Internet banking is a bonus. If that is all they need, that is all that most people will ever learn and that is ok. When they need something else, they ring me and pay me $60 an hour as a tech. I don't mind at all!

Re:Finally

[sgbett]

You might not get past the basics - but at least you learned the basics. The thing with 'the basics' is that anybody who is smart can learn 'the basics' in pretty much any field.

With IT though there is this weird thing where people seem to think it is perfectly OK to simply claim "I'm not very good with computers", and not even bother to try and get any further.

I don't think that's a blind spot. Nobody is asking them to write a perl regex to validate an email address.

I agree with you (and I actually think technically you agreed with the parent) *most* people do get the basics. I would seriously question the motives of those who *choose* not to get the basics.

Re:Finally

[[Zappo]]

I did my master's work on e-voting in 1999, and followed it since.

You're right, but nailed only half of the issue (audit).

The other half is that we expect our elections to employ secret ballots. With paper, you can physically watch the ballots, even though you've dissociated voters from votes. The voter can see that the paper is marked as the voter intended, but not with anything that identifies the voter, and deposit it in a ballot box. The voter can further have confidence that, as you say, many interested parties who are unlikely to collude will then watch that ballot box carefully; and that the votes it contains will be counted. The press can witness the physical process of vote retrieval and counting.

But in all electronic systems, it seems impossible to provide both an audit trail and a secret ballot. Various schemes that attempt to deliver both properties one way or another require trust in a rather small set of entities whose actions are not very transparent to observers and who cannot necessarily be deemed "unlikely to collude". Those trusted parties have the power to control the outcome of the election, subvert the secret ballots, or both -- which effectively means that they, and not the voters, pick the winners of the election.

You're Doing It Wrong

[eldavojohn]

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.

No faith

[JCSoRocks]

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?

Re:No faith

[getuid()]

(I'm the one vote you -1 flamebait -- sorry, was an accident, slipped on the mouse. Hope me posting in this thread will erase the vote...)

Re:No faith

[Jherek Carnelian]

Or they had just heard about how abysmally inaccurate previous all-digital elections had been and figured, "why bother?"

Nah. Dis stay Hawai'i brah, no ones know bout all da kine kapakai. We's jus wen to da beach an forgot about da kine.

What were the reasons?

[Daetrin]

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.

Why bother when you know its hacked?

[icebike]

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...

Re:Why bother when you know its hacked?

[icebike]

> no clear way to capitalize on this without being traced.

You presume a level of diligence that does not exist. We can't even get botnets shut down in this country when we know exactly which computers have been compromised, let along be able to trace the problem to the source.

Re:Why bother when you know its hacked?

[geekboy642]

ACORN is a red herring. The people out gathering voter registrations are payed per name. Federal regulations require ACORN to submit every single name they gather; they are not allowed to strike obvious forgeries before handing them to the government. It is the government's responsibility--because they've demanded the sole power--to strike invalid voters from the rolls. Moreover, you have to prove your identity when you vote. If there's a problem with people showing up with forged ID to prove they're someone who died 2 years ago, the fail is obvious. Voter registration drives hurt nobody. Voter disenfranchisement and lawsuits over hanging chads hurt everybody.

digital ballot stuffing

[madbavarian]

Give them a couple of years and the digital ballot stuffing software will get better. The voter numbers should be waaaay up.

Who cooked up this scheme?

[icebike]

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

Re:Who cooked up this scheme?

[saleenS281]

You forgot a step.

1) Con city into using Company A
2) Sign fat contract with Company A
3) Hold election (sweep massive FAIL under rug)
4) ????
5) Profit

Re:7300 votes?

[Intron]

Maybe 44,000 people voted and the digital system lost 80% of the votes. How would they know?

Engagement

[westlake]

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.

Not Necessarily Attributable to New System

[BJ_Covert_Action]

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....

look, morons:

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:look, morons:

[cdrguru]

The for small, local elections it may not matter that much other than standardization.

The real problem is speedy results. People in the US think of elections as a some kind of a race. A race with a winner and a loser where the results are available at the end of the race. In the case where results aren't available immediately, the TV News people are going to make up results based on exit polls and other information. This was done when Gore was announced around midnight in 2000. Of course, these were not official results, but that didn't matter all that much to people because they went to bed.

Without speedy results, we are turning over the elections to the TV News folks.

The worst news . . .

[hcetSJ]

was that those 7,300 votes were all cast by the same person.

I live on Oahu

[pwnies]

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.

Re:Age demographics?

[jonbryce]

The experience of postal voting in England says it can be gamed.

You get party officials going round retirement homes to "help" people complete their ballots.
You have 15 people living in a 1 bed apartment all registering to vote.

the other 36700 did vote

[bugs2squash]

They voted against the voting system...

Besides, what respectable electronic voting system for Oahu (population 900,000) would not register at least 1,200,000 votes ?

Intelligence has nothing to do with it...

[msauve]

Why should someone have to pay for technology in order to vote?

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 /., you should already be aware of all the security implications involved with voting-by-wire.

Another Possibility

[Sir_Dill]

I have never lived in Hawaii but my fiancee grew up there.

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.

dont look at me

[circletimessquare]

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