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Public Clearinghouse Proposed For Evoting Failures
Hugh Pickens writes "Alice Lipowicz writes in Federal Computer Week that Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, has reviewed hundreds of reports of problems with electronic voting systems during the last eight years. He is recommending a new regulatory system with a national database, accessible by election officials and others, that identifies voting system malfunctions reported by vendors or election officials and new legislation that requires vendors report evoting failures to the clearinghouse. 'We need a new and better regulatory structure to ensure that voting system defects are caught early, officials in affected jurisdictions are notified immediately, and action is taken to make certain that they will be corrected for all such systems, wherever they are used in the United States,' writes Norden. Adding that election officials rely on vendors to keep them aware of potential problems with voting machines, which is often done voluntarily and that voting system failures in one jurisdiction tend to be repeated in other areas, resulting in reduced public confidence and lost votes."
They don't get to vote in America, and we shouldn't let them count the votes either.
Look, I'm an IT guy. I completely get the labor savings, the fallibility of humans, the difference in cost. We ought to be willing to pay the cost for humans to count our votes - if it costs more, maybe we'll let less stupid stuff on the ballot, or vote less than every few months. I get that when people want to cheat, a way can often be found - though most vote-counting setups have multiple interested parties to limit the cheating. I get that the average American voter is mindless cattle whose vote can be bought with sufficient advertising. But still, I'd rather that people tried to get their cheating past other suspicious-minded people than that machines introduced the opportunity to rig elections wholesale in advance and without a trace.
In the mean time until the machines are granted the right to vote, they've got no business counting the vote.
As for the rest of it, well I believe it's been described as the worst system for managing society - except for all the others that have been tried. It's mostly working.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Am I the only one that read that as "Publisher's Clearinghouse" Proposed For Evoting Failures?
Diebold does not like your attitude. Their corporate shills have reported you to the DHS, who will put you on a terrorist watch list.
Your big mouth is a threat to national security. Enjoy being gang-stalked, prole. We have cameras in your bathroom.
-- signed, a thug who gets paid 37 grand a year plus free housing to troll nonviolents into, well, violence...tee-hee!.
-- also signed, the FBI. Man, we love watching hard-working Americans being laid off as we pay thugs to fatten our salaries!
Of course the ruling class (wealthy and political dynasties) wants to sabotage that exactly because it benefits them directly.
Personally, I believe we should have a national holiday for big vote days so we can celebrate the most important function of a citizen in a democracy.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
It seems a paper and pencil work just fine for Canada, and would be a lot cheaper than electronic voting, a clearninghouse, committees to oversee this crap, etc.
The companies making voting machines sure did cash in on the failure of the Florida paper/punch ballot.
I think the last time was in the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial race.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Its e-voting if its anything, learn to e-mmunicate
What we need to keep doing isn't reject an overly complicated electrical solution that's proven to be a technological dead-end. Instead we need to throw good money after bad and complicate the system even more. More paperwork will solve the problem!
Electronic voting is probably the biggest threat to democracy looming in the USA right now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
somehow I don't think my vote would get counted :p
Evoting is a solution in search of a problem. There's no compelling reason not to use paper ballots.
Many (most?) of these systems run atop Windows. And this new government agency is gonna monitor problems REPORTED by [M$]. Proof positive that a government agency can operate with a budget of zero dollars.
with the fill in the oval, scan it system. it worked ok. at least it has a paper trail, and that's all you can ask for
it is superior in that respect to the mechanical voting machines they replaced: mechanical black box has less attack vectors that electronic black box, yes, but mechanical black box has more attack vectors than paper trail. yes, you can cheat in any voting system, but a massive conspiracy of ballot stuffers, drivers losing boxes of ballots, etc.: this can be replaced with a much smaller group of well-placed corrupt bureaucrats to manipulate mechanical voting, and with electronic, one well-placed hacker and a few milliseconds can alter the vote in ways that even statistical analysis can't reveal the manipulations
the lesson being: if your voting system is a black box: votes in, elected representative sausage out, people won't trust the vote. they need something tangible, something they can trust and understand, in their hands, which only a paper ballot is. the most advanced technophilic society 100 years form now should still be using paper, for the sake of legitimacy of the government in the eyes of its people
it's just too easy to hack a machine, and once you place doubt in the legitimacy of your elected officials, democracy itself is in trouble. we have enough angry idiots running around the usa today in the form of the tea party mumbling about "secret muslims." all we need is even the slightest perception of election machine untrustability, and the social unrest will be considerable. the reality or lack thereof of genuine hacking events isn't even the issue: PERCEPTION is the issue. enough people don't have faith in their government as it is, don't give them more reason to spin their paranoid schizophrenic fantasies and rabble rousing hysteria. because they will do it. and idiots will believe it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Am I the only one who read the title as "Publisher's Clearinghouse Proposed For Evoting Failures"? I was wondering how Ed McMahon was going to be involved with it...
Allow me to sign into vote.gov with a government-provided Ubuntu/Chrome LiveCD for that election, my SSN, and a strong password for voting over https.
there is trusting too much in this world: a sort of gullibility to someone because you look too much at certain shallow easily manipulated signifiers of what a trustworthy person should be (like: wear a suit)
then there is genuine trust or genuine distrust coming from someone with a competent intelligence: a wise wariness, an awareness of what you lack in knowledge of a person, an emphasis on looking at what they say and what they have done in the past: sound judgment leading to an appropriate trust level
then there is this sort of pathological distrust, the mirror image of gullibility. where even those who are good people are cast in doubt, due to blanket statements about things you don't know, prejudice, mindless negativity, and a dim perceptive ability. all of which are on display in your comment above
there are people in this world who trust too easily, and there are people who trust too hard. both of which being character failures due to psychological imbalance and/ or intelligence defect. you are such a person
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't get it. Why don't we all just get a public rsa type key when we register, then use our private key to submit our votes, at either a public terminal or via the Internet from home?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Being able to vote from home would open up the possibility for unscrupulous types with access to violence to force you to vote their way.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
so it ain't gonna happen... the lobbyists will ensure it dies before ever getting debated...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Right, because they can't do the same by holding your family hostage while you paper-vote. (And before you argue with this, what's to stop you from contacting the police after both situations are over?)
There's a billion ways to make that happen and it doesn't require voting at home to do so.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I really don't see the point in these machines. In the UK votes are counted by volunteers, with quite basic fundamental (i.e. strong) overlapping controls. I fail to imagine an approach that could be any more secure, cheaper or better suited to audit.
Better yet it's obviously so. People can observe the entire process in motion, volunteer yourself and take part if you like. With an electronic system everyone's utterly reliant on controls implemented and only observable by other people who they don't know the names of and will never meet.
Sure it takes at least a day to get through it; almost certainly the day of the most interest and participation of the voting public. Between that and the volunteering, votes feel like they are conducted by the public (it also helps voting centres are usually community centres), not merely having one input to a government activity.
Why would anybody want a machine for a problem that is already optimally solved?
See, but academia has fairly solid proposals for machines that DO leave traces and that DO let voters verify votes. Better anonymity and transparency than now at a ballot box. Its just that somehow only shoddy adaptations of pure banking-type of systems (which only give a sysadmin or even only the creator's company some real insight into what's going on, not voters) are being employed.
In reality, academia thinks (and I think) that electronic voting machines could be quite strongly accountable, with better anonymity as well as transparency than current paper-based voting.
It seems to me that the organizers of such a system could look for precedent in the medical device industry. There is a central repository for medical device problems, the MAUDE database, that keeps track of adverse events, and is searchable by anyone. Any respectable medical device manufacturer will consult that database to make sure that their new wiz-bang product isn't susceptible to the same failings as existing products, and you can bet the FDA will do the same before approving a new device. Practitioners and users can search the database to see if there are issues with a particular device (or class of devices).
It doesn't mean that problems with medical devices don't still exist, but at least there is mandated uniform reporting.
Another key issue here is that the FDA is empowered to take devices off the market if enough serious problems come up. As far as I know, there is nothing like that in voting systems (but damn well should be).
I believe Winston Churchill said that with regards to democracy. Here in the US, we have a limited representative republic, not democracy.
A few key differences:
(a) No direct representation, but voting for an electorate who in turn votes for who goes to office.
(b) A dictator with the power to veto the will of the people.
(c) A third of the government (the supreme court) isn't elected, but appointed. And sits for life too.
(d) Disenfranchisement is allowed and common. Not only felons lose their right to vote, but in many cases unconvicted suspects and vagabonds are prevented from voting.
(e) Only pre-planned voting is allowed. You have to register to vote.
(f) No de-facto freedom of who to vote for. You're generally barred from voting in more than one primary election, and the two-party system doesn't give a lot of real choice.
It would be nice if we tried democracy here in the US. One man, one vote, without any "unless" clauses and hoops designed to keep the powers that be in power.
I once asked a gentleman from Norway if they use electronic voting machines; he said they just use paper ballots. I just don't understand what is wrong with staying with paper (optical scan for high volumes, though even that could be hacked). The right wing claims this leads to voter fraud, blatantly ignoring that pulling off a large enough fraud to affect an outcome would be akin to herding cats. On the other hand, with a purely digital system from cast vote to final tally, it can be altered anywhere along the line with any margin you wish; from skin of teeth to 101% for Kang. Lastly, there should be a 24 hour moratorium after any national or state vote: no polling and definitely no projected winners 'with 5% of the vote'. The Forth Estate has a valid role, but when it comes to US politics, they make stacks of cash on selling political ads (TV, radio, print) and then engage in rumor, speculation, and flat out guessing while the voting is still going on!
That's not "the same". If you hinder someone from voting, you get at most 1 vote (yours) for your preferred candidate. If you coerce someone to vote, you get their vote AND yours, at least 2 votes.
The same reason why harsher sentencing and other reactionary measures is not the answer to domestic violence and rape: The victim often (a) cares deeply for the abuser, and (b) doesn't trust a system that was unsuccessful at preventing this from happening in the first place to be successful at preventing reprisals.
Ok this will never happen, but..... we shouldn't have a "Multiple Guess" ballot. People should be educated and informed enough before they walk in the door. Upon entering each voter should be handed a ballot (a blank piece of paper) where they need to list the candidate they want elected and for what position they want them elected. They also need to list 3 reasons they want them elected. "Ballots" should be water marked to ensure that voters aren't just using the a given parties cheat sheet. A cheat sheet can be brought in, but must be hand copied. If you're illiterate too bad. If you have a doctors note indicating a disability where it's not possible to write dictation should be available. ahh well
We ought to be willing to pay the cost for humans to count our votes - if it costs more, maybe we'll let less stupid stuff on the ballot, or vote less than every few months.
It depends on the system. By your reckoning we should do away with computers in business and government altogether, and go back to filing paper in cabinets.
Here in Illinois we may have the world's most corrupt politicians. Our last Governor was convicted of a felony and the jury deadlocked on 12 other felony counts that will be retried next year while he appeals the conviction. The Governor before him is in Federal prison right now for bribery. In Chicago they have a saying; "vote early, vote often." In Illinois we're so patriotic that being dead doesn't keep us away from the polls.
Despite (or maybe because of) this, our voting machines spit out a paper trail, which is put in an old fashioned ballot box. If there are any questions, the votes can be retabulated by hand. So here at least, it would be as hard to rig elections wholesale and incredibly hard to do it without a trace; as hard or harder than pre-computer times.
Like any IT endeavor, procedures are more important than hardware and software. I agree with you about most states, who have no paper for humans to count. IMO that's just plain stupid.
Free Martian Whores!
the only way you are not an idiot is if you work for an electronic voting machine manufacturer and are therefore hopefully compromised
look, it's very simple: the more complicated a machine or a process, the more the attack vectors. understand that, or understand nothing
take a ballot box stuffed with papers. list the ways you can manipulate it
take a mechanical voting machine. list the ways you can manipulate it
take an electronic voting machine. list the ways you can attack it
if there are 10 good ways to attack the paper ballots, there are 100 good ways to attack mechanical voting machines, and there are 1,000 good ways to attack the electronic voting machines. understand? more complicated = more attack vectors. its that simple, really. and voting just isn't that complicated a process that improves if unnecessarily mechanized for some reason
in some arenas of life, such as voting in a democracy, technophilicity, loving and embracing new technology, is not a merit, its a danger. that really is the truth
if the people view their voting process as a black box they don't understand and don't trust, this will color the legitimacy of the government in the eyes of the people. its that simple. show me all of the encryption and verification processes you want. its gobblity gook. show me a paper ballot. i can touch, feel it, trust it. this is the only way a democracy should ever function, 200 years ago or 200 years in the future: paper. end of debate
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Right, because they can't do the same by holding your family hostage while you paper-vote.
Because, if I go to the voting booth and vote with a paper ballot, they have no way to know how I voted. If I am voting over the Internet from my home computer they can look over my shoulder to see how I voted.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Even so, I'm with the First Poster. He's got it exactly right. We can let machines do the counting if and when the machines are smart enough to vote and to care about those votes, presuming we're still engaged in pretending to stick to our constitutionally based, vague semblance of a democratic republic. Until then, machines that control vote counting are potentially proxies for corporations. No more, no less. And that is extraordinarily dangerous.
In the meantime, the system is absolutely corrupt from the top down, and introducing new mechanisms that may or may not allow wholesale election buying are a bad idea, because what is here now -- that is, people doing the counting -- is extremely difficult to corrupt all at once. It's probably the only thing in the entire process that works half-decently on a reliable basis. And yes, we can wait a few hours or even day for results if we have to. There's no actual need for a McDonalds/FedEx mentality about the vote. It isn't like the elected must start work on the very next day.
What we need (since I'm on my soapbox) is to stop regarding corporations as "persons", and forbid them from coming anywhere near a lawmaker or a political party or an election with money, opinion, gifts, or offers of employment before, during or after their elected term. Under penalty of having the executives hung. Corporations are not people. At best, they are sociopaths. Dangerous, without any concern for actual humans, and with goals that have no natural connection with the best interests of humans except at the executive levels. As demonstrated by such things as nine million dollar salaries. And higher.
The original idea of the constitution was, here we make the federal government, which we strip of most powers, not in ignorance that it will make things difficult for the government, but because it will make things difficult for them.
First, we should get back to that, and stop accepting the government's complaint that is "has to do something despite the constitution, because it needs to (if it really needs to, there is article five, ready and waiting... we will decide, not them, if it's really required.)
Second, we should apply the same general idea to corporations. These entities, when medium sized or larger, by their very nature, can collect more power in a day than most citizens will in their entire lifetime under the current setup. That's a really, really bad thing. Putting them in control of the voting process -- that's a REALLY really really bad thing. And that's what voting machines do. So lets not go there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I used to be a deputy director at a board of elections in Ohio. The county used Diebold machines.
These systems are drastically more expensive than the older method of voting; there is absolutely no cost savings, whatsoever. It is not uncommon for poll workers to break the systems because of their ignorance or carelessness in working with the hardware. A broken Diebold voting system is VERY expensive to correct. The old systems? Cheap as dirt and easy to replace.
The likelihood of a major problem is far greater with the Diebold systems than with the older stuff. Trying to get octagenarian poll workers to successfully use hardware that they've used only a few times ever, and with little training 6 weeks prior to the election? Yah...good luck with that.
And uniformity across counties using the hardware? Hah! In the county where I worked, one single individual wrote software to "assist" in tallying the votes. I have no idea what the software did because he refused to document the software, and he refused to comment his code EVER. After he left the office he CONTINUED TO UPDATE THE SOFTWARE. I tried to figure out what it was doing by staring at the code, but that's tough when the code changes every day and the author refuses to explain even the broad outlines of how it works.
I could go on and on...but you get the idea.
I'd like to see a true representative democracy. The Senate and House votes a bill up and the President signs it, but it doesn't become law without referendum. Laws would be voted on annually by the people, and would take a 2/3rds majority to pass. Laws against activities like murder, rape, robbery, etc. would have no trouble passing, while they'd have a harder time passing laws against things like smoking pot and playing poker at home with your friends.
As to "(b) a dictator with the power to veto the will of the people," that's not accurate. The veto can be overridden.
For (c) A third of the government (the supreme court) isn't elected, but appointed." But they have no power to pass laws, only to judge the legality of those laws. Many if not most local judges, where the majority of suspects are tried, are elected.
The "two party system" is a myth (call it a conspiracy if you like) perpetrated by the corporate media and the Democrats and Republicans they own. There were six candidates for President on my ballot in the last election, and all were on the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning, had anyone heard of them. The corporate media won't cover them and perpetrates the lie that a vote for a "third party candidate" is a wasted vote.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
Free Martian Whores!
Rather than electronic voting vs paper ballot, I suggest brick voting: chisel your selection onto a brick. Makes it very clear who you voted for.
Also, imagine the difficulty of sneaking in a large quantity of forged ballot-bricks, or making any significant quantity of ballot-bricks disappear.
and you accuse me of not remembering?
furthermore, for the sake of argument, i grant you complete acknowledgment of every concern you have just raised with the gore-bush florida fiasco of 2000...
and electronic voting is STILL worse and more delegitimizing for democracy. really
think about it: with a black box electronic voting process, voted go in, legislator sausage comes out. what happens in between?
at least with a hanging chad, you can look at the damn hanging chad and try to interpret intent. bt with electronic voting no one really knows what happens inside except some government bureaucrats who aren't paid enough. and we're supposed to trust that? really?
paper now. paper forever: you can TRUST paper. without trust in the voting process, there is no democracy. and electronic voting is inherently opaque, unnecessarily complex thereby exposing myriad of attack vectors, and therefore essentially untrustworthy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, we've never heard of that sort of error before, sir.
If your "Tallying" software was more than a case statement, you were being scammed.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
What we need (since I'm on my soapbox) is to stop regarding corporations as "persons", and forbid them from coming anywhere near a lawmaker or a political party or an election with money, opinion, gifts, or offers of employment before, during or after their elected term.
I agree with you on everything save opinion -- citizens who band together for a common cause (think: the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the NRA, etc.) under the guise of a corporation can not be muzzled if the 1st amendment is to mean anything.
Putting them in control of the voting process -- that's a REALLY really really bad thing. And that's what voting machines do.
No they don't. It's up to your state board of elections to set the specifications for their voting equipment when they request bids on such equipment. If those specifications leave room for manipulation than your grievance is with your state government, not the corporation(s) that responded to said bid. My state (New York) relies on machines to tabulate the vote but the paper ballots are retained and available for review. A certain number of districts are randomly audited to ensure that the machine count is accurate. What is wrong with this type of system?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No direct representation, but voting for an electorate who in turn votes for who goes to office.
It's called the House of Representatives for a reason....
A dictator with the power to veto the will of the people.
Huh?
A third of the government (the supreme court) isn't elected, but appointed.
Thank the gods for that....
but in many cases unconvicted suspects
Citation needed.
and vagabonds are prevented from voting
In what state?
Only pre-planned voting is allowed. You have to register to vote.
What's wrong with that?
No de-facto freedom of who to vote for. You're generally barred from voting in more than one primary election, and the two-party system doesn't give a lot of real choice.
There is no "two-party system". You are free to vote for any third party candidate that you want.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'd like to see a true representative democracy. The Senate and House votes a bill up and the President signs it, but it doesn't become law without referendum. Laws would be voted on annually by the people, and would take a 2/3rds majority to pass.
Yeah, I can see it would be a good system to let a load of uneducated retards whose main intellectual nourishment is American Idol vote on things of which they have only been educated, if at all, through the popular media. People who have sought no expert advice on the technicalities of all of the several hundred laws that are passed each year.
I'm not saying the politicos listen to the advice they receive or are any better for being in the pockets of Big Business, but do you honestly believe America could govern itself? Seriously? Every law?
IMHO we were better-off with the old scantrons (mark your machine-readable ballot with a pen).
It has the advantages of electronic voting (fast, easy counting) plus the security of thousands of pounds of paper (hard to rig).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
1. speeding things up and destroying the perception of trust in the voting process
2. slowing things down, but garnering trust amongst the voters
i would rather the vote take 3 months myself. because i think i have my priorities in order a hell of a lot better than you do
"I know for a fact that the first Obamite that got in my face would be bruised. And a lot of those people can't help but getting in your face, it is who they are."
well you know, the tea party has a reputation as a bunch of angry hysterical thugs. which is a shame because there are genuine grievances in what they stand for. unfortunately, words like yours simply means the thuggishness is real with threats of physical force. so even though i'm not a tea party fan and am glad to see their name and character besmirched by the likes of you from the inside, i'll still say a big "fuck you" to you for helping to destroy the civility of the political landscape in this country by being a testosterone-addled asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A friend of mine has parents that run an "Evil collections agency." They DO keep paper records, despite most collections and debt agencies keeping digital-only ones.
An interesting fact is that paper records are not destroyed by a filesystem malfunction; just momentarily misplaced. They have actually had larger agencies ask for copies of their paper files when the larger agency's data has been lost or damaged by technical malfunctions or disasters, on several occasions. (Debt collectors also share information on debtors to help in the collection of debts. If you have a debt in one township, and create another debt in another, the two collections agencies can collaborate, based on seeing the debts posted on your credit report to get information about where you live, your list of active phone numbers, etc. They cannot share it without an active debt in collections though.)
The basic crux of the argument is that it is hard to get a computer to modify paper-only documents without being uniquely visible as a process. (A simple shell-script can "Bulk-process" digital files. Not so with paper ones.) Also, people that keep paper documents provide a valuable service to their digitized peers.
I would very much like to see a "paper ballot" warehouse that keeps the paper versions of ballots, and uses this cache for evaluating prior elections post-hoc, and as a raw data collection for evaluating and designing new ballot strategies. Like all public knowledge institutions, it should be a transparent agency. Ideally, it should keep them for at least 2 decades, and perhaps longer.
IMHO we were better-off with the old scantrons (mark your machine-readable ballot with a pen).
It has the advantages of electronic voting (fast, easy counting) plus the security of thousands of pounds of paper (hard to rig).
We just implemented this in New York State with this week's primary elections. To call it a disaster would be an understatement. No privacy (reports of poll workers seeing how people marked their ballots and commenting "Well, there's another one for Schneiderman!"); confusing ballots (why weren't the incumbents listed first?, type so small that each ballot marking station had a magnifying glass as standard equipment); poorly-trained poll workers who didn't know who made the scanning machines, how to set them up, or whether the ballots should be fed in face up, face down, head-in, or tail-in (actually any of the above is supposed to work) -- thank goodness this was only a really-poorly-attended primary and not something like a Presidential election. Bring back my trusty old mechanical lever machine!
...
What we need (since I'm on my soapbox) is to stop regarding corporations as "persons", and forbid them from coming anywhere near a lawmaker or a political party or an election with money, opinion, gifts, or offers of employment before, during or after their elected term. Under penalty of having the executives hung. Corporations are not people. At best, they are sociopaths. Dangerous, without any concern for actual humans, and with goals that have no natural connection with the best interests of humans except at the executive levels. As demonstrated by such things as nine million dollar salaries. And higher.
...
I agree with pretty much everything but would add, in accord with corporations not being people, they should not be allowed to own intellectual property, or possibly not any property at all.
I really don't see this as being an issue... You'd have to go through so much effort to have any visible effect on the vote that it just wouldn't be worth it. Not to mention if you coerced enough people to actually have an influence on the vote, I really doubt you could keep it from leaking to the authorities. Somebody would talk.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Not to mention if you coerced enough people to actually have an influence on the vote, I really doubt you could keep it from leaking to the authorities.
What if it was the authorities who were doing the coercing?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
They've had those proposals before the current crop of voting machines. Why didn't they use them? No for-profit corporation will ever make a truly safe secure voting system. Even if they did, no government is qualified to judge if the corporation actually did it or not. The only way to really make this work to it is to have academia design the machine and release those designs. The governments would then hire multiple different companies to implement those designs in hardware and software, then have academia verify them. That is a huge undertaking, and it isn't worth it.
What if it was the authorities who were doing the coercing?
Well then you're boned. If the powers at be are trying to influence votes through coercion then it doesn't really matter where you're voting from. It's time to grab your pitchfork and torch and start rabble-rousing.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
No, yes, well yes and no.
Yes we still need humans to count but machines can help humans. Ultimately we need someone to sign off that the voting was legit as well as a paper trail. Voting machines can create a paper trail by printing out a slip and the voter putting that slip into a ballot box the old fashioned way. This allows for two methods of accountability, the old fashioned ballot box and the new electronic method. By random selection of say 50% of the electorates to be manually counted we can use machines to reduce the amount of labour yet maintain the same level of accuracy as well as leave sufficient evidence that can be investigated in all electorates if fraud is suspected in any electorate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Which county?
If it's the one I'm in, I think that some of the latest pass/fails would start to make sense...
I'm a she-slashdotter... but I make up for it by living with my folks.