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Overheated Voting Machine Cast Its Own Votes
longacre writes in with the results of a report on voting machines that malfunctioned in NY during the 2010 mid-term elections. "Tests of a number of electronic voting machines that recorded shockingly high numbers of extra votes in the 2010 election show that overheating may have caused upwards of 30 percent of votes in some South Bronx voting precincts to go uncounted. WNYC first reported on the issue in December 2011, when it was found that tens of thousands of votes in the 2010 elections went uncounted because electronic voting machines counted more than one vote in a race. A review by the state Board of Election and the electronic voting machines’ manufacturer ES&S found that these 'over votes,' as they’re called, were due to a machine error. In the report issued by ES&S, when the machine used in the South Bronx overheated, ballots run during a test began coming back with errors."
It's clear we're just not ready for electronic voting. Let's stick to paper ballots and re-visit this idea in twenty years or so.
machines cast the voters.
I presume that the vote was cast for Skynet, or at least against some relative of John Connor?
This reminds me of what I was thinking after yesterday's article about Java security problems.
I think society has taken the wrong approach to deploying computers. We execute untrusted code we receive from the internet. We build complex, computerised devices to perform a simple task.
I think that sometimes we should accept that less is more.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
I hear there is a new technology that doesn't rely on the increasingly unreliable power grid, buggy code, or downright crooked ceo's ( take that diebold)... and ballots generated can be counted more than once easily by a single person... I think it's called *paper ballots*.... hello? hello?
Seriously, why the hell are people even trying these things? No permanent record of any kind, little to no public oversight of the process, and of course glitches and the possibility for "glitches" on a massive scale that can completely overturn the entire election process. At least with paper voting, cheating is a) moderately easy to catch and b) moderately difficult on a large scale. Mistakes can be corrected afterwards, by examining the paper trail. An e-voting machine? No trail, and a single alteration the code can allow anyone to change the result in absolutely any way they want, with almost zero possibility of detection, and with a single commands.
They are a terrible idea, and honestly any politician/bureaucrat who pushes them should be regarded with strong suspicion, if not of attempting downright fraud, then of bowing to special interests (i.e. the machine manufacturers). Possibly both. And, even if they are really clean of both the preceeding, then they are technologically stupid and shouldn't be trusted to make decisions about these kinds of things anyways.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the subject, so I'm hoping someone here can provide some insight. Why do electronic voting systems seems to have so many problems? Yes, they obviously need to be designed for 100% accuracy, but computers and electronic equipment take care of so many other, more complicated operations like flying aircraft and recording financial transactions, all of which should be much more complex but require the same level of accuracy and precision as counting votes. Are voting machines really that bad, are news reports skewing my opinion of them, or am I just unaware of how many problems a paper ballot system has?
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
"Actual votes don't matter so long as the person that appears to win does so" - Just about every facet of the US Government
Paper and pen ballots.
ONLY.
And while we are at it, let's fix Voter Fraud with one simple tool: a freaking indelible inkwell at the desk where you pick up your ballot. That way, once you've picked up ONE ballot, you cast your ONE vote. People with purple fingers cannot pick up ballots.
Then we can toss all of this disenfranchising "voter ID" crap on the ashpile too. Our elections will guarantee that each person votes just once and every fucking vote is counted. No swinging chads. No overheating vote-generating machines (oh, and does that story smell like ripe bullshit to me -- yes it does!)?
Paper trail. Physically impossible to vote more than once..
Done.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Move Voting Day to Saturday. The only reason it was on Tuesday was to allow for travel time and to avoid the often-strictly observed Sabbath of the still quite Puritan colonial USA. Make it a Saturday, and make all businesses except essential service and emergency personnel close on that day period, so the people can take their time to vote.
There. That's the last one.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
From the article:
Board of Election Commissioner J.C. Polanco, a Republican from the Bronx, said the boards do a rigorous test of each machine, per state law, before deployment during an election and that the machine in question passed its tests on Election Day but will no longer be used.
“Commissioner [Naomi] Barrera, [the Democratic Bronx commissioner] and I pushed for the New York City board for us to get this machine replaced by ES&S and they have agreed to replace this machine immediately so the voters can rest assured that this machine will no longer be deployed,” Polanco said.
Norden said so far the machine in the Bronx was the only machine found to have this problem, but it’s also the only machine that’s been tested. The data that led the Brennan Center to discover the problem didn’t cover the entire city. While the South Bronx district was by far the most egregious problem area found, having virtually any over voting means there could be widespread issues.
...
Polanco said that the board is looking at implementing these recommendations, and, while “statistically speaking”, there was no way to guarantee something like what happened in the South Bronx could happen again, that he was confident the city’s electronic voting machines remain reliable.
“We don’t expect there to be another issue,” he said.
Do you think they may have been testing 'flaws' in machines here?
This is an area where you can skew the votes 30-40% and not change the victor.
Anyway, you guys need to come join our wonderful 'write an X on paper' system. We get results the same night, too.
Sent from my PDP-11
So skynet began its life as voting machine. Interesting
The machine was just upset about gay marriage.
Used to be that elections in New York were decided by dead people's votes.
Now they're decided by live capacitors.
What this solves:
Why can we not do this? Is it because people in power want a way to cheat? This isn't rocket science.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Boss Tweed: "Remember the first rule of politics. The ballots don't make the results, the counters make the results. The counters. Keep counting. "
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Euphemism/Backstory for ballot box stuffing in 2012 USA election.
Until they get serious lobbying money. Also, look for the Super Pac: 01010101 01101110 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110011 01101111 01101110 01100001 01100010 01101100 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110101 01100010 01110011 01101001 01100100 01101001 01100101 01110011 00100000 01000110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 01110011
It shows a cluster of voids in MULTIPLE voting cells in one area. That means
1) it was not random.
2) Multiple machines in multiple buildings all voided?? No, not overheating, you might pretend that this particular part of NY is hot,but different building have different heat characteristics.
That map is a clear voting fraud pattern, it suggests local tampering.
How is it possible to build a computer in the 21st century that is incapable of storing and incrementing a handful of integers correctly? I mean, really, it's not a very difficult task when you get down to it. It's so easy even practical, reliable, mass-produced mechanical computers can do it.
Norden said so far the machine in the Bronx was the only machine found to have this problem, but itâ(TM)s also the only machine thatâ(TM)s been tested.
God help us.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
well this can't be right the toaster won in a landslide
Might sound like conspiracy theorism, but we've seen black and white evidence. Maybe not in this case, but enough to make me not trust them. Any time a group of partisans can collect the machine tallies in a room by themselves and come out with different results, or more votes than voters show up in a district, that's all I need to know.
I've worked with computers for about 15 years now and I've never seen hardware glitches that magically only affect the most convenient values like that.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The voting machines use old fashion resistive touch screens. These touch screens are designed to be operated within certain temperature and humidity. If they are subjected to extremes then they lose their calibration and sensitivity. When they lose sensitivity and calibrations then people have to press hard sometimes and will miss buttons on the touch screen.
After entering the votes and before casting the the votes voters are presented with their tallies so they can confirm what was entered what what they wanted. They can go back and change things at any time, but most people just ignore it and press 'yes yes yes'
The New York folks are trained to deal with these machines and know exactly what conditions they need to have to operate correctly. The idea that somehow the machine themselves are counting votes on their own is fucking bullshit.
New York fucked up and they know it, but are pulling this shit because they don't want to pay for the machines and don't want to pay the labor.
I don't work for ESS, but I have dealt personally with New York in regards to voting and they have driven away all other voting companies with their bullshit. Nobody wants their money because this is the sort of shit they pull on a regular basis. If they worked for a private company and not the local government they would be convicted for fraud and be sued for evasion of contracts easily.
Added comment: Get the Choicepoint data, I bet it shows that section of New York votes strongly Democrat or strongly Republican, and it means that someone was trying to change the election by removing that cluster of votes.
Then go subpoena Choicepoint to find out who commissioned political affiliation data for those districts, and start prosecuting these voter frauds.
Look, I'm sorry but computerized voting machines is the end of democracy in America. Both sides will cheat to no end and the integrity of the electoral process (what's left of it) will be destroyed. It's too easy to corrupt the system silently when it's computerized. It's bad in every way imaginable.
The company owes the city, at minimum, a full refund for every machine they sold, because they all have to be scrapped.
But that doesn't go far enough. Since we're relying on them for a critical function, they need guarantees of correct count, after establishing basic ability to meet a minimum quality level.
1. They shouldn't be allowed to be bought at all unless the State qualifies them and it shouldn't be allowed to qualify them unless they can be shown to be more accurate under all circumstances than an audited hand count. Since the purpose of buying voting machines is in part to have more reliable elections, we should require a quality level well beyond what hand counting can meet. 4 PPM (4.5 sigma) would be a worthy criterion. Certainly, it has to be so low as to have almost no chance to turn the results of any election. Since most election results have a margin of more than 1% we could tolerate an error rate (count of undervotes plus count of overvotes divided by votes cast) of as high as 100 PPM.
2. Every election should be audited at a high enough rate to establish whether the machines have exceeded their minimum required error rate and to establish whether a penalty is required.
3. The manufacturer should be forced to post a large bond. Say, $10 per registered voter in the jurisdiction in which they are sold. The reason for this is that if the machines turn out to be unreliable in operation, you need to recover the penalty even though the manufacturer will probably be bankrupted. In 10 years, they get whatever money they didn't pay in penalties back and the warranty expires. They'd be penalized a substantial amount for every undervote and overvote and this would be paid first out of the bond and then out of profits and then they get priority for payment if the company goes into bankruptcy.
Here's how you do it.
Of course, it'll never happen, but one can dream.
I just don't understand. There's been a stream of voting machine stores on and off on slashdot for the last couple years.
We have netbanking. And ATMs. Both reliable. And used by the financial industry for gods sake.
We have ATMs all over the world. They seem to do fine, without any major issues. AND THEY HOLD AND DISPENSE CASH FOR GODS SAKE.
What is so special about designing and manufacturing voting machines ? Why does every voting machine ever built seem to have serious issues and allow you to put in fake votes, or miscount votes, or whatever?
Imagine if you could do this with an ATM, and get extra cash out and the ATM had no idea you did it?
What exactly is it about voting machines that makes it so hard compared to ATMs and every other electronic security device on the planet??! I just don't fucking get it, I'm sorry.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Electronic voting can be hacked rather easily, if not coded fraudulent to begin with. Even with oversight, this is the kind of thing that money can buy votes even easier than television ads telling the people what they want. Electronic voting makes me very upset to see our Democracy constantly eroding. If we're going to use e voting, we should at least have a paper trail that can be validated by each voter. I have a friend that is doing top of the line voting de-duplication and he sees fraud in them already, but no one wants to listen to him.
Slashdot knows how easy it is to hack these things , so why aren't we collectively protesting it? All a campaign needs to do is lose a couple grand to bribe hackers for a chance to get a 51/49% win. No one will ever be able to trace it to the politician, and he she might not know anything about it, just supporters doing. How do we bring national attention on electronic voting machines without actually hacking one as proof and going to jail?
God spoke to me
Why is it that those who understand technology express grave concerns about the current status of electronic voting machines, yet those who wish to exploit technology have no concerns whatsoever about electronic voting machines?
Here in good 'ol Lincoln, Nebraska, we use old fashioned No. 2 pencils and fill in the oval next to the name or ballot item. Until the Florida 2000 debacle, I had no idea there were even any other ways to cast ballots. I still fail to see why our method here shouldn't be the standard nationwide.
Perhaps it was voting for better working conditions. For itself.
Not only is there massive interest in openness and transparency in the voting process, but there also a need for extremely thorough vetting of the software, its design, and its update lineage. All of these things make it an ideal application for public development under the open source model.
Because of the huge number of expert eyeballs that would be paying very close attention to this code, you can be beyond certain that it would rapidly become some of the most robust software on the planet, and employing the most secure cryptographic systems for security and privacy and anti-corruption devices known to us.
The only people guaranteed to hate this (apart from e-voting machine manufacturers) would be those who currently have backdoors into the proprietary software. They'll fight the idea tooth and nail.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Vote by mail. It's that simple.
Anyone who wants to vote registers ahead of time with their address. Ballot gets mailed to each person weeks ahead of election day. They fill it out at their leisure, sign it, and mail it back in. Even better, people get pamphlets with their ballots explaining each issue (with explanations written by both the "for" and "against" sides, for fairness), so people actually understand what they're doing when voting on Referendum 1234.
Forget to mail it in early enough? No problem, just bring it to one of many public drop-offs on election day.
Don't have a permanent address, or forgot to register? Fill out the ballot in person at one of the drop-off spots. Lines are short because most people have already voted.
No need to worry about fraud, as each ballot contains unique markings to identify forgeries, and stealing ballots from enough mailboxes to make a difference is impossible without people catching on. Miscounts are reduced as well because the votes come in over a longer period, giving more time to get it right.
It's a great system, and I can see no reason not to make it nationwide. Scrap these electronic voting machines, scrap the mile-long lines at the polling places, and watch voter turnout skyrocket.
"Overheated Voting Machine Fails to Conceal its Ballot Stuffing Subroutine"
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I'm trying not to laugh.
So the voting machine cast extra ballots ? Anyone know where I can find an ATM made by the same company?
1. it's a black box, so joe blow doesn't trust it. he trusts paper and pencil. but a machine his vote goes into and out comes electoral sausage is not confidence building. you can feel and touch and trust paper. it is a known quantity. i'm talking about tactile, emotional trust here
the greatest strength democracy has is that it manufacture legitimacy: the government you have is the will of the people. anything that puts in doubt that the will of the people is being adequately expressed, creates illegitimacy and instability, thereby defeating democracy's greatest strength
2. it has more attack vectors. with paper ballots you can lose them, fake them, burn them, etc. but with electronic voting, you can do orders of magnitude more kinds of attacks. plus, with paper ballots you need an army of crooks to make a dent moving trucks full of papers around. good luck keeping that secret. with electronic voting, one well-placed hacker with 3.7 seconds can do untraceable damage on a much larger scale
of course all those paper ballots eventually get OCRed into a database, but at least you have that backup. yeah, electronic voting machines that print out a paper copy of the ballot on paper do the same, but now you are spending a shitload of money reinventing the wheel in a needlessly complicated rube goldberg way
the richest of societies and poorest of societies should all vote the same way: paper, pencil, box. is a marriage ceremony made better with electronic doodads? no. same with voting: it's sacred social compact, just like marriage, and the more simple it is, the better
technophiliacs like us here on slashdot sometimes turn to technology too much to solve problems. some problems just aren't solved better by throwing more complicated tech at them. some problems are about trust, vital trust, that should not be messed with, and should stay simple
don't mess with the vote: paper, pencil, box. anything more complicated is worse
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why cant these F'ing machines just keep a physical paper receipt that only the voter can see printing behind tamper proof glass? Each machine's receipt reals could be collected as an auditable record. The voter will know their vote counts. Win Win unless you
DONT want a fair election...
These WERE paper ballots. The thing most people don't realize is that machines are going to be used to count ballots. If the ballots are paper, those machines will be scanners, as in this case in the Bronx. No one is going to count every ballot by hand. Why? Because hand-counting is far more inaccurate than machine counting.
So, here's the thing: if you're going to use a machine to count anyway, it's better to use a machine with no moving parts because they have lower rates of failure. That's how the election officials in Brazil are doing it.
Also, it's worth nothing that according to the report only one machine in the entire district was malfunctioning, election officials were alerted during the vote, and the votes were not close enough for the voided over-votes to have made a difference.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Why? Because hand-counting is far more inaccurate than machine counting.
Not if the machine is faulty or there is voter fraud. Both of which happens way too often in US elections.
Hand counting with oversight by representatives of both parties is the most secure and reliable and therefore accurate system there is.
Yes, hand counting will be out by 10s or hundreds of votes. Whilst faulty or fraudulent machines can push that up into thousands.
Far closer to this story, the former owner of ES&S, who resigned from the board of its holding company just before going into politics Chuck Hagel went on to win some amazing election victories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Hagel
Naturally his 83% win was mostly counted by ES&S machines:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm
If you can't trust the voting system, you may as well be voting for Putin.
It's funny, overheated components is the exact same reason my girlfriend keeps finding Asian porn on my computers!
No matter which computer or where it is, they all overheat and start downloading specific porn from specific websites.
Fortunately my girlfriend is tech savvy enough to understand my CPU's love of Asian porn and doesn't get mad at me!
I gave up notions of being a programmer years ago, so I have to ask... is it really that challenging to create something that presents you with a small number of on-screen choices and counts the replies to each one, with a lockout period in-between?
I'm asking seriously here.
I was a scrutineer for one of the parties at one of the polls in the riding I lived in during the last federal election in Canada. There were two other parties at the poll who had scrutineers. Each of the three of us sat around a table while the deputy returning officer counted each ballot, showed it to the scrutineers, and waited for the scrutineers to not any exceptions. When he was done, the ballots were sealed in envelopes (which the scrutineers were permitted to initial on the seal), and placed in a box for delivery to Elections Canada.
At the end, each scrutineer checked their count against the official count by the deputy returning officer. The vote total was checked against the ballot booklets. All counts were consistent with each other, and the total consistent with the number of ballots cast.
In this polling station there were no irregular or spoiled ballots, and we had a count to report to our candidate HQ, and for the deputy returning officer to report to Elections Canada, in less than a half hour after the polls closed.
There's no need for machines to count votes. And the notion that people can't count votes quickly, and accurately is pure bullshit.
Which is why the machines should be randomly audited on a steady but irregular basis.
What it says on the box is "voting machine". What else would you expect it to do? It votes!
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I'm not saying anything tracable. You shouldn't be able to say "robert voted for mark"... But you should able to tell valid votes from invalid votes.
For example, lets say we give every voter single use serial number. It doesn't link to who they are. Like a scratch card with some numbers under it. Then when they got o vote those numbers have to be entered before the machine will accept the vote.
Lets say the code is long enough that the possibility of a machine erroring out and accidentially getting one of those numbers right is a million to one. When the votes are tallied the system will only accept votes with a valid serial number and no dublicate serial numbers will be accepted.
That won't stop someone from changing votes but it will make it very hard for people to add votes without a list of the serial numbers.
Now a problem with these serial numbers in the computer software world has been that the mathematical model used to deterimine what is and what is not a valid serial number gets out at some point and then it's becomes rather easy for a machine to automatically generate thousands of bogus numbers.
That is only possible because the cracker gets their hands on the software itself that determines if it's valid or not. In the voting system, this software would be retained only one a couple very secure machines and it would be exceedingly difficult for a cracker to get it.
I also think it would be good if the system let voters call up what the machine had stored as their vote. Again, this wouldn't be linked to their name but to that single use serial number. So if you keep that paper stub you can login to a site after the votes are counted and pull up that record of that vote. And if someone is compromising the votes then enough people should know which way they voted and see that the system has their vote wrong. Obviously we'll just have their word for it. We could possibly have several redundant databases that don't have two way links. Thus someone changing votes would be unlikely to be able to change them in all the databases and the inconsistencies between the databases would be a smoking gun.
A lot of people think voter fraud isn't a big deal. And maybe it isn't. But it is easier to commit voter fraud then it is to buy a bear under age. And that doesn't sit right with me given that our whole political system hinges on the legitimacy of those votes.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If there is voter fraud and not elections fraud, hand counting only means that both parties are hand counting fake votes and the means of counting them is irrelevant.
It was lunchtime, they claim it overheated after sitting idle for an hour. Electronics uses more energy when running, than when idle. If it was going to overheat then I'd expect it to overheat during use, not during idle. On the other hand I would expect tampering to occur when the machine isn't in use, say, at lunch time.
The article says they have 5000 of these. ES&S/Polanco blame it on *one* machine, . You're telling me that ONE machine is sufficient to do this out of 5000??? The article says it was the ONLY ONE TESTED. So you see there is a statistical problem, you test ONE machine due to obvious misvotes and then declare that only THAT machine was only the one at fault.
(Quote "Given that the city uses more than five thousand of these electronic voting machines")
The man in charge of the elections is Election Commissioner J.C. Polanco, a Republican from the *BRONX*, so presumably he was elected by these precincts and has a strong need to ensure the vote. Partisanship in electoral commissions is not conducive to fair elections.
If you look at the map, although there is a strong cluster at the district noted, the whole East side is more prone to invalid votes. Why?? It isn't enough to examine this cluster of voting precincts, you need to examine a statistical sampling of the whole election. If a problem is suspected in the vote for a candidate, it follows you should examine a sampling of the districts that would vote for that candidate to see if there's a significant likelihood of fraud.
It is not sufficient to take the most oddball result and just test that single machine, since there appears to be a clustering of medium odd-ball results on the East side. You need a proper sample, and proper testing of those machines.
This should have been done anyway. It is common in Russian satellite countries that the Russian backed candidate wins by 51-53% of the votes, declaring the election 'hard fought'. The whole aim of a cheater is to create a plausible illusion of democracy. You don't just investigate the obvious anomalies, you investigate a random sampling of the set. If you don't understand why this matters, take a look at Russia.
You insensitive clod!
Work Safe Porn
BACKDOORS in YOUR hardware & software!
You'd be surprised how much hardware and software have back doors built into them, much of it legally.
GOOGLE: Cisco routers back doors
and you'll find hours of reading material alone just for one company.
WIKILEAKS: published information on dozens of companies making spyware for hardware and software and selling it to governments.
When is the last time you checked the firmware on your PCI devices and network card?
Your router?
Dumped and checksummed/debugged your BIOS lately?
Why aren't the anti-malware companies like Symantec and others climbing over each other in an effort to invent the technology and utilize it via the cloud to create GIANT databases of legit firmware for hardware in the fight against the most serious of root kits? Are they in bed with big bro?
How many so called remote exploits were patched this week in Windows? This month? This year? Since its release? Start from the beginning of the Windows version release and count all of the remote exploits up to present day and compare that to OpenBSD for example.
###
U.S. govâ(TM)t wiretapping laws and your network
â" https://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-us-govt-wiretapping-laws-and.html
âoeActivists have long grumbled about the privacy implications of the legal âoebackdoorsâ that networking companies like Cisco build into their equipmentâ"functions that let law enforcement quietly track the Internet activities of criminal suspects. Now an IBM researcher has revealed a more serious problem with those backdoors: They donâ(TM)t have particularly strong locks, and consumers are at risk.â
â" http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/03/hackers-networking-equipment-technology-security-cisco.html
no one is going to count every ballot by hand
Yes we do.
</europeans>
ps: with appropriate security checks and balances, the errors introduced are accidental, and that implies more or less uniformly distributed.
Not great, but far better than the possibility to target an "error" in favour of / against a specific party.
I, for one, welcome our voting machine overlords.
What is so hard to understand?
Really? That the best excuse you could find? So, when did ANYONE EVER hear of an atm "overheating" and giving you 30% extra money? These voting machines are laughable, its basic stuff. Oh and why no reciept? uh i just realized, im asking the wrong question. Why no pitchforks?
Still I'd say the machine was fundamentally flawed. I expect more from such an important task.
1) it should not overheat. Sounds like a mechanical failure somehow, which of course is always possible in a mechanical device, and should be anticipated.
2) if it does overheat, it should not start making errors.
3) Overheating itself actually should be detected by the machine and be a reason for it to shut down: overheating means there's a mechanical problem, and results can not be guaranteed. And if it overheats to such an extent that the rest of electronics can't cope reliably anymore, it should definitely raise a warning and shut itself down.
Sounds like not enough testing done by manufacturer, and/or by the counters. I may assume they will do a test run of say 100 votes with a known result, right before and after the actual count, just to make sure the machine works.
See ... i told you the "towel trick" was a bad idea ...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
There is a solution to ALL election fraud - the Robinson Method.
Read about it here:
http://paul-robinson.us/index.php?blog=5&title=the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Instant results. No fraud. Huge savings in money and time. Ballot boxes in public view at ALL times, from the beginning of the election when they are empty, to the end of the election, when the winner will be clearly visible to all, the minute the final vote has been cast.
Electronic voting was only brought in so that the FRAUD would be easier.
Ask your representative what they think about the Robinson Method - if they tell you they are against it, you can work out what they believe about democracy.
The little wankers have planned this from a long time.
I have a friend that is doing top of the line voting de-duplication and he sees fraud in them already, but no one wants to listen to him.
Jim's Friend: Sir, I've finished my voting de-duplication process. We've got one vote for Bush, one vote for Gore, and one vote for Nader.
Election official: NOW what are we going to do?
You are so right.
People who want electronic voting are enemies of democracy.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
No one is going to count every ballot by hand. Why? Because hand-counting is far more inaccurate than machine counting.
I have participated in the counting of many elections in France. I'm not an election official or anything. In France the ballots are counted by volunteers under the watch of the ballot place officials, of party representatives and of the general public. Here is how it works.
Volunteers arrive a bit before the election closes. As soon as the election closes the officials open the transparent ballot box, count the envelopes and make sure that count matches the counter on the ballot box and in the registration book. Then they make groups of a hundred envelopes. Volunteers sit at (typically 3) tables in groups of four and receive the groups of a hundred envelopes one at a time. One volunteer opens the envelope, unfolds the ballot and reads it. He hands it to the volunteer sitting diagonally accross the table who reads the ballot aloud. The other two volunteers (also sitting diagonally from each other) have a sheet of paper and make a tick for the right candidate for every ballot. All the while officials, party representatives and general public hover around making sure there are no shenanigans. When the counting is done the election results for that polling place are then proclaimed right there on the spot.
I've never seen or heard of a discrepancy of more than one envelope in a thousand. In the few polling places that use e-voting machines however there's been discrepancies of up to 13 ballots in a polling place! So no, e-voting machines don't seem any more reliable.
Good god man! Have you seen what they have been doing on Wall Street the last decade! I can assure you, math has not been a strong point for the US lately.
and have the Nevada Gaming Commission test them.
Now why can't WMS, IGT, IT (Incredible Technologies, Inc.) build them?
I was once playing that slot that seemed to have some kind error going on and it manged to go though a realty safe shutdown where it slowly finished the bonus round then spit out the ticket and shut if self down all on it's own with out makeing the player lose there cash that they had in it.
atms are easy to put skimmers on some have passwords that are set to default.
Haven't you heard about civil rights for lamp posts and the deceased? An elevators and dish-washers? That's what this conscientious voting machine has been doing. It's just affirmative action!
on the ballot...
The machines overheat and go crazy.
1. Voter uses first touchscreen machine to 'fill in' their ballot.
2. Pre-printed paper ballot is fed into first machine, and the correct selections are printed onto ballot.
3. Filled ballot is fed into second, separate scanning machine that has a data link to the first machiine.
4. Machine one and two communicate and verify that everything matches. Paper ballot is dropped into box for later traceability, random checks, etc. If there is a discrepancy, the ballot (and corresponding data) are discarded, and the voter takes a new ballot and tries again.
You have instant confirmation between two separate machines, with paper trail. No more need to blindly trust a single machine.
I myself overheated, voting for a third party.
This problem is exactly the way they want it to be.
The more outrageous it becomes, the more propaganda noise is generated to hold off justice and accountability
The more backroom bills changing the law, to pull the plug on any lawsuits.
When everyone finally concludes these electronic gadgets must be outlawed in elections, it will be too late.
It can be argued, the damage is done, and it's already too late.
And just what evidence you have that brazilian elections are fair? I'd like to know that, because our government doesn't bring those pieces of evidence to the public.
Rethinking email
1) voting area contains a ballot box
2) voting booth contains a voting machine with a receipt printer
3) voting is done on the screen and after confirming the selections the person prints a ballot
4) ballot contains names of each vote, as well as a barcode that contains the same information
5) ballot is put in box
6) ballots are counted by scanning the barcode
7) each scanned ballot displays the selections on the screen to verify the text and barcode match
8) if there is question as to the counts, the ballots can be counted by hand and scanning can be repeated to verify the results
It has:
1) secrecy: the voting machine is not allowed to know who is casting the votes
2) a paper trail: the ballots can be independently verified by hand
3) speed: the scanning can be done quickly and simply
It appears that all machine's votes where for the democraptic incumbency.
I'm Canadian and agree 100% that our paper voting system is better. But, one problem a Canadian approach would have in the US system is that they vote for close to a dozen government offices all at once.
This is why the hanging chad issue came about--they had to punch out their vote for close to a dozen different positions (see http://americanhistory.si.edu/vote/large/7_02a_lrg.jpg for the 2000 Florida one).
One way a Canadian model might work for the US, is that ballots for each office are given to voters when they get there, and are colour-coded. This would prevent accidentally putting a ballot into the wrong box. And then votes for each office can be counted manually, in parallel.
But we then run into the second roadblock: for historical and constitutional reasons, there's no equivalent to Elections Canada that oversees a federal election, so every state gets to decide their own voting method.
Maybe it's just me, but I think of the whole democratic process as kind of a big deal. It's only the foundation for the country. Why the hell are we allowing single points of failure ANYWHERE in the process. My toaster oven has better redundancy and error reporting than the voting process described in TFA.
Simple solution: Every vote is counted at least 3 times at the district level: Once by a Republican appointee, once by a Democrat appointee, and once by a machine (note, this is ONLY a counting machine, unconnected to any network.) You can add another appointee if there is a 3rd party candidate on the ballot. Once you have the totals, cross-check. A discrepancy of more than 1% will trigger a re-count with a completely new cast. A new R, new D and a new machine. Cross-check again and repeat as necessary. Also cross-check against the total number of ballots received to make sure some didn't get swept under the rug during the counting process.
Might this process take a bit longer? Yeah, probably. But if you can wait 24 hours for your American Idol results, you can certainly wait a bit longer to for your Presidential Election results.
P.S. the 1% threshold for recount is just a number I threw out for the sake of argument.. nothing I've set into stone.
This signature is false.
I feel it is my civic duty to post the URL of the (Dutch) cartoon of www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl here, because apparently it has slipped the collective Slashdot consciousness that there are very simple and clear reasons why voting should be done with pen & paper to minimize fraud:
Practice your dutch on this:
http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/other/strip/index.html
N.B. it's 4 pages, click on the "verder" red pencil at the bottom right
The average citizen *must* understand how it works, be able to vote in secret, be able to view all of the procedure except for the secret vote, and must be able to trust that his/her vote has been counted properly.
If you can take over a country without a war just by manipulating a few engineers who make voting computers, that's a lot cheaper than manipulating thousands of volunteers of differing political parties, some of which might talk afterwards.
That's what you get with monopoly government driven product. How about a physical button you have to hold for two seconds to register the vote to trip the digital relay to register the vote?
Overheat and hang? Reboot? Absolutely. Overheat and cause programs to crash? Certainly.
But I have never had a computer overheat and consistently enumerate specific records.
Voting machines should by their very nature never be anything but open source, open design. There is no other way, but public transparency, that will guarantee nothing sinister happens in the process and it will also lay conspiracies to rest once and for all. That also does not mean that the machines should be free (gratis) of course, so manufacturers can still bid on the process. The proprietary nature of the current disasters just underscores and affirms that something should not be known to the public in general.