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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.
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.
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?
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
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
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"
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.
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
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.
And the debacle that was the 2000 election of GWB really showed the very best of Paper voting. And it's much easier to "lose" a boxful of voting slips.
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
The ballots were badly designed. That's like saying "The wheels fell off my Toyota Corolla, therefore all automobiles suck..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
The wheels fell of your Toyota Corolla, therfore, trains are more reliable, as they have fewer "wheel off" incidents. When many (most) cars have wheels fall off as often, one *should* question automobiles. Open voting fixes *all* complaints about anonymous e-voting or paper voting, but nobody seems to want to consider it.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
The people paying for ATMs need them to work. The people paying for voting machines don't care if they work. It's elected officials making these decision. It's your fault that it is this way (you either voted or didn't, either way accepting different levels of responsibility), and no, whining on Slashdot isn't doing something about it.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
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?