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IEEE Standards For Voting Machines
kgeiger writes "Voting machine designs and data formats are a free-for-all. The result is poor validation and hence opportunity for fraud. An IEEE standards group wants all election computer systems to speak the same language. From the article: 'IEEE Standards Project 1622 is working on electronic data interchange for voting systems. The plan is to create a common format, based on the Election Markup Language (EML) already recommended for use in Europe. This is a subset of the popular XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that specifies particular fields and data structures for use in voting.'"
None of that will ever happen.
If it did... How can these voting machine companies deliver the vote to the guy who paid them lots of money?
Shit they don't even try to hide it anymore. lol
If such a standard ever did get put in place... it would go thru politics and end up with so many holes the standard would be just as useless as what we have now.
I understand how a hand count works. I have no idea how most voting machines work, because their designs are secret. We can talk about standards after we get access to source code and design documents.
Palm trees and 8
Proposal for New IEEE 1622 Standard:
1.1 DON'T
1.1.1 Voting should be done on paper.
1.2 WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU
1.2.1 See 1.1 and appropriate sub-sections.
When Texas and Iowa are threatening to arrest election monitors, standards are not the issue.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Actually, this was the paper I was looking for:
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Republican-Primary-Election-Results-Amazing-Statistical-Anomalies_V2.0.pdf
Same authors and analysis. But much more in depth treatment of the data and analysis of alternate explanations.
Awesome, now we have a standard format to send the fraudulent vote tallies to the server.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Just say no to all electronic voting. I don't care if it's open source or not, how can you ever be sure about the software loaded on a voting machine unless you do it personally. And then how can anyone else who uses the machine trust you. I don't have a problem with machine counting of paper ballots because you always have a hand count to fall back on if necessary but I'll never trust pure electronic voting.
When Texas and Iowa are threatening to arrest election monitors, standards are not the issue.
No, what Texas has said is that international election monitors have to follow the same laws as everyone else and stay 100 feet away from the polling place. They are perfectly free to speak to any voter beyond that 100ft radius.
Also I believe the treaty the US signed regarding election monitoring note that monitors must obey local laws.
Did I miss something? This seems to be a non-issue.
xkcd.com/463/
Also, http://xkcd.com/927/
I'm not a conspiracy guy either but I must admit that is pretty compelling. I would like to see those graphs, minus precincts that used electronic voting machines. If they show the expected "ringing" oscillations when removing the influence of voting machines, then that's pretty damning...
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When I see this news, all I can think is "Great, now there's an easier way to transmit and receive fraudulent vote tallies." What the USA really needs is a short & sweet federal law that says something like:
"It shall be illegal to certify any public election tallied by methods or mechanisms not available in their entirety for public inspection."
No more of this secret-sauce craziness. If you can't show how you count, you're surely up to no good -- and it's high time for that reality to be codified in law.
I think not...(*poof*)
Do you remember Diebold's 'Default to Bush' setting on its voting machines. Where voting machines would treat all none votes for president and misvotes (where you fail to press the screen properly or where the screen fails to work), as a vote for George Bush.
http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html
Nice huh? Someone in Diebold thought a default vote for the Bush was the right setting and QA in Diebold seem to agree!
Romney family, bought Hart Intervic a voting machine company. And after the RNC stunts: They (party elite) had the results of a vote on the teleprompter because the vote count. They changed the rules to remove 10 Ron Paul votes. They refused to even read out Ron Paul voters from the podium, so Ron Paul gets 48, Romney gets 8, they only read "Romney 8 votes". Incredible. Disgusting.
Looking through that data, particularly the odd result that Romney gains far more in districts that show signs of ballot stuffing (abnormally high turnout in a low number of districts that vote a particular way). Those would be perfect targets for investigation. You could cross correlate those odd results with the voting technology used.
Funny you use this "period" as if it's an absolute belief of all people who understand technology. Yet we who understand technology know that a computer does not succumb to bias, misrepresentation, or threats. Corruption technically yes but not in the same sense :-).
You wouldn't trust the current attempts at electronic voting, but to assume a machine is not capable of providing better assurances than a piece of paper that gets ticked, put in a box, and then magically within the ether gets converted to a statistic of who is the least undesirable leader all the while being handled by multiple big fleshy corruptible bags of water is outright delusional.
Bring on the standards.
Bring on a fully auditable process.
Bring on a completely open machine.
Then if you still trust the highly flawed vote counting system which has very often given rise to all sorts of inaccuracies then we'll have the me in white coats waiting for you.
In other news, the Society of Aeronautical Engineers has recently announced a standardized zeppelin docking mechanism, so all hydrogen-filled dirigibles will be able to use the same berthing towers.
So a better system is to have two machines. One is used to fill in a vote which is both machine and human readable. Once printed, the voter can confirm the vote by looking at it and then lodge the vote for counting by another machine. OCR could even handle that. An audit can occur by hand counting the printed votes. All other controls that apply to older voting methods can still be applied such as incorrectly filled in votes and controls for fakes.
Agreed. I'd also like to see this same analysis applied to actual presidential elections of the past, not just primaries. Especially a close one like 2000. It's great work that should be continued. Basically a Freakonomics approach to elections.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
As a career mathematician / software developer, NOT prone to conspiracy theories, this study nevertheless got my statistical Spidey sense tingling. If I were determined to rig an election, particularly through electronic voting/tallying, this is EXACTLY how I would do it; selectively target larger precincts, because the vote flipping is less likely to be noticed there. (And more importantly, because spot-tests of the system are unlikely to cast enough votes to trigger the mechanism.)
;-)
That said, the study is sloppily done, not peer-reviewed, and prone to accusations of cherry-picking. They claim to have replicated their results all across the country, but provide no data to back this up. (E.g. they should show a scatterplot showing voting mechanism vs. "anomaly" strength, for a large number of states or counties.) And their shining example, the 2012 Iowa Primaries (actually Caucuses), DID use paper ballots and precinct-level tallying, yet still showed the anomaly. I'd like to hear their explanation for how they think the fraud could have crept in here. They also use Duval County, FL 2012 Primaries as another example of the anomaly, but paper ballots were used there as well. I don't know if the tallying was per-precinct or centralized for that election; if it were centralized, the fraud could easily happen there because it's a single point of failure.
More than anything, I would LOVE to get Nate Silver's take on this study. Perhaps he would have some intuition for how the precinct size / vote correlation might have arisen "naturally," and presumably he has access to the databases required to re-run the study on a larger scale. Either way, it's absolutely clear that paper ballots and transparent precinct-level tallying are essential to ensure fair elections. They can pry my cold, dead trees from my cold, dead hands!
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Not all machines or all districts. That is how the anomaly becomes so clear. If you look at the vote flipping and ballot stuffing statistical test for example, these 'dodgy' districts that show clear vote flipping all to Romney:
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Republican-Primary-Election-Results-Amazing-Statistical-Anomalies_V2.0.pdf
Tabulators seem to be easier to rig with tabulators showing a clear rigging for Romney:
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/stolen-election-2004-plus-the-voter-fraud-scam-series/wisconsin-no-tabulator-versus-tabulator-counties/
Presumably because a room full of people counting in front of witness needs a lot of conspirators, but the tabulator only needs the single engineer who sets up the tabulator to rig it and he can do hundreds of machines across many districts.
If you read the stats test, there was vote flipping (i.e. fraud) from Santorum to Romney in Ohio, and you can see the same thing on the Tabulators test. I don't like Santorum myself, but the numbers don't lie.
I'll copy the conclusion of the stats paper in full here, the numbers are quite damning. The data is there at the bottom, I've played with the Maine data myself to check.
VII. Conclusions
Slopes on cumulative vote tally charts, which should settle to horizontal lines,
are an amazing statistical anomaly. The hypergeometric distribution chart,
normally produces after a minor initial oscillation, a smooth horizontal line for
the rest of the chart. By applying this distribution to the 2012 Republican
primary election data, we exposed a serious election anomaly, which can be
seen as obvious slopes favoring one candidate. It is an extraordinary
observation and indicates overwhelming evidence of election manipulation. A
massive set of detailed data and analysis for all 50 states, beyond the scope of
this paper, also confirmed these unlikely results. These highly anomalous
election results indicate a widespread, systematic exchange of votes favoring
one candidate.
Statistical analysis of the Republican Primaries results from 2012 in Iowa, New
Hampshire, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, West
Virginia, and Kentucky show strong statistical evidence of election
manipulation15. The anomaly subsides somewhat towards the end of the
election cycle, when completion is weakened by the earlier election results.
Historically, an early vote gain effect snowballs through the various primary
states as it benefits the candidate with momentum as well as additional votes.
Mitt Romney, based on our analysis, should have (statistically) gotten third
rank in Iowa’s election (as opposed to second); second rank in New Hampshire
(as opposed to the first rank), and so on, resulting most likely to a brokered
convention at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL.
Some rather large statistical anomalies in states such Ohio have negatively
affected opposing candidates by reducing their momentum and fundraising
power. Ohio’s election (statistically) should have been earned by candidate Rick
Santorum. Rank switching in Oklahoma’s election also affected candidates.
The statistical analysis clearly shows that other candidates were supposed to
get more votes than the official count. Tests were performed on random
samples as well as the entire statistical populations represented by the whole
state in each case. These facts assure us that the tests have high statistical
power, as well as lack of selection bias. Many individual counties (600+) have
been analyzed as well, indicating that this type of election fraud is pervasive.
We urge readers of this paper to reproduce our results and publish their
findings.
We should allow machines to count votes someday. And that day is the day we have found machines responsible enough to become full citizens and themselves vote. But even then it must not be an exclusive privilege reserved to the machines, or they will quickly become our overlords.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
When I saw the introduction of electronic voting machines (even early ones that produced an actual printed paper tape for verification) I thought, "This is an idea that should have been laughed out of the room the day it was first proposed."
Then some years after, machines with dongles and flash memory, no paper at all. It was screamingly surreal.
As a computer consultant in 1980 I was approached by a friend on the Board of Elections to review bids for Shouptronics stations and optical readers. We both agreed to reject the idea of standalone machines, KEEPING THE PAPER BALLOT and doing optical counting in batches, with a dice toss for each batch (roll a six, count by hand and check against the machine).
We were overruled by the Board, they went for the machines because they claimed that with whole-machine voting "there are NO spoiled or incorrect ballots."
The surreal aspect to this is, in a situation where the real world yields variable results, some ballots spoiled because some people make dumb mistakes, they have opted to eliminate all the controls -- now you have one aggregate result that cannot be trusted.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Ok, hang on a sec.
Regarding the straw man, the study itself states: "At this point of our analysis, the cause appears to originate with electronic voting equipment; the problem does not exist when manual methods are used." But the Iowa example shown two pages later flatly contradicts this. See p.5 and p.7: Linked Study
Regarding Iowa: "GOP officials discovered inaccuracies in 131 precincts"... Perhaps, but the scope of these inaccuracies were magnitudes different than the purported "vote-flipping" implied by the study. Romney lost less than 50 votes on the statewide recount (relative to Santorum), compared with the study's implied 7850-vote gap. Data from the missing eight precincts couldn't come remotely close to closing this gap. So even correcting for the found inaccuracies, we're left with over 99% of the purported discrepancy unaccounted for. Were the fraudsters simply 99% successful at covering their tracks? If so, wouldn't there be many fewer precincts with discrepancies? The ~50 vote recount correction could easily be due to random human error.
Regarding cherry-picking: there is no question that there is a bulletproof correlation between precinct size and vote ratios, in Iowa in this primary. (The null hypothesis has been proven false, in other words.) The real question is whether that correlation ITSELF correlates strongly with the type of balloting/counting used, and for this there are very few data points shown. Are there counterexamples (places where electronic voting was used but the anomaly is not seen, or vice versa)? How many? What distinguishes the ballot-counting process in the Iowa Caucuses from, say, FL Palm Beach County (where there was no anomaly observed)? What were the correlations, if any, in all these different states and counties, of precinct size vs a priori voter registration (Republican / Democrat ratio)?
Can anything be gleaned from this? Again, it would be nice to see the study peer-reviewed, and to have stronger logic why the correlations COULDN'T be a result of "natural causes", rather than just we can't think of a way. (I agree that there is no other immediately obvious explanation, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist.)
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Not quite what you were asking for, but this shorter google doc - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumZzI2bVlON2VTMnFyYVZZSnpDYnNyQQ/edit?pli=1 - on page 5 shows the results of the last four GOP primaries, and only the one in 2012 displays the unusual behavior. If this were really a demographics thing I would expect to see such unusual behavior from the same county in previous years, especially since Mr. Romney was involved in the 2008 primary.
And while it's a little harder to tease out, this post - http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections/article20598.html - which has been reposted in a lot of places, alleges that the same effect has been seen in non-primaries, specifically the Barber vs. Kelly special election to replace Mrs. Giffords.
The current counter-hypothesis is that urban areas are more likely to vote for Romney and urban precincts are more likely to have more people, but if this were the case I would expect to see this phenomenon favor Democrats since their strongholds are typically urban areas.
I, too, would like to see something like the 2000 general election in some of these contested counties, and more general election results overall. Especially because there were no electronic voting machines or central tabulators during that election, which are the hypothesized methods for committing this type of fraud. This kind of information is supposed to be publicly available. Feeling ambitious, mate?
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