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Why Does a Voting Machine Need Calibration?
New submitter Shotgun writes "I heard on the radio that there were some issues with voting machines in Greensboro, NC (my hometown), and the story said the machines just needed "recalibration". Which made me ask, "WTF? Why does a machine for choosing between one of a few choices need 'calibration'?" This story seems to explain the issue."
better then MSNBC !!
Anyone that's ever worked with touchscreens before knows that those things need frequent recalibration
For either/both sides to call shenanigans when the vote does not go their way. I wonder if someone has done a study on the amount of press voter fraud gets vs. party election outcome and if there is as stark of a difference as I perceive. And if people really think that one party only wins when they "cheat", does that just reinforce myopic visions of political views (i.e. Most people think the way I do and so the only explanation is fraud)?
Put one at the left, the other at the right, and make them so far apart that they CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CONFUSED even if the system is out by some number of pixels (or even some fraction of an inch)!
Why is this so complicated?
no, it actually isn't. Don't fall into the false balance thinking. i.e. if The Blaze is bad then MSNBC is just as bad. Or that they 'counter' each other.
The Blaze is horrible, and it's based on a person who is know to make things up so he can then rant about them as if they are true for weeks on end.
The Blaze is not credible.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even before reading the article, I knew what the answer was. This is because at my workplace (a public library), we deal with a very similar thing on a regular basis. We have several self-checkout units at each branch, which are basically all-in-one Windows PCs running special software. They have RFID pads for scanning the books, and they take input via a touchscreen. The capacitive touchscreens on tablets and smartphones are generally of good quality, but these are different. They are crappy resistive touchscreens, designed to keep costs down. Accuracy is poor, and a calibration utility must be run regularly or the screens will start to drift. Calibration entails running a program designed for that purpose, then touching targets displayed in each corner of the screen in sequence.
If calibration on a low-quality resistive touchscreen is off, then the mouse click may register at a location as much as 1 full inch away from where the user pressed. I have personally seen this happen many times on our self-checkout units. So if you hear a story that someone on a voting machine pressed the box for the Democratic candidate and it checked the Republican, or vice versa, I'd be willing to bet money that this is what happened. If they were deliberately tampering with the votes, why would they show that to the user?
There are indeed serious concerns with the lack of source availability for voting machines, and the ownership of voting machine companies by individuals with partisan ties. But calibration is not some kind of conspiracy – it's the inevitable result of using cheap touchscreen hardware.
Citation needed. So far many of his "preposterous" claims have come true. Arab Spring ring a bell?
Ah yes, with articles entitled "Shove it Up Your Ass: Beck v. Bloomberg" and "Voting is Like 'Doing It': This is Quite Possibly Obama's Worst Campaign Ad to Date" it's obvious to me that "The Blaze" is a pillar of cutting-edge investigative journalism.
we should always use paper ballots
you can cheat with paper ballots, but it's hard and you need a lot of effort and cooperation between many saboteurs
with electronic voting, magnitudes of order more attack vectors are introduced, because it's more complicated, unnecessarily. and one well-placed hacker can untraceably and silently cheat in milliseconds over a broad swath of votes
if people don't believe their government represents the popular will, then we have all sorts of problems
so paper voting only. now and forever, no matter how rich or technophilic the society. the voting in finland should be the same as in bangladesh as in brazil as in the usa: paper ballots only. to preserve the integrity of the process, people trusting their vote matters
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The touch screen issue I can believe. My resistive-touch screen for my old gps unit was having the same issue (even when the unit was brand new). Some of the software buttons were working just fine, and some were not. And it wasn't a matter of re-calibration (at least, not a matter of re-calibration that I could do anything about). It was just a matter of the manufacturer using the cheapest possible hardware for the touch screen. Also, an actual picture of the screen would have been nice. I'm surprised that the voter didn't take any. Personally, I would have taken one, or I would have raised hell at the polling place itself.
In either case, whether you believe the story, or do not believe it. This story does bring up an underlying interesting issue. One of the main reasons Counties have switched from analog to digital is precisely to avoid these kinds of analog problems. But this will never be completely possible, to get rid of all the analog problems, whether it's a malfunctioning input device, or a badly designed input device, the process of converting an analog signal to a digital one will always be fraught with potential problems that won't be noticed until an election is really close and contested (just like it was with the hanging chad issue).
Maybe the law should prohibit the use of electronic voting machines with resistive touch screens then, or any device that needs recalibrating too frequently based on the rate of people who are expected to use it.
Even if/when they fix the touch screen issue, there will inevitably be other issues, some of which may not be obvious to voters.
The only reliable solution is to either not use electronic voting machines, or use them only as ballot printing devices (i.e. the voter enters his choices into the machine, the machine prints out a human-readable paper ballot with those choices, the voter reviews the paper ballot to make sure it is correct, and then either places it in to the ballot box or (if he sees an error) voids it and returns it to a poll worker in exchange for a new one).
Anything more complicated than that opens the door to errors and/or shennanigans.
In particular, electronic voting machines should NOT be relied on to hold the official voting record, as there is no layman-verifiable way to show that an electronic vote tally is correct.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
... is, as we say every time this comes up on /., paper ballots marked by the voter with a pencil.
Well I gave it minus when it was still in the recent submission / firehose stage. Of course I actually looked up what "TheBlaze" was when I saw the site banner of the story and didn't recognize the source (can't bring myself to put the 'news' prefix on it). Right near the top on Google was the Wikipedia link. Yep Glenn Beck. A guy so vile even Fox fired him. People, you have to look at the source before believing shit is legit. This guy is just a slightly less fat Rush Limbaugh.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Why are we using touch screens at all in something so important as an election?
ATMs have been using buttons down the side of the screen for decades - why aren't voting machines built the same way?
Whatever happened to all those video games that used to be in the arcades back in the 1980s? They had this amazing technology called a button. It never needed to be calibrated, and it lasted for years under incredible abuse. I swear, these election machine manufacturers seem like idiots.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When the topic is a grown up topic we love to have a discussion.
When the topic is about an over-blown registration error on one machine and the question is something other than how to fix the machine and prevent the problem, eg: whether or not there is a conspiracy, well you'll have to excuse us if we roll our eyes and walk away.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You could have just walked away. Yet you're here, and demanding silence on the part of folks you politically oppose.
My point stands.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
How different can it be? Can an election be complicated enough that voting cannot be done via on screen prompts and some text next to 8 buttons?
Change the text on the screen next to the button, but don't pretend that something as simple as a "Select which candidate you want to vote for" can't be done with a few buttons. Surely something which for the last couple of hundred years has been as difficult as tick this box can only be done with a touchscreen right?
I swear, the people who chose to buy these election machines seem like idiots.
FTFY. It's just another government contract - standard rules apply (lowest bidder and all that).
No, he said empathy lead to T4 (mercy killings- killing people because you think it's the right thing to do) which lead to genocide everywhere.
I know you want to make Glenn Beck out to be some evil genuis that you can love to hate but it is very clear, there was a step that led to a step that led to what you want to rant about. But ignoring the step before the step is like saying owning a computer will expose you to online porn and illegal downloading without ever getting internet access. There is a step- going online- that leads to the porn and free movies first. similarly, empathy lead to euthanasia. Euthanasia lead to widespread genocide. It's in black and white and if you have trouble reading, you can click the media matters link and watch the clip.