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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."
TheBlaze (i.e. Glenn Beck) is not a credible news source. Please delete this article.
This was a problem with electronic voting machines during the 2008 elections:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081029/0131342676.shtml
https://www.google.com/search?q=2008+voting+machine+screen+calibration
I'm speaking from a perspective of someone that regularly works as a poll worker during elections in the state of California.
One of the first things I do once our touch screen system is set up is confirm the calibration of the LCD panel. It's typical for the registration to be off by a few pixels, as our fingers are not perfect pixel-sized points. However, I have yet to experience an issue where the calibration is so bad that the wrong selection is made on behalf of the voter. Remember there are a whole host of perfectly valid reasons why this may be more of a problem for some voters than others, certainly including finger size and physical impairment affecting fine-motor skills.
If a voter did report a problem of this nature, recalibrating the touch screen would be one of the first things I would try.
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?
I swear the next person that says shenanigans I'm gonna pistol whip!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
Different touchscreen technology.
Old-school surface capacitance touchscreen kiosks often lose calibration - or can be deliberately miscalibrated for fun and profit.
First that letter was all about setting up a legal and public relations basis to question the election later.
Second, yes voting machines need calibration. Different types require different kinds.
For example the touchscreens, usually older resistive touch screens get mis calibrated on position. You have to remeber these things get locks in closets and sit in non-temperature controlled ware houses for a couple years at a time between elections, then they are jostled in trucks, cleaned with cleaners, and sometime run off various power sources. Empirically they do go out of calibration.
I personally have a ballot I saved from an AUtomark paper ballot printer in which all the votes are off by one oval width. that is 100% of the votes are incorrect and you can tell because a few are printed past the range of ovals.
Opscans are fairly easy to allign since they have relatively few degrees of freedom but they do get misalligned and become sensitive to printing tolerances.
Old lever machines used to have the gears wear down.
The solution to all this is not to require perfect everything but to have ways to check things. hand marked Paper ballots and some sampled recounts of those paper ballots such as is done in New Mexico is I believe the best compromise between transparency, robustness and simplicity. It's robust against human and machine errors so mere mortals can carry out very transparent elections. It's also robust against voter turnout variations too since it only takes more pencils to let more people vote, and if a machine breaks, you can still gather the ballots, so you dont get long lines at the polls.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Dec 15th 2009, claimed that Galileo proved the earth was round and that it revolves around the sun, and that the Dems/Obama are just like the evil people that tried to shut him up (I guess Obama is a Muslim Christian then, or Christian Muslim or something like that).
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
Claimed Sean Smith was a CIA operative sent to Benghazi to cover up Obama's involvement in the Libyan uprising.
speaking as someone who is 'aging' (cough), I can give you a solid data point: screens are great for *seeing* but lousy for *input*.
please don't abandon hard tactile buttons. everyone of every age can use buttons and see the screen. there's no parallax or steadiness of your hands needed for real physical buttons. its just so much more reliable and easier for people.
keep the screens. ditch the stupid idea of touching them.
I can't remember the last time I had to calibrate a button panel that had hardware switches for its input keys.
sometimes the older tried and true ways are still worth retaining.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
May 26, 2009 Beck claims that Hitler's "empathy" was the cause of the holocaust.
... is, as we say every time this comes up on /., paper ballots marked by the voter with a pencil.
If anyone wants their tablet recalibrated, they can send it to me. In my experience, the 64 gigabyte ipad 4 4g model is particularly prone to miscalibration. Typing errors can be a sign that recalibration is neccessary.
This is what we do in Canada. Voting booths are cardboard and are set up on tables. Votes are cast by marking paper with a pen. The ballots are then placed in a cardboard box. Can't get much cheaper or fool proof than that. I never understood the American fascination with making things so complicated. I know that the Canadian system works because anybody can understand exactly what's going on at every step of the process. Once you introduce computers, that all flies out the window.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In his book "Arguing With Idiots" (alternatively titled "My Inner Dialog"), Beck claims that Article 1, Section 9 Clause 1 of the constitution put a $10 entrance fee on immigrants coming to this country because the founding fathers "actually put a price tag on coming to this country: $10 per person. Apparently they felt like there was a value to being able to live here."
In actuality, Article 1 Section 9 Clause 1 was intended to prevent congress from ending the slave trade.
I've never had any calibration issues with my iPad. This kind of thing is a hallmark of older touch-screens, modern devices don't have this problem.
That's because your iPad uses a capacitive screen. There are still plenty of low-end tablets and devices that use resistive type screens that are prone to this problem.
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!
If you read the statistical analysis showing the vote flipping that was done to get Romney a win in the primaries:
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Republican-Primary-Election-Results-Amazing-Statistical-Anomalies_V2.0.pdf
The rigged precincts showing the rigging were 'Central Tabulator' systems (Diebolds), paper vote districts didn't show any 'flipping' for anyone let alone Romney.
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/stolen-election-2004-plus-the-voter-fraud-scam-series/wisconsin-no-tabulator-versus-tabulator-counties/
It turns out Diebolds Central Tabulator, lets the operator change the vote via a manual override screen!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRFtYGJtOEQ&feature=relmfu
So they didn't even need to do anything special, they just changed the numbers on the central counter.