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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.
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.
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).
Claimed Sean Smith was a CIA operative sent to Benghazi to cover up Obama's involvement in the Libyan uprising.
May 26, 2009 Beck claims that Hitler's "empathy" was the cause of the holocaust.
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.
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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!
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
Los Angeles County uses Inkavote. Basically it's just a little rubber stamp you press into the circle on the ballot. The machines themselves have guides to keep you from putting the stamp anywhere but an oval. You insert the ballot, ink in the correct circles, then remove the ballot and turn it in. There are no moving parts except for the small spring-loading in the stamper and the hinges holding the pages in the machine -- which are themselves identical to the ones in your sample ballot as mailed to you. This means you can mark your sample ballot at home, hold it up alongside the corresponding page in the machine, and simply copy your bubbles from your sample ballot onto the real one.
This has all the advantages I can think of -- it's almost non-mechanical and CAN be done by hand if there are insufficient machines available, it generates human-readable paper ballots, it's faster than a touchscreen system while also being far less complex, and it's easy to understand. There are many things I can gripe about, living in the Los Angeles area. The voting machines are definitely NOT one of them.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.