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Voting Machine Problem Reports Already Rolling In
Several readers have submitted news of the inevitable problems involved with trying to securely collect information from tens of millions of people on the same day. A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected. A North Carolina newspaper is reporting that votes for Romney are being switched to Obama. Voters are being encouraged to check and double-check that their votes are recorded accurately. In Ohio, some recently-installed election software got a pass from a District Court Judge. In Galveston County, Texas, poll workers didn't start their computer systems early enough to be ready for the opening of the polls, which led to a court order requiring the stations to be open for an extra two hours at night. Yesterday we discussed how people in New Jersey who were displaced by the storm would be allowed to vote via email; not only are some of the emails bouncing, but voters are being directed to request ballots from a county clerk's personal Hotmail account. If only vote machines were as secure as slot machines. Of course, there's still the good, old fashioned analog problems; workers tampering with ballots, voters being told they can vote tomorrow, and people leaving after excessively long wait times.
It is called paper. It works.
Voting machines are a solution to a problem that doesn't exits.
Nothing beats a paper ballot and a #2 pencil.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
One day we'll figure out how to vote like a civilized nation. Today is not that day.
I recall that several countries wanted to send election monitors to oversee the vote, and that at least one Republican AG was trying to prevent that happening. What happened with that?
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -- Joseph Stalin
Move to all mail voting, or in Ca at least I understand you can apply for permanent vote by mail status. Why the need to show up in person. Lets avoid the electronic and internet voting and use a well proven method. You actually have paper that if need be can be hand counted as well. As with many things best is the enemy of good enough in this issue as well as in a lot of tech things. Keep it simple stupid needs to be rule #1.
I'm glad this is the USA, where nobody would try to exploit these kinds of situations for political gain.
Harder than an ATM machine? Harder than a nuclear power plant control room? Harder than a 787 Dreamliner fly by wire system?
Well, I think all of Nevada has it right. At least here in Las Vegas the voting machines here are held to the same standards of slot machines. I could be wrong, but I think the gaming commission goes over them too, but I could be wrong. The rest of the nation has it wrong sadly :-(
As an American I am embarrassed by these problems. Is this due to incompetence? Not enough people caring? How can we expect government to grow and manage things like disaster relief, healthcare, and retirement when we simply can't get a working election system. This morning I went to vote in DC. I waited 60 minutes in line to get inside a church that had one working machine. Really? In the middle of a city we have a voting station with a single voting machine. Should I expect a single nurse for my flu shot?
This is the sort of shit that encourages OSCE observers to be present at your polling stations.
can you keep on walking into the wall. Year after year all you hear is problems with voting machine. Who is paying whom to keep having those thing year after year instead of paper?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Look guys, it's a few glitches. There are what, 350 million people in the US, half are eligible to vote, so 175 million voters. A couple of thousand counted wrong is tops a few VOTE RECORDED: MITT ROMNEY
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
inevitable problems involved with trying to securely collect information from tens of millions of people on the same dayk
Some problems are inevitable. But most of the ones we have are avoided by other major democracies.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/opinion/frum-election-chaos/index.html
In South Carolina they just kept most of the competition off of the ballot. Plenty of races for which I saw the D's signs... the Ds were not on the ballot, you had to write them in. There was a "vote R" and a "vote D" button, but the "vote D" button filled in only 3-4 options. Most races showed Rs running "unopposed".
Our number one export apparently, in terms of money spent. And yet, we can't actually have democracy at home. How much of a banana republic do we need to become before the UN starts to intervene and forces us to be monitored by their people to make sure we have a fair election?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
other countries have compulsory voting.
What doesnt the USA?
An Americans right to free speech should make it compulsory to vote and compulsory to include on all forms "None of the Above". That way Americans can voice thier displeasure with all parties.
or am I missing something...
I actually propose online crypto voting in addition to the traditional sorts of voting, of course utilizing an audited record open to everyone based on uid, and follow ups on random samples of those voters.
In the UK we put an x on a piece of paper
works pretty well
The Republic of Wadiya had similar problems in their voting process...
Something to think about: the partisan divide is mostly media driven, and most of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Fox News. Our country is being ripped apart because of Fox.
The second biggest investor in Fox is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. While I'm not against Arabs or Muslims, I don't believe Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is a friend of the US. Not when he is holding fundraisers for the families of suicide bombers, giving poor middle easterners a reason for what they do. I just can't vote for anyone endorsed by Fox.
He has boasted he gets Fox to change their programming. So much of the division and hate in the US comes from Fox News. Seems to be a reflection of the owners. The percentage of Fox owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal keeps Rupert Murdoch from a hostile take over. That gives Prince Alwaleed bin Talal a lot of power over Fox.
It also makes me believe that Fox News is a psychological terrorist attack, and that the GOP has fallen for it.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
#thirdworldproblems
I voted with one of those machines today. It's not a touchscreen, you use a trackball to select the candidate. The guy is obviously trying to make it look like the machine doesn't work by touching the screen and not showing the trackball being moved.
put a column of 15 buttons along each side, 30 candidates should be a good maximum. If more fit, put more on.
Dumb screen displays choices, button selects. Keyboards can sit a long time unused and still work so buttons will survive.
This is if you have to do it electronic. paper and a black marker is pretty foolproof.
I live in a small town outside San Francisco. It seems that two local districts vote in the place I went this morning, so a guy at the door routed voters to table A or table B depending on our street addresses. The problem was that competing teams of little-old-lady election volunteers were engaged in a turf war over who "owned" which voting booths. When I got my ballot from table A, the booths closest to it were occupied and the volunteers directed my wife and I to the ones nearer table B.
You would have thought I had peed all over the table B volunteers' Thanksgiving turkey.
Little Old Lady: Sir? Sir! These are for table B! You're supposed to use the booths over by table A!
Me: Umm, is there a difference?
LOL: Yes! These are for table B! If they're all filled up, table B people won't be able to vote!
Me: Well, table A's booths are all filled up and I'd like to vote, too.
LOL, whining and angry: But these are for table B!
Man. Hell hath no wrath like the elderly women proudly doing their quadrennial duties.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
mod parent up
I've seen 4 different machines up close when a state official was reviewing them for purchase; I was along working for a 3rd party and went around and used each. All of them were touch screens, none looked like the one in the video. I did this many years ago maybe around 2002 and they were all touch screen back then; one supported audio for use by the blind. Just how old would a machine be if it used a trackball??
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
How come with all the millions of voters - there is only this ONE video circulating.
WAKE UP PEOPLE - this is the intertubes, in a day where you can take and edit video on the fly form your phone and add special effects in minutes!!!
Stop believing all the shit you see!
Check out this video - shows real time removal of objects, can easily be edited to add objects - Diminishe Reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgTq-AgYlTE
Why is that? For the past four days top news story lists only Mitt Romney and not Obama.
Is Google fudging the results?
You gotta be a really stupid programmer, or a crooked one, not to be able to write a simple software with a few buttons to take a vote. How can anyone take the process seriously? This isn't rocket science.
The machine in the video is an ES&S IVotronic terminal. It's the same terminal I voted on this morning. It directly appears the digitizer is incorrectly calibrated. What the video author doesn't show is the paper tabulator in the lower left corner. It would of clearly showed his vote being tallied incorrectly. Perhaps he was voting Romney and didn't want his cast vote shown, but the paper trail recorder clearly shows your selection in the window. It even shows when you got back and correct a selection. Now, they key is that each candidate field on the screen is independently calibrated and can be re-calibrated in under a minute by any third party.
At minimum, this terminal should of been isolated and inspected for tampering. Hopefully that was the ultimate outcome. I know I would of not left the area until a proper election official arrived.
and all my ebullient folk would be forever happy.
now shut the hell up and get me another beer.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
next?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
the way they have these things locked up and unverified, and families of candidates invest in the companies that make 'em, you have better odds in the casinos.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
while it is easy to make a voting machine it is harder to make one that is untamperable unhackable auditable and cheap
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
clearly, you have tossed your cookies every time you see a mention of King Willard I. so when Google looks at your cookies, it tosses you a dog's breakfast of Romney. what you need to do is start a riot.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/35821
Communications of the ACM
Volume 27 Issue 8, Aug 1984
Pages 761-763
ACM New York, NY, USA
My polling station had machines and worked just fine. I suppose when you have tens of millions of people voting you will get some small percentage that are screwed up. But I doubt percentage wise it's any worse than human error + paper ballots.
Next time you plan to do anything dishonest dress it up in incompetence because pity is better than punishment.
Half the people on /. with the right connections and motives could steal computer-counted elections; the other half would make something so complex that it's bugs would either further disguise them (but give an undesired result) or give their tampering away. Well, a few Hans Reiser types would be easily caught but put in a good effort at a crazy explanation.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Why cant they just take my vote when they called me, 11deemillion times
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
First of all... look at Bush election, years counting and people end up in doubt. Paper election HAVE problems so it isn't in vain to try electronic elections. But... how a blind will vote in a touchscreen? What if it is "miscalibrated"? IMO what should be done is like in Brazil: - Open source machines. Everybody with some knowledge can see the code they are running, of course there will be some bugs, but with the time, things are going to be fixed. If you want to have a company behind the elections, it have to follow several laws and mandatory use only open source software, should open it's capital, etc... If no company private wants to do that way, so the government should create one. - Buttons. So you can feel the click when pressing, and it can have a surface blind-friendly. The two first elections in Brazil had some problems, but nowadays it is going pretty smooth, very few cases of machine misbehavior... The greatest problem is people trying to steal using other methods, like buying voters.
...This had been fixed with the new 'completely intuitive 22-foot-tall, 11-foot-wide 600 lever steam-powered voting machines'
http://www.theonion.com/articles/florida-to-experiment-with-new-600lever-voting-mac,29699/
If only printed receipts are counted, then would it not be even easier for a fraudster to mass print lots of "receipts" that would be indistinguishable from actual receipts? I'm just thinking that hand filled forms take longer to fill out in great numbers.
I suppose there's a system in place to block that. If so, how does it work?
(I don't live in the US.)
The USA should outsource their voting systems and electoral management to the Australian Electoral Commission. A federal body responsible for a unified, fair and well managed voting apparatus on election day... Serious USA, the poster child for democracy! WTF?!
If the voting facilitation machines fail, that means we risk having a douche bag elected rather than a douche bag! We need to correct this, immediately, so we can make sure a douche bag is elected, instead of a douche bag!
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I've always wondered why it is that the state government pays the cost of the Republican and Democratic primary runoff elections when it would make more sense for the parties to pay for the expenses, especially considering the fact that they can ignore these primaries when it comes to the Nominating Convention anyway. It's silly to make the state pay the expenses of a sham election; it's kind of like the silly TSA security theater. Does anyone know why the primary runoff election costs are not fully paid for by the parties that sponsor these candidates?
I don't think these problems are inevitable at all. Why is it that pretty much every other western, first world country can run elections without these "inevitable problems"?
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected.
Oh, wait. Sorry. I thought it was the other way around.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected.
These machines wouldn't have been built in Florida, would they?
US of A... Biggest banana republic in the world.
As a European I can only say that the mind boggles with how utterly corrupt you political system is.
This is the sort of crap you would expect in some third rate African state such as Rumbabwe.
"then would it not be even easier for a fraudster to mass print lots of "receipts""
Well with an electronic ballot, all you need is
$i="select count where candidate = '$candidate' from voting_table"
$i=$i+10000
"update count=$i where candidate = '$candidate' from voting table"
And I don't even have to try and hide the stuffing of 10,000 pieces of paper through that tiny slot without someone noticing me deeds.
I'm surprised in this day and age there isn't online voting. Pretty much everyone has a computer and those that don't can still go and vote normally. All the results being fed into a giant database is a good way to verify information (dead voters) and would get all the people that are too lazy to actually go vote. I don't think it could be worse then diebold machines. It would provide instant results too and allow people to analyze the data.
Of course there are ways it could be misused and there are opportunities to hack it, but people do that already in real life since you can't verify anyone or compare them against other districts. I've heard of people voting in multiple districts already.
If the third parties were smart, *this* would become the focus of their long marches: an army of volunteers to man the poles and count the ballots. I think red and blue folks would both be a little more at ease with folks other than the dominant party-opposite literally having their hands on the election. It would increase the visibility of the third parties a hundred-fold, make them seem far less crackpot, and would lead to more and more voters seriously looking at their stances on the leading issues.
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I am guessing that the booths tabulated results for two different voting precincts/districts, and that the routing/sorting of voters as they entered was based upon which distrist contains their address.
This answer would make sense if the voting occured in the booth electronically. If, however, your booths were just privacy zones where you could fill out your ballot, and then the ballots for A and B were inserted into the same box/optical scanner/tabulator afterwards, then in that case you are right about the ladies throwing hissy fits and being territorial about their table turf!
Who would want to start an open source voting system? Build a massively secure, ultra tested and locked down voting system based completely off open source hardware and software.
No surprise... What's next, taking apart the electoral college? Voter fraud? Just shut up and move on. Stop the circus that has stained our politics...
These people are making a mockery of us citizens. Software that's having faults in an exclusive choice control, are you fucking kidding me. That kind of technology has been on computers for a very long time now, it's not new or even rare, it's a common control that is used in almost every piece of software for the past 20 or so years. It doesn't even matter what API you use for such controls, they always work in very similar ways which are incredibly intuitive.
If that's not bad enough, they went and used results that were confirmed as flawed to pick the leader of our country. If I ran a counter-strike service with map voting plugins that "randomly" caused someone's vote to change, people would bitch up a storm and before I know it the server would be empty. What the fuck is wrong with people, we care that much about our entertainment but yet we can't show the same care for the leader of our country. No wonder our government is so fucked up.
Design a little fob, with an IPv6 address, specifically allocated for voting. Put a web server on it. Get the voter a key pair. They can post their vote on a public site, either anonymously, or with their name on it. Everyone can check and count the votes. Scrap all the existing e-voting machines. That person's IPv6 address is theirs for life, and never re-used. It stores and posts their votes forever. It's solar powered and runs off static ram. The info from it can be copied as needed, to verify if anyone wants to.
It was the latter. They were little tables with walls on top to prevent peeking while I filled out my paper ballot. It was pure territoriality. I thought it was more funny than annoying, though. She wasn't trying to stop my vote - she just wanted me to physically do it the way she thought I ought to.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Manual labor/processes do to a good extent though. More people to vote, more people to count.
While voting for individual propositions and such do matter, why do we vote for president? As far as I'm aware, that is completely decided by the electoral college. Is the popular vote recorded so we can feel warm and fuzzy inside?
So, is that badly-written, or is normal ballot closing time 6:54pm? We're 07:00 to 22:00 here (discarding the am/pm ambiguity) and we still find people unable to get to the ballot in time.
With a paper-and-ink ballot system, some constituencies make a bit of a sport of trying to return the first results, taking just a few hours to count and check the votes.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"