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.

Comments

Stupid.

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

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.

Re:Stupid.

[Goaway]

You don't use a machine, and you don't hire people. You take multiple volunteers who count in public.

Re:Stupid.

[hawguy]

#2 pencil is conductive. That makes it easy to read it by machine. I suppose you could do the same thing with a camera and a computer though.

Does any modern scanning equipment use electrical conductivity of pencil marks to read forms? I could see maybe back in the 60's when cameras and photo sensors were expensive, but I'd be surprised if anything built in the past 30 years doesn't use optical sensors.

Re:Stupid.

[amRadioHed]

Why is vote count delay even an issue? I know the 24 hour median wants results in prime time, but who cares about that? The president isn't sworn in until late January, let the counters take as long as is needed to do it right.

Re:Stupid.

[Goaway]

The high cost in volunteer time. Just because volunteers are paying those costs, doesn't mean they don't exist. And it isn't a good excuse to take advantage of them.

You can't afford an afternoon every few years to keep your political system running well?

How do you ensure that you have volunteers from "all" sides of the political spectrum instead of just "both" sides?

I don't. That's up to everyone to do for themselves. If you don't volunteer, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

E-votes

[Citizen of Earth]

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -- Joseph Stalin

Re:E-votes

[Mitreya]

Those who count the votes might decide everything, but they are still accountable to anyone who might be witness to them doing said counting.

That's probably why the electronic machines are being pushed as a replacement.
So that there is no counting that can be witnessed.

Re:How hard is this to do?

[sl3xd]

Harder than an ATM machine? Harder than a nuclear power plant control room? Harder than a 787 Dreamliner fly by wire system?

The key problem: Price.

Your examples can be counted on to be in use pretty much all of the time.

Not so with voting machines, where they sit unused in warehouses for months on end.

As a result, it's hard to justify to "fiscally responsible" election committees that your more expensive device is the best for the job.

One of the easiest things to cheap out on is the touchscreen. The touch sensors on your iOS or Android device are generally top of the line capacitive sensors - and even they have trouble from time to time.

If you go for a cheap resistive touch sensor, you can be pretty screwed. I know my office's HP DeskJet all-in-one has an extremely low-end touch screen - it's best described as "touch the screen, and get anything except what you intended to press.

I'm far more willing to chalk it up to deprecated, cheap-ass touch sensors than I am to call it fraud.

Frankly, we need the guys designing slot machine or video poker to do our voting machines - with the same regulations too (ie. full source code disclosure, full schematics, and so on). I think it's criminal that we require casinos to prove their machines aren't hacked, and require full source code and schematics -- but the same standard doesn’t exist for voting machines.