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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.
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
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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
My thoughts exactly. What's the use case for a voting machine? I think the Ruby on Rails blog demo had more fields than a typical vote screen.
body massage!
Yes. The challenge is to rig elections in plain sight. That's what's so hard about it.
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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.
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.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
This happens in other places, for example, Massachusetts.
The Republic of Wadiya had similar problems in their voting process...
Compulsory voting tends to favor the incumbent. Besides, if you're too fucking lazy to make sure you're registered and come down to a poll, who the fuck cares what you think anyways.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
FYI: In House District 2 in South Carolina, apparantly no democrat registered to oppose incumbant Joe Wilson (yes he was the same person that shouted out "you lie").
The democratic party isn't doing so great in SC. According to the wikipedia...
The South Carolina Democratic Party controls none of the statewide offices and holds the minority in both the South Carolina Senate and the South Carolina House of Representatives. Democrats hold one of the state's six U.S. House seats.
That is subject to coercion, and thus not usable as a voting method.
Harder than an ATM machine? Harder than a nuclear power plant control room? Harder than a 787 Dreamliner fly by wire system?
In all of the cases you describe, a contractor that screws up will be fined and sued into oblivion (ATM machine spitting out money, nuclear power plant meltdown, 787 falling down from the sky due to faulty wiring)
What we desperately need is to sue the contractors responsible for delivering malfunctioning voter machines into non-existence. Not "take machines offline" and probably buy from the same contractor next year.
Of course an even better solution is to go back to paper...
Anymore coercion than having to wait in line for hours on a day that you have to normally work? That, and an audit would be able to detect the amount of coercion.
other countries have compulsory voting.
What doesnt the USA?
Because we're not quite as stupid?
An Americans right to free speech should make it compulsory to vote and compulsory to include on all forms "None of the Above".
As long as we make suicide compulsory for people who come up with such dumb ideas. Rights aren't obligations.
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?
Having the vote on a workday is completely insane to start with.
And why audit to detect something when you can just prevent it in the first place?
Had a good old paper and marker ballot, show id - sign, attach sticker, in and out under half hour. this in MI.
Get up!
mod parent up
There are a lot of different types of machines throughout the nation. They don't all have trackballs.
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.
I'm a PA (Pgh) resident and I used the exact same machine today. It did _not_ have a trackball.
I use bubble sheets and pen. Let's hope the scanner works.
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
These are the exact reasons why we shouldn't have voting machines at all. They are an unnecessary, unreliable expense.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I'm far more willing to chalk it up to deprecated, cheap-ass touch sensors than I am to call it fraud.
I agree, this would be a really dumbass way of committing systematic fraud. If you have access to futz with the screen code you have access to futz with the database of votes and nobody can see you flip bits in there.
But most people don't have a clue about what happens inside the machine, but this screen switching stuff is visible and so it gets coverage while the real potential for risks doesn't get widely discussed because it is too egghead.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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?
You're SO hipster I want to strangle you. #ifuckinghatehashtags
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
"GO vote for Mitt Romney, or we'll break your fucking knee caps," seems to work regardless of the voting method used.
That is why voting is private. You can threaten someone to go vote some way all you want, but you have no way of knowing if they did or not.
That is not the case for remote voting, where you can stand next to them and make sure they vote the way you want.
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.
Compared to no machines at all? Are you kidding?
I shudder to think of the cost and reliability to count handwritten ballots.
No, I think voting machines are here to stay; but I'm not sure that touchscreens are a better alternative to scan-tron sheets or punch cards.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
But most people don't have a clue about what happens inside the machine,
What do you mean most people? Virtually nobody knows what's going on inside -- and that's the problem. I can design my own voting machine from the PC board and components all the way up to software - I have the skills. Even so, there's practically nothing I know about what's going on inside.
They're black boxes with no source code, and no auditing.
Yet, any of your average electronic slot or video poker machine is required to provide source code, schematics, and has regular 100% coverage auditing.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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/
So your theory is that a network that even in it's highest rated time slot only gets around 3 million viewers is somehow able to single handedly force a partisan divide in a nation of 350 million? That would be akin to me blaming the dumbing down of America on MSNBC.
I'm pretty sure the divide is being driven by people who think Fox news is the biggest threat to democracy and the source of all political doom in the US or for that matter focus on any single media source as the cause. The cause is much more widespread and has more to do with the fact that we live in a world where people feel the need to share their views 24/7 for every little thing in their lives, and much less to do with what 1 television station chooses to play.
For the record, Fox news is the #1 CABLE news channel which places them far behind any of the big three networks news coverage. ABC, CBS and NBC average 22 million viewers for their evening broadcast while FOX News averages about 1.9million (that's about half of 1% of the US). For some special occasions like the debates FOX occasionally beats even the networks but that is a very rare occurrence. In some extreme partisan minds the fact that an opposing viewpoint gets even that small sliver of airtime is enough to get them all worked up but that's more a reflection of them and much less an issue with Fox News.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Canada solved this too. People must have 4 consecutive hours available to vote. So if the polling stations are open from 7 AM to 8 PM, the employer could require the employee to leave at 4 PM (to allow for 4-8 PM), or arrive at 11 AM (to allow for 7-11 AM).
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.)
A good, audible electronic voting system, would not rely on a specific voting machine. After you vote, you should be able go home, get online and validate that your vote record is correct. Your vote record would be stored and replicated in a number of independent databases. If fraud is detected in your record, you could bring your voting receipt and dispute your vote. If someone voted with an ID/SSN of someone not allowed to vote, that voting record could be rejected after the fact. While in such as system there is risk that someone could crack the database that ties your ID to your voting record, I would rather take that risk, than risk having my vote be diluted by fraud.
I shudder to think of the cost and reliability to count handwritten ballots.
I have lived and voted in two different countries that used hand counted handwritten ballots. There were never any problems, counts were efficient, and reliability was high (very close electorates/ridings had recounts only to arrive at suffciently close to the same totals to give a very high degree of confidence in the counting process). While both countries had smaller populations than the US as a whole they had populations comparable to individual states, and I see no reason the systems wouldn't scale.
The first key is to have a completely independent organisation that runs the elections. But really look at any number of countries around the world that have reliable elections with handwritten ballots.
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Fuck price. Make this shit ourselves. Force it on the rest of the world for fair voting. Profit.
Mod that motherfucker troll.
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 rational actor won't vote because his vote has (not absolute) zero value, hence without compulsory voting only irrational actors will vote.
So because a vote is worthless, we should force people to vote? Do you realize how little sense that makes?
One of the easiest things to cheap out on is the touchscreen.
Indeed, you can make it so cheap that it turns into the cost of a few buttons. Seriously this fetish the world has with touchscreens now is getting out of hand. My local supermarket has a touchscreen on the credit card machine. The sum total of people's interaction with the touch screen is to select Savings, Credit, or Check Account. That's it. Every other machine in the world had 3 buttons. Some even had soft buttons under the screen with text written above them.
Oh the technology!
What next, voting machines must have rounded corners and can't be more than 10mm thick?
USE FUCKING BUTTONS!
But with compulsory voting, everyone's vote WILL count. That's the point of compulsory votes. The problem with it not being compulsory is that your vote may not be important. You may want a certain party and vote for it which gives you a single vote, but if 1000 other people have the same idea and don't vote at the same time then your vote is lost.
I don't want everyone's vote to count. If you're too lazy, apathetic, or ignorant to vote voluntarily, then you shouldn't be anywhere near a ballot box. A vote is a responsibility, not just a chore. There's no way there's a thousand people out there who just happen to mirror my voting preferences and won't vote voluntarily.
I thought the American voting system was fairly straight forward until someone pointed out to me that voting isn't compulsory. That's pretty fucked up.
No. It makes sense. A democracy should be first and foremost a place where people have as much choice as possible. All this mandatory bullshit makes it something other than a democracy.
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;
Rights aren't obligations - very true.
But in some places, voting is seen more as a responsibility that goes along with being a citizen. If you become naturalised, you take an oath of citizenship which includes the concept that citizenship comes with rights, but also responsibilities. Similarly the State has mutual responsibilities towards its citizens.
So in countries with compulsory voting, it's not really that you are being forced to exercise a right (which I agree is a bit non-nonsensical). Rather, the act of voting itself is seen in a somewhat different light. More as a citizenly duty, that fulfils your side of the government-citizen relationship, than a mere right.
"A vote is a responsibility"
Yes - that's exactly how it's seen in countries with compulsory voting ... and is why it IS compulsory.* It's a responsibility, not a right that you may or may not choose to exercise.
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* Well technically, in countries with compulsory voting, what is compulsory is that you turn up at a polling place on election day and get your name marked off the register. You are perfectly free to then put a blank ballot in the box, or draw smiley faces all over it, or whatever. They can't actually force you to vote, because that would obviously undermine the principal of having a secret, anonymous ballot.
I just voted for the new Police Commissioner role introduced in the UK. I don't want police commissioners to be elected so I wrote "NONE" across the piece of paper.
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.
Well technically, in countries with compulsory voting, what is compulsory is that you turn up at a polling place on election day and get your name marked off the register. You are perfectly free to then put a blank ballot in the box, or draw smiley faces all over it, or whatever. They can't actually force you to vote, because that would obviously undermine the principal of having a secret, anonymous ballot.
The bullshit rationalizations come easy don't they? They could have just stayed home and saved everyone some trouble. The US way is the superior way here because we don't babysit everyone's ass on election day. We don't make this particular bit of silly stuff illegal.
It is extremely foolish to force people who can't handle the responsibility of voting to appear at a voting booth. Maybe as you claim, the irresponsible person will vote for Mickey Mouse and throw their vote away. Or maybe they'll vote for the person at the top of their ballot.
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"
...which is why they randomise the order of candidates on every ballot paper. Not to mention where I live, at least, you have to indicate your preference of all candidates on the paper, not just choose one (i.e. mark your favourite candidate as '1', next favourite as '2', etc.) So someone that just comes in and marks the candidate who appears first on the ballot: a) won't be marking the same candidate in every case; and b) will have produced an invalid ballot anyway.
Love how you seem to think anyone's opinion that is not your own is automatically 'bullshit'. I've heard good arguments both for and against compulsory voting and while I personally think that while not perfect, it produces better democratic outcomes on average, that doesn't mean I think non-compulsory voting systems are complete rubbish. A lot also depends on the vote-counting method of the country/jurisdiction in which the elections are being held - some systems are much better suited to non-compulsory voting (particularly non-proportional or non-preferential voting systems).