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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
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?
Move to all mail voting, or in Ca at least I understand you can apply for permanent vote by mail status.
The Suffragettes would be terribly upset, we'd never hear the end of it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Anything that is not voting in person is susceptible to coercion, and thus not a reliable method for democratic voting.
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?
At least here in Las Vegas the voting machines here are held to the same standards of slot machines... The rest of the nation has it wrong sadly.
You mean no matter who's using the machine, the odds are they won't get what they wanted, but they'll feel like they got close enough that they keep coming back to pull the lever? No, I think that's pretty much what the rest of the nation gets.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
Our number one export apparently, in terms of money spent. And yet, we can't actually have democracy at home.
The joke at the time was, "And if it works in Iraq, we'll try it at home."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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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!