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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.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -- Joseph Stalin
A paper ballot and a black marker beats the hell out of the paper ballot and the No. 2 pencil.
"His name was James Damore."
I like this idea. The candidates get bussed from town to town over the course of a couple of weeks. People throw rocks at the candidates that they don't like. Whoever survives the trip, is elected!
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.
That doesn't sound like a defect.
How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?
What high costs? You volunteer to do it.
And one more time: they are not a safeguard against fraud.
Having multiple volunteer workers from all sides of the political spectrum is.
Won't happen. Ballots are counted by hand.
As the ballot counts are done in pairs, and even then are subject to being witnessed by the candidates or their representatives, you'd have to bribe one heck of a lot of people... up to and possibly even including the candidates themselves. Ballots with any writing or other identifying marks on them other than the voter's selection, which must be marked as described by the illustrated posters near each voting station, which might distinguish them from other ballots are considered "spoiled" and are not counted.
This is also can't happen, since the ballots are counted right there, almost immediately after the polls close.
The only real danger is if there is some sort of natural disaster which threatens one of the polling stations. I'm not sure what the recourse of EC would be in such a case... possibly a revote for people in that area.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
#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.
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.
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.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
We use paper ballots in Canada... counters get paid a small stipend (something like $30) to count the ballots, there's scrutineers to make sure they're counting properly, and any party can send a representative to watch the counting. When a ballot is counted, the person reads out loud who the vote is for, and shows it to another person to confirm. Any party can request a recount on the spot, and there's an automatic recount when the two leading candidates are close enough together in votes. Because there's paper ballots, we can keep a physical record of the voting, and in the event that there's a discrepancy or challenge, we can always go back and tally the votes again.
Since each polling station isn't more than 200-300 voters (most voting locations will have 6 or 7 polling stations each), we're still able to have results by the end of the night.
Considering that your current election is costing an estimated $1billion, I think you can afford to use paper ballots.
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.
For legally blind, there's a very large print version of the ballot in the booth. My legally blind grandmother never had any difficulty voting.
For completely blind, there's a braille template.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Actually, most equipment, such as Scantron, etc, does. While it's possible to do it optically, it can be done much faster by using electrical conductivity. That said, when, instead of correctly spotting 100 marks on a multiple choice answer sheet, you only need to do a few points, optical sensors probably make more sense.
All of the Scanners on Scantron's page say they do Optical Mark Recognition and/or Imaging. And they can detect ink or pencil marks.
http://www.scantron.com/scanners/
Do you have an actual reference for equipment that uses electrical conductivity to count marks? As I said, I can certainly believe that early machines did, but not anything built recently. I really don't see how electrical counting could be faster than optical counters -- keeping a good electrical contact with fast moving paper seems a lot harder than bouncing light off the paper.
I found an article confirming that early Scantron machines did use electrical conductivity to count marks:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/10/why-you-used-to-have-to-use-2-pencils-with-scantron-forms/
The earliest scantron-like machines used electrical conductivity, rather than light, to read forms. Graphite is quite conductive, so the machines simply had a mechanism at each markable area location to make contact with the form and detect if an electrical current is detected across the area. These systems were used as early as the 1930s.
But it didn't say when optical scanning came into use.
That site also has the obligatory XKCD comic:
http://xkcd.com/499/
Actually, votes are counted so fast in Canada, that we had to create a law that says results from the east coast couldn't be broadcast until the polls in the west coast were closed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.