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New York City Wants To Revive Old Voting Machines
McGruber writes "The NY Times reports, 'New York City has spent $95 million over the past few years to bring its election process into the 21st century, replacing its hulking lever voting machines with electronic scanners. But now, less than three years after the new machines were deployed, election officials say the counting process with the machines is too cumbersome to use them for the mayoral primary this year, and then for the runoff that seems increasingly likely to follow as soon as two weeks later. In a last-ditch effort to avoid an electoral embarrassment, New York City is poised to go back in time: it is seeking to redeploy lever machines, a technology first developed in the 1890s, for use this September at polling places across the five boroughs. The city's fleet of lever machines was acquired in the 1960s and has been preserved in two warehouses in Brooklyn, shielded from dust by plastic covers."
And do not need to be replaced.
OK we're all done here.
The lever machines will increase the caloric burn of the voters. Another attempt to get the populace into better shape.
and some can see leaning up and work on who you are voteing for.
At least these have a paper trail though --- anything's an improvement over ephemeral electrons for counting enumerating election results.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
electronic voteing makes it easier to cheat and cover it up.
why can't you put a lever machine in a booth?
You know, I redeploy fire regularly. It's a technology first developed in pre-history.
Before spending 95 million they should have leased 4 or 5 of the new machines and simulated a election sequence.
love is just extroverted narcissism
a sudden break out of common sense... in NYC
So do the leaver driven mechanical voting machines this story is talking about since in both cases they are essentially black boxes.
How much you wanna bet, there was some union worker who's been in the job for 20 years, and saw this coming? They saw it coming and said, "Rather than send them to the scrap yard, we're just gonna squirrel these babies away in this warehouse here," and rolled all those giant hunks of metal into storage in counties all over NY. I bet they got wrapped up, too.
Gonna be a lot of nostalgic voters this election.
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maybe it's just a old story. I think it was back in the old Chicago days
right because there's never forensic evidence unlike ballet box stuffing.
"In order to access our Web site, your Web browser must accept cookies from NYTimes.com"
NYT can suck my 8 inch non-dairy creamer. Anybody have a copy of the article?
What's to say the old machine weren't easy?
They don't call them vote riggers for nothing.
A lever machine is its own voting booth.
http://uploads.static.vosizneias.com/2013/03/lever_voting_machine.jpg
Notice the curtains.
This article explains the problems better.
In still others, workers seemed flummoxed by procedures that accompanied the new equipment, especially for accepting ballots when the scanners did not function. At times the frustration boiled over, and there were shouting matches between voters and poll workers.
At least some of the problems are caused by incompetent election officials. Perhaps that could work on reading comprehension?
sig?
I think it was back in the old Chicago days
Given the recent IRS shenanigans, I think we have the new Chicago days now.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Why does all the voting have to be done within one day? If they extended voting to last a week then there wouldn't be issues with long lines.
The ones in new york are enclosed by a built in booth with curtains that close when you lift the lever to start voting and open when you pull the lever to vote. If you're REALLY concerned that you're being watched just adjust the curtain.
They just don't want to learn a new way to rig the vote when they have their system down pat for fixing the lever machines. I'm sure some Diebold "consultants" could help them out with that problem.
ballet box stuffing.
I hope they don't do this regularly. If I pay for a box seat at the ballet, I sure don't want to be sitting on somebody's lap!
Louisiana sold its old lever voting machines to Mexico when it got the new "touch" voting machines.
You would not believe how pissed off the Mexicans were when Edwin Edwards was voted in as President of Mexico.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
In your comments to your New York returns to lever-voting machines story, slashdot, your moderators gave a score of (1) to "Juan" for spamming you with a Spanish language acne-cure advert.
ÂNo comprendas ninguno a slashdot Español?
Stop taking an inherently distributed problem (voting) and trying to centralize it. Those of us who make parallel and distributed systems would love to have a "problem" that comes per-parralel. Why do you continually try to make it serial? You're embarrassing yourself.
You think that because you don't know many ways to cheat using normal voting.
After their last election, Pakistanis were calling for a move to electronic voting because the paper voting was so horribly rigged.
Easy is a relative term. Changing a few bits on a computer is easier than creating fake ballots, using the votes of the dead, and other tricks.
We could make it bloody impossible to rig an election using computers and paper, and our no-how from printing the world's most popular currency, but we don't. Instead we go from a relatively difficult process to rig (at least on a grand scale) to an incredibly easy one and call it a day.
Depending on who it is, I typically don't mind having them sit in my lap, though.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Ever since the US election system hit the international news in the first Bush election, the rest of the world has collectively been shaking its head and wondering why the US doesn't adopt the system that almost everyone else uses successfully: Paper and pens.
Every argument against it has been solidly debunked.
So what is it that feeds your fascination with deploying the most convoluted, crazy voting machines instead of using the more reliable machines you have in abundance - humans?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Like the subway system currently in NY also. Just like some mainframes, also. Fix something that needs fixing first.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
RI went paper ballot over 30 years ago. All you do is mark up the ballot then feed it to the scanner. Couldn't be easier. The only time it gets interesting is when we have a ballot like that we had in the 2012 election. There was a federal, state, city, and then referendum ballot and they were printed on BOTH sides. That confused a lot of people.
Where did our current President cut his teeth in politics again?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You know all those ballerinos stuff their boxes--it's obvious.
Winning any election the old fashioned way lol
Only if done wrong.
If they don't, I'll help them start!
No one said the machines didn't work. The point is that going back to old voting machines is an epic failure of the political system in the 21st century.
Electronic voting is very simple, as long as it follows one cardnal rule: include the paper trail.
1) Create a PoV (point-of-vote) touchscreen machine w/ touchscreen that's networkable. When the user is done voting, the machine sends an electronic tally to a state / national database to keep count.
2) PoV machine also prints out a receipt for every voter after voting is complete, with detailed results that the voter can read and visually verify. Receipt includes a machine-readible 2D barcode.
3) Receipt gets fed into an on-site audit machine that's not networked. It reads in all the paper receits, scans the barcodes, and keeps a separate count on-site. It's count is audited against the count in the state / national database as the first layer of verifying vote integrity.
4) A random sampling of polling places perform paper counts of the receipts, which are then matched with both the machine-audit count and state/national database count as a second layer of verifying vote integrity.
Bam, there you have it. Electronic voting with instantaneous results providing continual updates regarding vote counts which still require two levels of auditing including a paper-trail to preserve vote integrity. And all this could have been done with technology that's been around for 15 years.
But capitalism has messed it up. Diebold gets contracts, palms get greased, and citizens get screwed.
This is all we use in Canada for every election at every level. It works fine. You have 100% paper trail, electronic tallying speed, no "hanging chaff" nonsense. It's a tried and true technology that has been around for decades and decades and decades. I don't know why the US goofs around with these other systems, other then PORK PORK PORK PORK PORK
It's because Canada (and most other countries) don't have a Voting Day.
In the US (AFAICT), they tend to have all of their election on one day in November: municipal, state, federal. In Canada, we have a provincial election OR a municipal election OR a federal election in any one year--never one day. There's actually concern when there's (say) one election in the spring and another in the fall: people get concerned that the public will get "election fatique".
There's also the fact that in the US people vote for judges, sherifs, criminal prosectures, etc. In Canada, we elect our riding representative, school board representative, and mayor (for municipal elections). There may be a referendum on a particular topic, which are like US propositions, but those are rare--unlike the US, where there can be multiple props.
So the "worst case" in Canada is four ballots in the case of a municipal election:
* city councillor
* city mayor
* school board rep
* city referendum on some (single) topic
In provincial and federal elections, you vote for you riding rep and maybe a (single) referendum topic (which usually only happens every 10 years or so).
I think it's a case of too much democracy in the US.
In Chicago, they likely still have the same VOTES left in the machines too.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What they say: "We need to redeploy the lever-type voting machines because the new electronic machines are too cumbersome."
What the cynic in me hears: "For whatever reason, we can't manipulate the tallies this year (was Diebold's bid too expensive?) so we have to go back to old-fashioned vote-counting fraud."
I'm not saying that's what's happening or even that's what I believe. I'm just saying that there is an increasingly cynical part of me that translates anything politicians say to the worst possible outcome. In this case, it's not even entirely accurate as these voting machines are not entirely electronic (votes use a paper ballot, which is then scanned, which implies there is a paper trail if necessary, nor are the devices manufactured by Diebold) but try telling that to the evil little guy lurking inside of me; he's not interested in those sort of details ;-)
I'd like to say this is because politicians are increasingly becoming corrupt and untrustworthy, but that would imply they were less so in the past. It's more likely that I'm just getting older.
last time NYC wore out a bunch of tic-tic-tic-ka-WHANG! lever machines, they bought all of Fargo's. in the 80s. I suspect a plain ol' warehouse in Brooklyn has allowed those things to get a tad rusty inside by now. they'll end up voting on scraps of paper bags and dipping fingers in purple ink on the way out.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Dan Rostenkowski used to tell a story about an old lady he once met who was from Hammond, Indiana. He recounted how the lady said that her will stipulated that she be buried in Cook County, Illinois when she died.
Rostenkowski asked why she wanted to be buried in Illinois when she was from Indiana?
She replied that she was a life long Democrat, from the days of FDR and she wanted to continue to support the party with her votes after she died.
I saw a comparison somewhere in a document about proper ballot creation. It turned out that bubble sheets, which any student is likely intimately familiar with, is the most accurate, over even 'complete the arrow for the candidate you want to vote for'.
Plus, well, equipment is more available.
That document was fascinating - It's not that creating a good ballot is actually all that complex, but I'd still probably end up spending a few days doing it because there's a lot of little 'gotchas' out there.
I don't read AC A human right
So, in other words there are a lot of retarded people in NYC.
We've been using scantron sheets in Iowa for almost 20 years now without incident. But then again, we're simple people who just want our shit to work. I guess NYC likes being complicated for the sake of being complicated.
The curtain automatically closes when you turn the first lever.
I agree about the IRS shenanigans. None of the conservative groups that were examined were actually denied a 501(c)(4) status. Why was the only group denied a a 501(c)(4) status liberal? Who was bringing political pressure to not deny 501(c)(4) status to conservative groups that are clearly political in nature?
A lot of those lever style voting machines can be easily rigged to pick specific people... just few turns in the gearing ratio, etc and whala.
Don't be fooled: this is not the Slashdot story you think it is. Why do we all hate touch-screen voting? One, because it's hackable, but two, because it doesn't leave a paper trail that can be used for a recount.
The electronic technology the city is using is a mark-on-paper, electronic scan system. It is, quite frankly, THE BEST electronic voting system ever designed: it's low-tech from the voter's side but fast on the officials' side. It has a zero-tech fallback in case of computer problems, and it allows manual recount of the actual ballots if necessary.
Lever machines are THE WORST manual voting system ever designed. They're complicated and confusing for the user, and while they're fast for officals to read, there is no recount: they do not store individual voters' intentions, only the total of all voters who used them. Just as bad, they are very hackable (mechanically), and if they fail, it's often hard to tell and impossible to fix on election day. They are, in every respect, worse than the punch-card systems that made election technology an issue in the first place.
Anybody who actually cares about election security should pick the optical scan system over the lever machine in a heartbeat. Why, then, are the voting officials complaining? Because they're worried that a recount would take too long with an optical scan system. The reason a recount would be faster with lever machines is BECAUSE THERE CAN BE NO RECOUNT. You just add up the totals on each machine, and you're done. But the true intentions of each voter are lost forever the moment they pull the lever and walk out of the booth.
Who was bringing political pressure to not deny 501(c)(4) status to conservative groups that are clearly political in nature?
Not sure back then, but today you can see them on TV. Crying up a storm about this "scandal". How in the world should a Tea Party group be a 501(c)(4)? If you were looking for political groups falsely using 501(c)(4) status to evade campaign reporting laws, wouldn't you target the ones named after a political party? Republicans are fine with profiling Blacks, Arabs, and Muslims. They say that's just common sense. Where's the common sense here?
We done der tried tat and I didnt meant to vote for Hugh J. Grant! Dat der a rich summabich!
Dammit, shoulda learnd my left from my der right.
When we had lever machines in our voting district you had to pull big lever to close the curtain before you could vote. Once you were finished you pulled the big lever again and your votes were registered and the curtain opened.
The only reason the US and in particular right now, New York City has issues with elections is because of corruption. No matter what system, there is always someone being paid off. As long as there is PORK flying around, you'll never get an honest election going.
Depending on who it is, I typically don't mind having them sit in my lap, though.
Depending on who it is, I typically don't mind having them sit in my face, either.
are you being paid by rich 'conservatives' or just an idiot? You sound like a Fox News talking head. I seriously think Slashdot is becoming infiltrated by astroturfers for 'conservative' American politics. And by certain tech companies of course but that's long been known. What's new is this political bent. Fortunately i've observed /. so far resilient and resistant to this because there are just so MANY regular smart people here that comment that we've kept the Karl Rove / Koch Brothers zomby army at bay.
It's pretty much guaranteed that whoever NYC elects will be an embarrassment. Different voting technology won't help.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The paper ballots introduced a few years ago really left a lot to be desired. You filled the things out at a desk with a visor that just about anyone can look over, and would be in plain sight to anyone who happened to be walking behind you. You put the ballot in a manilla envelope that would only partially cover it and walked across the room and fed into a reader, that was out in the open. Not one iota of privacy. With the voting booths, you pulled a lever and a curtain closed around you. You could probably change your clothes in the thing without anyone noticing.
Ahh the latest trend in online debate - accusing people that disagree with you of being paid shills. As though your ideas and beliefs are so righteous and pure that only the corrupt could ever disagree with them!
I drive a stick shift transmission. Nothing automatic about it. I think my engine has some computer components in it, but I believe they're only logging data... and don't actually accomplish anything vital.
Point is, my car works. And I would trust it a great deal more then a Google driverless car for example. And I'll tell you further, that I've had fewer mechanical problems with my car then most of my friends and family with much more complicated systems.
When it comes to voting you need a zero fail system. An electronic system is FINE if not superior IF it is ZERO fail.
The primary issue I've seen with these electronic voting systems is that they're badly designed. Period.
A badly designed digital system is going to be inferior to a refined hand crank system.
Stop farming the design out to one of these companies. Hold an open competition. Make it national if you like. Offer a prize. Set realistic goals for the prize that both encompass everything you need and try to exclude things you either do not need or actually shouldn't have at all (eg individual voter tracking).
Do that and I'd be very much surprised if we didn't get something a great deal better then whatever we've been getting from these e-voting companies.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In Australia We use pencils and number the squares on the ballot. Don't want to use the pencil?, no problem, you can bring your own pen, marker or whatever. It's simple, almost foolproof and works. We also have a professional, non-partisan electoral commission to run things, aided by an army of citizens who are temporary employees of the electoral commission, and are paid for their work. Counting votes is done by the electoral commission, and candidates can nominate scrutineers to make sure counting is done correctly. Its simple, effective, efficient and transparent. Who needs voting machines?
it ain't broke.... don't spend 1/10th of $1,000,000,000 to fix it.
Mexico's legislation regarding what is acceptable as a means of voting is quite strict, and while lever machines were accepted in 1910, they have never been used here. They became explicitly forbidden around 1988 (don't recall the exact date). The whole country votes with paper ballots; state legislatures can determine what gets used for local elections, but so far (fortunately!) only Jalisco and Coahuila have deployed e-voting machines. Sadly, I expect the number of e-voting machines to increase in the future elections. But no lever machines.