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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.
electronic voteing makes it easier to cheat and cover it up.
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
You know, I redeploy fire regularly. It's a technology first developed in pre-history.
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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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!
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.
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
But that is what the new nyc machines are. Paper ballot, pen, paper, and a scanner, but the voters and poll workers still have not figured it out. They make you wait on line to find out which line to wait in to get your ballot, then wait on line to get the ballot(and sign for it) the you have to fill it in where they can see you, but not your ballot, then you bring it to the scanning area, and the whole process takes more Room than the lever machines and walking from point a to b. last election, we had lines around the block to get into get your ballot, and with the levers, I never had more than 5 people in front of me
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
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
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.
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.........
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.
Hanging chad was not a problem. The population essentially is ignorant of statistics. The Florida election was a tie, plain and simple.
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.
Often on US ballots there are 8 zillion things to vote on, president, congress, senate, dog-catcher, judges, propositions, etc.
A pure paper vote is going to be filled out wrong 99% of the time.
I am a huge fan of electronic voting machines that print out your ballot and in clear text it lays out who and what you voted for. Then you take the paper ballot and put it in a ballot box. Then when the vote counting happens the computers can feed out a preliminary vote in seconds which is followed by the official count of the paper ballots themselves. The paper ballots would have the final say if there were any disagreement between them and the machines.
A system like this would increase security in many ways in that if someone tampered with the machines the paper ballots would effectively let anyone audit their own vote. And if the paper ballots are messed with they will disagree with the computer tally giving cause for an investigation. So to mess with an election you would now have to mess with both.
I certainly hope that everyone on slashdot agrees that computer only polling stations are about as secure as Windows 98.
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!