Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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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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!
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.
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.