Another Election, Another Slew of Voting Machine Glitches

An anonymous reader writes: As Election Day in the U.S. starts to wind down, reports from around the country highlight another round of technological failures at the polls. In Virginia, the machines are casting votes for the wrong candidates. In North Carolina, polling sites received the wrong set of thumb drives, delaying voters for hours. In Michigan, software glitches turned voters away in the early morning, including a city mayor. A county in Indiana saw five of its polling sites spend hours trying to get the machines to boot correctly. And in Connecticut, an as-yet-unspecified computer glitch caused a judge to keep the polls open for extra time. When are we going to get this right?

Comments

Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Irate Engineer]

We'll "get it right" when we knock off the electronic BS and use what has been tested to work, marked paper ballots. It.Just.Works.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your vote for has been recorded"
* added to terror watchlist*
*Candidate Y count +1*

No paper trail, no accountability... No democracy.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Z80a]

The eletronic machines would not have it if they used actual physical buttons.
They would not have this issue if the program was on a ROM chip.
Not a problem if the voting machines had a internal encrypted flash memory.
No glitch if used the two first on this list
And that could be solved by software as well.

But for some reason diebold think that they should do all this stupid flashy show instead of actually designing something actually reliable and safe.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Irate Engineer]

No hanging chads on a marked paper ballot.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[riverat1]

Unlike the bits in computer memory optical scan ballots can be recounted by hand if necessary. The error rate may not be zero but for most elections it's low enough to be below the threshold that would change an election.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always something old and archaic that "just works" -- doesn't mean we should stick to it.

Except that marked ballots work *better*. We're all listening if you can tell us specifically in what ways electronic voting works better, and how those advantages (if any) sufficiently offset the myriad of problems.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[hey!]

I have voted in over twenty elections using optical scan, and there have never been any problems. If there were problems they can be fixed by a manual recount.

As for the other problems you mention, they have nothing to do with paper vs. electronic. It's just bad organization.

Here's how we do it where I vote. You walk into the polling place, and you tell the nice old lady your address, She looks up your address on a paper printout, and when she finds it you tell her your name and she crosses it off with a red pencil and hands you your ballot. You go into the voting booth, which is nothing but a curtained aluminum frame with a table in it; the table contains a stack of markers. You mark off your ballot, go to the exit desk where the address and name procedure is duplicated with another nice old lady. Then you drop your ballot into a dropped box under the watchful gaze of a policeman. When the polls close the printouts go into another locked box and it's all driven over to the counting center under police guard.

There's literally nothing technological to screw up voting, counting or recounting, except that every polling place has to have a special machine for visually impaired voters. If that goes wrong the procedure is to bring a trusted person to fill out your ballot.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Peter Simpson]

My town uses paper ballots. Make your marks heavy and black, fill in the bubble completely...just like in grade school. Automatically counted, but the voter marked originals can still be counted manually. Voting machines are fixing a non existent problem. Just like voter ID laws.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Peter Simpson]

There will always be errors. Paper ballots minimize them.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Oligonicella]

What makes you think they aren't doing exactly what they planned on doing? All of your solutions require that the software not be malicious in the first place. Paper, black pen.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Peter Simpson]

Same in my town, and its fun to have a bit of a chat with the ladies, whjo don't get paid for sitting there all evening...at least not much.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[kenwd0elq]

AND, paper ballots allow one to recover from gross errors. Electronic ballots do not.

The only kind of "electronic voting" that I would support would be one that allowed the voter to fill in his ballot on the computer terminal and then PRINT the ballot. The voter then reviews the PRINTED ballot, and then drops it into the ballot box. Immediate results, which is what the BigMediaMoguls want, to do breathless "breaking news" bulletins, AND a scanable paper ballot which would be the OFFICIAL ballot.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Jason Levine]

Our voting procedure is very simple. I walked up, told the person my name, they looked it up and had me sign on the correct line. Then, I went to another person at the next table to get my ballot and a folder. I went to those folding tables with sides for privacy and marked in the little circles to indicate who I wanted to vote for. Next, I put the ballot in the folder and walked to a machine. I put the ballot in the machine and it pulled it in, scanning in my vote. I'm unsure what happens to the paper ballot at that point, but my guess is that it drops into a receptacle to be looked at if a hand or machine recount is needed. It's the best of computer-based voting (quick tallying of the votes) and paper-based voting (easy to recount to verify the votes). Is it tamper-proof? Of course not. Someone could still "lose" a bunch of ballots during a recount, but it makes it as difficult as possible to tamper with the results without over-complicating the voting process.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Le Marteau]

I've worked as an election judge in Colorado and in Pennsylvania and in both states I got paid between $100 and $150 a day for election day, and got paid for the training. It's not a bad way to spend a vacation day. Get paid for the vacation day, and the hundred and some bucks from the county, and get that vibe you get being a part of the democratic process. Plus, for places with electronic voting machines, it's good to have a technically oriented person there, because it is, after all, a computer and setting them up is usually not easy for non-techies.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[AK Marc]

Just incomplete circles, crossed out votes, partially spoiled ballots, and stuffed ballots. Aside from all the problems, they are problem free.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[PopeRatzo]

The only kind of "electronic voting" that I would support would be one that allowed the voter to fill in his ballot on the computer terminal and then PRINT the ballot.

And there are such machines, but they are shunned by secretaries of state around the country.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[kenwd0elq]

Yeah, I guess having electronic voting machines AND working printers is an invitation to failure, especially when a few dozen Sharpie pens is ... what, fifty bucks?

I realize this is heresy, but even though I've been working with PCs on a daily basis for THIRTY YEARS, not everything needs to be computerized.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Runaway1956]

Agreed.

Computers are making us stupid. The average store clerk can't even count change without the computer prompting him.

Stupid people who rely on computers want to hand over their very existence to computers.

What next? Computer dating?

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Dahan]

There will always be errors.

Which is why I objected to saying "It. Just. Works."

That's a silly objection. Errors that can be detected and corrected without much difficulty qualifies as working. As opposed to the electronic voting machines that are currently used in the US, where you have no idea if it recorded your vote correctly.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[pjbgravely]

What is wrong with NY's system which uses a paper ballet which is scanned but kept in case there is a problem with the electronic one? Well besides the obvious problem as your ballot is not secret because the ballets are numbered.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[TWX]

The ballot may be numbered, but is that number noted with your voting registration?

The only qualm that I have with the mail-in balloting that I do (and usually drop-off at the polling place the day of the election) is that I have to sign the outer envelope. The ballot itself has no distinguishing marks on it, so when it's removed from the envelope and put in the stack with all of the others it's effectively anonymous.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[ClickOnThis]

The theory is sound. The theory [of] electronic voting is that it's "better" than paper. But the reality for both is different.

The reality is that paper is better than electronic, and always will be.

You raised the issue of ballot-box stuffing. AC pointed out that a paper system can be observed by candidate surrogates. How do you "observe" ballot-box stuffing if the system is electronic? The answer is simple: you can't.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[riverat1]

Back in the day when we had polling place elections here in Oregon the ballots were numbered too. But the numbers were on a tear off tab that was removed before the ballot was dropped in the ballot box. The number were there for auditing purposes because then they could take the torn off tabs and the unused ballots and account for every ballot that was printed.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[SgtAaron]

You're using quotes which attribute the text to the original author and hoping bold face will suffice to highlight your differences with his/her opinion. Who is to say whether those tags will survive. And what's the point, anyway? Why not just quote the text and use your own words to express your view? I do have this off-topic opinion: I'm sick and tired of "FTFY" and wish it would end. Optimism.

Anyway I live somewhere in Oregon, and am happy with mail-in ballots. Easy. Get to ponder the thing for awhile over coffee, beer and/or whiskey. Oh, humans have to count them in the end. What else is new?

Here's to the thing finally being over. :)

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[dgatwood]

And only open voting takes care of outright fraud (other than coercion, which is trivial with today's systems anyway, but almost unheard of). You can run reports on voters/votes after the elections and find the dead people/ineligible voters after the election, and remove just their votes.

Ineligible voters are a red herring. The way voting works is basically immune to ineligible voters, assuming a modicum of competence. To vote, you have to provide your name and address, which is cross-referenced against a list of known-eligible voters. Everyone who is on the voter list should be a legitimate voter. If they aren't, that's incompetence on the part of the people administering the voter roll, and is unlikely to be caught after the fact but before it would be too late to invalidate the votes anyway. If you are not on the list, you can vote provisionally. Provisional ballots are not anonymous (or at least they aren't supposed to be), and are validated before the vote is counted.

So assuming you live in one of the 33 states that require some form of ID, the only feasible way to game the system as it is currently designed would be to have a bunch of people vote provisionally for people they don't think will vote, and hope that they don't get caught, and hope that the people really don't vote. But that would be taking a *very* big personal risk. And even in the 17 states that don't require ID, it would still be taking a very big personal risk.

With that said, you can make it absolutely airtight by issuing free national photo voter IDs to everyone and electronically tracking whether they have been used in a particular election. If someone forgets his or her card, the polling place could look up the person by name and last registered address, then compare the photo. And you're done. There's no legitimate reason to tie that identifier to a vote at all. Even better, such a scheme would also eliminate the need to go to a particular polling place, in theory, assuming a hypothetical universal voting machine that could handle ballots for different districts... but I digress.

You also get a feature impossible today. It's possible to have a spoiled ballot not caught by the tabulating machine. How is that handled on a recount? With open voting the voter can correct a cast vote that's counted incorrectly. Today you can never know how your vote is counted.

Again, that's just as easily handled in other ways. It just requires voters to perform a two-stage voting process.

• Step 1: Cast your ballot on an electronic voting machine. The voting machine prints a paper ballot with both human-readable information and a high-density bar code.
• Step 2: Scan your ballot on a second machine in a separate booth. This machine ingests the ballot and displays a voting confirmation. After scanning the list, you push "accept" or "reject". If you push "accept", it keeps the paper ballot as a backup. If you push "reject", it spits the ballot back out. You then return to a voting machine, scan the ballot to invalidate it, and recast your vote. That machine prints "rejected" on the cancelled ballot and keeps it for auditing purposes.

This scheme has the advantage of providing instantaneous vote totals, while providing a fully auditable paper trail. And if you want even more robustness, the voting machines would also have an independent electronic log of all the ballots, including any invalidations thereof. When you play back the combined logs of the original voting machines, you should get the same number as you get when you play back the combined logs of the scanner machines.

More importantly, this prevents a problem that your approach could cause, depending on how you implement it—people changing their vote after the fact for reasons other than actual errors (e.g. voting for a third-party candidate, then change your vote because an undesirable candidate looks like he or she is in the lead because of the third-party candidate taking votes away from the less undesirable candidate), which could lead to arbitrarily long delays before you really know who the winner is.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

When the polls close the printouts go into another locked box and it's all driven over to the counting center under police guard.

This is what I see as a potential problem. I was once an election assistant (in Germany), and I was impressed by how thought out the system was. At all times during the election there is at least on of the two "election leaders" in the room, together with at least two election assistants. One of the assistants makes sure the ballot box is secure at all times, very visible for all others in the room. So to mess with the box at this time requires at least 3 corrupt people, and there is no police involved. At the end of the day, both election leaders and all assistants come together and open the box IN PUBLIC. The ballots are counted right there and then, multiple times, and everyone of the assistants and leaders has to sign off the result. Again, this is in public, anybody can go there and verify nothing is tampered with.

The result is that at least 6 people there (and as many people as were watching) KNOW for a FACT the result of that district. They couldn't be more sure, they COUNTED it themselves. The paper with the results is sent to the election center, together with the ballot box. There the results are aggregated. The official results are later made available for every district, so the people that counted can verify the correct result was used during aggregation.

This is a very secure system, and the biggest weak point is the ballot box itself during the election, where you need three guys to tamper with it. And even then it's dangerous. There is no way to greatly influence the election result using just a few people. The counting happens before the ballots getting into the hands of the few. The people count, not the state.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[sumdumass]

A few years ago, some researchers found that with ohio's electronic auditing system, that you could reasonably determine who cast a vote based on the time it was cast and the order it was recorded.

Their fix was to obfuscate it and not make some of the information availible. Ohio still has a paper trail brought to us by a bunch of activist early in the switch to the electronic machines (my district had it from the start). In the review section of casting your ballot, it prints in paper in a window and you verify the screen and paper reciept with yout vote then select cast to record it or discard to start over.

I find that to be a reasonable system.especially now that i can get in and out in less than half the time it took in the 90s.

Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Minwee]

You walk into the polling station, check in at the desk with the voter registration card you received in the mail and your government issued ID. If you didn't receive the card then you just need to go through a more thorough ID check, but the result is still the same. Your name is crossed off of the list and you are handed the appropriate ballot and shown to a nearby booth. Once in the booth you pick up a pen and mark next to the correct names, fold it up and walk over to another group of volunteers near the exit. Your ballot is then run through a scanner which verifies that it is readable and the correct number of boxes in the correct sections have been marked. If they aren't then you have the opportunity to go back to the booth and correct it. Once you are satisfied that the ballot is accurate it is scanned again and placed in the sealed ballot box and you go home.

At the end of the evening a group of elections officials including volunteer observers from each party count the ballots by hand and compare that to the counts produced electronically and then you're done.

So, not a problem, not a problem, not a problem, and not a problem. All you need is to do it right. The only people with an interest in complicated computerized voting systems are the ones who sell the machines and the ones who buy the votes.

Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Well in Minnesota there is the concept of voter intent that needs to be determined. In the MN Secretary of State page there is a brief overview of the recount process. There is the election judge and a representative for each candidate and the representatives can challenge the judges decision. As for how to determine voter intent there is Minnesota Statute 204C.22 that defines what may and must be interpreted to determine voter intent as well as the following decisions and rulings to help guide the decision process. So in Minnesota it looks like the best way to ensure that your ballot gets counted correctly in case of recount would be to fill in the correct bubble but then also write in the candidate's name in the write in spot but not fill in the write in bubble.

Feature

[Livius]

...not a bug.

They've proven elections can be hopelessly unreliable and the electorate still won't care.

Re:Feature

[fustakrakich]

Eh, why should they? They don't put any opposition candidates on the ballot to vote for.

Vote by mail.

[Frobnicator]

Meh. I voted by mail a week ago. Got a paper ballot. Had lots of time to look up details on all the issues, including the judges, some obscure issues, and the people I'd never heard of.

Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.

I highly recommend it for everybody.

Re: Vote by mail.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm at least 80% sure your vote wasn't tampered with.

Re:Vote by mail.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not forcing you to do anything. I just thought that having a 'Get Out The Vote!' day at the office, where everyone gets to bring in their absentee ballot and fill it in during the staff meeting, would be a great way to build team spirit, and help remind everyone that it's what we share that really matters most. The event is totally optional, somebody has to keep the H1-Bs company, and you can fill the ballot out however you like.

Re:Vote by mail.

[steveha]

Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.

It's also much easier and lower-risk to vote fraudulently by mail. Even if someone comparing the signatures detects a forged vote, it will be pretty much impossible to find the person who forged it.

I much prefer showing up at a polling place and marking a piece of stiff paper or light cardboard, with volunteers (all political parties welcome) watching everything. I want the ballots hauled away in locked boxes and watched at all times.

Go ahead and use computer scanners to tally the votes. But keep the ballots as a paper trail. Recounts are easy to do and humans can easily check up on the results from the scanners.

And, polling places can have unofficial vote tally scanners that count votes all day and then forward the results to the state department of elections, so the news can find out who appears to be winning.

In fact, the above is the way elections used to work where I live; in recent years the state has gone to mail-in ballots only.

Where I live, the state department of elections mails out a voters's guide many weeks before the actual election, so it's easy to study. Ideally the guide should include a printed sheet that would list the offices for which you could vote, so you don't even have to figure that out on your own from your voter's ID card or whatever.

Re:Vote by mail.

[Grishnakh]

Or Arizona.

Liberals bash Arizona for various things, but the voting system there is far more progressive than what we have here in blue-state New Jersey, where there's no mail-in ballots, and there's electronic machines with no paper ballots.

Re:Vote by mail.

[sociocapitalist]

Meh. I voted by mail a week ago. Got a paper ballot. Had lots of time to look up details on all the issues, including the judges, some obscure issues, and the people I'd never heard of.

Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.

I highly recommend it for everybody.

And how do you know that your vote was received and accurately counted?

I voted by mail against a certain president. Twice. Didn't make any difference and I had no way to know if my vote was even taken into account as there is no feedback mechanism.

Just use

[geekoid]

a system like Oregon's mail ballot.

Until we do an open federally sponsored voting system, no one is going to engineer a solution properly.

Get rid of the electronic voting machines.

[riverat1]

Electronic voting machines are a solution looking for a problem. Good old paper ballots work just fine for elections and are easily recounted if necessary.

Re:Get rid of the electronic voting machines.

[SuiteSisterMary]

When you vote via computer, you're voting via proxy.

Would America allow the following idea:
"You walk into a polling station. You tell a person there everybody you want to vote for. That person disappears into a back room, comes back a minute later, and assures you your votes have been cast as you directed."

If the answer is 'no,' then you also must be against computer voting, because it's exactly the same. You are directing a system to cast a vote, then trusting it to do so.

Paper ballots and proper election scrutineering. It's the only way to go.

Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology..

[brxndxn]

Every ballot creates a new Bitcoin address (polling locations keep track of the generated ballot addresses) with a negligible fraction of bitcoins.. Every vote sends a tiny fraction of bitcoin to whatever addresses are represented by candidates. Only transactions from ballot-list addresses are counted. Candidates with the highest amount of bitcoins in their voting addresses from verified ballots win. Any screwups or attempts at fucking with the votes could be seen on the blockchain.

There's probably 1000 different ways voting can be done anonymously while still being verifiable using the blockchain. Don't ask me to solve all the problems - but they are solvable.

I believe the whole point of the 'closed source' ballot bullshit we have now is the same reason we have a ridiculously bloated war on terror. The real purpose is to concentrate power in the hands of the few. They make us believe our votes are counted.. but they haven't been counted right in years.

Re:Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology..

[Irate Engineer]

But why put the voting mechanics into a computer that the average Joe doesn't understand enough to verify? What is the advantage? The least technically literate person eligible to cast a vote should be able to understand and verify the vote casting and counting technology. Everybody understands paper; the same cannot be said for Bitcoin blockchains.

Re:Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology..

[riverat1]

Exactly. I'm a computer professional and I don't trust computers for voting and counting votes. It's too easy to do stuff behind the veil of the interface that you have no idea is happening. Even if it's open source unless you personally vetted and loaded the software you have no idea if it's what you think it is or not.

Paper ballots and hand counting is something that anyone smart enough to mark a ballot can understand and it's easily scalable.

Re:Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology..

[craigm4980]

Its easy to design an anonymous verifiable voting system using crypto (I don't think your proposed way solves all the problems, mainly secret ballots, but yes, there are ways). However its hard (if possible) to make one where selling your votes isn't equally verifiable: if I can prove my vote was or wasn't counted, generally I can prove to a third party how I voted thus I can sell them my vote. If this proof can be fully automated and done anonymously via bitcoin, vote selling would become super easy and completely safe. So do other forms of coercion.

I put some time into implementing such a system, but as documented here in the readme, there are basically unsolvable problems in the coercion and vote selling area. I haven't worked on the project much since some kind /. commenter pointed out the severity of the issue and I was unable to come up with a solution (thus it's in an unfinished unusable state). If you have anything better, please let me know. I hadn't thought of using the block chain (good idea!), but I think I found alternative solutions for the problems it solves.

Since then I've spend some time trying to design systems with somewhat different tradeoffs, but I haven't gotten anything really better than voting booths + some verifiability that your vote is counted while keeping secret ballot (a requirement for resisting coercion attacks).

You are clearly correct that just about anything (including your design) is better than the current electronic voting systems. Closed source uninspectiable systems that don't offer verifiability or even audibility are a joke, and advocating for or deploying them should be treason (Its worse than what Snowden did).

We'll Get This Right...

[linuxrocks123]

when we stop using computers to count votes.

Restating the obvious...

[ndykman]

Marked paper ballots. Done. Braille versions can be made for the blind, different language versions (what, voting based on a person's preferred language, that's just crazy) and so on. Optical scanning is old, tried and very well tested technology, and you can always fall back to hand counts.

Re:Restating the obvious...

[grnbrg]

There have been multiple places where the total paper ballots cast exceeded the number of eligible voters. Paper changes the fraud, but does *nothing* to stop it.

Stuffing a ballot box with fraudulent paper ballots is risky, and relies on many people to be effective in multiple polling locations.

Falsifying electronic records requires a few people at a strategic points, and can be impossible to detect.

Re: When are we going to get this right?

[rnturn]

Most likely when the electronic machines are sent to a recycling company -- Ireland recently dumped all theirs -- and paper ballots are used. The electronic machines have proven to be way too unreliable and easy to manipulate.

Toronto does, and counts electronically

[davecb]

The ballots are counted when cast, and results reported in the hour after polls close. If there is anything suspicious, the paper is there for a judicial recount. And it's way cheaper than touchscreen PCs.

Glitches, or on Purpose?

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

How hard is it to make a voting program?
How easy would it be to "skew" results of said voting program one way, or the other? I'm not a conspiracy nutter, but it does make me wonder from time to time...

I voted today using a real paper ballot

[Anonymous Coward]

I voted today using a real paper ballot which I placed into a real ballot box in the state of TN. Very satisfying. Not easy to do however, the state wants to force voters to use electronic black box voting machines. The precinct worker and the local supervisor tried to tell me that I could not vote using a paper ballot. I told them I had checked with the state election division (which I had done) and an election attorney confirmed that my right to vote using a paper ballot would not be denied. They actually called the secretary of state office on election day to confirm.

It is not possible to verify a vote using an electronic black box voting machine. As Ronald Reagan said "Trust but verify".

Re:Chicago fraud

[PopeRatzo]

The 2000 election judges that didn't show up this morning all received phone calls yesterday telling them they were "ineligible" to be election judges and could face sanctions if they showed up.

It's as if someone didn't want the polls in these Democratic precincts to open this morning. My guess is "True the Vote", a "grass roots" "voter integrity" organization who has a history of coming to polling places in minority communities and simply challenging every single voter. Until the police come and they move on to a different polling place.

Come to Australia!

[elphie007]

Come on Down Under, where we use the high tech method of paper and pencil. We did have an issue recently where a few votes were lost somewhere in outback Western Australia. The solution? The High Court decided to run that component of the election again. Easy, effective, safe and occasionally expensive.