Voting Machines Malfunction: 5,000 Votes Not Counted In Kansas County

An anonymous reader writes A malfunction in electronic voting machines in Saline County, Kansas, left over 5,000 votes uncounted. That's roughly one-third of the votes cast. Counting those 5,207 votes didn't change any outcomes in this case however. “That’s a huge difference,” county Chairman Randy Duncan said when notified by the Journal of the error. “That’s scary. That makes me wonder about voting machines. Should we go back to paper ballots?”

Comments

"Should we go back to paper ballots?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, even Kansas can figure this one out.

Re:"Should we go back to paper ballots?"

[TWX]

Yeah, I think that the answer is, "yes, we should go back to paper ballots."

I like optical-scan. You mark the paper ballot with a pen with indelible ink, connecting the two marks next to the candidate's name, then put the ballot into the input hopper and watch it go through the machine and get deposited in the locked output hopper. Granted, you don't get a display to confirm that your markings were read right, but if the system is designed right then a subset of polling stations at random is audited by hand, and if the results are too far out of line then the entire election is audited by hand. Plus, you can actually perform the audit without anything more complex than a desk with an inbox, an outbox, a pencil, and some paper. Some light might help so one can work at night.

Even optical-scan isn't foolproof; the ballot can be messed up if someone is an idiot or the machine that does the counting could malfunction or be tampered with, but at least there's a fairly easy way to recount if needed.

Never left paper ballots

[ZipK]

We switched to permanent absentee voting the moment they introduced electronic ballots in our county.

Paper ballots are perfect

[jamesl]

" ... Should we go back to paper ballots?"

Because we know that there have never been any missing votes or other irregularities with paper ballots.

Re:Paper ballots are perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to be perfect: we should switch to paper ballots if they are better than current voting machines. Someday we can switch back to voting machines if they become better than paper ballots.

The more people know about computers

[Presto Vivace]

the more they do not trust dre voting machines. Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

Re:open-source voting machines.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is old hat, and honestly the horse has been beaten to powder on slashdot, but systems that are both complex as well as powerful should be open source. Breathalizers and voting machines have no intrinsic monetary value in a society. Certainly it is a need to perform such tasks, but the greater good, the preservation of liberty and the accurate as well as precise regulation of a functional society, are of such an overwhelmingly greater imporance as to render the quite visible hand of the american free market moot. But we're hardly a capitalism here anymore. We're a plutocratic oligarchy.

Paper ballots are pretty damn open-source.

Just because a voting machine is supposedly running open-source software doesn't preclude tampering - hardware or software.

Say "No" to electronic voting machines

[amxcoder]

I recall seeing some video's online of electronic voting machines performing vote switching on the users within a day of this last election. Not to be trusted, any malicious algorithm can be slipped in to mess with the vote. I also saw them 2 years ago after that election. When it's happening enough, that people can get a cell phone video of it happening, it's happening too much. How many people don't realize that the machine mis-recorded or switched their vote between the time they selected the candidate, and the time they press the submit button?

Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Whether voter fraud, calibration issues, or electronic malfunction, it doesn't matter, as in all cases, there is no way to go back and re-check and re-count the ballots.

Re:open-source voting machines.

[lgw]

Paper ballots are pretty damn open-source.

Just because a voting machine is supposedly running open-source software doesn't preclude tampering - hardware or software.

Feels like I've said this 100 times now:

Electronic voting: bad.
Computer-assisted voting: good.

Sure, fine, have a touch-screen and pretty pictures and good usability in general, all of that is great. Then have the voting machine print a paper ballot, which is then cast normally. You can check the paper, or just use the paper yourself, if you don't trust the computer, or if it breaks, or has been hacked. And since almost all ballots will be printed cleanly, there will be little room for 2000-style "dimpled chad" and "interpreting the voter's intentions".

Voter-verified paper ballots trump "open source"

[jbn-o]

I concur. A development methodology ("open source") will not address any of the deficiencies (when viewed from the voter's perspective, the perspective that should matter most) of voting. No matter how much one trusts a voting program, there's no way to be sure that the computer used for voting is running only software one trusts. No electronic system can compete with the simplicity and recount-friendly approach of what is called for here: voter-verified paper ballots.

So address to the question in the /. summary: You never should have stopped using voter-verified paper ballots.

There are computers one can purchase that do as the parent post specified—the voter feeds in a blank ballot (one which they could have filled out manually if desired) and the computer (which has a scanner and printer attached) will scan the ballot, help the voter by showing the choices on a screen, reading the ballot aloud, or reading the ballot text to headphones, and then collect votes from the voter. Then the computer's printer will print the voter's votes on the paper ballot, and eject the printed paper ballot to let the user inspect that printed ballot. At this point the voter can choose to carry the voter-verified paper ballot to be counted or spoil that ballot and start again. The voter can also feed in a marked up ballot (marked by hand or by computer) and let the computer summarize the votes which that ballot specifies. These features let the blind and/or illiterate vote without losing their privacy by forcing them to find & bring in someone else to mark up their ballot for them. This is as close to computers used in voting as one should want to get.

Re:open-source voting machines.

[Midnight Thunder]

Paper ballots are pretty damn open-source.

Just because a voting machine is supposedly running open-source software doesn't preclude tampering - hardware or software.

I can remember one wise lecturer in my computer science course gave a challenge to come up with a system to solve a customer's problem. Being CS students we designed everything requiring the use of a computer. At the end he asked us if we had considered whether a non-computer based system would have actually have done a better job. While in the particular case the answer was no, it did show us that sometimes we use technology for technology's sake and not to solve the problem in the best possible way. Voting machines should be approached in the same way and the opti-scan mention by another poster certainly seems to strike the right balance between solving the problem and not throwing the wrong technology into the mix.

Re:I always insist on paper for vote

[Obfuscant]

And meanwhile, states are pushing voter-ID laws to combat a problem of which there are only a handful of incidents in the past 12 years.

Yeah, the "empty the cemetery" voting drives that the Daley machine in Chicago used to run on election day just can't possibly happen anymore. Especially when undocumented aliens can be found for $5 a pop at the local Home Depot and it costs almost nothing to drive a busload of them around to the polling places.

Anyone who doesn't think it happens is naive, and anyone who thinks it shouldn't be necessary to prove you have the right to vote someplace is asking for unauthorized votes.