Slashdot Mirror
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?”
Damn, even Kansas can figure this one out.
I think with all the programmers on this site , we should be insisting on paper voting. At least there is a reliable record to go back to (and no chads jokes please) recount.
Otherwise, why bother voting on a machine you don't get to see the source code for. You having a choice will not matter to whomever controls the code.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
We switched to permanent absentee voting the moment they introduced electronic ballots in our county.
The old systems work. The electronic system is too prone to failure and abuse. Paper or pottery shards.
Seriously, the rush to electronic voting after the 2000 Presidential election was just a bad idea all the way around -- and, frankly, most IT people with any experience were saying so. It is vastly, vastly harder to change physical media than to change electronics.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
the more they do not trust dre voting machines. Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President
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.
So there's about 15000 to 18000 votes to count?
Paper ballots. Electronic sounds awesome, but it's a lot of hassle for a small amount of votes.
Say you've got 5 polling stations with 4 people at each one, so 20 people. 350 or so ballots per station, each person has to tally up 100 votes at the end of polling.
You could count the entire lot twice in an hour at 4 ballots a minute per person.
So your 5 voting machines cost, what, $5K each? So $25K all up?
You can pay those 20 people $500 for that one day and spend $10K on wages.
You print 30,000 voting forms (at 5 cents each that's $1500) and getting some nice locked boxes ($2000) and storage of ballots for 12 months ($1000) in case of recount.
Oh look, you've got $10.5K left over. Use that to make a park nice and pretty somewhere.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
What an astounding surprise that voting machines malfunction so frequently.
That's totally not what I would expect from the US government.
The article is a little vague on exactly what happened.
A malfunction of electronic voting equipment left 5,207 votes out of the original Nov. 4 Saline County vote total, but no election outcomes were affected, according to the Saline County Clerk’s Office.
Then at the end
Outcome wasn’t affected
Merriman said that had the extra votes resulted in a change in the outcome of the election, everyone would have been notified immediately.
The problems occurred in machines at four voting locations in the following precincts: 12-13-14; 17-18-19; 20-22; and 15-16.
Votes for Sen. Pat Roberts, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Gov. Sam Brownback and Kansas Secretary of State Kobach all slightly increased.
Opposition to the jail/justice complex increased from a 953-vote difference to 1,748 votes, or from 53.95 percent to 55.08 percent.
So they evidently found the missing votes. But I'm not sure how.
Saline County Clerk Don Merriman said after the meeting that four of the 34 PEBs, or Personal Electronic Ballots, were not reading correctly on election night, which left the votes out of the original count. The problem has been fixed, he said.
He said the missing votes weren’t discovered until after votes were canvassed on Nov. 10. Merriman said he learned of the error during a “triple check” with flash cards from the PEBs.
...
The error was found the afternoon after votes were canvassed when flash card totals were compared to the printed totals.
“We always pull those flash cards and check those final totals to make sure we are OK,” he said. This is the first time we’ve had the PEBs act up like that. I’m pretty sure it is the programing in the PEBs.”
So which was missing votes? The flash cards or the printed totals? What are the printed totals? Just a summary or actual printed ballots?
If the printed totals were actual printed ballots that voters checked then I don't think there's anything to worry about.
But if there's no actual per vote record and people are just relying on the machines to correctly record the votes then I have to wonder how monumentally stupid people are to use or even create a system that insecure.
I stole this Sig
it might be state-wide by now.
I've been an elections inspector (head worker at a polling place) in Alameda county a few times, and AFAIK almost every county in California is using this type of optical-scan system. There are also some special systems for disabled voters using touchscreens or audio devices.
My thinking is that it could be programmed to reject valid votes to give an edge to one political candidate
If a single machine were reprogrammed, it would be detected when the scanner cartridge was audited. There are also uniquely numbered pull-tie-like seals protecting the sensitive parts of the machine, so any unauthorized access is likely to be noticed.
or to give poll workers knowledge of who is voting democrat or republican, etc.
We already have this knowledge, as voter registration is listed in the street index used to identify voters at the polling place. Not only that, but another copy must be posted outside the polling place. As voters are crossed off the list, the "outside" street index can be used by party campaigns to see who hasn't voted. In some places, they'll actually use this information to go to your house and ask you to go vote (if you're registered with their party).
.: Semper Absurda
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.
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.
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".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
there will be little room for 2000-style "dimpled chad" and "interpreting the voter's intentions".
There should already be little room for this. "Voter demonstrates intentions by poking hole in piece of paper. No hole, no intention to vote." Very simple. The failed assumption is that every person who cast a ballot intended on voting for every position and if there wasn't a hole there was a mistake. People who had no intention of voting for any candidate got their vote counted anyway.
This voting system was approved by both parties prior to the election. It wasn't a surprise dropped out of Heaven on an unsuspecting public. The time to say "gee, it's too hard to poke a hole" was before the election, not after.
We shouldn't have to find an excuse for preventing that kind of nonsense. It should be SOP that people can refuse to vote for a particular office and have it honored. It should be SOP that those who followed the instructions get their votes counted and those who don't don't.
Bingo. Having computer assisted voting that produces a ballot that is both machine and human readable is a must. Without this paper trail, you have absolutely nothing. Even with crypto, crypto doesn't protect against erasure, and an "accidental" erasure of votes on a voting machine can sway an election.
I was working on an e-voting prototype using Java in the late 1990s. No matter how it worked, there was no way to secure it, so I gave up on the project, because if the device couldn't be hacked, the data on it was destroyable. Distributed storage could easily be hacked/tampered with, and would be hard to admin by volunteers. The hardware could be made more secure, but it would completely destroy voter anonymity.
Instead, David Chaum's Verifiable Voting system is the absolute best thing out there. It provides not just anonymity for votes, but validates ballots were done correctly.
My local precinct uses electronic black box voting machines. On election day (Nov. 4, 2014) I requested a paper ballot. They told me I could not vote with a paper ballot. I told them that I had checked with the election division of the secretarty of state office for my state and that I did in fact have the right to vote using a paper ballot. They asked me to wait, they called a supervisor. The supervisor then called the secretary of state office. After a few minutes they issued an apology to me and said that yes I could vote with a paper ballot and yes my vote would count. I voted using a real paper ballot which I placed into a real ballot box.
If they do not allow you to vote using a paper ballot then they are denying your right to vote.
Probably driven by the media since they want a result as quickly as possible so they can sell more tv-time. I have no idea how the presidential election works in the US but I assume here that the president elect doesn't take over directly, it probably takes some months before he/she can take office anyways so time should not be an issue for the election in it self. And also since the result is to last for four years, having a result in seconds seams quite useless.
Many years ago our company was asked if we could develop electronic voting systems for elections (we do, in fact we invented electronic voting systems decades ago for conferences and audience interactions, so we basically were a logical choice). The customer intended to buy a complete electronic voting infrastructure for a whole country, so this was very tempting. I was tasked to research into this topic, and have examined this very thoroughly from every angle possible.
My conclusion: There is no, absolutely NO way to get the level of democratic voting quality from electronic ballot systems that is comparable to classic paper ballots. The risks are immense, the gain neglectable.
The electronic system is in no way verifyable by the average voter or voting administrator. Anybody can look into a ballot box before the vote starts and see that it is empty, people can watch over the whole thing to verify that everybody casts only one vote, and wittnesses and recounts can see that every vote from the box is counted for the right candidate. But nobody can do this in an electronic voting system. Yes, they can click on a button and the system tells them "0 votes in ballot box", but they cannot verify this. The voters cann press "A", and the machine tells you that your vote was cast for "A", thankyouverymuch, but internally it could just drop the vote or count it for "B" or "C". Nobody could check this. At the end, the machine would display some numbers for A, B, and C, and you have to believe them.
And this is just the logic part of the problem. On top of that there is the question of technical reliability and user errors. There have been voting systems with touchscreens that needed to be calibrated before use, and there have been several cases where mis-calibration led to votes being cast for the wrong candidate/party (just as an example, whoever knows a technical system will know thousand ways it could fail). How does the system cope with a power loss during voting? Has the vote you just cast been counted or not? And what about the ease of vote? You and I can cope with "press candidate button, verify choice, press submit button", but an astonishing number of people can not (anyone who ever did tech support will not be that surprised).
All the key requirements to a democratic vote cannot be established simultaneously with an electronic voting system: Verifyability, integrity, secrecy. Yes, you can do a lot in the realm of integrity (like they do in Vegas for the one-armed bandits), but the stakes are way higher and so is the temptation to fix the game in a way that will go undetected even by the toughest inspection (and you cannout tough-inspect every electronic ballot box after every election!). And if you want a really reliable system, you will loose the secrecy factor. If you want secrecy, the verifyability and integrity will go down the drain. It is in fact worse than the business classic "Iron Triangle" (Fast, Good, Cheap, pick any two), it is more or less a "pick one". And for a true democratic vote, you will need all three.
The only advantages that an electronic ballot system can give are the results seconds after the closing of the ballot station and no problematic votes where people have to decide whether a vote is valid or not. Thats why the politicians LOVE electronic voting - it gives them nice results in time for the evening news. But do you really want to sell away the integrity of the last democratic instrument left for the citizens for saving a few man-hours in each ballot station? And I'd rather wait for the morning paper with the final results from a paper-based, democratically obtained election result than seeing grinning polititians congratulating themselves in the evening news, claiming their win from a quite doubtful, error- and manipulation-prone process.
In the end, I had a long and intense talk with our company founder and CEO and could convince him that electronic voting is a bad idea for democracy, and he communicated this very result to the customer. And as the customers intention was to have a democratially sound election system, he agreed.
We had those in my state as well. They were awful.
First, they had a "master lever" so that people wouldn't have to think about their votes (except for the non-partisan races that people using the master lever often neglected...)
Even more egregious was that the commit action was tied to the curtain release lever, so people who needed help with something would sometimes (maybe as much as half the time...) pull that to open the curtains, ending their vote, and it was not reversible.
The final tallys had to be read from a paper tape, and I don't envy anyone trying to do a recount on miles of calculator ribbon.
Finally, they were gigantic and heavy, so we only had a few per precinct, leading to long lines everywhere.
I do not miss those machines.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
NO ONE counts paper ballots by hand.
The entire nation of Canada says you're full of shit.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time