Georgia Defends Electronic Voting Machines Despite 243-Percent Turnout In One Precinct (arstechnica.com)

"In Chicago, it used to be claimed that even death couldn't stop a person from voting," writes Slashdot reader lunchlady55. "But in the Deep South, there are new reports of discrepancies in voter turnout with the approval of new electronic voting systems." Ars Technica reports: [I]f any state is a poster child for terrible election practices, it is surely Georgia. Bold claims demand bold evidence, and unfortunately there's plenty; on Monday, McClatchy reported a string of irregularities from the state's primary election in May, including one precinct with a 243-percent turnout.

McClatchy's data comes from a federal lawsuit filed against the state. In addition to the problem in Habersham County's Mud Creek precinct, where it appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.) Multiple sworn statements from voters describe how they turned up at their polling stations only to be turned away or directed to other precincts. Even more statements allege incorrect ballots, frozen voting machines, and other issues. "George is one of four states in the U.S. that continues to use voting machines with no ability to provide voters a paper record so that they can verify the machine counted their vote correctly," the report adds.

Comments

Re:What good is the paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

The machine also doesn't store the votes. Each voter gets a single card as he walks in and has to return it to the pollsters as he walks out.

100% the Dims' fault

[Anonymous Coward]

They will do anything to prevent proper legal voting: no voter documentation, no citizenship question or proof.

But even with all the ballot stuffing, they don't always win!

Re:100% the Dims' fault

[fafalone]

Maybe if Republicans weren't doing things like placing all the ID places in wealthier areas, poorly reachable by public transport from less wealthy areas, open only during weekday business hours, requiring a not-trivial-to-the-poor fee, disallowing comparble non-state IDs less likely to be possessed by whites, their voter ID whinging wouldn't get shot down as transparently racist.
If you're willing to reform those problems across the country, *then* we can talk about voter ID. Also the right has yet to present any evidence of large scale illegal alien voter fraud.

Why not just count them?

[hawguy]

Why not just count paper ballots like Canada does? Each precinct tallies up their counts and reports them upstream where they are aggregated. The manual counts are supervised by representatives from each party. Publish all of the counts and subtotals so they can be verified. Even if there are a 100 million ballots to count, by distributing the work, it can still be done in a timely manner.

Washington state is all paper ballots

[93 Escort Wagon]

We are 100% vote by mail.

I actually miss going to a polling place, though. It made voting and democracy seem very real, somehow.

Re:What good is the paper?

[cervesaebraciator]

My voting place just uses plain scantron like paper ballots. Fill in the oval, stick it in the machine, done. Keep all the ballots for at least 8 years or something, and if you ever need to verify the vote, take them out and check them by hand. (This assumes they are stored securely.) [...] While I could design something secure that uses touch screens and such, I still wouldn't trust it as much as this plain simple system. Sometimes simple wins. I doubt your going to improve on this design much, no matter how much you try to do so.

+1. People miss the importance of expense and effort. The important thing isn't that a system like this can't be compromised. It's that it is much, much more cumbersome to compromise it than an electronic system. It also has the deterrent effect of leaving a fair bit of evidence (paper trail, numerous co-conspirators needed, etc.) that it has been compromised.

Never forget

[PopeRatzo]

Habersham County’s Mud Creek

Mud Creek is overwhelmingly one party. It is the same party as the Secretary of State, who is now running for governor of Georgia. He's being sued for disenfranchising minority voters, elderly voters and young voters. I'm going to let you guys guess which party it is. Here's a hint: it's the party that is constantly crying about voter fraud that doesn't exist.

Also, to the AC in this comments thread who redundantly posts that it was actually 670 voters of 3,704 registered voters, you should know that on election day, the aforementioned Secretary of State's own website showed that Mud Creek only had 276 registered voters. Magically after 670 votes were cast in Mud Creek, the Secretary of State's website was changed to say that there were actually 3,704 registered voters and not 276 as previously stated. Mud Creek's total population as of the 2010 census was fewer than 2,000 souls (men, women and children).

Re:Never forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Mud Creek voting district is not the same as the Mud Creek census area. In this case it is the name of one of the five voting precincts in Habersham county.

What happened is that Habersham county changed the voting districts twice in the last few years. It went from 14 to 2 and then in 2016 to 5 voting precincts.
In the 2016 election, Habersham county had 20,380 registered voters of which 13,890 actually voted. Voting districts tend to be areas containing the same number of people, so a fifth of 20,380 registered is about 4,166, and a fifth of 13,890 would be about 2,778.

The 276 on the state's web server is was probably left over from when Habersham county had 14 precincts or may be just a typo. That number is supposed to get updated by the local people. The low turnout is due to the fact that it was a primary election.

Re:Never forget

[PopeRatzo]

What happened is that Habersham county changed the voting districts twice in the last few years. It went from 14 to 2 and then in 2016 to 5 voting precincts.
In the 2016 election, Habersham county had 20,380 registered voters of which 13,890 actually voted. Voting districts tend to be areas containing the same number of people, so a fifth of 20,380 registered is about 4,166, and a fifth of 13,890 would be about 2,778.

That's entirely conjecture. All I did was state the facts clearly. Your narrative doesn't match up with reality.

First, the Habersham voting districts are not equally divided. Second, the census most certainly measures voting districts. Since Mud Creek is in the most rural area of Habersham, it makes sense that it would be a smaller population than the other voting district. Third, it is most definitely NOT up to the "local people" to update the Secretary of State's website. The current voting age population of Mud Creek voting district is just over 2100. That either means they're registering children to vote in Mud Creek or there's shenanigans going on.

Re:What good is the paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

The machine also doesn't store the votes. Each voter gets a single card as he walks in and has to return it to the pollsters as he walks out.

That's not correct.
The token you hand in does not contain your vote for an obvious reason. It used only to verify that the number of votes cast is the number of votes recorded, and that the voter is a valid voter (having been given the token).

The voting machine store the votes cast on that machine, and the votes are extracted from the voting machines locally to a memory card after the polls close. Each counties memory cards are taken to a tabulation computer (not internet connected) that reads the voting machines memory cards and tabulates the totals. The tabulation machine's totals are then put on a memory card and loaded into an internet connected server that uploads the totals to the State of Georgia's central server.
The memory cards are encrypted with a unique key for each county so the state knows that the upload is from a valid device.
No voting machine is ever connected to the Internet. Actually, I'm fairly sure they are never connected to any network.
The totals are uploaded to the States web server where it is published for anyone to see, and also for each counties voting commissioner to verify that their counties votes are recorded correctly by the state. There is considerable detail in the result spread sheets.
general results:
http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/summary.html
detailed results by county, type of ballot (provisional, advance, absentee, polling place):
http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/reports.html#

There are some obvious holes in the system.
For each election, the local county downloads a config file from the state that contains what election, who is running, the screen layouts etc.
Then the local county manually installs that onto each voting machine using memory cards. At some point the memory card used to update the voting machines is placed in a computer that has shared a device with a computer that is connected to the internet. So if the internet connected computer is infected, then it could infect the memory card used to update the voting machines.

Also, if a voting machine is bricked, then the votes from that machine are irrecoverably lost.
This happened frequently when using mechanical voting machines back in the Jim Crow days, but usually only machines in the polling places of Black neighborhoods would fail.

Also, the other thing about electronic voting machines is that every voter has physical access. If no one is watching, a person could break into the voting machine (they do have a lock), connect a memory card and load malware. or brick it.

Re: What good is the paper?

[whoever57]

That's how it works where I vote.

Fill out paper ballot, it is then scanned and kept. I can't audit that my vote was accurately counted, but an audit can be done globally.