I think you misunderstand the voting receipt. Ours say, "Thank you for voting today, February 5th, 2008 Primary Elections." and it has the logo of the election board. That's all. We hand it to people after they put their ballot into the scanner or return the touchscreen activation card. In Illinois employers must give workers time off to vote, so asking for a simple verification that they did so seems fair. It is unfortunate that ward heelers also use it, but since it doesn't have any indication of how you voted, it is of little use.
The details of a Candian election are very similar to those of an American election, in any state. All the stuff about special tapes, matching number of ballots issued to those counted, etc. have been developed over the years to avoid cheating, yet it still goes on, mostly on the local level.
A friend of mine was a local poll-watcher in Chicago some years ago, while we were still using punch-card voting. She went to a preceint where on the page for the alderman's race the poll judges had taped over the non-incumbent's slots and circled the incumbant's slots in red ink. The unstated rules was that if your precinct didn't go for the incumbant you would stop getting garbage pickups. My friend complained and called Election Central, which closed the polling place for a few hours while new punch units were delivered.
My friend nearly got beat up. Not by the poll workers, but by the voters. Many of them were city workers, who were afraid that if they didn't bring their voting receipt to their boss that they would be fired. This sort of thing happens all the time at the local level, no matter the voting system in use. The problem is not Karl Rove using satellite transmissions to Diebold machines, it's local ward heelers who will violate the Constitution and all the laws of god and man just to get their brother-in-law on the city payroll.
I am an election judge in Chicago. We use Optical-scan paper ballots plus one touchscreen machine per precinct, which is mostly used by the blind with a set of headphones. We have gone to the expense of placing a scanner in each of our hundreds of polling places. Its great advantage is that the system identifies ambiguous ballots immediately, while the voter is still there.
In 2004 a lady ticked next to the wrong candidate, so she ticked the right one, circled one of the ticks and put an X next to it, then pushed it thru the scanner. It was promptly rejected. If it had been a hand-count ballot we would have had to devine her intent by ESP, or reject her ballot. As it was, we gave her a new one to fill out (she was pissed), and we marked her original "spoiled" and put it in the correct envelope so our tallies of ballots issued would match.
I might also point out that the scanner does not show a tally when a ballot is submitted. It only shows that a valid ballot was submitted. In some of our elections there are nearly 100 names on the ticket, so nobody can really see who you voted for. After the polls close we bundle up the ballots in a sealed bag, take the chip from the scanner, and transmit the results to HQ. The ballots and the chip are returned to the collection station by one Repub and one Dem judge. We only see a cumulative total at the end of the night. Write-ins? Fine, if you keep the writing in one specific area. Such ballots are dropped by the scanner into a different compartment, and we hand-tally those votes later. Your non-write-in choices are caught by the scanner.
So much of the commentary over the last few years on the voting problem has been by people who have no idea of how elections are actually run. I encourage all of you not just to sign up for poll-watching, but to volunteer as a judge in your area. You will meet your neighbors, help the common weal, and bring your own integrity to the process. The problem isn't hackable machines, the problem is hackable people.
So, the old and "stupid should not be allowed to vote? What's your position on Jews and Catholics being allowed to vote?
I am not defending stupidity, but rather the fact that all humans make mistakes. Including you. You seem to think that our Chicago ballots are like those #2 pencil answer sheets we used in school. If you look at http://chicagoelections.com/docs/ballots/387d.pdf you will see that our ballot has the names already on it. The voter completes the arrow pointing to their choice. This paper is then pushed into the scanner, and drops into a sealed box. The paper ballots and the scanner memory chip are returned to the collection station in sealed packages after the polls close. We get the convenience of rapid results from a perfectly hand-verifiable paper record.
You might ask why we need the scanner. Some of our elections have 96 different names on the ballot, when you add in judicial elections and other races. Hand counting would take all night, and far more liable to fakery.
Actually I'm a bit surprised you oppose strong ID laws. How will you know if a voter is too old to meet your standards without a date of birth?
As to the mistake vs. tampering issue, there is still no evidence that any electronic votes have been tampered with. Most of the evidence is that maybe it could be done, and that exit polls conducted by college students hanging out all election day in Starbuck's didn't match expectations. Now contrast with the notorius 2000 Florida vote, which was amazingly close, so much so that the hanging chad case became critical. Your breezy dismissal of the mistake issue sets us up for another debacle. Disenfanchising those who don't meet your standards seems like a poor way to promote democracy.
i am an election judge in Chicago, where we use mostly optical-scan paper ballots, with a scanner in each polling place. They are vastly more reliable than hand count paper ballots. Why? Because voters make dumb mistakes.
An example. In the last election a lady in my preicinct filled in the mark for the wrong candidate. She then filled in the correct one, circled one of the two, and put an X next to it and proceeded to slide it into the scanner. The scanner is set to eject any ballots with ink outside the specified areas, or with marks for more than one candidate for one office. If she had just put it in a ballot box it would have been up to me and the other judges hours later to devine which person she was actually voting for. It would be an ink version of the hanging chad. Instead I gave her a new ballot which she filled in correctly, and her votes were unambiguously counted. Two judges (one for each party)defaced her first ballot, signed it, and placed it in the spoiled ballot envelope so we could account for it when we closed the poll.
I wish some of the people who criticize polling procedures would work one year as a judge and see how elections really work, instead of coming up with pipe dreams like the punch ballot up above,a system only a sysop could love. I had two 100 year old voters last election who could never could have figured that one out.
According to NASA, MGS outlived its design parameters by 400%, and relayed important information right up to the end. Further, the Mars Rovers have outlived their warranty by 2 years. I think we're doing something right.
Happily, Soko, this system exists. The Sequioa touchscreen machines used in Cook County, Illinois produce a plain text report of every ballot on a long roll of paper. The voter can read the roll through a window and make sure it accurately represents his choices. When the ballot is finally cast the papper rools out of sight into a sealed cassette, which is returned to the regional receiving station along with the electronic recording cartridges. In case of a recount, this paper trail can be easily consulted.
A. Employees of whom? Diebold or the local elections commission?
B. What do you mean affiliated? Does that mean you give up your right to vote? Or do they just hire Mongolian citizens?
The question is whether or not Branson will have any escape system at all, other than a waiver of liability written by Solomon the Wise. The SpaceShip One craft had no ejector seat. The pilot was supposed to throw a lever to release the nose, then squirm out the resulting hole, then free-fall for a couple of minutes, then deploy the chute, without a pressure suit. They had a better escape system on a B-17 in 1943.
Stealing smart cards would only work if you also stole an actuator. On the Sequioa machines, we put the card in the actuator, punch in a number, and the card pops out. You insert the card into the voting machine and do your thing. First, the card is time coded, so if you wait more than 5 minutes to insert it into the voting machine it won't work. Secondly, after you cast your ballot the card is deactivated and then pops out of the unit. You return it to the judge and we activate it again for somebody else. Thirdly, the actuator is coded for a particular precinct, as is the voting machine. If you steal an activated card fom the 39th precinct and race over to the 47th in just 4 minutes, plus breeze through the voter verification process, the card won't work on some other voting machine. Finally, the total number of votes cast in a precinct must match the number of voter verification sheets. If 150 voters showed up but 175 votes were cast, we'd notice.
The comparison is invalid, because lotery machines, like ATMs, are just dumb terminals connected continuously and directly to a big, secure central computer which is constantly maintained by experts in white coats. Anybody who wants an ATM or lottery machine in their establishment must also set up the proper data line, whether dial-up or broadband, to qualify.
Voting machines are set up in drafty church basements, fire houses, private homes and even hot dog stands at most twice a year for 13 hours, maintained by 60 year-old volunteers. There may a phone line, there may not be. Hell, there may not even be a bathroom. That's what the differences are.
Local or state election boards are in complete control of the system. By the US Constitution, voting is at most a statre concern, almost never Federal. You also have the issue that every jurisdiction has different kinds of elections. In mine there are 80 judges running for retention, a craziness unmatched in other states.
In many jurisdictions, like mine, they do put an X next to somebody's name, and then slide the ballot into a scanning machine which counts the votes. However, the issue of returning to a 1920's style all-manual system is the count, the crucial part of the system. In Canada ballots have only 3 or 4 party names listed. Its easy to count those. In Chicago, we will have nearly 90 names on the ballot. The possibility of mischief or mistakes increases dramatically when you let humans do it.
Christ on a crutch, this suggestion is just plain nuts! I'm getting voters who can't figure out right now how not to vote for both guys in a single name race, and you want them to vote three times in varying semi-random patterns. If all voters were from MIT it might work, but until that happy day we need to simplify, not randomize.
They are not dead set against paper trails. In my area, where I'm an election judge, each precinct will have at least one Sequioa touchscreen unit that produces a paper tape. When you review you votes the tape appears in a window next to the machine. When you cast the ballot the tape rolls up into a sealed cassette, which we return to Election Central along with our optical scan ballots and the usb drive that electronically records the votes. We will have already transmitted the electronic results to Central. Sequoia makes paper and paperless versions, as well as the paper ballot scanners. Why do we use both systems? Because the city can' afford to buy all new systems
Perhaps Diebold is afraid that officials will balk at buying the more expensive paper trail units. Remember, the customers are you, the taxpayer.
There may be interest in using the fMRI system, but with such scans going for more than US$4,000 a pop, it isn't very likely that law enforcement agencies will be swarming to scan suspects.
This is to all US readers of this thread: What are you doing to help in this situation of creaky or questionable voting systems?
In this country most election judges are volunteers, your neighbors. I have done this for two elections in my city, one the 2004 National election and this year's primary in March. I can tell you that at least in my area we need help! I'm 55 years old, and am the youngest election judge in the district. We are moving toward Deibold-type machines, and we don't have computer savvy people to set them up. Whether you use the machine verified paper ballots or all-electronic systems, you need people comfortable with equipment to make them work right. And we don't have enough.
By all means suggest better ways to do the job. But it you really want to help join us in actually running an election. The problem isn't corruption, it's not having the right people. Call your local election comission and join up. You will learn much more about the actual nuts and bolts of your government.
There was also a good piece on the invisibility question about 2 weeks ago in Science News, my favorite technical magazine. Its way better than any jerk wire-service story.
Maybe part of the issue here is what sort of book is being published, by whichever route. Editing, marketing and distributing a technical work is very different from doing the same for a literary work. While basic copy editing is a fine skill, doing the same plus editing for more artistic effects is more akin to an art. I don't say this to demean technical works; I write instruction books myself for a living. However, the two challenges in the technical realm are accuracy and clarity, which have a different priority in the litererary world. In my anecdote about Drieser, his editor became more of a junior collaborator, and devoted much of his career to honing the author's words. I don't know if such a committment is needed in technical works.
Faster ways to format material for printing eliminates one bottleneck in the publishing process; easy production of small numbers of physical books eliminates another. What I don't often hear is what sort of publishing book creators actually want to accomplish.
I can see these services being very handy for specific kinds of publishing and distribution projects, like your church or organization assembling a cookbook for fund-raising drives or printing a small set of instruction books for your proprietary software. But what does this have to do with the kind of publishing services offered by the big houses: editing, marketing, distribution, etc.? Will the next Da Vinci Code or Tom Clancy thriller be POD? I doubt it. I do see the economies of initial production getting a little cheaper, which might make big publishing houses a tad more willing to try out new authors, but their entire business model is based on shooting for blockbusters.
The questions that need to be asked include: How will you get anybody to order your book? Who will edit it and advise you and how to enhance it? (It was said that Theodore Drieser delivered his manuscripts to the editor in a truck, and the editor returned them in a taxicab.) Who will vet the book for libel or accuracy? These are some of the things that reputable publishers currently provide. These programs, as clever as they might be, won't.
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Secret ballots mean secret. You sould be able to verify your own vote, but not get a verifiable record open to use for intimidation or corruption.
I think you misunderstand the voting receipt. Ours say, "Thank you for voting today, February 5th, 2008 Primary Elections." and it has the logo of the election board. That's all. We hand it to people after they put their ballot into the scanner or return the touchscreen activation card. In Illinois employers must give workers time off to vote, so asking for a simple verification that they did so seems fair. It is unfortunate that ward heelers also use it, but since it doesn't have any indication of how you voted, it is of little use.
A friend of mine was a local poll-watcher in Chicago some years ago, while we were still using punch-card voting. She went to a preceint where on the page for the alderman's race the poll judges had taped over the non-incumbent's slots and circled the incumbant's slots in red ink. The unstated rules was that if your precinct didn't go for the incumbant you would stop getting garbage pickups. My friend complained and called Election Central, which closed the polling place for a few hours while new punch units were delivered.
My friend nearly got beat up. Not by the poll workers, but by the voters. Many of them were city workers, who were afraid that if they didn't bring their voting receipt to their boss that they would be fired. This sort of thing happens all the time at the local level, no matter the voting system in use. The problem is not Karl Rove using satellite transmissions to Diebold machines, it's local ward heelers who will violate the Constitution and all the laws of god and man just to get their brother-in-law on the city payroll.
In 2004 a lady ticked next to the wrong candidate, so she ticked the right one, circled one of the ticks and put an X next to it, then pushed it thru the scanner. It was promptly rejected. If it had been a hand-count ballot we would have had to devine her intent by ESP, or reject her ballot. As it was, we gave her a new one to fill out (she was pissed), and we marked her original "spoiled" and put it in the correct envelope so our tallies of ballots issued would match.
I might also point out that the scanner does not show a tally when a ballot is submitted. It only shows that a valid ballot was submitted. In some of our elections there are nearly 100 names on the ticket, so nobody can really see who you voted for. After the polls close we bundle up the ballots in a sealed bag, take the chip from the scanner, and transmit the results to HQ. The ballots and the chip are returned to the collection station by one Repub and one Dem judge. We only see a cumulative total at the end of the night. Write-ins? Fine, if you keep the writing in one specific area. Such ballots are dropped by the scanner into a different compartment, and we hand-tally those votes later. Your non-write-in choices are caught by the scanner.
So much of the commentary over the last few years on the voting problem has been by people who have no idea of how elections are actually run. I encourage all of you not just to sign up for poll-watching, but to volunteer as a judge in your area. You will meet your neighbors, help the common weal, and bring your own integrity to the process. The problem isn't hackable machines, the problem is hackable people.
I am not defending stupidity, but rather the fact that all humans make mistakes. Including you. You seem to think that our Chicago ballots are like those #2 pencil answer sheets we used in school. If you look at http://chicagoelections.com/docs/ballots/387d.pdf you will see that our ballot has the names already on it. The voter completes the arrow pointing to their choice. This paper is then pushed into the scanner, and drops into a sealed box. The paper ballots and the scanner memory chip are returned to the collection station in sealed packages after the polls close. We get the convenience of rapid results from a perfectly hand-verifiable paper record.
You might ask why we need the scanner. Some of our elections have 96 different names on the ballot, when you add in judicial elections and other races. Hand counting would take all night, and far more liable to fakery.
Actually I'm a bit surprised you oppose strong ID laws. How will you know if a voter is too old to meet your standards without a date of birth?
As to the mistake vs. tampering issue, there is still no evidence that any electronic votes have been tampered with. Most of the evidence is that maybe it could be done, and that exit polls conducted by college students hanging out all election day in Starbuck's didn't match expectations. Now contrast with the notorius 2000 Florida vote, which was amazingly close, so much so that the hanging chad case became critical. Your breezy dismissal of the mistake issue sets us up for another debacle. Disenfanchising those who don't meet your standards seems like a poor way to promote democracy.
i am an election judge in Chicago, where we use mostly optical-scan paper ballots, with a scanner in each polling place. They are vastly more reliable than hand count paper ballots. Why? Because voters make dumb mistakes. An example. In the last election a lady in my preicinct filled in the mark for the wrong candidate. She then filled in the correct one, circled one of the two, and put an X next to it and proceeded to slide it into the scanner. The scanner is set to eject any ballots with ink outside the specified areas, or with marks for more than one candidate for one office. If she had just put it in a ballot box it would have been up to me and the other judges hours later to devine which person she was actually voting for. It would be an ink version of the hanging chad. Instead I gave her a new ballot which she filled in correctly, and her votes were unambiguously counted. Two judges (one for each party)defaced her first ballot, signed it, and placed it in the spoiled ballot envelope so we could account for it when we closed the poll. I wish some of the people who criticize polling procedures would work one year as a judge and see how elections really work, instead of coming up with pipe dreams like the punch ballot up above,a system only a sysop could love. I had two 100 year old voters last election who could never could have figured that one out.
According to NASA, MGS outlived its design parameters by 400%, and relayed important information right up to the end. Further, the Mars Rovers have outlived their warranty by 2 years. I think we're doing something right.
Happily, Soko, this system exists. The Sequioa touchscreen machines used in Cook County, Illinois produce a plain text report of every ballot on a long roll of paper. The voter can read the roll through a window and make sure it accurately represents his choices. When the ballot is finally cast the papper rools out of sight into a sealed cassette, which is returned to the regional receiving station along with the electronic recording cartridges. In case of a recount, this paper trail can be easily consulted.
A. Employees of whom? Diebold or the local elections commission? B. What do you mean affiliated? Does that mean you give up your right to vote? Or do they just hire Mongolian citizens?
The question is whether or not Branson will have any escape system at all, other than a waiver of liability written by Solomon the Wise. The SpaceShip One craft had no ejector seat. The pilot was supposed to throw a lever to release the nose, then squirm out the resulting hole, then free-fall for a couple of minutes, then deploy the chute, without a pressure suit. They had a better escape system on a B-17 in 1943.
Stealing smart cards would only work if you also stole an actuator. On the Sequioa machines, we put the card in the actuator, punch in a number, and the card pops out. You insert the card into the voting machine and do your thing. First, the card is time coded, so if you wait more than 5 minutes to insert it into the voting machine it won't work. Secondly, after you cast your ballot the card is deactivated and then pops out of the unit. You return it to the judge and we activate it again for somebody else. Thirdly, the actuator is coded for a particular precinct, as is the voting machine. If you steal an activated card fom the 39th precinct and race over to the 47th in just 4 minutes, plus breeze through the voter verification process, the card won't work on some other voting machine. Finally, the total number of votes cast in a precinct must match the number of voter verification sheets. If 150 voters showed up but 175 votes were cast, we'd notice.
The comparison is invalid, because lotery machines, like ATMs, are just dumb terminals connected continuously and directly to a big, secure central computer which is constantly maintained by experts in white coats. Anybody who wants an ATM or lottery machine in their establishment must also set up the proper data line, whether dial-up or broadband, to qualify. Voting machines are set up in drafty church basements, fire houses, private homes and even hot dog stands at most twice a year for 13 hours, maintained by 60 year-old volunteers. There may a phone line, there may not be. Hell, there may not even be a bathroom. That's what the differences are.
The machines you propose exist. See http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=204 463&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=1670 4581#16705009
Local or state election boards are in complete control of the system. By the US Constitution, voting is at most a statre concern, almost never Federal. You also have the issue that every jurisdiction has different kinds of elections. In mine there are 80 judges running for retention, a craziness unmatched in other states.
In many jurisdictions, like mine, they do put an X next to somebody's name, and then slide the ballot into a scanning machine which counts the votes. However, the issue of returning to a 1920's style all-manual system is the count, the crucial part of the system. In Canada ballots have only 3 or 4 party names listed. Its easy to count those. In Chicago, we will have nearly 90 names on the ballot. The possibility of mischief or mistakes increases dramatically when you let humans do it.
Christ on a crutch, this suggestion is just plain nuts! I'm getting voters who can't figure out right now how not to vote for both guys in a single name race, and you want them to vote three times in varying semi-random patterns. If all voters were from MIT it might work, but until that happy day we need to simplify, not randomize.
They are not dead set against paper trails. In my area, where I'm an election judge, each precinct will have at least one Sequioa touchscreen unit that produces a paper tape. When you review you votes the tape appears in a window next to the machine. When you cast the ballot the tape rolls up into a sealed cassette, which we return to Election Central along with our optical scan ballots and the usb drive that electronically records the votes. We will have already transmitted the electronic results to Central. Sequoia makes paper and paperless versions, as well as the paper ballot scanners. Why do we use both systems? Because the city can' afford to buy all new systems Perhaps Diebold is afraid that officials will balk at buying the more expensive paper trail units. Remember, the customers are you, the taxpayer.
There may be interest in using the fMRI system, but with such scans going for more than US$4,000 a pop, it isn't very likely that law enforcement agencies will be swarming to scan suspects.
This is to all US readers of this thread: What are you doing to help in this situation of creaky or questionable voting systems? In this country most election judges are volunteers, your neighbors. I have done this for two elections in my city, one the 2004 National election and this year's primary in March. I can tell you that at least in my area we need help! I'm 55 years old, and am the youngest election judge in the district. We are moving toward Deibold-type machines, and we don't have computer savvy people to set them up. Whether you use the machine verified paper ballots or all-electronic systems, you need people comfortable with equipment to make them work right. And we don't have enough. By all means suggest better ways to do the job. But it you really want to help join us in actually running an election. The problem isn't corruption, it's not having the right people. Call your local election comission and join up. You will learn much more about the actual nuts and bolts of your government.
There was also a good piece on the invisibility question about 2 weeks ago in Science News , my favorite technical magazine. Its way better than any jerk wire-service story.
Maybe part of the issue here is what sort of book is being published, by whichever route. Editing, marketing and distributing a technical work is very different from doing the same for a literary work. While basic copy editing is a fine skill, doing the same plus editing for more artistic effects is more akin to an art. I don't say this to demean technical works; I write instruction books myself for a living. However, the two challenges in the technical realm are accuracy and clarity, which have a different priority in the litererary world. In my anecdote about Drieser, his editor became more of a junior collaborator, and devoted much of his career to honing the author's words. I don't know if such a committment is needed in technical works.
Faster ways to format material for printing eliminates one bottleneck in the publishing process; easy production of small numbers of physical books eliminates another. What I don't often hear is what sort of publishing book creators actually want to accomplish. I can see these services being very handy for specific kinds of publishing and distribution projects, like your church or organization assembling a cookbook for fund-raising drives or printing a small set of instruction books for your proprietary software. But what does this have to do with the kind of publishing services offered by the big houses: editing, marketing, distribution, etc.? Will the next Da Vinci Code or Tom Clancy thriller be POD? I doubt it. I do see the economies of initial production getting a little cheaper, which might make big publishing houses a tad more willing to try out new authors, but their entire business model is based on shooting for blockbusters. The questions that need to be asked include: How will you get anybody to order your book? Who will edit it and advise you and how to enhance it? (It was said that Theodore Drieser delivered his manuscripts to the editor in a truck, and the editor returned them in a taxicab.) Who will vet the book for libel or accuracy? These are some of the things that reputable publishers currently provide. These programs, as clever as they might be, won't.