NYT Exposé, The Trouble With Touch Screens

ZenFountain

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January 6, 2008

Can You Count on Voting Machines?

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

[Full Article]
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To little too late?
 
ZenFountain said:
To little too late?
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You do understand that Diebold machines were not used in Cuyahoga County in the 2004 election? The net-left's wholly fabricated "controversy" about the Ohio results was entirely without foundation.
 
pomeroo said:
You do understand that Diebold machines were not used in Cuyahoga County in the 2004 election? The net-left's wholly fabricated "controversy" about the Ohio results was entirely without foundation.
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Yeah, besides the mountains of fact, it is entirely without foundation.

Why do you think democracy is something that only "the left" cares about?
 
Sir Robin Goodfellow said:
What's wrong with pencil and paper? Why the need for fancy machines?
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I'm only going by hearsay here, since I'm a Canadian like you and haven't voted in an American election. But my understanding is Americans vote for a lot of positions in local elections, and (I think) civic, county, and state positions are all up for grabs. So you may have a dozen or more positions that need to be filled (mayor, council, school board, county board of commissioners, state stuff, judges, perhaps even the dogcatcher), and several candidates for each. That's one long ballot, and a lot of counting! No wonder the Americans are looking for a good way to automate the process.

For Americans, here in Canada (at least in my city):
* Local level: mayor, one councillor (for the ward we're in), and school board trustees
* The city is not part of a county, so there's no county level people to vote for
* Provincial level (provincial elections are on separate cycles from city elections, which are independent again from the federal election cycle): we vote for only one position: who will represent us in provincial legislature. Usually there are half a dozen names on the ballot.
* All judges are appointed, not elected
* For federal elections, we vote for only one position: who will represent us in Parliament. Usually there are half a dozen names on the ballot.

Our ballots are likewise much shorter.
 
Well speaking from personal experience, I've never found our paper ballots that arduous. Though, I like voting for all those things, on account those local elections are much more likely to have an effect on my day to day life.

I would rather have a human being counting votes, with all the inherent risks and error in that, than a machine. Seems like it would be messier to try to fix an election based on paper ballots. With electronic voting, all you need is a technician with an agenda; the machines could be fixed before anyone even votes.
 
The preferential system here would be a bit hard to reliably automate.

When we vote in Federal elections we get a small A5 piece of paper with the people trying to get into the House of Representatives on it, which we number preferentially, and we get a piece of paper that is A4 in height but about a metre long and full of squares for the Senate (the senate isn't representative but states are equally represented (12 senators) plus 4 senators that represent the territories (2 ACT + Jervis Bay Territory, 2 NT + Indian Ocean Territories Norfolk Island is not represented at all)).

The senate ballot is divided lengthwise with a single row at the top with the party name, a line, and then numerous boxes below the line with the name of each candidate below in columns that correspond with the top row.

We can put a 1 in a box above the line, or chose our preferences of the senators below the line.

It is actually far simpler then I have made it sound.
 
JoeEllison said:
Yeah, besides the mountains of fact, it is entirely without foundation.

Why do you think democracy is something that only "the left" cares about?
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Wrong as usual. The loony-left produced zero facts. The Kerry campaign agrees with me.
 
JEROME DA GNOME said:
You can not write code which has the correct outcome with pencil and paper.
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You'd have to alter the codes at the precinct level, since every precinct has a unique ballot. The conspiracy necessary would rival the truthers 9/11 conspiracy in complexity and numbers of people involved.
 
WildCat said:
You'd have to alter the codes at the precinct level, since every precinct has a unique ballot. The conspiracy necessary would rival the truthers 9/11 conspiracy in complexity and numbers of people involved.
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Not really. Put the attack in at OS kernal level.
 
geni said:
There was no shortage of facts produced. The argument was over what they ammounted to.
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There was a shortage that amounted to no facts at all. There wasn't a shred of evidence suggesting any Republican vote fraud in Ohio.
 
pomeroo said:
There was a shortage that amounted to no facts at all. There wasn't a shred of evidence suggesting any Republican vote fraud in Ohio.
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The fromer doesn't follow from the latter.
 
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geni said:
The fromer doesn't follow from the latter.
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I don't recall suggesting that one statement "followed" from the other. They are related: The left-net's fabricated "controversy" has no facts supporting it, and there isn't a shred of evidence for Republican vote fraud in Ohio.
 
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I like this part:

Indeed, in a more sanguine political environment, this level of error might be considered acceptable. But in today’s highly partisan and divided country, elections can be decided by unusually slim margins — and are often bitterly contested.
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Typical media nostalgia for that mythical time when things weren't highly partisan and divided.

Reading the story it seems obvious that a desperate attempt to find a solution for a one-time crisis led to many more problems. Out here in Arizona, Republican Evan Mecham was elected governor with about 40% of the vote in 1986, with two Democrats (one nominally an independent) getting about 30% each. Mecham proved such a disaster that the establishment decided it had to institute a "solution", requiring a run-off election among the top two finishers in the event no candidate got 50%.

Well, you can probably guess what happened. In the next election, the Republican candidate got about 49.9% of the vote, the Democrat about 49.7%, with minor party candidates taking up the rest. Everybody grumbled about how ridiculous it was that we had to have another vote, and so of course the law was changed back to what it was before (after the Republican won the runoff).

Personally, I like the optical scan ballots we use out here; they are easily counted via machine, they reject improperly filled out ballots so the voter can correct any accidental overvotes, and they provide the desired paper trail for recounts.
 
pomeroo said:
I don't recall suggesting that one statement "followed" from the other. They are related: The left-net's fabricated "controversy" has no facts supporting it, and there isn't a shred of evidence for Republican vote fraud in Ohio.
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It had facts supporting it (for example there genuinly various ways to rig the polls on the machines used). What the facts amounted to is a seperate question.
 
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