Maybe this is nothing. All hardware and software glitches sometimes. I’ve build and written enough of both to know that. But, as the saying goes, if we can land a man on the moon, why can’t something as relatively simple as this work 100% after all this time with teams of professionals creating them?
Glitches cited in early voting
After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors — and a caution against the careless casting of ballots.
Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen — the final voting step.
Election officials say they aren’t aware of any serious voting issues. But in Broward County, for example, they don’t know how widespread the machine problems are because there’s no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.
Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it’s not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot — essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
Huh? 15 steps? I doubt adjusting a nuclear reactor requires 15 steps!
Is it too late to get the UN or some country free from government corruption help monitor our elections ?
Adjusting a nuclear reactor only requires a degree in Nuclear or Mechanical Engineering. Piece of cake. Just remember Chernobyl. 😉
it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,
The poll worker’s union specifically dictates that only a professional poll station recalibration technician (PSRT) may perform such tasks. Currently PSRT’s are on strike for shorter working hours which are currently 5 hours per day, and more vacation time, currrently 362 days per year.
It could be worse, you could live in the Chicago area and dela with stuff like this, from the Chicago Tribune 10-30-06
———
Chicago and Cook County election officials on Sunday welcomed a federal investigation into the foreign ownership of their electronic voting machine manufacturer and said it will not distract their preparations for the Nov. 7 election.
“It will clear the air once and for all,” said Tom Leach, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
The response follows weekend reports that the parent company of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems is under review for alleged ties to the leftist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Sequoia denied any improper influence on American elections and said Sunday that it asked for the investigation along with Smartmatic Corp., which is owned by Venezuelans. But the companies did not expect it to be reported just days before the election.
http://tinyurl.com/yfgvuj
[ed. PLEASE use tinyurl.com for long urls]
Replace all card and paper voting machines with electronic voting machines.
Lets see some of the benefits…
Cost of many millions for the machines (many many many millions).
Not quite as reliable as paper (ok, much much less reliable).
May or may not leave a paper trail (they have not been so far).
Easier to commit fraud with (recent stories of security issues).
Faster vote count (if you don’t count the time need for a recount since no one in their right mind would trust the counts obtained by this method).
Sounds like a deal to me! Lets do it!
Signed,
Your local elected official
…but you forgot the principal benefit:
More money in the pockets of the Republican-supporting manufacturers. Oh, wait, that’s just a coïncidence…
On the Herald article. Talk about a sloppy or an intentionally misleading collection of quotes. If B and C below are in fact real problems, how in hell could someone lead and bracket the article with A? That’s like saying, if three people walking ahead of you fall into an open elevator shaft, you might want to be extra careful when you step into the same shaft.
A. ” a caution against the careless casting of ballots.”
B. “Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen — the final voting step.”
C. “He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.”
And then there’s this one below. I believe what this means is, “our day job operating the Slurpee machine at 7-11 didn’t prepare us for all this needing to think ahead.”
“Election officials say they aren’t aware of any serious voting issues. But in Broward County, for example, they don’t know how widespread the machine problems are because there’s no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.
Slight better methodology next. Which would be good, if this wasn’t also a complete useless effort, given this is basically a one day election. And those votes on the machines that are shut down, is that a nostalgia fix for folks praying for a hanging chad redux?
“In Miami-Dade, incidents are logged and reported daily and recorded in a central database. Problem machines are shut down.”
and…
”In the past, Miami-Dade County would send someone to correct the machine on site,” said Lester Sola, county supervisor of elections. Now, he said, “We close the machine down and put a seal on it.”
Wonder if anyone has made it clear to them not to use the seals from Sea World when they do this.
And last, but not f-ing least, the quote below. Anyone who reads this article SHOULD be an instant conspiracy theorist. Call PETA, parrots all over South Florida are going to be endangered from looking down at the bottom of their cage, reading this and FOPL (Falling Off Perch Laughing).
“That’s exactly the kind of problem that sends conspiracy theorists into high gear — especially in South Florida, where a history of problems at the polls have made voters particularly skittish.”
Skittish? How about crapping in your pants” terrified that the election scientist, who were bewildered by paper chads, have found a f*%k-up accelerator system to best their last effort.
I find it amazing that a country who hurtles around the planet telling everyone how to be a democracy appears unable to run their own election process free from substantial corruption.
Because ballot boxes were never “stuffed” in the past or destroyed all-together. I have little faith that any system will be anything close to perfect, and all this hysteria over the ability to tamper with these machine, which are prone to physical security issues just like the paper ballot system, is mighty disingenuous.
They don’t tell you that when “out of calibration” it votes an all republican ticket.
Opps!
#10 Mike wrote:
“I have little faith that any system will be anything close to perfect, and all this hysteria over the ability to tamper with these machine, which are prone to physical security issues just like the paper ballot system, is mighty disingenuous.”
There’s the rub. Because of the miracle of digital technology and networking, you DO NOT have to be physically present at the voting site to affect the vote count. This also means that once you have done what is needed to modify the vote count of one machine, you can affect changes to multiple voting sites relatively easily.
A very big difference between paper ballots and electronic voting machines!
Steve
Who said this is a democracy
Hail King George!
Long Live The King!
Why do they hate this country so much?
#11 – When the voter-machine Diebold family head declares Ohio WILL be delivered to the Republicans, and Ohio Republicans subsequently block every attempt to investigate, and Republicans lead a self-righteous campaign to put an end to exit polling, and float a fiction that exit polls are just naturally somehow less accurate in precincts that wind up in the Republican column, and a Republican Supreme Court blocks a state court-mandated recount in Florida… – just what the hell do YOU think is going on?
Oh, Tammany Hall did the same thing in local New York City elections with paper ballots as recently as the 1930s. Not to mention the first Mayor Daly in Chicago. Well, that makes it okay then.
Remove those machines. Burn them. Bury the ashes, and then sow the ground with salt so that nothing will grow over their burial cairn until glaciers come to clean up the mess.
The Republicans will hold onto both houses come November. You heard it here first: many machine “glitches”, many adjustments will be made, and scarily, most of all we will hear no reports of failures in most areas — because they’ll have the bugs worked out of the dial-in-and-change-the-vote software.
Make that #10. Guess I needed a recount of my own.
And to forestall all the it-happened-with-paper posts:
No, it didn’t. Paper was paper. Computer voting machines can be instructed to alter the votes in any way, from multiple access methods, and there is
NO
WAY
TO
EVER
TELL
IT
HAPPENED.
FOREVER.
A single human being can dial in and hack an election, and no one in the world except that human will ever know.
It already happened, clumsily, in 2002 and 2004. Exit polls don’t just suddenly fail. Hell, exit polls were criticized for being TOO accurate and ruining voter turnout in the western US. They suddenly started sparking and failing in key contested areas with Diebold machines. Impossible. Billions to one odds. Not happening.
Occam’s razor: someone changed the vote totals on the accumulators in Ohio.
Witness in two weeks a major upset as the Republicans hold on to both houses — and NO ONE will question the machines. The pollsters will be blamed again.
#17 – Sadly you will be proven correct.
Next prediction? The first newspaper man that “Watergates” the story will be sent to gitmo under the new McCain law. He/she will then be worked over (because its now ok) and give up the source. The person in administration who deap-throats the info to that reporter will be shot or simply dissapear.
I was listening to npr the other day (local station: KUOW, king county, seattle) and they were interviewing poll workers, and one of them said that she had to have “young people” help her out – in order to get the voting machines working (apparently they were stuck in Vietamiese mode or something)
Keep in mind that voting machines are designed to be operated by old people (aka poll workers and the people that vote – aka all old people) old people are notorious for not understanding current (or even not so current) technology, I’m not really sure how they’ll resolve this issue (other than getting new blood into the system, that is)
If you enjoy podcasts, “Science Friday” from NPR had a very interesting discussion on this topic just a couple of days ago. Good listening as are all the podcasts from that show.
Basically… why the heck do we not have a voting system that is verifiable? All we need is an electronic machine that fills out a printed paper ballot for you, so you can read it, and then the paper ballot is counted separately by different machine.
Good listening:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/sciencefriday/scifri-2006102711.mp3
#12
These are supposed to be stand alone machines aren’t they? Why would you connect them to the internet and add an unnecessary attack vector? As long as they are stand alone, they shouldn’t be assumed to be any more or less secure than a paper ballot box as they are both susceptible to malfeasance by poll workers.
Why doesn’t Microsoft step up to the plate with a voting machine..
hehe
but seriously.. this sounds like a job for the peeps that make slot machines.. trouble is.. its seems like they are trying to make a voting machine on the cheap
I wonder why more states have not realized they can bypass much of this confusion by adopting voting by mail. If a paper trail is wanted, make the ballot duplicative.
you americans are oh-so-funny lately LOL
i’m canadian.. obviously
What’s the problem with fuckin’ paper and pen? It is a very simple solution: Paper and pen. Everyone knows how to use it. It is a little harder to tamper with and paper is itself a trail. Besides that, it is cheap, very cheap.
Those machines ought to be banned by the the constitutions (yes, I wrote it purposefully in plural, as each country has its constitution).
#21 Mike wrote “These are supposed to be stand alone machines aren’t they? ”
A good question. I am not sure about the machine mentioned above. For Diebold voting machines apparently some connect to a network and some don’t.
From http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf
“NETWORK OVERVIEW The Diebold voting machines cannot work in isolation. They must be able to both receive a ballot definition file as input and report voting results as output. As described in Section 2, there are essentially two ways to load a voting terminal with an initial election configuration: via some removable media, such as a flash memory card, or over a network connection.”
From http://people.howstuffworks.com/vote-tampering.htm
” Election officials either transmit the tallies electronically, via a network connection, to a central location for the county, or else carry the memory card by hand to the central location.”
Steve
During the years that these machines were developed, three of the e–voting vendors, Diebold, E S & S, and Hart Intercivic, all hired foreign tech personnel using the federal government’s controversial H-1B visa program. Many H-1B workers do not have the technical skills that they claim to have, and many have not undergone proper background checks. These workers will work for much less pay than Americans, and they cannot change jobs as easily as Americans can, so they are very popular with cost-cutting executives.
A fourth vender, Sequoia, is owned by Smartmatic, a Venezuelan firm which does quite a bit of programming work offshore.
I am afraid that U.S. elections are no longer under U.S. control