I’ve said it before in previous posts we’ve had over the years about voting machines. ATMs and related are bulletproof. The software literally never crashes or connects you to someone else’s account or any number of other potential problems. Voting machines — generally made by companies who also make things like ATMs — are vastly simpler on every level. If they aren’t 100% secure and work perfectly, then it’s because they were designed to not do so.
More W.Va. voters say machines are switching votes
Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.
This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for “Barack Obama” kept flipping to “John McCain”.
In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. Both county clerks said the problem is isolated.
[…]
Wood said some voters might not realize that touch-screen voting machines may take a few seconds to record their choices.“The reaction time [on the machines] may be different. And when you hit the screen a second time, it cancels your vote,” Wood said. “When you get in a hurry, if you go to fast and hit it again, you can cancel what you just did.
[…]
“My son Chris said, ‘Mom, I didn’t vote for the people who came up on that machine. I wanted to go back and vote again. I called the lady at the polls and she said it was my fault because of the way I was punching the buttons.”
“A few seconds” to record your vote? What are these built with, 8008 processors? Actually, given how simple voting machine software is, even those should be fast enough.
And all this assumes you’re allowed to vote after ‘the great purge of 2008.’
Be prepared for a lot more stories in the news like this.
UPDATE: LibertyLover in comment #5 gives one explanation why these machines take so long to register and a possible reason why the bad votes. In other words they went for a system that is inherently not designed for the average user.
You have vending machines for your politicians?
Pen and Paper now! And UN observers NOW!
21,
pen and paper are NOT fool proof. and has been MESSED with sense it started.
Agree with dave..
THERE IS NO REASON, that computerized voting can NOT be used.
LOCK down all the ports.
USE Strange OS types, that have LITTLE use for extra drivers, so nothing can be added.(turtle basic would be cool)
SIMPLIFIED inputs, and WRITE IN VOTES are done on paper, and CALLED IN.
NETWORK connector to a HUB that parses all the votes from the machines, SAVE EACH MACHINES VOTES with a machine number and location, THEN JOINS the data and SENDS it to the BEST place to be joined up.
Once again, it’s only democrat voters who are having problems with voting, no matter how simple you make it. Likely the same people who nuke strange things in the microwave, use lemon dishwasher detergent to make drinks and signal a left turn before veering right.
I’m curious, which party pushed for these touch screen voting machines, and other newfangled technology? Which party pushes for internet voting?
Why is everybody whining about this problem being reported only by democrats? The way I see it, it could be any or both of these reasons:
1) Only someone stupid enough to vote for Obama can encounter such a problem. If you’ve got the brains to vote for McCain then you can work out how to use that stupid machine.
2) This whole thing is just another stunt being pulled by the Obama community. In other words, it simply never happened.
#38, even back in 2000 virtually ALL issues with voting machines in all states were limited to Democrat votes being switched to Republican. Now its been on the record for some time that people who vote democrat are smarter than republican supporters (look it up) so your assertion that only republican supporters are smart enough to use these systems is a bit flawed.
Now if however, it was ALL down to user error, then we’d have a damn good cause for investigating if the ballots and voting machines were deliberately constructed to make voting democrat as difficult as possible (like the infamous butterfly ballot).
#23, Ariane,
Good idea. I’d add that there be two paper print outs, one is saved by the polling station and the other is saved by the voter. The paper ballots could then be tabulated using OCR for verification.
#24, Thomas,
A paper trail does not really solve anything IMO. It simply provides a false sense of security.
At least a paper trail can be verified. How will you verify a computer tabulation?
… how do we know that the computer that is tabulating the results is doing so correctly?
Which is why a paper trail to verify the computer calculation is needed.
#37, Lyin’ Mike,
I’m curious, which party pushed for these touch screen voting machines, and other newfangled technology?
The Republicans.
#40
> At least a paper trail can be verified.
How exactly? The system could just as easily print what you want to see even if it is not what was stored. Suppose you do need a recount. What are you going to do: require that every person submit their receipt? The problem is not nearly as simple as you imagine. What paper trail do you have with paper ballots that validate that the vote you cast was what was counted? Once you drop your ballot into a box, your vote looks just like any other.
I still contend that we need to tie votes to specific people via IDs. That prevents people that should not be allowed to vote from voting and provides a means by which you could validate your vote. If an ATM spits out the wrong balance, you can go online or to a teller to get a listing of what was charged against your account. The balance on the paper receipt means nothing. With either paper or electronic, there is no way to verify your vote was cast and included as intended.
#41 – Thomas
The top-most rule should be that the vote must be “human Verifiable” and that means some kind of permanent paper record for each vote cast.
The solution is actually very simple: two independent systems for counting votes. The first system displays choices and prints a receipt that is ‘humanly readable’, and the receipt is then inserted into a separate machine that counts the votes. The first machine can keep it’s own tab, and the totals can be verified by comparing the results of both systems. If there are any questions, the receipts can be manually counted.
In my county in California the machines are electronic, but they have a paper tape inside them that is shown through a window. You verify your vote twice, once on the screen, after which the paper is printed and then you verify that what the printout says is what the screen says.
The main question is why does anyone object to verifiable votes?
#12: No you don’t have it right. A couple of under reported things about the acorn “scandal”.
First, ACORN was paying people to register voters. These people that do this aren’t either the brightest or most honest people. Guess what? Some of them made up registrations by picking names out of phone books or whatever. What is the worst outcome of that? The slight possibility that someone would be double-registered, which should be detected by the registrar when the stuff is keyed in. Since the names were essentially random, there is virtually no chance any of these fictitious people will be voting fraudulently or otherwise.
Second, it was ACORN itself that reported the problem! This whole thing is designed to make it look like the Democrats are just as crooked as the republicans, and make you not pay attention to reports of REAL election fraud.
Have Democrats ever committed election fraud? Of course they have (which may be why the party has refused to make it an issue). Since the Greeks invented Democracy, crooks have been trying to rig the system. The problem with voting machines is they can do it ever so much more efficiently now, and make it even harder to detect.
#28: Another unreported fact about ATMs at your bank made by the same people that make voting machines, is the billions of dollars in electronic fraud the banking system eats each year. So just maybe the security and accuracy of the bank ATMs is a bit of an illusion.
Chris
#41, Thomas,
Suppose you do need a recount.
This is the real easy part. When the vote is accepted, the machine prints out two paper ballots. One is given to the poll staff and retained. The second is verified by the voter that that is the choices they wanted. If there is any error, all paper ballots and the previous computer vote are destroyed / canceled and the voter’s correct choices reentered. If there is a recount then those paper ballots retained by the polling station are the ones counted. They may be manually counted or using an Optical Character Recognition scanner and software.
I still contend that we need to tie votes to specific people via IDs.
That destroys the privacy of voting. Also, vote denial is much more a problem than is illegal voting.
With either paper or electronic, there is no way to verify your vote was cast and included as intended.
Again, which is why TWO paper ballots are printed, one for the voter and one as a backup for the election. The number of paper ballots should equal the number of electronic cast ballots even without knowing or checking those ballots.
Electronic cash registers print two receipts for card purchases. A top copy usually stays with the business and the copy goes to the customer.
#24 – Thomas,
I thought that was obvious. When a machine in Volusia County, FL (just as an example) says that there were -16,000 (yes, negative) votes for a candidate, use the paper trail.
Also, whenever the count is challenged, there would be a double paper trail, one copy in the voters hand and another in the lock box. I expect it would be the printouts in the lock boxes that would be used for manual recount.
When there is no paper trail and only a number in the computer, voter machine hacking is very simple, just alter the count. No one can check it against anything.
Even the simple logic that negative 16,000 people voting for a candidate is a logical impossibility won’t provide an actual count. But, little pieces of paper will. People can actually count them. Without them, we have nothing but a complete and utter sham.
http://verifiedvoting.org/
#44
RE: Recount
Having people re-enter from paper ballots is frankly unworkable. The error rate would be incredibly high, time consuming and expensive. I see data entry errors all the time with systems I’ve built and that is with trained professionals much less volunteers. The odds of getting the exact same count with volunteers in the event nothing was wrong with a given machine would be very low as the number of ballots increased. In addition, we already have tons of problems with the handling paper ballots both before and after elections. See stories of paper ballots ending up in trash bins, people’s garages etc.
Again, electronic cash registers are a poor example because the volume of transaction verification over say a month is orders of magnitude lower than an election. You don’t have millions of people asking for their receipt to be verified. Furthermore, the store does not match against their own paper. They match against their computer. In the event that your paper receipt does not match the store’s computer receipt, they would either believe the computer or give you the difference just to make you happy. Now imagine that millions of people wanted their receipt verified. It is simply not workable.
IMO, we must find an all electronic means of ensuring the election results are valid. To make that work, there must be some means of ensuring that the data of a given vote has not been altered. To do that, we need a digital signature on each vote in addition to some sort of verification system that is independent of the voting system.
This is such an easy problem to solve, that I think they DON NOT WANT IT SOLVED.
Use a touch-screen computer to create a human readable ballot.
After you vote, you check your ballot for accuracy and put it in a box.
This way, election official have data for early tabulation but there is an official unambiguous hard copy for disputed elections.
I am not convinced at all anything sinister is taking place. Given the average American can’t program a VCR, the clock on their microwave oven blinks “12:00”, and the type of computer problems I field from my friends and family, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that some people are totally dumbfounded by electronic voting. Aren’t you assuming people out there know what they’re doing?
To all the conspiracy theorists, use your memories. All these electronic machines are the result of panicked reactions by legislatures to the fact that some people in Florida were too stupid to operate their ballots. The outcry for this ‘new technology’ was from DEMOCRATS.
Of course, the Bush Derangement Syndrome afflicted will blame the R’s for getting what they asked for. They demanded electronic voting machines because that evil Republican paper was rigged to get Bush elected, blah, blah, freakin’ blah.
You asked for these machines, you got them. Too bad. Now live with it or shut up and just follow the directions on the plain old paper ballot.
Corollary: Those who can not operate the ballot correctly should not be the example used to ‘reform’ the voting process.
We once held an election by students in which they voted for president and such using an apple II. The results were instant. The code was so short I typed it in using basic.
Their results didn’t match that of the actual vote by the adults who voted at the same location in the school lobby.
I’d say stick with paper ballots or a dirt simple mechanical system.
It can get really hard to hack gears and get away with it.
Anyone that thinks people don’t get money out of ATMs who shouldn’t is nuts.
The people that know the most about computers trust them the least because people on both sides and all around have to many reasons and chances to hack the systems.
I lived and voted for almost 20 years in a town that used punch card ballots. After voting I would always pull the card out and look at the holes to make sure I punched the right ones. Never, NEVER, not once did I see a hanging chad, dimpled chad or anything other than a clean hole where I intended it to be. That makes me wonder what kind of cheap-ass cards did they use in Florida to have so many problems? Did no one tell the voters they had to push the little puncher all the way in?
I would love to see international voting observers, but Congress passed a bill specifically outlawing it. (What were they expecting?)
#51 – “That makes me wonder what kind of cheap-ass cards did they use in Florida to have so many problems? ”
I really doubt it had so much to do with the quality of the cards themselves as it did the quality of the card operator. 😉
#46 – Thomas,
I’m very surprised by your response. I am a computer programmer. I can assure you that there is absolutely no way to prove a program correct without an external source of verification.
You also missed my point about the two copies of the vote. One goes into a locked box on the side of the election machine. The other goes to the voter’s hand. The former would be the one used in a recount. The latter is for emergency or for particular complaints about individual votes, such as the ones in this article.
However, the important point is that any computer that simply tells you a number is a wildly insufficient voting machine. There must be a paper trail. Otherwise you have this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbuwbkqAe_A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WMG34cv0zM
What struck me about the article was “Chris” crying to his mommy that his vote didn’t register correctly. What is he, a 5-year-old ACORN registree?
All your vote are belong to us.
Liberty Lover is incorrect. 1 to 2 inch separation is not even close. So the whole use of that as a explanation for the switched votes is bullshit. If there were 1 or 2 inches between the touch screen and the panel there would be VERY noticeable areas along the edge. VERY NOTICEABLE!!
Now if you want to talk about a calibration issue that is a whole different thing but parallax is not the cause of that problem.
#52, geof,
I really doubt it had so much to do with the quality of the cards themselves as it did the quality of the card operator.
Most of the problems arose from:
1) The style of “butterfly” ballot. The directions said to pick a candidate from each page even though the number of candidates took up two pages. That ended up disqualifying many ballots when they picked two people.
2) More common was that the machines were old and hadn’t been cleaned out. The chad build-up inside the machines made it difficult to punch out the proper hole.
3) related to #2) was that the punches were worn and dulled from use, thus hindering a clean punch.
#57 Fusion said, “Most of the problems arose … The style of “butterfly” ballot. The directions said to pick a candidate from each page …”
2nd graders smarter than Florida democrat voters…
“In various experiments conducted around the country last week, schoolchildren had little difficulty understanding and using butterfly ballots. Second-graders in Leesburg, Ga., voted for their favorite Disney character using a butterfly ballot. “School psychologist Ron McGee asked the 8-year-olds at Lee County Elementary to vote for their favorite Disney character, using a ballot similar to the one that has caused controversy in Palm Beach County, Fla.,”. reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He said not one of his 74 young voters marked a choice they did not intend to mark on the ballot, “
Whatever happened to PAPER and a lead pencil?
Fusion, I think your system also destroys the privacy of ballots. If a voter has a receipt for how he voted, that eliminates secret ballots.
Chitty, chitty hung chit, bang bang. In to mail no 52. In all probility it wasn’t the ballots, it was the idiots reading them.
#56, I didn’t say that parallax was the problem here. I said “typically.” Perhaps I should have said that it is typical in industrial applications where ruggedizing is required. In these applications touch screens do indeed sit 1 to 2 inches over the monitor. It makes it easier to replace the monitor with as little downtime as possible. It isn’t as prevalent now due to LCD flat screens, but I still see quite a few applications where this is a problem.
Without actually seeing the device and the model of the screen, this is all guesswork.