I can't even give obviously edited. Ever used a lower-end Android phone? I have, and this looks like a video directly from one. Jittery, frame skipping mess.
Obviously edited b/c of the distinct scene cut between the candidate selection that takes up the first half of the video, and the cast vote button which takes up the second half.
All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together.
Evidence, citations? Not at all obvious. On the surface, looks quite real. And I've had enough touch-screen devices to know that mis-calibration is common, so it's plausible.
Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.
This was my thought exactly. If someone was going through the trouble of altering votes, it would make no sense to make note of this within UI elements, it could just as easily "secretly" change the votes for 1/8 (just my theoretical magical number) voters and alter the results just enough without being noticeable.
from the article (emphasis mine):
> I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
Except this just frustrates the voter and maybe he doesn't bother voting for Obama at all. There's no accusation of "altering" the votes because how do you track, "Touchscreen didn't select Obama, voter just gave up?"
Donning my tin foil hat for a minute here -- I think if I were to try and attempt to commit voter fraud through the machines, I'd make it this obvious intentionally so it seemed like a legitimate accident to those who noticed; "It's too obvious to be fraud"
It would probably cause a small dent and shift by people who don't notice or are confused (elderly).
If you had complete control over a voting machine, it wouldn't make any sense to try to lower turnout or confuse anyone- you'd want people to vote and leave without having noticed anything, so you could change their vote.
The result here is that the voting machine was taken out of duty and will be investigated. If the strategy was to make the error so outlandish that nobody would believe it was happening, the strategy has failed.
Since it's pretty obvious that this would be the outcome, it's not a good strategy, and is therefore not likely to have been enacted.
Yep. That's clearly what's happening, and given that there's instant feedback, the user would know there's a problem, and either ask for a different machine or adjust until the system represents their actual intent.
I'm not claiming it is malicious, but would they? If they can swing even 1% of the votes of people who just don't care enough, or would feel embarrassed at failing to use a machine, they can have a significant impact while having an obvious scapegoat.
Assuming it's miscalibration, how many people used this machine before the video? how many afterward?
>I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
That sounds like they were very likely the first person to complain. What did the rest do?
I've used that exact type of machine to vote in North Carolina (but this ballot is not from North Carolina). You have all sorts of people pounding on the screen all day.
Remember the reason we all wanted electronic voting after the year 2000: because it gives absolutely clear answers, not necessarily better answers. (Even the best systems have errors because there are humans involved.) You don't have to debate whether that smudge counts or does not count as a vote.
Electronic voting should be allowed but not unless it prints out a ballot with all your selections on it so you can verify and have a real paper trail; not some bit in a database that can be changed and most likely has been changed in the past based on grand jury testimony from one of the diebold programmers. As a programmer knowing how insecure programs are I want paper for something like this.
> "Electronic voting should be allowed but not unless it prints out a ballot with all your selections on it so you can verify and have a real paper trail"
The lack of a receipt is deliberate and prevents vote-buying. A carbon copy of your vote will open as many avenues to fraud as it will close.
With everyone and their dog carrying around a camera in their pocket by means of a cell phone? Hardly. Anyone interested in selling their vote could easily take a photo of their ballot (with some identifying info added to the photo as well to show it wasn't a copy from a friend) to prove they voted the way they were paid.
Even if this theoretically did increase the chance of vote-buying, I think it's still a worthwhile tradeoff for the massive increase in accountability we get from it.
I've used this machine in another state, and it absolutely generates a paper trail. There is a rolling receipt going on the left-hand side of the machine behind glass that records every single button press you do, and scrolls out of view when you complete voting so the next guy can't see it.
It's not perfect, and not my preferred system, but it's pretty decent.
I'd prefer to keep a receipt for myself, with a randomly generated serial number on it, so at some point I could verify that the digital record of my vote #158FA134 matches the paper receipt and who I voted for.
As others have said, this is exactly how you can start buying votes. Pull any book about cryptographic voting off the shelf and this is treated as a design flaw.
Because if you can prove to a third-party how you voted, you can sell your vote, or coerce someone else to vote a certain way.
It's one of the biggest challenges in crypto-voting systems. And there are some solutions. But we need to hammer down on the "silly people, why not just print a receipt" idea really hard.
But I still would like to be able to have it proven to me that the way I voted matches what the system records. To me, that seems more important, but I also cannot say that it's more important than your points. Hm.
If the receipts are anonymous, they can't prove how you voted, only that you were able to obtain a receipt. So what if we increase the supply of receipts enough to destroy the value of an individual receipt? For example, voting machines could drop duplicate receipts in a bucket that voters have access to.
Jim is not a nice man and is very demanding and abusive and goes to vote. He wants his wife to vote for X, but he suspects that she will vote for Y. Today, she can vote for X or Y and tell her husband that she voted for Y. He has no way to prove her wrong. With receipts, he can tell her, on no uncertain terms, that she is to show him her receipt afterwards. If she doesn't produce a receipt showing she votes for X, he'll beat her. With receipts she does not have a free vote, without receipts she has a free vote.
I want to buy your vote, and will pay you €10 to vote for X. Today, you can vote for who ever you want, and tell me you voted for X and demand payment. I have no way to prove you wrong. Hence vote buying is hard to do, because you can't know if you're actually buying votes. With receipts, I can ask to see your receipt, and only pay out if you vote for X. With receipts, vote buying now becomes an actual thing that I can do.
Yes, no system is perfect, and the current system does have that flaw. But "record yourself marking the paper and putting it in the box" doesn't scale. If lots of people in an area do that, someone'll figure out what's going on.
> does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration
I think you mean if the machine was intentionally designed to alter votes, it wouldn't do it in this fashion. The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.
> The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.
Altering is an action, not something passive. If a machine is altering votes then it must be doing that intentionally. What is happening here is the person interacting with this machine is interacting in such a way that makes the machine believe he is pressing elsewhere on the screen.
The title reads as if the machine is doing something, the reality is the user is doing something in such a way that the machine believes they're doing something else, due to poor calibration.
> I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
Then the issue could be the system is damaged. There are these sort of touch screen systems all over England in train stations and every single one I've used has problems with the "next" button because of how much usage they see.
My point is "alter" is something that has to be done on purpose, by using the word alter they are stating the system KNOWS the user is voting for Obama and changes it to Romney.
His test is far from conclusive. Some subsection of the screen working incorrectly while other sections work correctly is entirely consistent with a miscalibrated or faulty touchscreen.
I disagree. If this person decided to walk away because of confusion/frustration/etc, then it would've been one less vote cast and would have altered that individuals vote. It wasn't intentional, but a software/hardware bug.
But maybe the programmer didn't do this. Maybe it's something under the election worker's control like calibration settings on only part of the screen, or the spacing of the ballot, or something else user-configurable. Just a thought?
Highly doubtful that an election machine would be able to pass any standard tests that would allow it to be specifically rigged like that by an election worker. If it were built to calibrate on only part of a screen, it would be ripe for rigging by both sides.
The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical.
It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.
For the most part, things aren't as bad as they seem. It's a huge country and any oddities gain a great deal of traction. Most votes go simply and smoothly.
That being said, I'm taking a two hour drive later today to vote because my vote-by-mail ballot never arrived, so...
It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.
You only hear about the ballots that crash, not the millions that land safely every election.
Selection bias, perhaps. Sure, there will be a small amount of miscalibrated machines. And a smaller amount will happen to be miscalibrated to select the wrong candidate. But you'll only ever hear about those latter cases. The others will be caught and corrected without internet vitriol.
If you vote with paper, you don't worry at all if it's counted right.
Note that this doesn't mean it's counted right: it just means you have no way to worry about it. Maybe election officials are debating whether that line for Joe is a mistake or not. Now the problems are seen immediately instead of unseen, which was one of the driving forces for people who didn't want to ever go through the hanging chad issue again.
I'm certainly not saying computer voting is better than paper voting -- they each have their trade-offs. (I'd prefer paper ballots that voters can "self-scan" by a machine that is very conservative in what it accepts, but that's a whole separate discussion.)
Dear Sir, As an Indian I can testify that we actually have far more election abuse - people being blocked from entering a voting booth, vote boxes(still vote on paper) being stolen, voting booths set on fire...
Of course, again, there is media acting as a watchdog, and a hope that the manipulation is statistically insignificant.
FWIW, most of the world votes on paper, and if history's anything to go by paper ballot is way more reliable than electronic, at least when it comes to auditability. I'm sure it's possible to design a secure and tamper-proof electronic voting system[0] with a great, useable interface... but nobody seems interested in doing that.
[0] system, not machine, because you most likely want the machine recording votes and the machine tallying them to be fully separate.
I would like to disagree with Mr.Param who is either being a cynic or trying to be "me-too".
India is aggressively moving away from paper-ballot voting to EVM's. In our last general elections, a million electronic voting machines (EVM's) were used which reduces vote-rigging, ballot capture etc. In maybe 5 years, we will be completely rid of paper-ballots.
All right, I have been living in the US for a while, and didn't know about the move to electronic voting. However, my point about there being FAR more abuse in India stands. Here are some references:
Fatal attacks near polling booth - 2009 - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123985213176424031.html
this is a lot of people. I am sure that if we investigate the details of elections in India, Indonesia, and Brazil, we will find an array of fudged votes and issues.
In other words, I am pretty sure that the error rate for the mix of remote/paper/electronic voting will hold pretty constant regardless of population size.
Brazil actually has a very organized election. Aside from bad politicians we have to chose from, the election does not have many problems. We have a judicial system just for election (with judges and clear laws) ready to take actions (and they do take) when something goes wrong. All election occurs in one day, a sunday so everyone can vote, and the results usually come in less than 4 hours, because all vote is electronic.
> But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)
The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system.
Everything that is a disadvantage for Obama is naturally going to get more attention, because most of the internet age that use sites like reddit and HN are the sort that want progress.
I'll bet there are machines that have this problem (assuming this is not an isolated incident and his a software/hardware issue) that vote for Obama when Romney is clicked, but that won't be big news in this circle of news because who cares about Romney here?
The republicans are the party of liars. Who is more likely to actually commit these crimes? Republicans. Even the 4 votes thing you came up with is probably republicans spreading lies.
What? Are you denying Romnesia, or the lies that led to the Iraq war. Or Nixon's party. Or that the military-industrial xomplex and big oil is allied with republicans. Or Peter Norvig's analysis of who you should vote for http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html
It's easy to call "troll" and try to sneakily shout out the other person. You should try some self-reflection if you're a republican. If you've got enough inquisitiveness to be on HN, apply that to deciphering what the republican party actually stands for.
I'm 100% in favor of that on specific issues, and I wouldn't dispute a claim that Republicans lie more. But calling the Republic Party the "party of liars" and using that argument during a discussion of voter fraud? Not classy. Especially not in this community.
You have presented what is nearly the most asinine counter-intellectual analysis I have ever read.
The linked facts do not support you. Only 4% of the population is in that category and of that category 63% voted D, 35% voted R. In no world does this equate to D are represented in the majority by those without High School educations.
Further-more, (from your own source) of the 28% of the population who are college graduates 50% voted D 48% voted R. This explicitly indicates more College Graduates voted D than R.
In no world does this equate to D are represented in the majority by those without High School educations.
I never said that. If you want to criticize my post like an asshole, at least read it first.
Are you by any chance a Democrat without a high school degree? If so, I forgive your lack of reading comprehension skills. In that case, let me give you an example:
If I said, "The best racial demographic for Democrats is blacks" (which is just as true as my statement about education), that would not imply that I think most Democrats are black.
Your statement directly states a comparison between R and D percentages and uses the ambiguous term 'best'. The idea that you can state with any credulity that 2% of the population is 'better' than 15-16% of the population, or that that comment has any value to anyone else is the height of vapid punditry.
That's some cute pedantry, requires some very creative reading to come to that self-righteous interpretation. I find semantic pedantry more vapid than data, though.
Yet again, the Republican candidate scores his highest vote share among college graduates, and the Democratic candidate scores his highest vote share among people without high school degrees.
You have yet to inform us as to how or why this pedantry is useful, relevant, or rewarding. If my interpretation of your connotation or intent is somehow incorrect, your arguments have not materialized.
Re-iterating your mouth noises does not show for the depth of the thought that originated them.
While I critiqued your lack-of-thought construct, you immediately countered with both an ad hominem and appeal to authority.
The guy I replied to asked for a source for the statement,
Someone who votes Democrat is equally likely to have a college education as a Republican.
I provided a source showing that this is at least close to true, and possibly it tilts a bit towards the Republicans rather than being equally likely. I also provided an interesting tidbit that, while the college educated demographic is best for Republicans, the no high school degree demographic is best for Democrats.
Are you offended that I answered the guy's question by linking to some data, or that I added a sentence about an interesting tidbit of information from that data? Because immediately after I posted, you replied with unnecessary insults and ridiculous straw men. I hope you can understand why your post elicited a facetious response from me, which you self-righteously deem "ad hominem".
Are you confused enough to think that my comment was a compliment?
> Yeah, statistically, democrats are smarter than republicans. I must be smarter than average!
If it makes you feel good, so be it. Please be sure to keep that cork on the fork.
Quick. Since you are so smart: How many years will it take to pay off 16 trillion dollars in debt while paying interest and continuing to over-spend at a rate of over 1 trillion per year?
In your answer consider the continued erosion of our manufacturing base, increased costs of a welfare society, erosion of human capital due to crappy union-driven education, the effects of tax increases and Obamacare.
Now, I expect an answer. Real numbers. No bullshit. Fire-up Excel and give us some numbers. See, there's the problem with self-appointed "smart ones": Talk is easy and cheap. Show me the facts, numerically, and we can start to have an intelligent discussion about how to move this country forward.
I'll bet you a cookie you don't move a finger to show HN readers a single proposal on how to deal with our national debt. Not one.
I am an independent thinker who appreciates portions of both platforms. I can't be swayed by pretty speeches, posters, ads, t-shirts, debate "gotcha's", etc. I cringe to think that there are Americans who vote "for the team" rather than through careful analysis and consideration of the issues in the context of the times we live in. The bigoted dismissal of millions of citizens by attaching a political label to them is sad and despicable.
Here's your chance to show us you are not just a troll. What's your answer to my question. Any reader should be able to plug your numbers into a spreadsheet and verify them.
Precisely what I predicted. Even worst: You don't seem to be willing to (or capable of?) distilling through data on your own and have to resort to being supported by others.
If you even took a few minutes to play with the numbers you'd be horrified to realize where we are and, more importantly, where we are going.
Creating an economic model with a spreadsheet is a really scary and sobering exercise. I've done a couple. The aim was to see what needed to change in order to achieve what most would recognize as solid economic recovery over a period of time. I played with periods in the range of 25 to 50 years. And, while the numbers can never be 100% accurate, the reality painted by the model is nothing less than scary. Even if my numbers where 100%, nah, 200%, off the reality they paint is horrible.
No, you can't fix it by taxing the rich. Not even close. You can't even fix it by taxing everyone. You just can't. You have to cut spending with a vengeance and, yes, adjust taxes --for everyone-- slightly. Let's not get facts get in the way of a good bullshit discussion.
Do a model, discuss it with a few people and then go read the likes of Peter Norvig and see what you think of them.
Here's my answer to Norvig's "Why do you support Obama?" segment on the page you linked:
"End of war in Iraq". Who the hell cares. The war is a rounding error compared to what we've been doing to this country under Obama. What? Five, maybe six trillion dollars in additional debt? Please.
"Focus on al Qaeda and Taliban" Who the fuck cares? What happened in Libya demonstrates full-well that terrorism wasn't challenged in any way by getting this guy. Old history.
"Universal Health Care" Disaster. Talk to a few business people to get real data. They are scared to death. If Obamacare is so good, why did he have to grant exceptions en-masse to unions?
"Increase US Manufacturing" I used to own a manufacturing business. I saw, first hand, what was going on and have the scars to prove it. The economic dump was so deep that some kind of a pull-back was inevitable. I love it when people take credit for things they had nothing to do with. I use to do a lot of day-trading. There were days when stocks would over sell to such a degree that you absolutely KNEW --if you were conscious enough to remove yourself from the fray-- that they were going to come back up. Some of the easiest money I ever made, both on the long and short side.
"Save Detroit" Detroit has been an ugly mess for decades. The coddling of the unions made us less competitive and allowed abominations to creep into contracts. GM had, at one point, thousands workers actually reporting to work and getting paid a full salary to do absolutely nothing. Detroit needed a good hard reset. They didn't get it. We'll see where the story ends. I don't see any option for a happy ending because the culture and rules are the same, thanks to Obama. He needed those people to vote for him in future elections and swiftly bought their votes via the rescue plan. I wonder, how would Norvig feel if the Federal Government threw billions of dollars at a failing competitor. Ford did not need any money. The government artificially altered the market. And this is good?
"Bring back jobs" Government can only create government jobs. Obama did not create a single private sector job. The private sector created these jobs. Again, I refer you to my explanation when a market is over-sold.
"Cut taxes on middle class" Really, we are diluted and stupid enough to be happy with an extra $400 a year in our pockets? Wait, then they take it back out through other taxes. I get it if you want to believe in His Excellence Obama no-matter-what, but this is silly.
"Support green energy" I am still waiting to get a number from someone, anyone, on how many of the over five million jobs his holiness created were "green energy" jobs. Crickets. And Norvig is quoting a comedian for his facts? Whew!
"Avoid another banking crisis" So, our politicians create the mess that cau...
Pretty much all your points come down to "ignore the past, where republicans always screw over the public, trust us this time". That approach is unscientific. It completely ignores data. And the numbers you're fuming about are a trick. The republican proposal is to cut 5 trillion in taxes. How does that help the debt problem. And the debt isn't a problem at all. The entire professional economist community is against you, just like the entire professional climatologist community is against you on climate change.
I don't know if you're purposefully being a caricature of republican voters or if you genuinely believe what you're saying, but when you mess with Norvig, you mess with the best. You cannot win against Norvig, he is a tech super-ninja. Those super-ninja skills can equally be applied to deciding who to vote for, and his opinion on this case is signed and sealed. There is no question that today's Republican Party is anti-public, anti-world, anti-science.
The party lost its mind in general, but there are many decent Republicans who don't associate with the party's more ridiculous ideas. I don't know which party/movement you associate with, but you're doing a poor job of representing it.
Look, we get it that you have strong political opinions. That's great. Have fun expressing them as well or as poorly as you like. But for many, many reasons-- for example, that this is a technology site, or that this is a site that tries to cultivate a community of thoughtful commentary-- it isn't a good idea to post this kind of thing here.
I'm not really being political. The OP said democrat fraud isn't getting attention on here, I simply pointed out it's more likely republicans would be committing fraud. That is all. I get it that republicans would "feel" offended, but that doesn't counter the likelihood of which party would harbor the unsavoury characters.
If you knew you'd get a downvoting-kicking, what exactly motivated you to engage in a behavior that so clearly violates the culture here? I'm not accusing, I'm genuinely curious.
The CEO's of the companies making these voting machines are all die hard Republican supporters, especially Diebold.
Being that none of these machines are open-source, that's really the important factor, the political persuasion of the companies manufacturing the machines.
The essence of democracy is an essential distrust of power, so yes, I'm concerned.
If they made the machine, it is probably incompetence. iVontronic looks like it is owned by Printelect, which is owned by Owen Andrews, who seems to be affiliated with the Democrats.
>here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine
To be fair it is a claim of a problem affecting Romney by some person which is then refuted by another person (some sort of voting official?). The problem affecting Obama was captured first hand and confirmed as voting machine problem by second source per the Gawker article.
[ Note : I have no dog in this hunt - just pointing out something that I noticed. ]
The video you linked to has no video evidence what you say is 'the same problem' is actually happening. Furthermore, republicans have been public and outspoken about false outrage regarding voter fraud which statistically almost doesn't exist. Then behind closed doors reveal their false outrage is to cover their actual motive, 'to make it harder for minorities to vote'. This is happening all over the country. People care about both sides cheating. The internet loves both candidates, however, we all know it 'reality' that has a liberal bais.
I think the difference here is that there is absolute proof that it wasn't end user error whereas with the story you linked to there were no videos or any other demonstrations.
I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion.
In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.
> Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion.
Unless you're trying to bribe the counters/interfere with the counting ;).
You are correct good Sir. Your error is to assume the US is a single country the way Germany is a single country. The US has some characteristics that best resemble Europe and some characteristics that resemble a single country. You'll get into trouble every time you try and put it into one bucket or the other.
Note that Germany is a federal republic with multiple states just like the USA, where each state has different voting laws. It just happened that our constitutional court declared that all current voting machines are inherently unsafe. This judgement applies to all states of the republic.
> (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population.
It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc.
Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you guys have no figured that out yet.
Obviously scaling is hard, but I would expect that's one of the things a well functioning, well funded government should take care of, much like how Facebook and Google manage to scale well.
Your mistake is in thinking that Americans want a well-functioning, well-funded government. Some do, but a substantial swathe of America is currently, for one reason or another, opposed to that.
If Canada and the US merged, would it be twice as hard to vote? Of course not. Voting is the most trivial govt activity to scale up! It is the equivalent of an embarrassingly parallel pb.
The "300M citizens" excuse is even less valid in the context of presidential elections, because each state plans it independently from the others. So it is more like 52 tiny countries voting together!
It is parallel, but not all jobs are run on the same hardware/software and you can't re-run jobs which error out. In fact, some jobs don't error out but should be invalid and if discovered as such might cast doubt on the authenticity of other jobs, etc. etc. So it's really not as trivial as you make it out to be, and neither is anything else which involves coordinating 100M+ people doing a particular task.
@daneilrhodes: you took the words right out of my mouth. I had no idea scaling was so simple.
OP: When has this been used as an excuse for anything that you are apparently deeming as 'sub-standard' here in America? Cite a source please? Gotta be honest, I've never heard that excuse once.
I also had no idea the rest of the world had solved the problem of civics and effective government. Why are you guys keeping it a secret? Care to share?
> It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc.
I am simply providing an explanation that statistics indicates that there will be an absolute greater # of issues.
I would also suggest that governing at scale is hard and doesn't seem to scale linearly; much worse, as far as I can guess, based upon my news reading. Things like population density, diversity of industry, diversity of cultures start to play out in a very loud and complicated way. The only person I've met (who I talked about this with) who appreciated the scale of the US immediately was from Russia, which has similar scale issues.
i think geography (namely, distance) is actually the fundamental issue here
on top of geography, there is the issue that different states (in the U.S.) can have very different logistical/structural systems, different laws, different economic conditions, different budgets, etc
In the particular case of roads, the issue is actually that America does not have enough people for it's size. The population density in many states is too poor to support, at tax rates that americans are willing to tolerate, the amount of road that is necessary.
See: the disparity between road quality in Maryland (good density) and Pennsylvania (poor density). (or, to correct for climate, compare Pennsylvania with New York).
I guess what I'm saying is that while dodging the real cause of this issue, Americans are going to point to large geography rather than large population as the 'root cause'. In this case that isn't entirely without merit, since for a lot of Americans (those in Maryland for example) the '(tax rate * population) / area' equation works out alright.
It has less to do with population density and more to do with population clusters. The people in Sweden aren't even distributed across the entire country.
Ehh, maybe. Philadelphia's roads are legendarily bad though.
One summer when I was living in Philadelphia they removed the surface of the road in front of my apartment. Two months later they put it back. And if it's not that, it's crews filling in holes from road-work with about half as much asphalt as the hole needed, or the random patches of cobblestone street still left in the city, seemingly with little rhyme or reason.
A great example is Canada. 35 million people, but 80% of them live within 200 miles of the US border. The population density stat would be very misleading in that case.
Neither is the US population. Let's compare apples to apples for a minute. WA + OR ~= Sweden:
WA+OR population: 10.6 m, size: 170,000 sq mi
Sweden population: 9.5 m, size: 173,860 sq mi
Now, I think that's a pretty fair comparison. The roads can be pretty terrible in Washington and Oregon from my experience. That may be because federal money for roads goes to other less dense states, but these proportions hold up fairly well nationwide too. I think it's just a matter of less public funding, it's that simple.
Your comment caught my eye, because I usually hear population density being used to explain why Australia's internet isn't as good as elsewhere.
I'm certainly no expert on the topic, but I haven't heard any news about any major problems with Australia's roads. I'm curious to know how they compare with roads in the US.
USA density: 33.7/km2 87.4/sq mi population: ~ 314 mil
AUS density: 2.8/km2 7.3/sq mi population: ~ 22 mil
I'm an Australian that's lived and worked all over the US for 3 years, and have been in Canada for 7 now.
The roads in America are horrible by Australian standards. When I bring friends to the US they are shocked and say things like "it just doesn't look finished". This is more-or-less true for the majority of social services in America.
Of course, the climate in Australia lends itself to much better roads, but in comparison to Canada's roads, America's still suck, so there is no excuse.
The reasons I have usually heard for poor internet in Australia are usually along the lines of "little/poor fiber to the continent" or "momentum from previously little/poor fiber to the continent". I don't know how much truth there is to either of those.
If you use "number of issues that come up" as a measure of how bad things are, size is absolutely an issue. One-in-a-million errors will occur 300 times if everyone votes.
Did you miss the States part of "United States of America"? Ever since Madison's brilliant compromise at the founding of our current government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise the USA has tried to be mindful of the sovereignty of the states. (America's previous government, under the Articles of Confederation, was a loose agreement among the states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State%27s_rights#Controversy_to...) The balance got out of hand in the mid-1800's and a civil war broke out over the issues of states' rights vs. the federal government. Generally, states have the freedom to run elections in any way they want without interference from the federal government.
In fact there was a case in my home state of New Hampshire a few years ago, where a state worker was investigated for not using funds that had been made available by the federal government for each state to use for elections. The state worker's defense was that the money had strings attached; basically there were some restrictions on how the federal money could be used during the election. The investigation was dropped immediately, in favor of the worker. Basically my state would rather spend millions of extra dollars to run the elections than allow the federal government to put restrictions on the way they run elections.
Yes, I have a bit of a grasp on the setup, I just think it's completely insane and not worth the tradeoffs :)
Do you feel it's beneficial for New Hampshire to be in a federal union where it doesn't control its economic policy, central bank issues, or foreign policy, but can ensure it has its way on such issues on who can get married and how you vote in the federal elections, where your votes are ultimately largely meaningless? That seems a bit neither here nor there to me.
It's not so much about making each vote count for something (although people pay a huge amount of attention to NH's early primaries), it's about making sure the larger states don't steamroll the smaller ones.
The USA experimented with decentralized banks (each state printed its own currency for a while) and it was a mess, so centralized banking is more of a practical solution than an ideal one. Other issues including who gets married etc, are idiosyncratic to particular cultural and even subcultural groups, and seems best handled by responsive, representative legislation than blanket national policy.
That's a side effect of the way we've suborned the electoral college. When an individual in the U.S. "votes for a Presidential candidate", they are actually voting in a state-wide election (to determine who the state's electors vote for). The election isn't national, so there's usually no need for the Federal government to be involved.
That's also one reason we're so hesitant to get rid of the thing: at the same time, we'd need to nationalize election administration. If we didn't, it would be much easier for states to "cheat" and exaggerate their voting power by claiming higher voter turnout than what actually happened.
Think of it like a badly-designed old dataflow that you would love fix, but there are so many dependencies now that it's become a major project.
Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up.
If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.
Well ... I live in a country without voting machines and we still manage to count all votes on the same day. There is no need for faulty machines, is there?
Other countries rely less on machines where this sort of thing is even possible. The fact that human-built systems are likely to contain errors is an argument for making these system as simple as possible. The fact that we use touchscreen voting machines in the U.S., with all the hidden errors (honest or malicious) they can introduce into the canvass, is insane.
Yes! People are surprised when I hear that I, as a software developer, am utterly opposed to touch-screen voting and internet voting.
California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise.
I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.
> Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?
What on earth? I marked the candidate I wanted to vote for with an X in a circle on a paper ballot. Marking circles for more than one candidate is a spoiled ballot you can replace instead of depositing if you wish. This isn't rocket science.
Computer-based systems that print out a machine-readable paper ballot that can be hand-counted as well. You vote (perhaps with a touch screen, perhaps not) by making your selections, printing out your ballot, examining it, and inserting it into the tabulator once printed.
There's still plenty of margin for error (for instance, the printer could run misprint or run out of ink, the tabulator could be buggy), and corruption ("here, let me file that for you...") but I think it maximizes the benefits of touchscreen voting for disabled voters while minimizing the downsides.
Oh, they get reported on (Netherlands). Usually there are four, five polling places in the country where there are problems with voting boxes or ballots. Yes, we have problems, but a) there doesn't seem to be intentional interference, and b) the scale is a few orders of magnitude smaller than in the US.
Are there problems ("bugs")? Sure. Are there problems similar in magnitude to the 'shenanigans' in the United States of America being discussed by morsch? Quite possibly not.
If OP comes from a democracy, I highly doubt they do things like:
- Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1]
- "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2]
- Another article on "True the Vote" [3]
- Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4]
- You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines. [5]
- Again, you don't see stuff like this on election day outside of the US: [6]
- Thankfully, there are honorable republicans who also call this out, like Conor Friedersdorf: [7]
- And this, it's just... Baffling to people in the rest of the world. [8]
Again, this is unheard of where I live, not because people don't care but because we're not (completely) bamboozled!
So very much this. Voting systems and elections in the US are heavily gamed, mostly legally but always unethically. The reason why the US does not have smooth voting is because the incentive for elected officials isn't in getting people voting, but enabling voting for those with interests aligned with their own. When it comes to actual voters, some of them see nothing wrong with policies that are highly discriminatory, and that includes how elections and voting is conducted.
The "gamed" bit is the essence of the problem. The USA has a winner-take-all two party system and not a parliamentary setup. This simultaneously makes the victory margins razor thin (because the two parties naturally align at about 50% support) and the stakes of the outcome very high.
Where in most of Europe people can just go vote their favorite party and let the legislators figure out the details later, everything in the US is determined on one day.
So the incentives to game the system are immense, which is exactly why you see this kind of "Voter ID" laws to target unwanted demographics, and elaborate GoTV efforts with buses shuttling people around town, etc...
But even in the US, it doesn't have to be that way. Several states (mine among them) have moved to a 100% mail-in ballot system and eliminated in-person polling places.
> Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly
Why would that discourage anyone? In slovenia, you are required by law to carry an ID when you turn 18/get voting rights. So there's really no excuse for anyone to not have an id (or driver's licence).
An example: In Texas, a student ID is not good enough to count as a voter ID -- but an NRA member card is. I kid you not. The Simpsons could not have come up with something more absurd.
Minorities in the US are way less likely to carry photo ID. I could go on and on. In short, the situation is different than in Slovenia.
Also, there's a loaded history, too. Blacks were disenfranchised post-Civil War through a whole host of measures, of which IDs was just one of them. Requiring IDs or literacy for voters brings back thoughts of Jim Crow laws. These issues are steeped in history that Slovenia just doesn't have.
It's the same here. Well, similar, you're not legally required to carry it with you; most people do so anyway for convenience. But some countries don't have a national id, including but not limited to the US.
The UK briefly introduced and then scrapped a national ID system, bowing to public pressure. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006 -- a key phrase being "Many of the concerns focused on the databases underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves."
It's not something you can easily compare across borders and it's extremely loaded with all sorts of issues in the US, as far as I understand.
In a lot of countries, ID is not mandatory, and government-endorsed photo IDs are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. As such, people with a high income will be more likely to have them.
That applies doubly so for a passport or driving license -- people with more money are more likely to have a car or travel overseas, so more likely to have those types of ID.
So I guess we're talking about people under 21 who (a) don't drive, (b) have never needed an ID for any other purpose, and (c) can vote but for whatever reason, are too poor/disadvantaged/etc. to get an ID.
And those people get a provisional ballot anyway.
I guess I don't see the problem with requiring ID; we require for far less important things already.
Don't forget people over 21 who don't drink, e.g. muslims. I can well imagine that poor muslims who don't own a car constitute a significant constituency, and with a significant Democratic preference; it seems plausible that keeping them from voting would lead to a noticeable shift in the overall result.
> You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines.
Well, that's not strictly true. I recall waiting about half an hour on the election day for one of the elections I voted in in Ontario.
Several hours' wait during early voting seems a little bush league though.
There's also the possibility that other countries have more robust voting systems so there is less to complain about. Do you think voters wait in line for five hours in Germany, or get turned away from booths in Scotland? Voter turn out is slightly larger in both countries compared to the US, so apathy probably won't explain fewer complaints. It's more likely that the lack of a US national standard system permits more screw-ups and maybe occasional outright abuse.
I don't understand why isn't there a national council responsible for maintaining consistent and well run elections.
To me it would seem like an easy win to push for it and push it through. "We need to preserve our democracy!" "Any one who doesn't vote for this bill, is unamerican!" "We cannot let our ability to vote be assaulted!" etc.
Our government is structured in such a way that elections are run at the local level, which can be seen as a strength. Imagine how dangerous it could be if one company manufactured every single voting machine used in every single polling place.
How many companies does it take to cover 90% of the electronic vote? Five companies are more difficult, but hardly impossible to manipulate. One company may be easier to audit, on the other hand.
In some ways, one company would be more difficult to audit than multiple companies, as the auditor wouldn't have any frame of reference.
If we are looking at a future with pervasive electronic voting machines from multiple manufacturers, I would insist on having multiple different kinds of machines in each polling place. That way, any meaningful differences between machines would stand out.
There's an interesting line of thought that a fragmented and diverse set of technologies and policies is more robust than a consolidated 'council'. You might be able to mess up any given district - but if you corrupt the council then you straight up win.
This makes a bit less sense when you look at how it ends up that a very few districts end up deciding the race - but I think the idea itself is sound. Those battlegrounds will shift, likely more rapidly than endemic corruption can take hold.
In the US, the power to manage elections is still very much held at the state level. There have been federal inroads (Voting Rights Act) but historically the states have held full control over voting procedures. Most positions being voted on are state-level or lower (the only federal ones are President/VP, Senate, House) and all initiatives being voted on are state-level or lower. Also, the Constitution specifically gives power over choosing of Electors to the states. (Article II Section 1 "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors") so each state does things differently.
Well to inject a bit of optimism here let me tell how of how it "just works" in the second largest city in New Hampshire.
There are several "wards" in the city, and each contains a school that is the voting location. Outside of each location will be people holding signs of all candidates, but all they said this morning are things like "Happy voting" and "Thank you for voting."
Inside the location there will be about 8 lines with last name letters. A-D and E-H, I-M, etc. If your last name was Dorette you would get into the A-D line. This is one bottleneck, but it resolves very quickly. You say your name, they find your name and cross it off, and you are handed a paper ballot.
With the paper ballot you then wait in a second line until a booth (containing nothing but a marker pen and writing surface) is free. There are about 16 of these booths, with privacy screens behind them.
If all the booths are filled you will have to wait, BUT if you do not mind people being able to possibly see your vote you are welcome to go to a temporary booth, that is just a series of lunch tables with cardboard dividers. Less privacy, far more seats. Maybe 30-40 people can fill out ballots at once at the ward I was in.
You fill out your ballot with a black marker and bring it to the end of the room where there is a single machine. This machine does nothing but take your ballot and scan it, so the line here processes near instantly. The ballots are kept to be recounted by hand if need be, and most importantly, the machine portion of voting is not a bottleneck.
Thanks for sharing what I'm sure is a fairly normal experience.
It sounds very similar to the last time I voted (also in a school building), except I never experienced a line longer than, say, 2 persons -- I guess we have more, smaller locations/voter --, and of course there was no computer at the end, you just put your ballot in the box. And there were no people picketing near the location, and nobody thanked me for voting. Well, that's not true, the people inside said thanks (and so did I).
Representatives of all parties are present when the votes are counted (and recounted). We get the results in the evening, 2 or 3 hours after the elections close.
It's not entirely comparable since our ballot is quite simple, two pages with large letters, it takes about a minutes to fill out with two crosses in the right place. From what I understand you often vote on loads of things at the same time and it takes a while to fill out correctly.
In the state of Washington (not to be confused with the city of Washington; our largest city is Seattle), everyone gets the chance to vote in the privacy of their own home even weeks before the election and mail in their ballot, or drop it in a drop box. There is an outer envelope one signs and an inner privacy envelope which is left unopened until the count starts. It's possible that there are hidden shenanigans, but if there are observers for the vote-counting process I can't imagine any problems.
What I've found is that it roughly correlates with education, and not in the inverse sense. More educated and accomplished Americans usually scoff at any and all hint of real not-an-isolated-incident systemic corruption as "conspiracy theory," grouping it in the same category as David Icke's tales of shape-shifting reptiles. There is no organized crime in America, no systemic corruption. Everyone is just doing their job.
It's incomprehensible to me as an American how so many citizens of the country I live in are so fundamentally ignorant, but that doesn't change anything. I voted, but I honestly doubt my vote even gets counted. I wouldn't even be surprised if eventually it becomes public knowledge that the entire election process has been a complete sham and the totals mostly made up for the past few decades at least.
In any case, what am I supposed to do besides vote (at the polls - I'm all but convinced this is pointless), spend my money wisely (this is the best method I've come up with to enact some kind of change, but it's hardly effective since I'm not a billionaire), and write my "representatives" (who invariably respond with some boilerplate bullshit and go on doing whatever the folks paying for them (global business) want)?
Yeah, all it will take is a few more users taking videos from their phones of a similar thing happening, and then this things goes ballistic... especially if some people can't select Obama and Obama loses.
What about the other reports that mention votes for Romney being changed to Obama? It's just that "votes get switched to Romney" will make the Internet go ballistic--it's still a problem either way.
I hope it is a hoax or a miscalculation issue. If it is actual fraud, I hope the people behind it are found, tried and if convicted punished to a degree warranted by what this would be -- treason.
Looks like a calibration issue. They should have included selecting other candidates in the list. While not good enough (voting machines should be "perfect") calling it "altering votes" is a little much. It shows you that it has registered the wrong candidate, I would call this incorrectly registering input.
"I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."
FWIW:
Using a cell phone to take video in polling places in most states is prohibited, and in general "frowned upon" in others. I would not be surprised if he simply took a video as quickly as he could and then left. I agree it would have been a more believable incident if there was more video.
Based on the reddit story, I think this was Central PA, which definitely falls into the "not allowed to take video" category.
I wish they had also taken video of them selecting Jill Stein to see if the entire machine was calibrated incorrectly or just the Romney/Obama section.
Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks.
If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.
He mentions in the description for the video hitting Jill Stein selects Jill Stein. He was eventually able to vote by hitting a very small area between Obama and Jill Stein.
> If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.
Wrong:
> Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
He describes in his comments how he touched numerous points down each of the candidates and all points registered for the correct candidate except for Obama.
That makes it not sound like a calibration error to me.
It's so funny to see that hardly anyone actually did anything more than just watch the video. The same "oh it must have been miscalibrated" is repeated up and down the comment page.
Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.
Actually AmVess, that was my point, that most people didn't read the article, they just jumped right to the miscalibration explanation that was already eliminated by the guy making the video.
It's pretty clear that you didn't read (or understand) my comment. Don't comment, you're bad at it. Dumbass!
Miscalibration is supported by the video. We have to take the person's' word on the other buttons, which they for some reason didn't bother to take a video of.
Miscalibrations can also happen in these sorts of resistive touch screens that fit the described behaviour.
I got really into playing pinball a few years ago, and I got into the habit of turning of a pinball machine whenever it wasn't working correctly (mis-aligned flippers, whatever) so that other people didn't waste their quarters. Yes, it was kind of obnoxious. Sorry.
Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.
I saw this earlier and I noted that news agencies seemed to be reluctant to post it. CNN has been on this from the jump. I think people are afraid of it being revealed as a fake. There is some serious validation that needs to occur if this is the case.
What I've read[1][2] in regard to this incident is that it is most likely a calibration issue: i.e. the touch screen is improperly calibrated and as a result is not selecting the proper region of the screen. Now this is concerning because it likely means other machines could be or are miscalibrated. However the important takeaway here is that this is not some malicious attempt to rig the vote. If that were the case the likely method would be completely invisible from the UI; why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated? Of course, they wouldn't.
Unfortunately no, if you read what he wrote in the comments of that submission:
Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
The video would be truly compelling if he had repeatedly tapped from Romney to Stein. As it is, the video appears to show miscalibration, and only his testimony suggests fraud. If the video showed what he claimed, it would be lawsuit material.
That doesn't actually mean anything. Resistive and infrared touchscreens (especially cheaper ones) can have all sorts of hilarious calibration errors where part of the screen area works perfectly fine, but other parts of the screen are off completely.
I used to work on kiosk software for restaurants. At the start of every day we had to go through all of the touchscreens in the restaurant and calibrate them. Sometimes they would lose their calibration halfway through the day and need to be recalibrated multiple times.
The consumer electronics industry has shipped hundreds of millions of touch screens in the last few years and i've not seen a single article complaining that they opened up their new tablet/phone to find it mis-calibrated and that their touches were off my such a huge margin. Why are voting machines apparently subject to calibration problems that other touch screen devices are not?
Miscalibrated devices shipped to consumers get returned, resulting in extra costs to the retailer or manufacturer. Miscalibrated voting machines don't.
Most likely it's the difference between capacitive versus resistive screens. If you purchased your phone based on the lowest bidding vendor, I'd bet there be a lot more problems with it too.
I remember the old Nintendo DS touch screen, which was resistive, required user calibration where you would press on the corners of the screen. If you missed the corners (which, with the relatively thick stylus and the relatively thick bezel on the original DS, wasn't uncommon), the accuracy of your touch positions would be very notably off, to the point that using touch-screen keyboards in some games would be difficult.
Obviously I don't know for sure if this was the exact case with this voting machine, but the point being, some touch screens do require calibration and there is a chance for error. Or, of course, it could simply have been a factory mistake.
Either way, I doubt there's any malice behind this error.
Honestly curious - what kind of abuse could cause a calibration error?
My kids abuse my iPad pretty heavily but generally smacking on the screen with their hands and fingers a lot but I still have never seen it mis-calculate a touch.
iPads used capacitive touchscreens which aren't prone to the same sorts of calibration issues that resistive touchscreens are.
I don't know much about electronic voting machines but I wouldn't be surprised if they mostly used resistive touchscreens (which are historically much cheaper to produce).
If you ever used a Palm Pilot, you've seen this sort of calibration issue. Given the state of government procurement, they're likely using that cheaper, crappier tech in most areas.
This is an example where technological ignorance is dangerous because it leads to the wrong conclusions.
Multi-touch screens as used in smart phones use capacitive touch sensing technology, they do not require calibration.
Cheaper, older touch screen systems (such as those used with ATMs or voting machines) use resistive touch technology, they absolutely require calibration.
The touchscreens you see in modern consumer electronic devices are capactive touchscreens. I think the iPhone was the first major device to ship with a capactive touchscreen, prior to that, resistive and infrared touchscreens were a lot more common (and cheaper).
If you've ever interacted with a touchscreen at an ATM, mall kiosk, or airport kiosk, it's likely that they were resistive or infrared based, and more susceptible to calibration errors.
Yes, very likely a calibration issue. There was a similar instance occurring here in Colorado [1], but in the opposite direction (a vote for Romney went in as Obama). The machines definitely need to get better, but it is probably not fraud or a hack of any sort.
> why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated?
Because the person who wishes to tamper with the outcome of the election only has access to (or, very likely, skillz to modify) the calibration template (which has to be reconfigured each election, hence is modified by more people), not to the entire source code and tool chain of the voting machine. Most attacks are not gigantic conspiracies with unlimited resources.
Is it too much to ask to just completely open-source these voting machine? These machines decide the future of our country and affect the entire world. The least we could do is allow everyone to verify for themselves whether the machines are secure.
Make sure you open-source the compiler, the firmware, the hardware manufacturing process, the assembly, the drivers, the software that built the compiler, and the software that built the compiler that built the compiler.
Or just operate under the assumption that some of the machines are compromised and make sure you have ways of recognizing faults after-the-fact.
You say this in a way that implies that it's not feasible to do such a thing. I'm pretty sure that all of those components have been open sourced in various projects, just maybe not all in the same system.
Which is proper. The report that the volunteer said "everything will be okay" is the worst part of this. Systems need to recognize and isolate damage, not assume it will never occur.
Really, intentionally disregarding a broken machine is felony election tampering. We shouldn't have bored old ladies running precincts, we should cough up for paid, trained professionals.
What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question.
In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case.
How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?
Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.
Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area.
If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.
How do you count a smudge instead of a complete filling-in of the oval? You have humans go over them, and people hate that.
Just because you never see this issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that the ambiguous ballots don't matter in the vast majority of elections so no one cares.
I'm not saying computers are better than paper. They each have trade-offs.
It just seems more natural to fill in a line than to fill in a circle. Your wrist is more stable and less shaky to make a couple straight lines with a marker.
I was going to say you're wrong, but I agree that if I had to fill in dozens or hundreds of items, I'd prefer filling in lines. Your wrist is more stable and it seems like a very quick motion.
However, that kind of efficiency isn't required at all in a ballot. Making a couple of crosses instead of lines isn't going to make a big absolute difference in terms of the entire voting process. You want to maximize other things, first and foremost making it easy to understand and easy to recognize clearly for both the voter and the people/entities who count.
There's never been any real discussion about it being complicated, confusing or needing any other kind of design change. (Which isn't to say that you couldn't make arguments in that vein.)
I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by a faulty touch screen. These incidents hurt the trust on the election process, though.
The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1]
There have been problems like this in every election with these machines.
More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA!
Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.)
The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that.
Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards.
In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.
"Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other."
Since when have Democrats been passing laws to prevent old white people from voting?
Democrats have tried to increase the length of time early voting happens, increase the hours, and increase the number of voting locations. All of these changes make it easier for people who were on the fence about voting to vote.
They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadvantages Republicans.
It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.
Increasing access to voting isn't a form of voting manipulation, because the whole point of voting is to provide voting opportunities to every person who is eligible to vote.
Democrats are trying to change the voting rules because they believe that doing so will make the vote come out the way that they want it to.
If you don't call this voting manipulation, what do you call it?
I agree that it is nicer than trying to disenfranchise people, but the intent is the same. And I believe that the people pushing the rule would be doing the opposite if that's what their poll data suggested would be effective. As evidence see the story I linked to above of somebody trying to disenfranchise Florida Republicans by calling them up and telling them that they were ineligible to vote.
I don't think this is anywhere close to being as nefarious as voter suppression attempts.
If the increase in early voting schedules (even assuming that there is an intent to manipulate on the part of one side) are favoring one side, it is easily neutralized by the other side by participating in the early voting with equal, if not more, enthusiasm.
On the other hand, the victims of voter suppression tactics have no easy recourse to counter these attempts.
Trying to disenfranchise people is wrong and should be outside the bounds of political activity, it's not 'the same' as trying to get your people to vote.
If they were taking up weapons and shooting up precincts likely to vote for the other guy, would 'the intent be the same'? I mean, they're just trying to win the election.
I agree that elected officials and candidates are always looking to influence voters minds and the process itself to win. However, pursing better access to voting isn't unethical, even if people pursing those policies and systems themselves are attempting to use that access to bolster their own support. In fact, I would say that pursuing actions with positive externalities and outcomes that bolster your position is what we want politicians to do: being so successful at fixing and addressing our problems as a society that we want them in office again and again.
Granted, I don't think that the US gov't is an example of a system in which we are achieving wild successes and are therefore wanting to keep certain people in office :-)
Clearly, allowing easier access to voting is evil. No, definitely we should make it harder for those least able to afford it....working class people... to take time off from work and stand in line to vote.
Polls are generally open 12 hours, plus there's early voting and absentee voting. "Working class" people have no less opportunity to vote than anyone else.
I don’t get US voting. Why don’t you do it on a Sunday, like much of Europe? 12 hours, fine, but on a day when most people have to work. When you add in commute times and all that there has to be little time for many people to vote and you basically have to plan your day around it. If voting is on a Sunday you might even spontaneously decide to take a lazy Sunday stroll to the voting booth. (But then again, you have to register beforehand in many states, which also seems pretty crazy to me.)
Add the long lines (Seriously, what‘s even going on with that? Germany has a much higher voter turnout than the US – 74% vs 49% during the last federal election – and I have never seen any lines. The most I ever had to wait were two or three minutes, and I also haven’t ever seen media reports about long lines.
It seems to me that trying to make voting easier is very much the right thing to do in the US while making it harder is not.
However, I do not believe in any grand or small conspiracy theories and I don’t think there is any kind of large scale manipulation going on. It just all seems dysfunctional, not manipulated. When comparing it to German elections, why does it seem that politicians have so much control over it? They don’t seem to be shy to make politics with how voting is implemented – which is a total taboo in Germany†, no politician would ever dare to give off the impression that they are trying to change how the election is run in order to favor their party. Much of the organization is handed off to independent experts who take most of the decisions.
It’s not that hard. There are many Europeans countries where voting is just not a big deal and where there are never big issues like in the US. You are the oldest democracy in the World, shouldn’t you have figured out that stuff by now?
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† There is one recent exception to this. The federal voting law was declared unconstitutional two times in a row from the constitutional court during the last years.
The way federal elections work is that it’s basically proportional representation – i.e. people vote for parties, any party with more than five percent gets the percentage of seats they won – but there are also direct candidates in every district, insuring that everyone has her or his candidate they can write to. Those direct candidates are elected using first past the post, but they are at least supposed to be inconsequential to the percentage of seats a party gets. If there aren’t enough direct candidates to fill the seats a party got, those seats are filled from a per-state party list of candidates.
However, what happens when a party has more direct candidates than they have seats? Before the constitutional court struck that down those “overhang mandates” were just added without changing anything else, basically skewing with the percentages. A party which got 50 seats might suddenly get 60 seats without other parties (without overhang mandates) also getting more seats.
In the last election this has favored conservatives, but taking this to the constitutional court was successful. The court gave the parliament time to change the law. What was unique and unprecedented, however (and a rare case of German politicians making politics with how voting works) was that the current conservative government decided unilaterally on a solution – instead of by working together, as had been tradition. However, that solution was also struck down (with constitutional judges showing pretty open dismay that the parliament was seemingly unable to solve this problem in the long time allotet and worried about the fact that an election is coming up in 2013) – leading the conservative government to this time around try and find a consensus solution. So it all was back to the tradition of not just changing election laws unilaterally without at least talking to the biggest opposition party and trying to find a solution both can agree on.
What will happen now is that parties without overhang mandates will get more seats to balan...
However, since the post to which you're replying specified more people voting, not more votes, your vacuous statement is not on point. Stop fear mongering and being a pointless pedant.
The extreme form would be to ensure that every person who favors your position gets a vote cast and counted, without changing the votes of others.
It's the difference between persuasion and "get out the vote". Persuading voters to your point of view is more honorable, but "get out the vote" is often more cost effective.
What is this "representative sample" that you're talking about?
It is well-known that the subset of the population that goes to the polls is NOT representative of the country as a whole. That is why pollsters are so careful to get polls of "likely voters". Because Republicans tend to be more motivated to vote than Democrats, so if they just took a poll of everyone they called, the results would always be strongly skewed Democrat.
(Getting this right is very tricky, and different methodologies around it is one reason that different pollsters often have a consistent difference in the polls that they produce.)
I can. If you can't be bothered to vote your vote isn't needed. You have no clue what you are voting for and you can not, in any conceivable way, make a reasonable judgment of who to vote. I cannot think of a scenario where having more people, who have no clue about why or who they are voting on (and this is sadly the vast majority of people), will be better than having less.
It looks good if have there are a lot of people participating but you have not gained anything if those that voted did not have the slightest of interest in it.
I agree that people without a clue have no business voting. But be careful making the assumption that someone who "can't be bothered to vote" is less informed.
Even the well-informed can end up thinking "my vote doesn't matter anyway, so why bother." And rationally, they are not exactly wrong. Yet, the system would break down if everyone took that view. People need to be encouraged to vote, even though they may see it as a waste of time, because in aggregate their votes are important.
There is no nastiness in preventing voter fraud either. Unless you call it voter suppression.
As for making voting easier, Republicans see it as cynically making fraud easier in the name of getting uninformed people who don't pay attention to vote for you. If you see it as Republicans see it, what the Democrats are doing is not exactly nice behavior.
What an aggravating, ignorant, and ahistorical comment.
Besides the responses nearby taking you to task for the sophistry of your last sentence, I feel like it's worth highlighting the very real history of vote suppression in the South under Jim Crow. That's decades of violence, physical intimidation, bogus literacy tests, and a host of other tactics, directed at suppressing the vote of blacks and the poor. At every step of the way, these shameful tactics were justified as some kind of proxy for "intelligence" (and some other "wise" comments here repeat that justification).
Working to increase access to the vote is, in a very real sense, a continuing rejection of these disgusting tactics.
This is why I used the term "ignorant" above. It is as if you do not understand and appreciate the significance of this history. This is not a simple Democrat/Republican issue. Increasing access to the vote is an attempt to remedy, in an imperfect way, the biggest failing of American democracy.
Ah yes, the fun of politics. As soon as someone says something that you disagree with, just flip your emotional switch and let the rant flow.
I actually am quite aware of that history. I am also aware that of dozens of efforts in the last several years to change voting rules, every Republican effort has been to make it harder in the name of reducing fraud, while every Democratic effort has been to make it easier in the name of improving access.
It may not be a simple Democrat/Republican issue, but at this point it is definitely a highly partisan Democrat/Republican issue.
Sounds like increasing access to voting, while yes, done with the intent to increase your share, has the added advantage of increasing access to voting, and hence should be encouraged.
Complaining that it's dishonest and wrong is like the joke about "reality having a well known liberal bias"
Democrats have routinely fought efforts to cleanse voter registrations that for people that have died, moved or never existed in the first place. When votes are cast under these names, they disenfranchise legitimate voters. This is the very scam for which ACORN was driven underground.
The most recent example was this year in Florida, when the time frame for early voting was shortened to ensure that only one Sunday fell in it rather than the usual two. They did this with the knowledge that Sundays during early voting swing extremely liberal, thanks to primarily black churches encouraging their communities to vote and providing transportation.
exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair
It's absolutely not proof. It's, at the least, evidence. Exit polls are statistical -- in my dozens of times voting, I've never hit an exit pollster.
But if you say "the exit polls disagree with the official numbers, so let's go with the exit polls" you have substituted your official election mechanism with the exit polls.
Statistics tells you the odds that the exit poll would disagree by some degree with the actual result. If the odds show, for example, only a 1 in a 100 million chance of it happening, an investigation should take place. That you've never hit an exit pollster doesn't say much, because the odds can be computed with high confidence by polling only a tiny fraction of the voters.
Statistics is highly valuable despite not being proof. For example, it's a foregone conclusion that Obama will win today, based on earlier polls. It's not certain that he'll win, but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.
Normally I wouldn't worry about this, but if you want to give them power to invalidate an election (or force an "investigation," whatever that means), then you shouldn't just let them run around doing whatever they think is best.
but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.
I don't even know what mindset produces this thought. While Nate Silver doesn't think Romney will win, he gives changes that are a hell of a lot bigger than "nil."
Exit pollsters should be regulated, I agree, if only to avoid an expensive unnecessary investigation.
The media says that Obama and Romney are neck & neck, because that gets more viewers, which sells the advertisements they depend on. (Every presidential election in your lifetime is guaranteed to be declared a "virtual tie" by the media--you'll hear those exact words every 4 years.) Those who understand stats know (with almost certainty) that it'll be a landslide for Obama in the electoral college.
How old are you? Within my lifetime there have been at least six presidential elections that were absolutely not reported as "virtual ties", including the last one.
That's just the one I found in 5 seconds. This one's from mid-August 2008: "New [LA Times/Bloomberg] poll shows McCain - Obama in virtual tie". And from Sept: "[NBC News/Wall Street Journal] Poll shows Obama and McCain in virtual tie". 3 months later, still a virtual tie! I'm sure I could find a closer one. I didn't say the media would always report that in November.
I went back to 1992 and still found "virtual tie" reports. That's 5 elections in a row.
Exit polls are like a canary in a coal mine. They can show evidence of manipulations that might have happened. If an investigation finds that no such manipulation seems to have occurred, then no harm is done.
Unfortunately current US elections are unauditable because voting machines DO NOT produce any kind of verifiable voting trail. Furthermore the apparent conclusion of the US media is that past discrepancies are evidence that their exit polling is flawed rather than that the voting process is being manipulated. (They are biased to decide that way because accusing the winners of manipulating the vote - even if it is true - pushes them away from the appearance of neutrality that they try to keep.)
Furthermore you can't do exit polling on mail-in ballots. So this potential signal of flawed elections is being lost at the same time that manipulation of elections is becoming even easier.
Personally if polls are overwhelming, and elections are in line with polls, I believe the result. But I believe that there are lots of people trying to slip a thumb on the scales, so if polls are close, I am dubious about the results. I personally believe that current evidence is that the Republicans are more successful in getting their thumbs on the scales, so I'm doubly suspicious when Republicans mysteriously do better than polls indicate they should.
I want us to have elections that I trust. I do not want crappy election machines. I want verifiable paper trails. I want random spot checks. We know how to run better elections than we do. We don't because nobody wants to put the work out. I want us to put the work out.
NY also has a paper trail. I voted this morning. I filled out a form, using a pen to fill in the circles for my votes, much like standardized tests. I then fed that form into a machine. The polling station kept the form, which is the paper trail for the electronic record.
According to polls, the election will be decided by swing states that are expected to have margins of victory under 4%.
If, hypothetically, the election is decided for Romney in states like Pennsylvania which polls indicated were leaning Democratic on electronic machines where there is no paper trail, will you be inclined to believe that his last minute ads made that a fair win, or would you be inclined to believe that the election was stolen? (Note, the information that Pennsylvania is one of the states without a paper trail is in the article, published today, that I linked to.)
I, personally, would be inclined towards the theory that the election was stolen, and the purpose of his last minute ad buys was to create plausible deniability for the manipulation. If, on the other hand, there was a paper trail and audits verified the count, I would be much more comfortable with that election outcome.
Whether or not this machine is auditable, unauditable voting machines are a real problem.
From the source, And so electronic voting machines fell from favor. Just 25 percent of the country will use paperless systems this year—down from 40 percent in 2006.
I read that as a quarter of the country will be using paperless systems in this election. If that is wrong, please explain the correction.
Grabbing another source, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233058/Election_watc... lists specific states where paperless systems are likely to be a big issue. Two of them, Virginia and Pennsylvania, are significant swing states that currently lean towards Obama in polls. If both have an unexpected swing to Romney, his chances of legitimately winning enough other states to carry the election are significantly increased. (According to what I see on http://www.electoral-vote.com/ he'd need to carry North Carolina and Florida - both of which he's at least tied in, and then any other swing state.)
Hopefully unaccountable election machines won't prove to be the margin of victory in this election. However anyone who thinks it is impossible is either uninformed, or unwilling to consider the evidence.
"It's a foregone conclusion".. ?? Because of Nate Silver's statistical analysis of polls? The polls which themselves are flawed. The "statistics" are based on nothing but polls, all with margins of errors and varied methodology. A sample of 1000 people can hardly predict an entire state, because there are many factors that influence turnout that aren't captured in polls. Being the subject of a poll is generally a passive activity -- they come to you, while going to vote is an active activity. "Likely voters" is a very subjective term and thus a difficult thing to quantify.
> The "statistics" are based on nothing but polls, all with margins of errors and varied methodology.
Sure, but if the methodology is standard and the poll shows 60%/40% with a 3% margin of error, you can safely bet money on the outcome. Statistics works just as well for casinos; they may lose in the long run, but they almost certainly won't.
> "Likely voters" is a very subjective term and thus a difficult thing to quantify.
Stats can be used to determine the likelihood that those being polled will actually vote.
You also will have gotten rid of the idea that a vote is cast in private. A possible explanation for differences between exit polls and election results is that voters may not want to admit voting for extremist parties, or, conversely, may not want to publicly admit not having voted for party X.
Good points. A solution would be to give everyone a receipt for their vote, with an anonymous copy that can be put into an exit poll bin. And something equivalent for mail-in voters.
This is a great idea. Obviously it would have to be implemented properly and would be subject to the some of the same problems exit polls already have (i.e., voters not wanting to participate), but it solves a lot of the other problems neatly.
The catch in this is that having proof of voting a particular way makes a voter susceptible to bullying, or gives them the ability to sell their vote. The Wombat Voting system attempts to address this with a public-key approach: http://www.wombat-voting.com/
That possible explanation has been put out repeatedly.
Given how successful exit polling was until 2000 in the USA, and given how successful it is in elections around the world, I do not believe that this is a plausible explanation of recent discrepancies.
But, as is common in this sort of situation, I have no way to prove it.
Nate Silver wrote a great article in 2010 about why the notion of exit polling itself has a lot of fundamental problems[1]-- among them, the fact that it is extraordinarily difficult to get an truly random sample.
If you read the article, there are several instances of the same problems causing very large errors in elections prior to 2000, for example, several miscalled states for Clinton in previous elections. To claim that these polls "suddenly" stopped working is demonstrably false.
I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine.
That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.
If your plan to secure the machines is to have the source be open, you have already failed. You need a system that works well even if the source has been altered.
Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.
And here I thought in the Turing year of 2012 people would finally start to understand what it means that any electronical voting machine contains a Turing equivalent machine.
An electronic voting machine doesn't have to be Turing-complete, surely? It would require especially-fabricated non-Turing-complete chips / ICBs, and some very simple interface like an LED bank and good old-fashioned physical buttons (as a touch-screen LCD unit alone is probably turing-complete), but I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to devise a specialised electronic voting system that couldn't have its behaviour altered without physical modification.
[edit PS] Of course, this is purely academic. You might as well fantasise about a voting system made of Babbage-esque clockwork.
What problem do electronic voting machines actually solve? The US didn't seem to have problems counting millions of paper ballots (save for some hanging chads) until the "solution" of electronic voting machines appeared.
1. Allowing people with disabilities to vote. For example, headphone voice prompts for blind people, large print/high contrast for the elderly etc.
2. Making sure voters understand the voting procedure - particularly if there are multiple offices and issues on the ballot, multiple ballot papers and so on.
3. Ensuring voters' intent is recorded unambiguously. For example, you can't put marks in multiple boxes (intentionally or accidentally) and you can't leave a dimpled or hanging chad.
4. Perfect counting (assuming the data is entered correctly and the software works right) as opposed to manual counts where papers sometimes end up in the wrong pile.
5. You can offer voting in multiple languages.
6. You can randomise the order of candidates on the ballot, to evenly distribute any impact being at the top might have.
7. Ability to take backups for transit or deliver results electronically, avoiding boxes of ballots going missing.
8. Reduced counting costs and faster results, allowing more polling stations to be operated and allowing the polls to stay open later for the same result delivery deadline.
Whether it succeeds at offering these benefits, and whether they're worth the obvious cost in trust is debatable.
Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly?
The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines.
Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.
The fact that the current implementation is not reliable doesn't make the whole idea of electronic voting bad. We've had electronic voting for general elections in Brazil since 2000, with very few accusations of fraud.
But there are very significant issues with the principle of electronic voting:
Ideally, every voter would be able to verify their own vote after the fact via some cryptographic mechanism. But on the other hand, this mechanism should be such that the government (or another individual trying to coerce our voter) would not be able to verify the vote -- an almost contradictory, difficult requirement. I am not aware of such a method being employed in any large-scale election.
In the absence of such a method, you have a heap of problems:
1) How do you make it verifiable for the general public? Even if you accept that the general public will not be able to verify it (bad!), how would you make it verifiable even for experts? It's almost impossible to ensure that the code being run is the one you verified beforehand, especially on such a large scale, so this way is out of the question. (Remember, this is a high-stakes game, so you'd better know that your CPU in fact executes your opcodes correctly...)
2) Electronic voting & tallying opens the door for large-scale manipulation without leaving traces. If you want to remove 10000 paper ballots, you have to somehow get rid of them (with people watching). 10000 votes vanishing in a computer? No problem, just a memory operation, a bystander would never notice it.
Some of this can be dealt with by having the machine print out a paper ballot immediately after voting, and keeping those ballots. Then you're in fact using the relative safety of paper ballot voting to double check the electronic record.
Of course the existing systems take these into consideration. There are a dozen security measures in place here:
1) The software is exactly the same for the whole country (138m voters). All software that runs on it is encrypted and signed, and the box is physically sealed to detect intrusion.
2) You verify your vote before it's committed to disk on the voting machine. See next point.
3) Every ballot box records votes to a flash card that is physically taken to the nearest court house, where a judge is responsible for the equipment that can decrypt, compile and transfer results to the federal system, using a private network. At no point a ballot box is connected to any network or external devices.
4) The equipment is programmed to only function during official voting times, and only after running a test suite and integrity verification
5) At the end of the day each ballot box prints it own vote report, archived locally, and keeps a copy of the results in it's internal flash memory
If you remove 10k votes from one machine, the numbers won't match: every voter is registered, and you have to sign a small declaration if you don't vote - the number of voters is always known beforehand. Voluntary elections like in the US pose an interesting problem, maybe you could require pre-registration?
I think bypassing all the security measures undetected would be one hell of an achievement.
I can't fathom why would you even choose touchscreens for voting machines. It's a simple interface, mechanical buttons are much better. They are more durable, offer tactile feedback and can be used by people with visual impairment.
This happened earlier as well during the early voting period (though Romney votes were being switched for Obama -- funny how one got coverage whilst the other didn't).
It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error.
Is it real, and Republicans are fraudsters? Or is it a fake, and Democrats are fraudsters? Or is a Republican plant of a fake so that I believe I hate Democrats?!? Or maybe even Democrats planted an obvious fake, to make me think Republicans posted the fake, so that I'd know it's fake and end up disrespecting Republicans for the poor attempt at influencing me?!?!?!
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadEdit: Also, it's been verified and taken offline. http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...
All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together.
That's not all the commenter was saying. OP was claiming the original video was staged and fake. He was accusing the Redditor if deception.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-11-02/entertainment/ba...
Call me when they verifiably lie, ala Fox, and then we'll talk.
Looks like a bug, actually swings a close election?
It would probably cause a small dent and shift by people who don't notice or are confused (elderly).
The result here is that the voting machine was taken out of duty and will be investigated. If the strategy was to make the error so outlandish that nobody would believe it was happening, the strategy has failed.
Since it's pretty obvious that this would be the outcome, it's not a good strategy, and is therefore not likely to have been enacted.
Assuming it's miscalibration, how many people used this machine before the video? how many afterward?
>I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
That sounds like they were very likely the first person to complain. What did the rest do?
I've used that exact type of machine to vote in North Carolina (but this ballot is not from North Carolina). You have all sorts of people pounding on the screen all day.
Remember the reason we all wanted electronic voting after the year 2000: because it gives absolutely clear answers, not necessarily better answers. (Even the best systems have errors because there are humans involved.) You don't have to debate whether that smudge counts or does not count as a vote.
The lack of a receipt is deliberate and prevents vote-buying. A carbon copy of your vote will open as many avenues to fraud as it will close.
Even if this theoretically did increase the chance of vote-buying, I think it's still a worthwhile tradeoff for the massive increase in accountability we get from it.
It's not perfect, and not my preferred system, but it's pretty decent.
It's one of the biggest challenges in crypto-voting systems. And there are some solutions. But we need to hammer down on the "silly people, why not just print a receipt" idea really hard.
Jim is not a nice man and is very demanding and abusive and goes to vote. He wants his wife to vote for X, but he suspects that she will vote for Y. Today, she can vote for X or Y and tell her husband that she voted for Y. He has no way to prove her wrong. With receipts, he can tell her, on no uncertain terms, that she is to show him her receipt afterwards. If she doesn't produce a receipt showing she votes for X, he'll beat her. With receipts she does not have a free vote, without receipts she has a free vote.
I want to buy your vote, and will pay you €10 to vote for X. Today, you can vote for who ever you want, and tell me you voted for X and demand payment. I have no way to prove you wrong. Hence vote buying is hard to do, because you can't know if you're actually buying votes. With receipts, I can ask to see your receipt, and only pay out if you vote for X. With receipts, vote buying now becomes an actual thing that I can do.
Employers could now request that employees tell/prove/check who they voted for.
Unions could now tell/prove/check who their members voted for.
Churchs could now tell/prove/check who their members voted for.
In a small community you can keep track of who voted in what order, then look at the receipt and know who voted for who.
Of course, we have ways of securing access to ballot boxes to a reasonable degree, and those ways are also applicable to the paper receipts.
Probably a receipt without a timestamp, and with a paper cutter would work as well.
I think you mean if the machine was intentionally designed to alter votes, it wouldn't do it in this fashion. The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.
Altering is an action, not something passive. If a machine is altering votes then it must be doing that intentionally. What is happening here is the person interacting with this machine is interacting in such a way that makes the machine believe he is pressing elsewhere on the screen.
The title reads as if the machine is doing something, the reality is the user is doing something in such a way that the machine believes they're doing something else, due to poor calibration.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/12q6wu/2012_voting...
> I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
My point is "alter" is something that has to be done on purpose, by using the word alter they are stating the system KNOWS the user is voting for Obama and changes it to Romney.
I disagree. If this person decided to walk away because of confusion/frustration/etc, then it would've been one less vote cast and would have altered that individuals vote. It wasn't intentional, but a software/hardware bug.
Cause it won't be spun like that at all.
It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.
That being said, I'm taking a two hour drive later today to vote because my vote-by-mail ballot never arrived, so...
You only hear about the ballots that crash, not the millions that land safely every election.
(2) We are OK publicizing it.
(3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about.
---
But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)
Um, unless you're talking to India which manages to pull off votes with 1.2 Billion People. You are like 25% their population.
Note that this doesn't mean it's counted right: it just means you have no way to worry about it. Maybe election officials are debating whether that line for Joe is a mistake or not. Now the problems are seen immediately instead of unseen, which was one of the driving forces for people who didn't want to ever go through the hanging chad issue again.
I'm certainly not saying computer voting is better than paper voting -- they each have their trade-offs. (I'd prefer paper ballots that voters can "self-scan" by a machine that is very conservative in what it accepts, but that's a whole separate discussion.)
Of course, again, there is media acting as a watchdog, and a hope that the manipulation is statistically insignificant.
FWIW, most of the world votes on paper, and if history's anything to go by paper ballot is way more reliable than electronic, at least when it comes to auditability. I'm sure it's possible to design a secure and tamper-proof electronic voting system[0] with a great, useable interface... but nobody seems interested in doing that.
[0] system, not machine, because you most likely want the machine recording votes and the machine tallying them to be fully separate.
For further read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines
India also has option called "None of the Above" as a voting option, which is extremely democratic.
Booth capturing "found primarily in India" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing
intimidation on racial lines: http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/162808/1/5847
You are plain kidding if you feel elections in India are anywhere close to being as good as US.
this is a lot of people. I am sure that if we investigate the details of elections in India, Indonesia, and Brazil, we will find an array of fudged votes and issues.
In other words, I am pretty sure that the error rate for the mix of remote/paper/electronic voting will hold pretty constant regardless of population size.
The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system.
Everything that is a disadvantage for Obama is naturally going to get more attention, because most of the internet age that use sites like reddit and HN are the sort that want progress.
I'll bet there are machines that have this problem (assuming this is not an isolated incident and his a software/hardware issue) that vote for Obama when Romney is clicked, but that won't be big news in this circle of news because who cares about Romney here?
Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines...
It's easy to call "troll" and try to sneakily shout out the other person. You should try some self-reflection if you're a republican. If you've got enough inquisitiveness to be on HN, apply that to deciphering what the republican party actually stands for.
The best educational demographic for Democrats is "No High School". The best for Republicans is "College Graduate".
The linked facts do not support you. Only 4% of the population is in that category and of that category 63% voted D, 35% voted R. In no world does this equate to D are represented in the majority by those without High School educations.
Further-more, (from your own source) of the 28% of the population who are college graduates 50% voted D 48% voted R. This explicitly indicates more College Graduates voted D than R.
I never said that. If you want to criticize my post like an asshole, at least read it first.
Are you by any chance a Democrat without a high school degree? If so, I forgive your lack of reading comprehension skills. In that case, let me give you an example:
If I said, "The best racial demographic for Democrats is blacks" (which is just as true as my statement about education), that would not imply that I think most Democrats are black.
So check the 2012 results: http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president?hpt=...
Yet again, the Republican candidate scores his highest vote share among college graduates, and the Democratic candidate scores his highest vote share among people without high school degrees.
Re-iterating your mouth noises does not show for the depth of the thought that originated them.
While I critiqued your lack-of-thought construct, you immediately countered with both an ad hominem and appeal to authority.
Good luck out there, you're going to need it.
Someone who votes Democrat is equally likely to have a college education as a Republican.
I provided a source showing that this is at least close to true, and possibly it tilts a bit towards the Republicans rather than being equally likely. I also provided an interesting tidbit that, while the college educated demographic is best for Republicans, the no high school degree demographic is best for Democrats.
Are you offended that I answered the guy's question by linking to some data, or that I added a sentence about an interesting tidbit of information from that data? Because immediately after I posted, you replied with unnecessary insults and ridiculous straw men. I hope you can understand why your post elicited a facetious response from me, which you self-righteously deem "ad hominem".
> Yeah, statistically, democrats are smarter than republicans. I must be smarter than average!
If it makes you feel good, so be it. Please be sure to keep that cork on the fork.
Quick. Since you are so smart: How many years will it take to pay off 16 trillion dollars in debt while paying interest and continuing to over-spend at a rate of over 1 trillion per year?
In your answer consider the continued erosion of our manufacturing base, increased costs of a welfare society, erosion of human capital due to crappy union-driven education, the effects of tax increases and Obamacare.
Now, I expect an answer. Real numbers. No bullshit. Fire-up Excel and give us some numbers. See, there's the problem with self-appointed "smart ones": Talk is easy and cheap. Show me the facts, numerically, and we can start to have an intelligent discussion about how to move this country forward.
I'll bet you a cookie you don't move a finger to show HN readers a single proposal on how to deal with our national debt. Not one.
I am an independent thinker who appreciates portions of both platforms. I can't be swayed by pretty speeches, posters, ads, t-shirts, debate "gotcha's", etc. I cringe to think that there are Americans who vote "for the team" rather than through careful analysis and consideration of the issues in the context of the times we live in. The bigoted dismissal of millions of citizens by attaching a political label to them is sad and despicable.
Here's your chance to show us you are not just a troll. What's your answer to my question. Any reader should be able to plug your numbers into a spreadsheet and verify them.
Go!
Peter Norvig, who is a god among the mere mortals here, makes a better case than I could http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html
If you even took a few minutes to play with the numbers you'd be horrified to realize where we are and, more importantly, where we are going.
Creating an economic model with a spreadsheet is a really scary and sobering exercise. I've done a couple. The aim was to see what needed to change in order to achieve what most would recognize as solid economic recovery over a period of time. I played with periods in the range of 25 to 50 years. And, while the numbers can never be 100% accurate, the reality painted by the model is nothing less than scary. Even if my numbers where 100%, nah, 200%, off the reality they paint is horrible.
No, you can't fix it by taxing the rich. Not even close. You can't even fix it by taxing everyone. You just can't. You have to cut spending with a vengeance and, yes, adjust taxes --for everyone-- slightly. Let's not get facts get in the way of a good bullshit discussion.
Do a model, discuss it with a few people and then go read the likes of Peter Norvig and see what you think of them.
Here's my answer to Norvig's "Why do you support Obama?" segment on the page you linked:
"End of war in Iraq". Who the hell cares. The war is a rounding error compared to what we've been doing to this country under Obama. What? Five, maybe six trillion dollars in additional debt? Please.
"Focus on al Qaeda and Taliban" Who the fuck cares? What happened in Libya demonstrates full-well that terrorism wasn't challenged in any way by getting this guy. Old history.
"Universal Health Care" Disaster. Talk to a few business people to get real data. They are scared to death. If Obamacare is so good, why did he have to grant exceptions en-masse to unions?
"Increase US Manufacturing" I used to own a manufacturing business. I saw, first hand, what was going on and have the scars to prove it. The economic dump was so deep that some kind of a pull-back was inevitable. I love it when people take credit for things they had nothing to do with. I use to do a lot of day-trading. There were days when stocks would over sell to such a degree that you absolutely KNEW --if you were conscious enough to remove yourself from the fray-- that they were going to come back up. Some of the easiest money I ever made, both on the long and short side.
"Save Detroit" Detroit has been an ugly mess for decades. The coddling of the unions made us less competitive and allowed abominations to creep into contracts. GM had, at one point, thousands workers actually reporting to work and getting paid a full salary to do absolutely nothing. Detroit needed a good hard reset. They didn't get it. We'll see where the story ends. I don't see any option for a happy ending because the culture and rules are the same, thanks to Obama. He needed those people to vote for him in future elections and swiftly bought their votes via the rescue plan. I wonder, how would Norvig feel if the Federal Government threw billions of dollars at a failing competitor. Ford did not need any money. The government artificially altered the market. And this is good?
"Bring back jobs" Government can only create government jobs. Obama did not create a single private sector job. The private sector created these jobs. Again, I refer you to my explanation when a market is over-sold.
"Cut taxes on middle class" Really, we are diluted and stupid enough to be happy with an extra $400 a year in our pockets? Wait, then they take it back out through other taxes. I get it if you want to believe in His Excellence Obama no-matter-what, but this is silly.
"Support green energy" I am still waiting to get a number from someone, anyone, on how many of the over five million jobs his holiness created were "green energy" jobs. Crickets. And Norvig is quoting a comedian for his facts? Whew!
"Avoid another banking crisis" So, our politicians create the mess that cau...
I don't know if you're purposefully being a caricature of republican voters or if you genuinely believe what you're saying, but when you mess with Norvig, you mess with the best. You cannot win against Norvig, he is a tech super-ninja. Those super-ninja skills can equally be applied to deciding who to vote for, and his opinion on this case is signed and sealed. There is no question that today's Republican Party is anti-public, anti-world, anti-science.
I've been on here for 3 years, I'm a hugely valuable but underrated member of this community.
Being that none of these machines are open-source, that's really the important factor, the political persuasion of the companies manufacturing the machines.
The essence of democracy is an essential distrust of power, so yes, I'm concerned.
none of these machines are open-source, that's really the important factor
This is the least important factor.
In fact, the iVotronic Machines were indeed created by and originally manufactured by Diebold, though it was sold to another company in 2009.
If they made the machine, it is probably incompetence. iVontronic looks like it is owned by Printelect, which is owned by Owen Andrews, who seems to be affiliated with the Democrats.
To be fair it is a claim of a problem affecting Romney by some person which is then refuted by another person (some sort of voting official?). The problem affecting Obama was captured first hand and confirmed as voting machine problem by second source per the Gawker article.
[ Note : I have no dog in this hunt - just pointing out something that I noticed. ]
I think the difference here is that there is absolute proof that it wasn't end user error whereas with the story you linked to there were no videos or any other demonstrations.
In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.
Unless you're trying to bribe the counters/interfere with the counting ;).
> "verification of the result must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject."
It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc.
Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you guys have no figured that out yet.
Obviously scaling is hard, but I would expect that's one of the things a well functioning, well funded government should take care of, much like how Facebook and Google manage to scale well.
So to summarize, it's hilarious when Americans use the large population excuse for having sub-par services.
The "300M citizens" excuse is even less valid in the context of presidential elections, because each state plans it independently from the others. So it is more like 52 tiny countries voting together!
OP: When has this been used as an excuse for anything that you are apparently deeming as 'sub-standard' here in America? Cite a source please? Gotta be honest, I've never heard that excuse once.
I also had no idea the rest of the world had solved the problem of civics and effective government. Why are you guys keeping it a secret? Care to share?
Who's keeping it a secret? Elections Canada policies aren't exactly classified information.
I am simply providing an explanation that statistics indicates that there will be an absolute greater # of issues.
I would also suggest that governing at scale is hard and doesn't seem to scale linearly; much worse, as far as I can guess, based upon my news reading. Things like population density, diversity of industry, diversity of cultures start to play out in a very loud and complicated way. The only person I've met (who I talked about this with) who appreciated the scale of the US immediately was from Russia, which has similar scale issues.
I didn't say it was easy, but I said it's something that should be in hand
on top of geography, there is the issue that different states (in the U.S.) can have very different logistical/structural systems, different laws, different economic conditions, different budgets, etc
See: the disparity between road quality in Maryland (good density) and Pennsylvania (poor density). (or, to correct for climate, compare Pennsylvania with New York).
I'm not saying that states with bad roads don't have themselves to blame, just that density is a factor.
You're saying that it's got more to do with how much the population is willing to be taxed, which I believe is the real reason.
I guess what I'm saying is that while dodging the real cause of this issue, Americans are going to point to large geography rather than large population as the 'root cause'. In this case that isn't entirely without merit, since for a lot of Americans (those in Maryland for example) the '(tax rate * population) / area' equation works out alright.
One summer when I was living in Philadelphia they removed the surface of the road in front of my apartment. Two months later they put it back. And if it's not that, it's crews filling in holes from road-work with about half as much asphalt as the hole needed, or the random patches of cobblestone street still left in the city, seemingly with little rhyme or reason.
Now, I think that's a pretty fair comparison. The roads can be pretty terrible in Washington and Oregon from my experience. That may be because federal money for roads goes to other less dense states, but these proportions hold up fairly well nationwide too. I think it's just a matter of less public funding, it's that simple.
I'm certainly no expert on the topic, but I haven't heard any news about any major problems with Australia's roads. I'm curious to know how they compare with roads in the US.
USA density: 33.7/km2 87.4/sq mi population: ~ 314 mil
AUS density: 2.8/km2 7.3/sq mi population: ~ 22 mil
The roads in America are horrible by Australian standards. When I bring friends to the US they are shocked and say things like "it just doesn't look finished". This is more-or-less true for the majority of social services in America.
Of course, the climate in Australia lends itself to much better roads, but in comparison to Canada's roads, America's still suck, so there is no excuse.
David Frum weighing in: http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/opinion/frum-election-chaos/in...
Opinions on whether something should be handled at state vs federal seems to ebb and flow in great proportions in the US.
In fact there was a case in my home state of New Hampshire a few years ago, where a state worker was investigated for not using funds that had been made available by the federal government for each state to use for elections. The state worker's defense was that the money had strings attached; basically there were some restrictions on how the federal money could be used during the election. The investigation was dropped immediately, in favor of the worker. Basically my state would rather spend millions of extra dollars to run the elections than allow the federal government to put restrictions on the way they run elections.
Do you feel it's beneficial for New Hampshire to be in a federal union where it doesn't control its economic policy, central bank issues, or foreign policy, but can ensure it has its way on such issues on who can get married and how you vote in the federal elections, where your votes are ultimately largely meaningless? That seems a bit neither here nor there to me.
The USA experimented with decentralized banks (each state printed its own currency for a while) and it was a mess, so centralized banking is more of a practical solution than an ideal one. Other issues including who gets married etc, are idiosyncratic to particular cultural and even subcultural groups, and seems best handled by responsive, representative legislation than blanket national policy.
That's also one reason we're so hesitant to get rid of the thing: at the same time, we'd need to nationalize election administration. If we didn't, it would be much easier for states to "cheat" and exaggerate their voting power by claiming higher voter turnout than what actually happened.
Think of it like a badly-designed old dataflow that you would love fix, but there are so many dependencies now that it's become a major project.
If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.
Or that they don't happen...
Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up.
If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.
California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise.
I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.
What system, in your opinion, would minimize error?
What on earth? I marked the candidate I wanted to vote for with an X in a circle on a paper ballot. Marking circles for more than one candidate is a spoiled ballot you can replace instead of depositing if you wish. This isn't rocket science.
There's still plenty of margin for error (for instance, the printer could run misprint or run out of ink, the tabulator could be buggy), and corruption ("here, let me file that for you...") but I think it maximizes the benefits of touchscreen voting for disabled voters while minimizing the downsides.
- Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1]
- "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2]
- Another article on "True the Vote" [3]
- Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4]
- You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines. [5]
- Again, you don't see stuff like this on election day outside of the US: [6]
- Thankfully, there are honorable republicans who also call this out, like Conor Friedersdorf: [7]
- And this, it's just... Baffling to people in the rest of the world. [8]
Again, this is unheard of where I live, not because people don't care but because we're not (completely) bamboozled!
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOT1bRYdK8
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-ball...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-tr...
[4] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/21/voting-wron...
[5] http://news.yahoo.com/voting-already-mess-florida-041641182....
[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/no-one-i...
[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/shame-on...
[8] http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/doral-florida-early-vo...
Where in most of Europe people can just go vote their favorite party and let the legislators figure out the details later, everything in the US is determined on one day.
So the incentives to game the system are immense, which is exactly why you see this kind of "Voter ID" laws to target unwanted demographics, and elaborate GoTV efforts with buses shuttling people around town, etc...
But even in the US, it doesn't have to be that way. Several states (mine among them) have moved to a 100% mail-in ballot system and eliminated in-person polling places.
Why would that discourage anyone? In slovenia, you are required by law to carry an ID when you turn 18/get voting rights. So there's really no excuse for anyone to not have an id (or driver's licence).
Minorities in the US are way less likely to carry photo ID. I could go on and on. In short, the situation is different than in Slovenia.
The UK briefly introduced and then scrapped a national ID system, bowing to public pressure. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006 -- a key phrase being "Many of the concerns focused on the databases underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves."
It's not something you can easily compare across borders and it's extremely loaded with all sorts of issues in the US, as far as I understand.
That applies doubly so for a passport or driving license -- people with more money are more likely to have a car or travel overseas, so more likely to have those types of ID.
The US does not have national ID, and doesn't even require you to show identification to the police when asked.
So I guess we're talking about people under 21 who (a) don't drive, (b) have never needed an ID for any other purpose, and (c) can vote but for whatever reason, are too poor/disadvantaged/etc. to get an ID.
And those people get a provisional ballot anyway.
I guess I don't see the problem with requiring ID; we require for far less important things already.
Well, that's not strictly true. I recall waiting about half an hour on the election day for one of the elections I voted in in Ontario.
Several hours' wait during early voting seems a little bush league though.
*(Scotland 64%, Germany 68%, US 55%)
In many other countries these things are banned because people care.
To me it would seem like an easy win to push for it and push it through. "We need to preserve our democracy!" "Any one who doesn't vote for this bill, is unamerican!" "We cannot let our ability to vote be assaulted!" etc.
If we are looking at a future with pervasive electronic voting machines from multiple manufacturers, I would insist on having multiple different kinds of machines in each polling place. That way, any meaningful differences between machines would stand out.
This makes a bit less sense when you look at how it ends up that a very few districts end up deciding the race - but I think the idea itself is sound. Those battlegrounds will shift, likely more rapidly than endemic corruption can take hold.
There are several "wards" in the city, and each contains a school that is the voting location. Outside of each location will be people holding signs of all candidates, but all they said this morning are things like "Happy voting" and "Thank you for voting."
Inside the location there will be about 8 lines with last name letters. A-D and E-H, I-M, etc. If your last name was Dorette you would get into the A-D line. This is one bottleneck, but it resolves very quickly. You say your name, they find your name and cross it off, and you are handed a paper ballot.
With the paper ballot you then wait in a second line until a booth (containing nothing but a marker pen and writing surface) is free. There are about 16 of these booths, with privacy screens behind them.
If all the booths are filled you will have to wait, BUT if you do not mind people being able to possibly see your vote you are welcome to go to a temporary booth, that is just a series of lunch tables with cardboard dividers. Less privacy, far more seats. Maybe 30-40 people can fill out ballots at once at the ward I was in.
You fill out your ballot with a black marker and bring it to the end of the room where there is a single machine. This machine does nothing but take your ballot and scan it, so the line here processes near instantly. The ballots are kept to be recounted by hand if need be, and most importantly, the machine portion of voting is not a bottleneck.
It went very smoothly today.
It sounds very similar to the last time I voted (also in a school building), except I never experienced a line longer than, say, 2 persons -- I guess we have more, smaller locations/voter --, and of course there was no computer at the end, you just put your ballot in the box. And there were no people picketing near the location, and nobody thanked me for voting. Well, that's not true, the people inside said thanks (and so did I).
Representatives of all parties are present when the votes are counted (and recounted). We get the results in the evening, 2 or 3 hours after the elections close.
It's not entirely comparable since our ballot is quite simple, two pages with large letters, it takes about a minutes to fill out with two crosses in the right place. From what I understand you often vote on loads of things at the same time and it takes a while to fill out correctly.
isn't it illegal to campaign within a certain radius of a polling place?
I have no idea why other states don't do this.
What I've found is that it roughly correlates with education, and not in the inverse sense. More educated and accomplished Americans usually scoff at any and all hint of real not-an-isolated-incident systemic corruption as "conspiracy theory," grouping it in the same category as David Icke's tales of shape-shifting reptiles. There is no organized crime in America, no systemic corruption. Everyone is just doing their job.
In any case, what am I supposed to do besides vote (at the polls - I'm all but convinced this is pointless), spend my money wisely (this is the best method I've come up with to enact some kind of change, but it's hardly effective since I'm not a billionaire), and write my "representatives" (who invariably respond with some boilerplate bullshit and go on doing whatever the folks paying for them (global business) want)?
And although I think this is overblown, in general I think this seems a legit reason to sneak a recording.
I wonder what the trade-offs are for randomizing each ballot.
"I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."
Based on the reddit story, I think this was Central PA, which definitely falls into the "not allowed to take video" category.
http://www.citmedialaw.org/state-law-documenting-vote-2012#P...
If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.
Wrong:
> Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
That makes it not sound like a calibration error to me.
Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.
Don't troll. You are bad at it.
It's pretty clear that you didn't read (or understand) my comment. Don't comment, you're bad at it. Dumbass!
Miscalibrations can also happen in these sorts of resistive touch screens that fit the described behaviour.
Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.
[1] Joseph Hall comments here, also provides a link to further commentary by him: http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-...
[2] http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machine...
Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
Edit: Just watched the video again. The video suspiciously freezes from 11s to 18s. Probably, something inconvenient being edited out amateurishly?
I used to work on kiosk software for restaurants. At the start of every day we had to go through all of the touchscreens in the restaurant and calibrate them. Sometimes they would lose their calibration halfway through the day and need to be recalibrated multiple times.
2. Because these machines are open to the general public who are hitting the screens with their meaty fingers all day.
I remember the old Nintendo DS touch screen, which was resistive, required user calibration where you would press on the corners of the screen. If you missed the corners (which, with the relatively thick stylus and the relatively thick bezel on the original DS, wasn't uncommon), the accuracy of your touch positions would be very notably off, to the point that using touch-screen keyboards in some games would be difficult.
Obviously I don't know for sure if this was the exact case with this voting machine, but the point being, some touch screens do require calibration and there is a chance for error. Or, of course, it could simply have been a factory mistake.
Either way, I doubt there's any malice behind this error.
I have used a ton of touch screen devices in public. I've encountered quite a few that were miscalibrated.
Public devices put up with abuse that your private devices do not.
My kids abuse my iPad pretty heavily but generally smacking on the screen with their hands and fingers a lot but I still have never seen it mis-calculate a touch.
I don't know much about electronic voting machines but I wouldn't be surprised if they mostly used resistive touchscreens (which are historically much cheaper to produce).
I recently had to help my mother recalibrate her sewing machine's touch screen.
Multi-touch screens as used in smart phones use capacitive touch sensing technology, they do not require calibration.
Cheaper, older touch screen systems (such as those used with ATMs or voting machines) use resistive touch technology, they absolutely require calibration.
If you've ever interacted with a touchscreen at an ATM, mall kiosk, or airport kiosk, it's likely that they were resistive or infrared based, and more susceptible to calibration errors.
[1] http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machi...
Because the person who wishes to tamper with the outcome of the election only has access to (or, very likely, skillz to modify) the calibration template (which has to be reconfigured each election, hence is modified by more people), not to the entire source code and tool chain of the voting machine. Most attacks are not gigantic conspiracies with unlimited resources.
Or just operate under the assumption that some of the machines are compromised and make sure you have ways of recognizing faults after-the-fact.
In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case.
How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?
If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.
Just because you never see this issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that the ambiguous ballots don't matter in the vast majority of elections so no one cares.
I'm not saying computers are better than paper. They each have trade-offs.
EDIT: Out of 1000 people, how many will get confused by this design? http://www.umsl.edu/~kimballd/polk.pdf
SECOND EDIT: misaligned arrows were also a problem in Florida in the 2000 election
However, that kind of efficiency isn't required at all in a ballot. Making a couple of crosses instead of lines isn't going to make a big absolute difference in terms of the entire voting process. You want to maximize other things, first and foremost making it easy to understand and easy to recognize clearly for both the voter and the people/entities who count.
There's never been any real discussion about it being complicated, confusing or needing any other kind of design change. (Which isn't to say that you couldn't make arguments in that vein.)
There's not much room for error in this design - it seems to work well for us.
The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazili...
More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA!
http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being in the GOP's favor. I have not personally verified, but it would not surprise me.
Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.)
The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that.
Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards.
There already have been laws broken this year (see http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-aft... and http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-... for example), and everyone expects the lawyers to be gainfully employed as a result.
In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.
Since when have Democrats been passing laws to prevent old white people from voting?
They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadvantages Republicans.
It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.
If you don't call this voting manipulation, what do you call it?
I agree that it is nicer than trying to disenfranchise people, but the intent is the same. And I believe that the people pushing the rule would be doing the opposite if that's what their poll data suggested would be effective. As evidence see the story I linked to above of somebody trying to disenfranchise Florida Republicans by calling them up and telling them that they were ineligible to vote.
However:
Increasing voter access is NOT ANTI-DEMOCRATIC.
Restricting voter access IS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC.
Which one are you accusing the Democrats of pursuing? Thus is the crux of this entire thread.
If the increase in early voting schedules (even assuming that there is an intent to manipulate on the part of one side) are favoring one side, it is easily neutralized by the other side by participating in the early voting with equal, if not more, enthusiasm.
On the other hand, the victims of voter suppression tactics have no easy recourse to counter these attempts.
Trying to disenfranchise people is wrong and should be outside the bounds of political activity, it's not 'the same' as trying to get your people to vote.
If they were taking up weapons and shooting up precincts likely to vote for the other guy, would 'the intent be the same'? I mean, they're just trying to win the election.
Granted, I don't think that the US gov't is an example of a system in which we are achieving wild successes and are therefore wanting to keep certain people in office :-)
/sarcasm
Stop with the class-warfare nonsense.
http://blog.luxehotels.com/2012/10/30/luxe-sunset-boulevard-...
Did I mention you need to be voting in Bel-Air to take advantage of this offer?
Yep, it's all pretty much the same everywhere. Let's drop that class-warfare nonsense.
I don’t get US voting. Why don’t you do it on a Sunday, like much of Europe? 12 hours, fine, but on a day when most people have to work. When you add in commute times and all that there has to be little time for many people to vote and you basically have to plan your day around it. If voting is on a Sunday you might even spontaneously decide to take a lazy Sunday stroll to the voting booth. (But then again, you have to register beforehand in many states, which also seems pretty crazy to me.)
Add the long lines (Seriously, what‘s even going on with that? Germany has a much higher voter turnout than the US – 74% vs 49% during the last federal election – and I have never seen any lines. The most I ever had to wait were two or three minutes, and I also haven’t ever seen media reports about long lines.
It seems to me that trying to make voting easier is very much the right thing to do in the US while making it harder is not.
However, I do not believe in any grand or small conspiracy theories and I don’t think there is any kind of large scale manipulation going on. It just all seems dysfunctional, not manipulated. When comparing it to German elections, why does it seem that politicians have so much control over it? They don’t seem to be shy to make politics with how voting is implemented – which is a total taboo in Germany†, no politician would ever dare to give off the impression that they are trying to change how the election is run in order to favor their party. Much of the organization is handed off to independent experts who take most of the decisions.
It’s not that hard. There are many Europeans countries where voting is just not a big deal and where there are never big issues like in the US. You are the oldest democracy in the World, shouldn’t you have figured out that stuff by now?
—
† There is one recent exception to this. The federal voting law was declared unconstitutional two times in a row from the constitutional court during the last years.
The way federal elections work is that it’s basically proportional representation – i.e. people vote for parties, any party with more than five percent gets the percentage of seats they won – but there are also direct candidates in every district, insuring that everyone has her or his candidate they can write to. Those direct candidates are elected using first past the post, but they are at least supposed to be inconsequential to the percentage of seats a party gets. If there aren’t enough direct candidates to fill the seats a party got, those seats are filled from a per-state party list of candidates.
However, what happens when a party has more direct candidates than they have seats? Before the constitutional court struck that down those “overhang mandates” were just added without changing anything else, basically skewing with the percentages. A party which got 50 seats might suddenly get 60 seats without other parties (without overhang mandates) also getting more seats.
In the last election this has favored conservatives, but taking this to the constitutional court was successful. The court gave the parliament time to change the law. What was unique and unprecedented, however (and a rare case of German politicians making politics with how voting works) was that the current conservative government decided unilaterally on a solution – instead of by working together, as had been tradition. However, that solution was also struck down (with constitutional judges showing pretty open dismay that the parliament was seemingly unable to solve this problem in the long time allotet and worried about the fact that an election is coming up in 2013) – leading the conservative government to this time around try and find a consensus solution. So it all was back to the tradition of not just changing election laws unilaterally without at least talking to the biggest opposition party and trying to find a solution both can agree on.
What will happen now is that parties without overhang mandates will get more seats to balan...
Stop with the naive "we're all in this boat together" bullshit.
More people voting == voter manipulation??!??
I would call that a MORE REPRESENTATIVE democracy.
It's the difference between persuasion and "get out the vote". Persuading voters to your point of view is more honorable, but "get out the vote" is often more cost effective.
Just what we need? Definitely.
I cannot think of a scenario where having more people in a representative sample would be worse than having less.
It is well-known that the subset of the population that goes to the polls is NOT representative of the country as a whole. That is why pollsters are so careful to get polls of "likely voters". Because Republicans tend to be more motivated to vote than Democrats, so if they just took a poll of everyone they called, the results would always be strongly skewed Democrat.
(Getting this right is very tricky, and different methodologies around it is one reason that different pollsters often have a consistent difference in the polls that they produce.)
It looks good if have there are a lot of people participating but you have not gained anything if those that voted did not have the slightest of interest in it.
Even the well-informed can end up thinking "my vote doesn't matter anyway, so why bother." And rationally, they are not exactly wrong. Yet, the system would break down if everyone took that view. People need to be encouraged to vote, even though they may see it as a waste of time, because in aggregate their votes are important.
"As" nasty? Nice wording. There isn't a shred of nastiness in it at all.
As for making voting easier, Republicans see it as cynically making fraud easier in the name of getting uninformed people who don't pay attention to vote for you. If you see it as Republicans see it, what the Democrats are doing is not exactly nice behavior.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/09/26/obama-accus...
Besides the responses nearby taking you to task for the sophistry of your last sentence, I feel like it's worth highlighting the very real history of vote suppression in the South under Jim Crow. That's decades of violence, physical intimidation, bogus literacy tests, and a host of other tactics, directed at suppressing the vote of blacks and the poor. At every step of the way, these shameful tactics were justified as some kind of proxy for "intelligence" (and some other "wise" comments here repeat that justification).
Working to increase access to the vote is, in a very real sense, a continuing rejection of these disgusting tactics.
This is why I used the term "ignorant" above. It is as if you do not understand and appreciate the significance of this history. This is not a simple Democrat/Republican issue. Increasing access to the vote is an attempt to remedy, in an imperfect way, the biggest failing of American democracy.
I actually am quite aware of that history. I am also aware that of dozens of efforts in the last several years to change voting rules, every Republican effort has been to make it harder in the name of reducing fraud, while every Democratic effort has been to make it easier in the name of improving access.
It may not be a simple Democrat/Republican issue, but at this point it is definitely a highly partisan Democrat/Republican issue.
Complaining that it's dishonest and wrong is like the joke about "reality having a well known liberal bias"
It's absolutely not proof. It's, at the least, evidence. Exit polls are statistical -- in my dozens of times voting, I've never hit an exit pollster.
But if you say "the exit polls disagree with the official numbers, so let's go with the exit polls" you have substituted your official election mechanism with the exit polls.
Statistics is highly valuable despite not being proof. For example, it's a foregone conclusion that Obama will win today, based on earlier polls. It's not certain that he'll win, but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.
Normally I wouldn't worry about this, but if you want to give them power to invalidate an election (or force an "investigation," whatever that means), then you shouldn't just let them run around doing whatever they think is best.
but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.
I don't even know what mindset produces this thought. While Nate Silver doesn't think Romney will win, he gives changes that are a hell of a lot bigger than "nil."
The media says that Obama and Romney are neck & neck, because that gets more viewers, which sells the advertisements they depend on. (Every presidential election in your lifetime is guaranteed to be declared a "virtual tie" by the media--you'll hear those exact words every 4 years.) Those who understand stats know (with almost certainty) that it'll be a landslide for Obama in the electoral college.
Found in another 5 seconds: "National Poll Shows Bush, Kerry in Virtual Tie"
I could go on.
And Bush/Kerry was also pretty damned close. Not one of the races I was referring to.
I went back to 1992 and still found "virtual tie" reports. That's 5 elections in a row.
Unfortunately current US elections are unauditable because voting machines DO NOT produce any kind of verifiable voting trail. Furthermore the apparent conclusion of the US media is that past discrepancies are evidence that their exit polling is flawed rather than that the voting process is being manipulated. (They are biased to decide that way because accusing the winners of manipulating the vote - even if it is true - pushes them away from the appearance of neutrality that they try to keep.)
Furthermore you can't do exit polling on mail-in ballots. So this potential signal of flawed elections is being lost at the same time that manipulation of elections is becoming even easier.
Personally if polls are overwhelming, and elections are in line with polls, I believe the result. But I believe that there are lots of people trying to slip a thumb on the scales, so if polls are close, I am dubious about the results. I personally believe that current evidence is that the Republicans are more successful in getting their thumbs on the scales, so I'm doubly suspicious when Republicans mysteriously do better than polls indicate they should.
I want us to have elections that I trust. I do not want crappy election machines. I want verifiable paper trails. I want random spot checks. We know how to run better elections than we do. We don't because nobody wants to put the work out. I want us to put the work out.
Please stop.
The machine in the video (at least when deployed in NC) absolutely has a paper receipt that gets printed every time a button is pressed.
According to http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/computer-s... a quarter of the country in this election will use paperless machines. No paper trail at all.
According to polls, the election will be decided by swing states that are expected to have margins of victory under 4%.
If, hypothetically, the election is decided for Romney in states like Pennsylvania which polls indicated were leaning Democratic on electronic machines where there is no paper trail, will you be inclined to believe that his last minute ads made that a fair win, or would you be inclined to believe that the election was stolen? (Note, the information that Pennsylvania is one of the states without a paper trail is in the article, published today, that I linked to.)
I, personally, would be inclined towards the theory that the election was stolen, and the purpose of his last minute ad buys was to create plausible deniability for the manipulation. If, on the other hand, there was a paper trail and audits verified the count, I would be much more comfortable with that election outcome.
Whether or not this machine is auditable, unauditable voting machines are a real problem.
You aren't reading your source correctly.
I read that as a quarter of the country will be using paperless systems in this election. If that is wrong, please explain the correction.
Grabbing another source, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233058/Election_watc... lists specific states where paperless systems are likely to be a big issue. Two of them, Virginia and Pennsylvania, are significant swing states that currently lean towards Obama in polls. If both have an unexpected swing to Romney, his chances of legitimately winning enough other states to carry the election are significantly increased. (According to what I see on http://www.electoral-vote.com/ he'd need to carry North Carolina and Florida - both of which he's at least tied in, and then any other swing state.)
Hopefully unaccountable election machines won't prove to be the margin of victory in this election. However anyone who thinks it is impossible is either uninformed, or unwilling to consider the evidence.
Sure, but if the methodology is standard and the poll shows 60%/40% with a 3% margin of error, you can safely bet money on the outcome. Statistics works just as well for casinos; they may lose in the long run, but they almost certainly won't.
> "Likely voters" is a very subjective term and thus a difficult thing to quantify.
Stats can be used to determine the likelihood that those being polled will actually vote.
Given how successful exit polling was until 2000 in the USA, and given how successful it is in elections around the world, I do not believe that this is a plausible explanation of recent discrepancies.
But, as is common in this sort of situation, I have no way to prove it.
[1]http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/ten-reasons-why-you-s...
Still the national media had faced those issues and successfully did it for decades. Then their polls stopped working in 2000. Why?
That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.
Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.
No magic can make the halting problem decidable.
[edit PS] Of course, this is purely academic. You might as well fantasise about a voting system made of Babbage-esque clockwork.
1. Allowing people with disabilities to vote. For example, headphone voice prompts for blind people, large print/high contrast for the elderly etc.
2. Making sure voters understand the voting procedure - particularly if there are multiple offices and issues on the ballot, multiple ballot papers and so on.
3. Ensuring voters' intent is recorded unambiguously. For example, you can't put marks in multiple boxes (intentionally or accidentally) and you can't leave a dimpled or hanging chad.
4. Perfect counting (assuming the data is entered correctly and the software works right) as opposed to manual counts where papers sometimes end up in the wrong pile.
5. You can offer voting in multiple languages.
6. You can randomise the order of candidates on the ballot, to evenly distribute any impact being at the top might have.
7. Ability to take backups for transit or deliver results electronically, avoiding boxes of ballots going missing.
8. Reduced counting costs and faster results, allowing more polling stations to be operated and allowing the polls to stay open later for the same result delivery deadline.
Whether it succeeds at offering these benefits, and whether they're worth the obvious cost in trust is debatable.
The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines.
Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.
Ideally, every voter would be able to verify their own vote after the fact via some cryptographic mechanism. But on the other hand, this mechanism should be such that the government (or another individual trying to coerce our voter) would not be able to verify the vote -- an almost contradictory, difficult requirement. I am not aware of such a method being employed in any large-scale election.
In the absence of such a method, you have a heap of problems:
1) How do you make it verifiable for the general public? Even if you accept that the general public will not be able to verify it (bad!), how would you make it verifiable even for experts? It's almost impossible to ensure that the code being run is the one you verified beforehand, especially on such a large scale, so this way is out of the question. (Remember, this is a high-stakes game, so you'd better know that your CPU in fact executes your opcodes correctly...)
2) Electronic voting & tallying opens the door for large-scale manipulation without leaving traces. If you want to remove 10000 paper ballots, you have to somehow get rid of them (with people watching). 10000 votes vanishing in a computer? No problem, just a memory operation, a bystander would never notice it.
Some of this can be dealt with by having the machine print out a paper ballot immediately after voting, and keeping those ballots. Then you're in fact using the relative safety of paper ballot voting to double check the electronic record.
1) The software is exactly the same for the whole country (138m voters). All software that runs on it is encrypted and signed, and the box is physically sealed to detect intrusion.
2) You verify your vote before it's committed to disk on the voting machine. See next point.
3) Every ballot box records votes to a flash card that is physically taken to the nearest court house, where a judge is responsible for the equipment that can decrypt, compile and transfer results to the federal system, using a private network. At no point a ballot box is connected to any network or external devices.
4) The equipment is programmed to only function during official voting times, and only after running a test suite and integrity verification
5) At the end of the day each ballot box prints it own vote report, archived locally, and keeps a copy of the results in it's internal flash memory
If you remove 10k votes from one machine, the numbers won't match: every voter is registered, and you have to sign a small declaration if you don't vote - the number of voters is always known beforehand. Voluntary elections like in the US pose an interesting problem, maybe you could require pre-registration?
I think bypassing all the security measures undetected would be one hell of an achievement.
In our country (Brazil), the electronic voting machine is strongly marketed by the government and big media as a model for the entire world to copy.
It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error.
Source: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electroni...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...
They are great if you are looking for biased, unfounded, or fraudulent "facts" to support an extractive wealth policy that exploits "undesirables"
Too confusing. I'm staying home.