E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes 601
nick_davison writes "The Indianapolis Star is reporting the latest case of 'interesting' E-voting results. Tuesday's Boone County election, using MicroVote software returned 144,000 votes from 19,000 registered voters. After much panicking and tracking down the bug, the actual number of votes turned out as 5,352. With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"
Re:For Chicago... (Score:3, Informative)
Glad I looked for a post like this before I tossed in my immediate reaction: these guys are amatures, Cook County ILL has been running this way spanning three centuries and two millenia!
are there any opensource solutions? (Score:2, Informative)
If there is one out there, then it needs to be pointed out to the govt buyers.
Exit polling (Score:1, Informative)
It's inaccurate and makes the newscasters and us look like total fucking fools.
And it can sway an election.
As an Indiana voter... (Score:4, Informative)
I went to vote at 7:00 am after the polls had been open for an hour and was turned away because of "computer problems." Apparently one of the "pick X candidates for city council" votes was not allowing a voter to pick multiple candidates. Our election board had to print up paper ballots at the last minute, delaying the opening of the polls for about two hours. When I finally got a chance to vote, it was the good-old-fashioned way: checking off candidates pen and paper, and counted by hand.
Okay, shame on us for not having a backup in place in case the computer screwed up. But the computer shouldn't have screwed up in the first place. Testing, people?
Elsewhere in our county, first the machine neglected to tally absentee ballots in a very close race. Then it was discovered that one of the voting stations put the wrong candidates on the ballot, which may lead to a special run-off election. [lafayettejc.com]
http://www.lafayettejc.com/news20031111/2003111
Re:Ok.... (Score:2, Informative)
At the end of the night, our election board produced a box of 462 absentee votes that they forgot about counting. After these were added in, the margin of victory was 5 votes.
This has prompted a call for a MANUAL recount. One problem being cited in this case is the "split ballot" problem where different people voting at the same precinct must use different ballots.
Here is the punch line: Since there is no real way to do a MANUAL recount with these electronic ballots, it is likely that we will be having a special election to figure this whole thing out.
And we thought this would be better than hanging chads....
Re:What is wrong with an "X"?? (Score:2, Informative)
Computerized collection and computerized tallying are not the same. Where I live, the ballots are paper and you have to use a marker to fill in the center section of an arrow. The paper gets fed into a scanner (not networked) that counts the votes fed to it. The scanners (complete with locked bins full of ballots) are then taken to another location where the counts are downloaded to a single database.
The volunteers at polling locations are there to make sure that nobody stuffs a ballot box and there are volunteers that ensure that boxes are transferred and downloaded without tampering as well.
Re:Heh Heh Heh. Boone county losers! (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to see what it looks like, watch the opening minutes of "Hoosiers". Much of it was filmed here.
Boone county is mostly farmland; corn, soybeans, winter wheat, although much of the farmland that borders I-65
is being converted to industrial parks. There are clusters of new home developments, ugly self-similar brownish houses
made of styrofoam and pressed wood, packed together with no trees on what used to be soybean fields.
They might be considered bedroom communities but that's not representative of the majority.
We've recently gotten a Starbucks at the Shell station up on the Zionsville exit. That's about as liberal as they get.
Lebanon High School still has "Drive your tractor to school" day.
You have a choice on most ballots here of Republican, or Republican.
The same political structure and families have been in place for as long as I can remember.
The voting machines are electronic but not touchscreens. They're those big suitcases on
a stand with push buttons and red LEDs. The system has been in place for at least 10 years.
Re:Byzantine Generals Problem (Score:3, Informative)
Kinda. Not public/private keys (voting is anonymous) but... Voter Verified Electronic Election [free-project.org] is Ivory Tower Egghead stuff that you might like.
RE: Diebold on 'This American Life' (Score:2, Informative)
Basically they talked about electronic voting and some of its (many) drawbacks. Most
For anyone who doesn't know about 'This American Life', basically they are short stories (about 3-4 per show) revolving around a certain theme. The stories are real life stories from ordinary people in America. Many of the stories are funny, some are sad, and almost all of them are thought provoking. I'd highly recommend listening to a show or two.
And no, I'm not affiliated with the show. Just an avid listener
I've done vote-counting in France (Score:3, Informative)
The number of persons who would have to cheat to change a vote is high (at least four volunteers, plus the "overseers" from each parties and from the municipality); in addition, the "paper trail" remains behind to allow recounts.
And in presidential elections (with something like forty or fifty million potential voters, so big if not quite US-scale), projections accurate to the % are available the minute the polls close.
It's only drawback is that it require a non-ridiculous number of volunteers, who are (rightly, IMHO) not remunerated.
Re:Put down the OSS Kool-Aid for a second, people. (Score:3, Informative)
What people need to realize here is that technology does NOT always solve a problem. Even if it appears to solve the problem it may create numerous other problems. Why put the election results into the hands of a few campaign-funding corporations? Our government has a history of setting up phony elections to install leaders in other countries, why make it easy to do so here. Read here [bowlingforcolumbine.com] or here [bowlingforcolumbine.com]. You can argue that Michael Moore is a wacko, he isn't, but history often has a way of telling us the truth behind the rhetoric.