Touch Screen Voting Trouble in Florida 574
usn2fsu03 writes "Here we go again with
another election controversy in South Florida. Touch screen voting was used in a State House election that was won by twelve votes. Unfortunately, there were 134 people who went through the process of checking in to vote, but either did not vote or cast a vote that was not counted. Without a paper trail it is anyone's guess as to what those voters' intentions were. Obviously, there is work to be done in the Election Supervisor's office before November comes around."
electronic voting sucks (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean seriously, what will it take for these people to realize some things are just better done the old way, one of them being voting.
I can see it now, in the future major media conglomerates will consolidate and choose the president based on which is the most popular in *their* opinion. I guess that could be called a 'representative democracy' too
Representation of corporations *shudder*
I think each slashbot should think carefully about this and write to his congressman.
Why is this so hard to get right? (Score:5, Insightful)
-Voter touches appropriate button on screen
-Voting machine records the vote electronically and also prints the vote on paper (maybe in like a scantron type format so it can be easily recounted)
Done?
Controversial but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Idiocy will always be resistant to technology (Score:1, Insightful)
Do it again ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Push the VOTE button! (Score:1, Insightful)
Has to be said. (Score:3, Insightful)
Voters' "Intent"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but since when was any vote-counting system designed to interpret what a voter's intent was, beyond correctly-cast votes?
If people don't/can't vote correctly using even the simplest methods, then perhaps even they did not know what their intent was.
At least the problem is obvious this time (Score:3, Insightful)
But the worse scenario is one where there's no way to tell anything's wrong. No reason to request a manual count, no reason for trusting fools to question the results.
Most people, it seems, have an "I haven't verified this system, therefore it must be secure" mindset. But don't worry; this particular problem will be fixed and people can go back to assuming everything works until the next time something is obvious wrong.
Remember - it can't be a problem if nobody knows about it.
I guess this is (Score:2, Insightful)
Still, USA is not a democracy. Its a republic. People seem to forget that...
Very good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
All the groups calling for voting reform can point there and say "Electronic voting without proper auditing tools is worse than hanging chads."
The Canadians will just keep laughing, as more people ask why their pencil and paper system works more smoothly, and in many cases faster, than ours.
I don't care if we have a fancy electronic system with proper audit trails, or if we go to a pencil & paper system with proper audit trails. I just care that we get there quickly.
frob
Hmm? (Score:3, Insightful)
I kind of get this kooky conspiracy theory feeling where say every 3 votes for the "wrong" candidate is excluded and it's a part of the closed program code. You kind of get that feeling when you see stuff like this: Bogdanoff had a ready explanation for the mystery. She theorized that some of the people who cast nonvotes were among the county's true-blue Democrats who were appalled to find a ballot with only Republicans. Did this really happen?
I'm otherwise (still) surprised that paper receipts were never given in the beginning, but it's a very good idea for the future. If anything, it should be a requirement.
Voter intent? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is this so hard to get right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not done. You still have no idea whether the version recorded on some internal paper spool is actually what you voted for on the screen. If there's a bug, or a malicious hack that can screw up the all-electronic process, then it's equally likely that there's a bug that'll also mess with what goes on the paper.
Ultimately, you need a machine that prints out a paper ballot that can then be verified by the voter and deposited in a ballot box. This box needs to be at least partially recounted (2%, perhaps) before any result can be certified. If the outcome of the electronic vote is very close, the entire set of paper ballots needs to be recounted.
Re:Maybe those 134 just didn't chose any candidate (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not whether those individuals voted or not.. it's that there's no way to go back and check whether they did or not. There's no way for people doing a recount to go and look for the equivalent of "hanging chads" and such.
The article even addresses that, it's fine if someone doesn't want to vote. It is NOT fine that there is no way to go back and identify the voter's intent.
Re:Push the VOTE button! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Controversial but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing that it reminds me of is an news investigation into supermarkets scanning incorrect prices at the checkout. It turns out that almost all mis-scans are in the store's favor (i.e., scans a higher price than the actual item).
I think my point is that with the machines, how do you know you completed the transaction? There's no receipt or verification. Maybe I pressed vote, but it didn't register. Maybe there's a bug in the code that says:
if vote != Republican rollback else commit
And how do you know the system isn't rigged or at least tilted a little? Your post, while correct, assumes that nothing ever goes wrong. See Common Sense vs. H. Chad, 2000. Things always go wrong. These systems have no way to deal with that.
Re:Voters' "Intent"?? (Score:1, Insightful)
Voting is to convince the losers, as well... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you acheive the first goal, but fail to address the second, you create an increasingly angry and restless population, and that's unhealthy for any democracy. A lesson many politicians seem to have taken from the Florida debacle is that most people will "get over it", and go back to driving their SUVs and watching TV. So far they've been right about this. Unfortunately, that only works if we're talking about an isolated incident; if people begin to develop even the impression that they're being repeatedly screwed, our society will suffer.
This is good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Voters' "Intent"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
yrs,
Ephemeriis
Re:What? No receipt? (Score:2, Insightful)
Paper receipts that stay at the polling place = good. Allows parellel count of small sample to check machine accuracy; allows recount in the event of a problem.
Paper receipts that go home with you = bad. Potential for intimidation and vote buying.
Re:electronic voting sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people just will NOT vote correctly. They will NOT follow instructions. They just won't.
While a paper trail is absolutely necessary to see WHERE the problem lies, it certainly doesn't address that some people are either careless, lazy or just plain dumb.
State mandated recount (Score:5, Insightful)
Hows the recount going to be fair if they can't recount the individual votes? About all they can do is tabulate the total from each voting machine again.
As many people have already stated, this is exactly an audit trail is necessary with electronic voting.
Re:Push the VOTE button! (Score:2, Insightful)
I do not understand why you Americans go for these Rube Goldberg methods of casting a vote come election time. I can understand the need to be able to count the ballots quickly, so go for cumputerized voting if you must, but why not use the KISS approach for what should be a required paper trail? Seems to work just fine in the rest of the voting world, and there's no silly assed questions concerning "hanging chads".
The solution that works w/o a paper trail (Score:3, Insightful)
Voter enters the booth, booth closes and locks. The booth will not re-open until the person has voted properly or if they page a pollworker to let them out. If the latter occurs, the pollworker can give them additional instructions or let them out and note the incident for any subsequent legal challenges to the election.
Of course, in all fairness a "none of the above" entry should be made for any one-party election.
I vote in all local and national elections and my local incumbent "representative" is not of my political party. My party (or any other party for that matter) does not even have a candidate on the ballot! In those cases, I leave the entry blank if I cannot vote "NO" to abstain. Since in the Florida election all the candidate choices were Republicans, I would think that some voters seeing their party was not represented at all on the ballot would abstain in a similar fashion.
So there's nothing to see here.
Re:Push the VOTE button! (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but out of all the voting systems, computer systems could be more idiot-proof than any of them. I quickly thought of several simple ways for the system to prevent a luser (I mean voter) from leaving the booth before they actually voted. This same non-voting problem may have happened with the chad-machines. And even pen and paper isn't immune from UI problems.
Re: Or use the VOTE wizard! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not keeping more of your own income; it's continuing to accept the services you formerly paid for with taxes (in fact taking more services), but now paying for them with a cash advance from a multitrillion dollar credit card. You're still going to pay it all back one day with money from your income, but with interest.
Re:Voting is to convince the losers, as well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Quite frankly, that's no surprise. What is surprising is that so many people have, and so little has actually been done to improve the situation. I think this general lack of outrage over the screwup in Florida has put a lot of unfortunate ideas in politicians' heads-- many of which have led us to the existence of these machines. Certain politicians have gotten the notion that they can roll out even more questionable voting systems and nobody will much care or notice. This concerns me, and I imagine it concerns you, as well.
Though I think these electronic voting machines are a non-partisan issue that voters of all stripes should be outraged about, I wish the Democrats/Libertarians/Greens/Militiamen (someone!) would begin with some partisan sniping about it. At least then people might pay some attention.
Re:Why is this so hard to get right? (Score:3, Insightful)
The new elecronic voting machines work just like the old mechanical ones. The ballot is a giant 3x3' printout spread over a pushbutton and LED panel. You press next to a candidate (or ballot question) where you used to flip a switch, and an LED glows telling you it understood your selection.
There are 2 big buttons at the bottom of the device. A red "CANCEL" button, and a green "VOTE" button, right where you used to pull the handle.
Votes are tallied using the same procedures as the old voting machines. There is an electronic odometer for every putton on the device, that is recorded at the start of the election, and the end of the election, and periodically during the course of an election.
They election officials record (seperately) how many people cast votes on each machine. At the end of the day, you know if all of your numbers match up.
Sure these devices cost money to build, but I am willing to wager they are still a hell of a lot cheaper than the touch-screens.
Re:electronic voting sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you please explain why the Democratic election officials in Democratic wards would do something that would impact their core voters? This question should be posed to the County election boards in the recount counties which, by the way, were majority democrat.
Voting should be simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Voting should be so easy and so simple to do that it is hard to screw up.
A key part of a fair election is that if someone makes the effort to cast a vote, the system should record that vote.
Making it unnecessarily difficult risks making it an unfair election.
Re:electronic voting sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, who determines the definition of "basic intelligence"? It sounds to me like you want to go back to the days where people had to take a test in order to be able to vote.
I have a pol. sci. professor who's smart, and sat on some committees to decide voting machine laws here in Indiana. She admitted that she didn't understand some of the machines that were put before her - not because of her lack of intelligence - but instead because of poor UI design.
How does a voting machine proceed to the next voter if the previous one didn't push the "vote" button? That's what I don't understand. The company that made the machines in the Broward County case - I don't remember the name right now - said that a possibility is that the voters didn't push "vote" on the review screen. I did this recently, too, when I registered for my spring classes. I didn't confirm becasue I thought the review page was a confirmation page, so the classes didn't get recorded. It's a good thing I could go back and change it because I had a paper printout. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm not a moron as your theory would suggest.
Re:Voter intent? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's the point. We ought to know.
Oh, look, they're adding a paper trail... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, how is this better than a paper ballot with a stub you detach as proof of voting?
It gives the machine makers millions that should have gone to public schools.
Hooray for demcracy.
Re:Why is this so hard to get right? (Score:3, Insightful)
At some point you must trust the election mechanism to work. If you're concerned about the version recorded on some internal spool to differ from what you voted for on the screen then you might as well be concerned with the votes actually being counted properly at the end of the day when all the voters have left the building.
Yes, election fraud can exist. But I don't think it's going to happen at the machine level--it's going to happen at the human level.
These election machines that are having so many problems (or at least reported problems) should be validated, of course. They should be certified by both parties and then not changed. The source really ought to be open which would make certifying the machines that much easier (both sides review the same source code, both compile the program, and both better produce the exact same executable).
But some people that seem to think that the manufacturer of voting machines is going to intentionally write code to conduct election fraud are insane. At least when election fraud normally happens, it is done quietly in dark corners with no evidence. In the case of a voting machine that does the fraud for them, that's like putting the evidence right out there in public. Someday, someone's going to check that machine, take it into evidence, reverse engineer the executable, and you're going to be sitting in jail and your company bankrupt. I don't think they're going to risk it.
Re:Voting Helpers (Score:3, Insightful)
"No.. no.. you don't want to pick *him* he's the wrong candidate." ;-)
That's not a bug -- it's a feature (Score:1, Insightful)
It is a little surprising that so many people chose no candidate, given that this was a special election with only one question on the ballot. (Why bother voting if you're not going to vote for anyone?) But on the other hand, voter stupidity and the fact that the only candidates were Republicans would tend to increase the number of nonvoters.
I think that we need to get a verifiable hardcopy system where the voter gets a chance to verify the hardcopy token before it disappears into a secure receptacle. This will not only make recounts better, and it will also help technology-challenged voters to vote the way they intend.
The one issue here is that the token cannot display more than just a small amount of information. Otherwise very few voters will bother to check it for accuracy. And in a regular election, the level of State House Representative is surely below the cut that should be made. Otherwise (in most states) you will have at least six different names that the voter has to check: President, US Senator, US Representative, Governor, State Senator, State Representative. If you think that more than a few percent of voters are going to pay attention to a long list of names after they are already done voting, you are crazy.
"Fled Voters" (Score:1, Insightful)
What would REALLY worry me is if there were more votes than voters signed in. Now THAT is definitely voter fraud.
Re:Voting is to convince the losers, as well... (Score:2, Insightful)
On the contrary. An angry and restless population is not a good thing when that population believes they have no way to influence the government democratically. Then you either get people acting out violently, or giving up on government altogether and becoming apathetic and angry. It's not like either of these things are unheard of in our country.
NOTA (Score:2, Insightful)
NOTA gives voters the opportunity to actively state that they don't like any of the candidates. With a binding NOTA, if the majority of votes go to NOTA, no one is elected and the process begins again. In a non-binding NOTA, the populace get to express their opinion, but the candidate with the most votes still wins.
Nevada has had non-binding NOTA on the books since 1976. This past summer, Massachusetts passed the first binding NOTA. It goes into effect in 2005.
Re:electronic voting sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
You are guilty of a common problem amongts Democrat types - blame the Republicans for everything no matter what.
If the ballot machines in Black, Democratic voting areas were programmed to silently ead up the ballot and ignore the vote, the blame rests soley on the elected officials in the Black, Democratic voting areas (which usually happen to be Black, and are most likely Democrats). Blaming the republicans in the white, Republican areas for apparently configuring their machines correctly makes absolutely no sense, especially considering that they had no control over the other areas voting setup.
Re:electronic voting sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Democracy....pffhhht! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:electronic voting sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
I won't ask you to prove your assertion. We're not necessarily after an accurate count, but we must have a count we can agree on. That's not a joke: read on...
If a group of people sit down and all agree that candidate A got so many votes and candidate B got so many, that becomes the result regardless of whether we're talking about X's in boxes, holes in punch cards, or readouts from some MS database. And even if we make a 2+2=5 mistake, it doesn't matter so long as you (or the delegate representing your interests in the vote counting process) fails to catch the error along with everyone else.
The appropriate Sneakers quote is: "The world is not governed by reality, but by the perception of reality."
If one of the group disagrees with the result, the "paper trail ballot" type systems allow us to narrow the scope of the disagreement from the "I don't trust the vote count from that State, let's recount..." down through the "I don't trust the vote count from that precinct, let's recount..." all the way to "I don't think this particular punch card was read properly, let's re-examine it". Through a process of "do we all agree that this ballot represents a vote for candidate A? [Yes] or [Disputed]" questioning, we can get the number of disputed ballots down to a number less than the margin of difference. Of if we can't, the whole election get's thrown out.
To wit, the clear problem with electronic voting machines is that they allow reasonable people to disagree with the result in a way that cannot be discounted. Think about it: if you, as a reasonably well educated Slashdotter, show up for the vote count and assert that the electronic voting machine changed your vote, how can the election officials prove, to the reasonable man standard that you're wrong?
If I were in charge of selecting a voting system, I would be running scared away from any system which doesn't provide me with a way to prove Joe Slashdotter voted the way Joe Slashdotter perceives himself to have voted. As noted in the article, vote counters don't like close races, because it raises the percentage of votes where an undisputed result must be agreed upon before they get any peace. Electronic voting systems allow people to get machines, precincts, and even entire state-wide mandated voting systems thrown out. We could be headed for this first ever Presidential Election in 2004 that gets thrown out because of the number of disputed votes, no matter who is the apparent winner.
A voting system without a paper trail changes the equation from one of "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for this (blank checkbox, hanging chad, or otherwise disputed) ballot into "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for these (electronic only, no paper trail, disputed) thirty thousand some odd ballots...
If you live in a district where there isn't a paper trail, just call your local election board, tell them you want to witness the vote counting for your next election, then after they've approved, tell them you will disagree with any electronic-only result. I'll bet they add a paper trail just to avoid the headaches.
Re:(stupid) electronic voting sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used [ncsl.org]) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.
All sampling systems have a margin of error. [learner.org] It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance [ithaca.edu] in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.
In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie" [fec.gov]. It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup [google.com].
Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.
The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes [ohio.com] to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box [blackboxvoting.org] tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.
We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate [truthout.org] choose one or the other corporate [informatio...house.info] flack [corpwatch.org] as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum [highroad.org] won the popularity contest [cnn.com].