Orange County: More E-Ballots Cast Than Voters 434
"David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system, said it would be impossible to identify which voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts because of steps the company had taken to ensure voter secrecy. For this reason, an exact account of miscast ballots is impossible. The good news, if the folks there can be believed, is that there is no evidence yet that any result is in jeopardy. In a masterpiece of understatement, elections system analyst Kim Alexander is quoted as saying, "Certainly this kind of problem that's occurred in Orange County doesn't do anything to contribute to greater confidence in electronic voting systems." Steve Rodermund, Orange County's registrar of voters, is quoted as saying that despite the problems, he is satisfied with the performance of Orange County's new electronic voting system."
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't America get this right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't the torch-bearer of democracy even remotely get this right? Is it because there is no federal standard, or do Amercians really not care that much?
Voter Secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be, though the very idea may anger many on Slashdot, a situation where the application of technology is bad because we are trying to fix something that is not broken. Regardless of your personal party affiliation, what happened in Florida was at least mitigated by the availability of some kind of paper trail for the votes - once the electrons flow from the voting machine switch, there is no positive record that they ever existed. Also, it is important to remember the fact that people too stupid to manipulate a paper ballot probably will also have trouble with E-voting (reference recent Slashdot story "Fixing your parents PC").
Re:Why can't America get this right? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not voting on the matter because I dont care that much.
On a more serious note, no federal standards... Look at Florida with chads, Orange County now with E-voting and so on. Essentially its a big mess, and quite frankly not that many people care about it.
Re:Why can't America get this right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do-over! (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does this have to be up to the candidates? Clearly by the mere fact that incorrect ballots were being shown, the people were not properly given the ability to vote for the candidate of their choice. Their choice may have not even been on the ballot, since many people were shown ballots for other precincts. Shouldn't this automatically trigger a "do-over"?
Re:I guess nobody cares.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Politicians know this about us too. They know they can rack up a rediculous deficit without getting thrown out of office, because we don't care. They know they can get away with starting a war on false pretenses if they feel like, because we don't care. I sometimes wonder what an elected official would have to do in order to get thrown out in protest. Is there any limit to what they can just shrug off?
Somewhere along the line, whatever systems we used to have in place that gave some power to individual citizens have failed us or disappeared. There used to be checks and balances in the system to stop governments doing rediculous things. Voters used to think they had some power through the ballot box. Individuals used to be able to run for public office and make a difference.
It's a sad thing indeed when a whole society loses faith in an important part of what makes it a functional community.
Re:Why can't America get this right? (Score:2, Insightful)
That doesn't seem to be the issue here as people voted outside of their precinct. Hand-written ballots could conceivably suffer the same problem.
The real question is: Why were these people allowed to vote in areas they aren't permitted to? I usually have to show some ID and they check a record book when I vote. If people are getting around that, then it really doesn't matter what type of ballot it is. People can just go vote in each different polling location. *sigh*
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Before now, you stamped your card, and put it in a sealed ballot-box. Nothing could change your vote, nor could they be tallied for the wrong district. Now, you hit a button and can only hope that your vote is going to the right district, that the machine is reporting what you actually voted, and not what some poll-worker wanted, or even that your vote is cast at all, rather than ignored.
If you live in CA, support Barbra Boxer. She appears to be the only politican around here who is calling for a paper-trail requirement for electronic voting machines. That way, if there was any doubt about the result, the paper ballots could be recounted to verify the result was legitimate, instead of requiring a re-vote which (as this article explains) is the only real option with the current system of electronic voting.
All we need is one serious fuck-up, like California (the most liberal state around) being won by Bush, and you'll see voter riots. Which, incidentally, is how the rebellion in Haiti began.
Ancillary Problem - No One Noticed The Candidates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Were voters walking into the election so blindly that they didn't even notice THE WRONG PEOPLE on the ballot?!?! I know it's probably on the difference in something like "Sanitation Commisioner" or some crap, but come on! No wonder the school boards here in South Carolina are filled with people who have last names beginning with a letter before M. They're alphabetically the first people on the ballot!
True cause is apathy leading to 'slow' pollworkers (Score:2, Insightful)
All of the poll workers were retired. The people who are running our elections at the local level are the ones who a) were thoroughly taught pride in our nation's democratic process and b) have enough time to register to vote, decide who to vote for, and then actually get up off their butts and go vote. It is not surprising in the least that the mostly elderly population of poll watches has trouble doing anything more than the simplest tasks on a completely foreign computer application.
After seeing the way the supposedly 'trained' poll workers at my polling location were left clueless when anything even slightly out of the ordinary happened, it's obvious that some reform is needed in this area (our city used pen+paper voting, counted by machine).
Unfortunately, until more people start to care about elections, poll workers will consist of whoever is willing to sign their name for the job, regardless of whether they are truly able to do what's required.
Re:Not a problem with electronic voting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Voters enter a 4-digit code? (Score:2, Insightful)
This seems like a flaw in the technology itself. The old way, you'd have to assert your name and address to a human poll worker, who then gave you the specific ballot.
The method described in the article is equivalent to the poll worker giving you a stack of ballots, one for each district, and just accepting whichever one you decide to give back to hir.
Re:Voter Secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
We'd have saved ourselves a lot of agony if we'd just had the states create uniform standards for recounts instead of thinking magic voting machines would fix our problems.
Re:Why can't America get this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Post misrepresents story (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, it should be simple enough for a person with a 6th grade eduaction or disabilities or computer illiterate or a non-native English speaker to use. A tall order for any software.
My $.02
I loved the part (Score:3, Insightful)
Poll worker incompetence aside, the only real alternative to this is to start over. I don't care what they think the margin of error is, due to the number of blatantly screwed up ballots, as soon as there's ANY QUESTION, you THROW THE VOTE OUT AND START OVER. This may not be economically feasable; I'm unfamiliar with the frequency of these kinds of problems.
If you've caught this many misvotes that actually hit the system, how many did you miss?
OC Resident (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it is too far-fetched to see Bush win California. California elected a Republican for Governor, and he's doing a good job. California is made up of a huge latino population, and believe it or not, the Bush family is fairly popular amongst latinos (thanks to W's connection to Texas, and his brother Jeb's hispanic connections via his wife). Why do you think Bush made that effort to 'help' illegals? He wants California. He could get it. I don't think there will be a riot either way, however....
Who do you think is more, or less, likely to have assault rifles in the home: Bush backers, or Kerry backers?
Why do they have to be assault rifles for people to be able to riot? Saturday night specials, hell, GASOLINE AND ROCKS can be used to riot. Pipes. Sheer human strength and madness.
But if you want to insist on guns for a riot, are you trying to say Democratic supporters don't own guns? What about the criminal element, they own guns right? Even illegal weapons. Criminals likely don't vote, but they sure as hell favor liberals over tough-on-crime conservatives.
And statistics plainly show that blacks make up a large majority of the criminal element. (Remember racists, correlation != causation, so you can't use this stat to further your agenda.)
And it is a fact that blacks vote for Democrats.
I think this clearly shows that, gun-control issues aside, a substantial portion of people that favor Democrats -- regardless of whether they actually took the time to vote -- are armed and have the potential to riot.
However, I have a bit more faith in our democracy than the conspiracy theorists on here, already salivating over something new they can use to claim they lost unfairly if it comes to that.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
We forget that the reason the founding fathers included it in the Bill of Rights was not to defend your right to shoot a turkey for dinner. It was to protect your right and responsibility to rise up against our government in rebellion when it is necessary. The founding fathers firmly believed that a revolution would be necessary every few generations to keep the government honest. I believe they would feel we are long overdue.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants -Thomas Jefferson
Re:Not a problem with electronic voting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the natural response to this is to simply USE PAPER BALLOTS. Any form of electronic record stored in RAM or on magnetic media can be tampered with. And any two CD-Rs look alike... It's a hell of a lot harder to swap two big boxes full of ballots than a single CD...
The two major objections that are usually posted here are that paper ballots take too long to count, and that paper ballots are a real bitch to deal with when you're voting for lots of things at once (California, anyone?). There's nothing wronge with machine-readable paper ballots (like the ubiquitous Scantron) for speed. As for multiple issues, it'd be easy to issue multiple pieces of paper. Vote for governor on the red one, proposition X on the blue one, etc. Then sort by colour and count by hand (or machine).
The only reason to implement wholly-electronic elections is to fix the results. Nothing else that is of any use to anyone can come from it.
Re:We were getting it right (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, an organization that has pledged to defend civil rights shouldn't use the legal tools at their disposal to fight defective voting systems...because the system that comes next might be worse?
That's a great democracy we've got here.
Re:lack of insecurity, (Score:3, Insightful)
1) BAD: What happens when there's an ordinary, garden variety software bug that drops votes on the floor, or worse yet flips them from one candidate to another? No need to hack anything -- your votes are gone.
2) WORSE: What happens if you have a corrupt programmer at the manufacturer who is introducing backdoored code? No need to hack the system at the polling place -- it's arrives at the door pre-hacked.
--Paul
Re:We were getting it right (Score:5, Insightful)
The ACLU is supposed to be looking out for our voting rights. They didn't CAUSE the problems in Florida, or elsewhere, they just pointed them out. Hell, I've been downright disgusted with how poorly run our polls are here in Massachusetts - imagine my surprise when I voted for the first time at the age of 20 only to discover that you walk up to a table manned by two half-blind 70 year olds who have all the names of residents in the district here taped out onto the table, sorted by address. And they ask you "What's your address?" whereupon they find it listed and then ask you "what's your name?" and then they check you off on the list.
You could literally come in at the end of the day and claim to be fucking anybody. No ID required, no nothing. I mean, I know my vote for president (and in the democratic primaries this year) doesn't count for shit thanks to the electoral college system, but couldn't we at least pretend that it does?
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway. I applaud the intent, but I suspect you'd find that any attempted revolt would quickly find itself labelled "terrorists" and have the full force of the US military brought to bear if necessary.
Which is to say, in this day and age, unless you have a lot of high powered armaments to threaten with, the only thing a standing army is good for is making large red smears when the cruise missles and fuel air explosives arrive.
By all means, defend your right to bear arms - but if you want to stage any form of revolution in the US you're better of forgetting your hoarded assault rifles, and start getting a decent chunk of the US military on your side first.
Jedidiah.
Re:lack of insecurity, (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to KNOW that my vote is being counted dammit. I want confirmation, and I want an undisputable record that is NOT alterable by the software on the machine. Putting all the trust in one company is BAD, BAD, BAD. There is no other way to put it. There's no way to overstate the danger of allowing the country's vote to be handled by a single company that insists their methods of counting are a trade secret.
If you want electronic voting, fine. But then I insist that we be allowed to see the code, and have a way to guarantee that the code you show me is the same as the code that's on the machine's. This isn't rocket science. It's really quite easy to do. Unfortunately none of the people involved in the decision making process for the adoptation of these machines is actually a computer scientist. The fact that all the complaints are coming FROM the computer science community, and not from any particular party affiliation, should be telling you something.
Re:Why can't America get this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
VOTE!
Dont like who is running? Then pick someone you like in the primaries who best represents your interests in the next elections.
You have the power to change it.
Kerry and Bush are the running because that is who the people of both parties chose. We had far left radicals like Dean and Kucinich and moderates like Lieberman. I am an Edwards supporter myself.
If people do not vote then why should they care?
Re:Thanks /. for another misleading headline (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you wouldn't know it by reading the headline...
Uh, how was the the headline misleading? It said more e-ballots cast than there were voters, and in some precincts more e-ballots were cast than there were voters. The headline didn't claim there was any misconduct and neither did the blurb, all it said was that there was a fuck-up, which there clearly was.
The fact that there was no misconduct doesn't really make the situation any better, in fact in some ways it makes it worse. If there was clear fraud involved it would probably be more likely for the vote to be redone, instead they're just shruging and saying oh well.
The fact that some precincts lost voters while others gained doesn't make it "even out" or anything like that either. The people who were given the wrong ballot _didn't_ get to vote for the person they wanted in their precinct and most likely voted for someone completly random in another precinct.
Re:lack of insecurity, (Score:1, Insightful)
How would we know if the "problems" occurred or not? The machines provided no way to audit the results. The machines could have made subtle changes to the votes and no one would be the wiser.
Re:How do either of you know? (Score:2, Insightful)
As another poster mentioned the ballot is pretty simple. Also you are free to watch the vote counting and people from all parties do watch.
Re:lack of insecurity, (Score:2, Insightful)
Why, there's absolutely no chance that a corrupt programmer wouldn't have put in a simple check for the date before setting the corrupt bit to run.
Of course not.
Re:Paper Ballots (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. And paper would have been just as anonymous, too, so there would still have been no way to go back and try to guess which votes in a given precinct were valid and which were invalid. The whole paper-vs-evoting thing is a total red herring in this situation.
If we'd been using e-voting for a hundred years and only now were switching to paper, the volunteers manning these booths would have made just as many mistakes in the transition. Any time you have a new system, people have trouble adapting. Surely we have all seen examples of this in our own experiences. The fact that many poll workers are retirees makes it that much harder for them to learn new procedures.
Re:I guess nobody cares.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I still hold out hope that the citizens of some big state like California will lay the smack down on the Federal government and threaten to secede if things don't change. I'd like to see my own state do it, but we don't have the clout. "Fuck with Indiana and we'll... we'll... stop selling you corn!" Oooh, scary.
Re:How do either of you know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that you don't have to vote, you just have to turn up. The nice thing about compulsory voting is that if you want to exercise your democratic right not to vote, you have to make an effort. Which is as it should be.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
And who do you think is the most threat with an assault rifle, a Bush [blankdocument.com] backer [feld.cvut.cz] or a Kerry [snopes.com] backer [pbs.org]?
Freshman Level Programming Assignment (Score:2, Insightful)
What the hell is this world coming to when this is really such a problem? If it's not the programming (and it shouldn't be!!!), there's something wrong with our election monitoring process that's allowing people to vote more than once.
Assignment 1 - Week 1
1. Create an array of variables to hold election counters for each candidate.
2. Create an array of text strings to hold election choices. Use a multidimensional array so that rows may indicate offices of election and columns can indicate names.
3. Display Election choices on the screen
4. Increment array from step 1 as choices are made. Allow only one choice for each row.
Extra Credit: Allow write-ins.
If voting changed anyting... (Score:1, Insightful)
Call me a cynic, but politicians have got us stitched up like kippers. They're professionals, not fuelled by beliefs but by cash. They make gestures to the people, which we lap up, and everyone's happy for a couple of months. Then, when people start to think, they make another gesture. It keeps happening. It's classic misdirection, just like the technique used by magicians.
People, we gots to stand up for ourselves! They're directors, not politicians. Presidents are CEOs. They don't represent us, but their shareholders. We're the unwitting fools that bankroll them and their buddies.
Every stance Bush has taken, on almost every issue, has been centered around profit. Kyoto? Screw it! It costs too much to comply! Iraq? Screw it! George and Dick can make a killing giving our money to their buddies to clean up the mess they made us pay for. Oh, then they can sell the oil they steal from Iraq, and make even more money.
Don't take my word for it, think about it.
Re:Post misrepresents story (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of the impetus for digital voting is to continually try to make the process as simple as possible for the idiots who can't figure anything out. What was the problem with the Florida elections? Very little was wrong with the ELECTION process and law, except it presumed that the people voting actually had a brain.
Stop dumbing everything down. Why should someone with a 6th grade education GET a vote? Or a non-english speaker? If the person isn't minimally competent in english, how informed a voter ARE they?
I think the common sense needed to fill out even a butterfly ballot is pretty much de rigeur for crossing the street, much less making a choice of political leaders.
If they can't figure out voting, it's pretty good proof that they're not competent to cast a vote. Sorry if that's not politically correct enough but is it so terrible to require a minimum level of sensibility to participate in a democracy?
I think the other problem comes from trying to apply technology to solve every problem, actually. Paper ballots, marked in ink, are the simplest tech around and should be used for the actual voting (because ultimately there is a paper trail). Let the technology be applied at the ballot desk, where the voter can feed their sheet in and are IMMEDIATELY told if it was read OK. If it's ok, the person presses the 'confirm' button and the computer increments the various candidates' vote counts.
Let technology be applied to accelerate the tabulation process, not to replace Voting 1.0 - a piece of paper.
Re:Electoral College (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, I remember the first
First, it assumes that having the chance for one vote to sway the entire election is a positive thing, or the best measure of the importance of your vote. I don't really want my vote to be the one that decides the election; I want it to be the votes of myself and everyone who has similar views, wherever they may be.
Second, as you said: your vote can only turn the election if the race is very close in your county/state. Thus only votes in contested districts are theoretically more important. Votes in uncontested districts are instead nullified. They are less important. In fact they are completely irrelevant. So to give individual voters in highly contested districts more power, you remove power from individuals in uncontested districts entriely.
This is not a good tradeoff. You disenfranchise political minorities so that a voting machine... er, I mean voter in Florida can turn the entire election.
Let me put it this way: I live in Texas. I'm not going to vote for Bush. Tell me again how the Electoral College makes my vote more important?
Successful armed revolutions not required (Score:2, Insightful)
The people who are most quietly passionate about freedom in this country are in now or were in the military. If it came to a revolution you can bet more than a few tanks would be rolling in favor of the opposition. Picking a side is practically a time honored tradition in the military and I believe still taught as a moral imperative at West Point. Which means precisely that if there were any real form of revolution in the US, a decent chunk of the US military would already be on your side.
The worst case scenarios you hear of (where the US forces crush any attempt at rebellion) assume that the military and intelligence and all of the civil defense authorities do exactly what politicians tell them to without question, up to and including blowing up orphanages. Fortunately, reality is a lot more brutal.
Even more fortunate, no matter how bad the system gets in America the foundation still allows the forces of rebellion to take over legally without ever picking up an assault rifle. That's why we have elections - if you had enough people to start a rebellion you could just get elected. If you didn't have enough people on your side, you're keenly aware that the majority of the people don't want you in charge. And if you ever lose your right to vote, you and all your neighbors (and most members of the military) have that rifle handy to remove the minority that stole your right to vote.
Outright Crapola! (Score:3, Insightful)
Your sentiment is lost in the histories of WWII Stalingrad and the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, as well as your beloved government's military actions in the Middle East
Firstly, an armed populace a la the US Constitution should have whatever weapons the military has -- because the population WAS THE MILITARY. The modern Western forms of military (essentially degraded into mercenary forces) have broken with that. But, to an important degree, if the citizen solider can get his hands on an assault rifle, he can match the standard issue of the mercenary soldier (i.e. those "serving" in the US military today).
Secondly, if your concept of overwhelming force really functioned in Reality, then Vietnam would be America's 51st state, and Iraq would have been the 52nd by 1993. Those didn't happen, and that's because even the best equipped solider in the world can be shot in the neck at dusk in a mountain pass. Firebombing hardly dictates the outcome of a campaign.
Overwhelming force is the Big Lie that brought the British Empire their defeats in America
The right to keep and bear arms is still fundamental to a free citizenry. And they can still use it to prosecute war against their own government, should it come to that. The gov can issue forth the tanks, planes and helicopters, but will find themselves torching houses with no inhabitants, while they get picked off by rifle and bazooka fire as they make their way back to base
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
You name me ONE person who was in active COMBAT in Vietnam who didn't commit a "War crime".
I'd rather vote for the man who admits wrong doing and apologises rather than the man who does wrong but thinks it's right because it's "God's will", and refuses to admit otherwise.