Paper Ballots Will Return In MD and VA 420
cheezitmike writes "According to a story in the Washington Post, 'Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday's election. Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out. "The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost," Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'"
nothing new (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm from VA and I've been voting on paper ballots since the 2000 election. We use an optical scan system that is fairly foolproof. It counts but there's a basket of paper ballots underneath it.
Re:Welcome to your local polling place... (Score:3, Interesting)
The woman had no clue what he was going for. I nearly lost hope right then and there, and I hadn't even got to the voting booth yet...
E-Voting has its advantages (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest problem with "e-Voting" is they tried to make it "all E."
Computer-assisted voting for the blind and physically disabled is a must.
A computer that takes the voter's choice and spits out a computer-AND human-readable ballot, plus a separate machine for blind people to use to read back their ballot to them, plus a separate machine to count the votes, would meet the requirements of allowing the blind and disabled to vote as much as the current high-tech systems do while providing the paper trail the old systems do.
As a bonus, non-disabled voters and voters comfortable with human assistance do not require the use of any technology at the time they cast their votes. If the power goes out, the polls can remain open. This means polling stations can scale to more voting booths very cheaply.
I'm not convinced (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm still not convinced that electronic voting is a bad thing. I certainly agree that the current implementations are very poor but I think we should work on them rather than writing off electronic voting completely.
Elections should be based on the popular vote, not the outdated electoral college system and electronic voting is really the only way to make it happen.
The technology for making such a system already exits. I think the best approach would be an open source approach where the design of the entire voting system is available to any and everyone. Everyone from security experts to laymen could understand how the system works and help to improve it.
Re:No Barr in CT (Score:3, Interesting)
There should be a simple legal remedy for this. If they can't get all legitimate candidates onto the ballot, they should lose their electoral votes.
http://www.transparentvoting.org/ (Score:2, Interesting)
There are petition drives in place to do this in other states as well. Transparent Voting [transparentvoting.org] is a nascent group that wants to require paper ballots in Missouri as well.
Mathematical Guarantees Of Correctness fo E-Vote (Score:3, Interesting)
One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years [springerlink.com]. (See also Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography [amazon.com].) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.
I repeat myself for emphasis: there are methods to produce a secret, secure, election that is verifiably correct to an arbitrary degree of certainty. If you don't understand how, do everyone a favor and follow the links and read the material.
We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.
Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.
Why I like the Electoral College (Score:5, Interesting)
The Electoral College system has been losing popularity in recent years (notably among Democrats, for some odd reason *grin*), but I actually think it's a good thing, and here's why: No election is ever going to be perfect. In order to declare a winner with certainty, you need a very certain tally of the votes. I think we should be able to get the counted results for an election to be *very* reliable, in terms of errors, but I don't think you can ever achieve *perfection*.
When you have extremely close elections, like in the 2000 USA election between Bush and Gore, (witness how much havoc was wreaked by "Hanging Chads" and other problems), it's almost impossible to get a nationwide total that people will agree is valid, particularly if the difference between the candidates is less than 1/10 of 1 percent. You get trapped in 'recount' limbo, and 'rules lawyer' hell (where advocates for either side try to argue why certain ballots should be counted one way or another, trying to guess the intent of a vote with a hanging chad, or trying to figure out if some votes were made by people illegally voting multiple times with the names and addresses of dead people, or the same person voting multiple times under different addresses in different precincts.
The electoral college system helps 'smooth out' our inability to get *perfect exact totals*, by making the election be a district-by-district contest, where it's usually easier to decide which candidate got more votes in an individual district or state, than it is to determine the exact national total of votes. It's sort of like analog vs. digital recording of data: theoretically, analogue would be an exact represention, perfect, but we find in reality that analog recordings suffer from imperfections which distort them; digital, on the other hand, while never a truly exact/perfect representation of the data, gives us a way to record the data in such a way that we can compensate for later distortions which are introduced during transmission or duplication, and usually get much closer to perfection than analog allows.
(I would like to note that, technically, right now, the 'districts' are entire states; I do think we should break it down into smaller districts, like congressional districts or something - I don't like winner-takes-all delegate allocations at the state level, because that's too 'low resolution').
With the electoral college, if there is a problem with voting in one state or district, you can at least narrow down the 'fight' over recounts, etc, to the state or district where there is a problem or extremely close contest and don't have to worry about any other states/districts. If we went to a popular national vote, if you have a close election, recounts and rules lawyering will have to go on in every single district in the nation. That sounds ugly, and expensive to me, and more susceptible to fraud/manipulation, because the nations attention will be spread out over every state/district, instead of just worrying if the votes in say, Florida, or Ohio, or New Mexico, are accurate, and if there was fraud in those individual areas. It allows us to focus on specific places, instead of *everywhere*.
Re:No Barr in CT (Score:3, Interesting)
I will go you one further: we should do away w/primaries as well.
Re:suddenoutbreakofcommonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
yeah but she doesn't believe in dinosaurs! I mean wtf, anybody that doesn't fear a sudden velocoraptor attack just ain't right in the head!
Also relevent may be
the report outlining her abuse of power which she "hasn't had time to read yet" but some how "cleard her"
she has only left the us once
shes a creationist
she cant name any papers she reads
she cant name any supreme court rullings except roe vs wade
she thinks taking 14 g hrs between waters breaking and going to hospital with a downs syndrome child (already a heightened chance of miscarriage) is a good idea
she thinks shes in charge of the senate
but nah its mainly the dinosour stuff.
Re:Makes it sound bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
I grew up in Maryland and moved to VA in 2002. Up until then we had machines where you'd pull a lever next to the candidate of your choice. So they've gone to electronic, and then to paper in 6 years?
Re:suddenoutbreakofcommonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
So if you got married and chanegd your name on your ID, but forgot to change it with voter registration (or here, where you don't have to notify anyone, but it can show up under the old name sometimes), you should be barred from voting for not caring enough? Should there be a "caring" test at the polls? Isn't having ID a poll tax anyway? You must present ID, and there are no free forms of ID available. If you can't pay, you can't play. At least they let the blacks vote now, that's good enough right, so poll taxes are fine?
Re:suddenoutbreakofcommonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
Screw you. When I registered to vote in my current state, the person who copied my name off the form left an 'r' out of my last name. I've tried to correct this through two primary and election cycles now, and I believe they still have it wrong. I've still been able to vote, because the name is almost the same and I can show them that I correctly received my polling information under the not-quite-right name. But according to you I lack the basic intelligence to vote?
Citizens get to vote, that's how democracy works, and you don't get to decide who is qualified based on, for example, how likely some data entry temp was to mistype their crazy islamist-ferner-sounding name with all the consonants. Screw you.
Re:Makes it sound bad? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no reason to not use electronic voting machines that are properly designed and verified.
Sorry, but if you're referring to the type of electronic voting machines that do not use a paper ballot as the official record, then you're wrong. Even if the machine uses open-source software, even if it is tested and verified to work. Computers can break, and they break a lot. It's my job to fix them, so I see them break more often than most people do, and I don't want to rely on them for something as important as voting.
However, I'm a huge fan of optical scan machines. They're proven, they're reliable, and there's no reason not to use a machine to scan paper ballots. Also, there's no reason not to use a computer with a well-designed UI to prepare and print paper ballots, which can be verified by the voter before being cast. But whatever technology is used, I think we need physical human-readable ballots. There's just no good reason not to.