Orange County: More E-Ballots Cast Than Voters

Nofsck Ingcloo writes "Orange County, California has discovered the joys of electronic voting. The story originated in the LA Times, which requires registration to view it. Yahoo News has a copy here. Problems occurred in races throughout the county. Among the symptoms of the problem were turnouts exceeding 100%." Read on for more.

"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

how hard is it to have a system that when person A votes for Candidate X, increments X's vote-count by 1? How can something as simple as basic counting fail. How bad are the programmers for this e-voting stuff?

Re:I don't get it

God only knows, since the public isn't allowed to look at the code. We really need to learn from Australia and use open source code. It's the only way to be sure your vote is counted.

Spare me the open source mantra of it's "The only way to know your vote is counted". As big of a fan of OSS as I am open source would do nothing to make sure my vote is properly counted.

You might say "Sure we can view the source" but how can you A) Make sure that's the source running on the machine; B) Make sure the results aren't edited after the election (vi results anyone?).

The only way for e-voting to be secure (open source or closed) is with a paper audit trail. Print me out a paper ballot based on my voting selections and let me drop it into a drop box. Until that happens I won't trust any e-voting system (closed or open source | copyleft or copyright). Anything else has the potential of being fucked with. I don't trust any balloting scheme that can't be recounted by my 85 year old Grandmother who volunteers for election day -- and neither should you.

Re:I don't get it

If you read the story, the errors weren't a programming problem, they originated with the people running the booths. Some of them gave voters the wrong access code (not realizing that some of the polling stations served more than one precinct), and so the person's vote was cast for the wrong precinct.

Re:I don't get it

And just the fact that you are giving volunteer poll-workers that much power is quite disturbing...

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.

Re:I don't get it

Yeah, Californians never riot when they feel opressed.... oh wait, nevermind [wikipedia.org]

Re:I don't get it

Before he was elected, I believe there hadn't been a Republican govenor in California in something like the past 50 years (not too sure, just some news blurb I heard).

Why repeat it if you are not sure. Before our Democratic Governor was recalled, Pete Wilson was the Governor of California, a republican.

California has a very liberal state assembly because of how the districts are laid out, however Californians tend to vote conservative. In recent years we passed propositions to get rid of bilingual education, stop illegals from getting government assistance, only recognize a marriage between a man and a woman, and recall our Democratic governor.

The idea of a Republican taking California in a presidential election is not far fetched at all.

Re:I don't get it

Take a look at the elections for the past several years. California is nearly always caried by Democratic candidates, even with the democratic candidate isn't all that popular nationwide.

OK, let's look:

(source: Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections [uselectionatlas.org]

Year Candidate who got CA electors
2000 Al Gore (D)
1996 Bill Clinton (D)
1992 Bill Clinton (D)
1988 George Bush, Sr (R)
1984 Ronald Reagan (R)
1980 Ronald Reagan (R)
1976 Gerald Ford (R)
1972 Richard Nixon (R)
1968 Richard Nixon (R)
1964 Lyndon Johnson (D)

I think 40 years is far enough for now. Anyone who's interested go back further on their own.

Now, what do we learn from this, kids? That California is just as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat. To state otherwise is foolish.

Re:I don't get it

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.

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.

Paper Ballots

Even with paper ballots, the poll workers could have given out the wrong ballot to the voters. It wouldn't have made a difference in the results. It's still the wrong ballot, whether it's paper or bits.

WTF?

Why are there no comments? Looks like we need independent auditors for Slashcode!

Re:WTF?

I think that's because all the initial comments on this story got attached to other adjacent stories. :)

Two replies?

something seems buggy here

Why can't America get this right?

In Canada, for a federal election we record something like 15 million hand-written votes in a few hours.

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?

Re:Why can't America get this right?

It's the same in the UK. Millions of paper votes are counted in a matter of hours. It's a system that works well, so I don't understand the need to force through such obvious broken technology.

Re:How do either of you know?

The thing about compulsory voting is that I am really split over it. I know it is my democratic right not to vote, yet I also know that making people vote gives you a much better outcome as everyone is represented.

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:Why can't America get this right?

The powers that be WANT these machines in place because they are easily manipulated. There are already weird anomolies where republicans win landslides when exit polls indicate they should not have.

Re:Why can't America get this right?

We're not so much the "torch-bearer of democracy" anymore as we are a mob with torches. And proud of it!

We were getting it right

Why can't the torch-bearer of democracy even remotely get this right?

We were getting it right before this. We had minor problems here and there, but nothing that drastic. Then, Florida. Because it was the deciding state, the vote was extremely close, and it had no uniform standards for what counted as a 'vote,' it became a battle to the death that had to be settled by the courts finally. And because of inherent "flaws" that hadn't caused any big problems up to then, the ACLU sued everyone who was using the punch bllot and forced them to go to new methods which produced (surprise) chaos the first time out. My city had clueless poll workers who couldn't even boot their machines for hours at the beginning, turning away hundreds or thousands (no one is sure even now) of voters. Even scarier, the poll workers were getting assisted by walk-in voters who had technical knowledge and were helping them to fix the problems. I heard one guy on the radio talking about how he'd poked around in the OS (WIndows CE, no less) on the Diebold machine, looking for the missing application. A number of poll workers took the manines home after they were trained and stored them in their garages until voting day. The 'seal' was a sticker that could be easily removed and reapplied without detection. Not exactly what you'd call secure. Tell me this is better than what we had, I dare you. Thanks, ACLU!

Actually, we were not getting it right

>Thanks, ACLU

This is bullshit. The ACLU and NAACP wanted shorter lines [63.135.96.161] and a felon list that included only, you know, felons.

In fact the debacle in Florida showed us we WEREN'T getting it right and we needed a federal standard, like most western nations, but the states were sold on the 'digital voting' snake-oil and here we are. And make no mistake about it, they were sold on this knowing full well how easily these machines can be manipulated.

'Tis politics as usual.

Re:We were getting it right

Thanks, ACLU!

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:We were getting it right

Huh? This is not the ACLUs fault. The ACLU didn't put Diebold forward as a company to provide a well-run, secure electronic voting system - I'm pretty certain given the well-documented ties between Diebold management and the GOP that blaming the ACLU for their selection is pretty ludicrous. Hell, I doubt the ACLU even proposed electronic voting.

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:Electoral College

Actually, under the electoral college system your single vote is more likely to sway the election in the event of a close vote than it would be in a direct majority count, and is therefore, theoretically, _more_ important.

Ah yes, I remember the first /. article where some educated person posited this inane theory. Yes, it does in fact amplify the power of groups of small groups of voters thus allowing them to effect the larger election in ways their raw numbers would not. There are a couple reasons why the electoral college is still bad.

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?

Voter Secrecy

/puts flame shield on
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"). /removes flame shield

Re:Voter Secrecy

Agreed. What really blew Florida up was lack of standards in doing the hand counts. In California, many counties used punch ballots without problems for many years. The trick is that the state has a standard (3 corners of the chad have to be detached) for how to hand-count a vote. Florida, not having that, was at the mercy of whatever standard the individual county officials decided to make up. Naturally, with an election teetering in the balance, the two parties pulled out every stop to influence this process, including pressuring the officials, sueing, screaming all over the press, marching into the buildings, etc.

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.

So, why doesn't a losing candidate sue?

It seems pretty open & shut. They have no clue what the real results should be.

Maybe they can call in some UN observers (or Haitian officials) to supervise the next round of elections.

Post misrepresents story

Once again a post appears which completely misleads /.ers. This time, despite the long post, the poster failed to mention that the reason for the vote discrepancies is that workers gave voters the wrong codes, and therefore, people were voting in the wrong precincts. Most likely, the 1st precinct on the list got vote from other precint voters, resulting in a larger than %100 turnout. Simple case of garbage in-garbageout. There was no machine cracking or even machine errors that anyone has mentioned.

Re:Post misrepresents story

But, what about ease of use? Paper and pencil ballots are easy. It sounds like a poorly designed and documented system. Which, while not technically a machine error must be accounted for. If complex codes, sub-menus, small type etc. are in the way of accurrate voting, then the system STIILL is broken.

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

Not a problem with electronic voting...

I think this story is kind of misleading. There was no error in the electronic voting machines, there was no programming error, no hacked results. As far as I can tell, it seems like the problems came entirely from the people running the polling booths, who hadn't recieved adquate training/instruction. This kind of screw-up could have happened regardless of the method being used to tally the votes! The REAL problem is not that the electronic voting machines are unreliable, it's that humans are, and without the paper trail that normal procedures generate, there's no way to go back and fix mistakes. If people want to implement electronic voting on a wider basis, I think traceability is a key issue. (Provided, of course, that voter anonymity is preserved, but this shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than it is with paper ballots.)

Re:Not a problem with electronic voting...

This kind of screw-up could have happened regardless of the method being used to tally the votes! The REAL problem is not that the electronic voting machines are unreliable, it's that humans are, and without the paper trail that normal procedures generate, there's no way to go back and fix mistakes.

But the fact that there was no paper trail is a consequence of the fact that they used electronic voting machines. Any other method would have created a paper trail automatically.

Re:Not a problem with electronic voting...

(Provided, of course, that voter anonymity is preserved, but this shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than it is with paper ballots.)

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.

Do-over!

To successfully challenge the outcome of an election, losing candidates would have to prove in court that the problem was so widespread it probably changed the outcome of the election, said Fred Woocher, a Santa Monica election law attorney.

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"?

speaks for itself. [ACK!]

for those who prefer not to RFTA

"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."

cleetus

lack of insecurity,

I live in California, and have experienced this situation first hand. When i went to vote (luckily right down the street from my house) I was surprised to see how secure the system was.
(besides seeing that it was manned by a bunch of old ladies who wouldn't know how to operate the machines themselves)
The machines use no internet connection, in fact the number of cards, steps, and the size of the voting system makes it "almost" impossible to hack.
Brief description for those of you who have not come into contact or heard of the system yet:
You walk in and provide them with your name, they hand you a card with a smart chip (flash memory) and you walk over to the tablet-computer-like voting machines to cast your vote. At this point your name is on the flash memory, and when you insert the card you can begin the voting process. the only cord leading away from the unit was a power cord and I didn't pick up any WiFi signals with my ears.
You continue your voting, and the selections you made on the screen are put onto the card when you finish. Then your card is ejected back into your sweaty little palms.
you hand said unmarked card to the attendant and she puts it safely with the others. I've also heard the cards are kept for a manual tally back at the voting offices.
What is so great about this you ask? Well considering that the machines are not biased and that the people who built or were contracted to build them did not tamper with them, there is very little chance for a misread vote, or a "purposefully changed" vote. On the other hand from the information I've gathered the system is also open to a more wide spread hack or foul play because of it's final form: mass data statistics. one file or even multiple files holding numbers...MUCH easier to change as opposed to 6 million ballots, but at the same time much harder unless you have the knowledge or skill set which is (I suppose) very steep, deep, and wide.
Weighing all of the factors, I believe that the system is just about as secure as before, but it still needs a lot of work. (it could be ten times better, easily .

Re:lack of insecurity,

The insecurity I'm most worried about is the kind that comes from INSIDE the company that provided the machines. When voting, EVERYTHING about the process MUST be open to public scrutiny, and I mean EVERYTHING. Voting is too important to hide the mechanism behind NDAs and patents. If the software counting the votes is secret (and it is), as most corporate software is, then it's not a trustable vote. Companies wanting to keep their methods secret is perfectly acceptable when they are trying to make money off of a trade secret. It's NOT acceptable, however, when they are trying to make money by convincing the government that their system is a safe system that won't disenfranchise any citizenry.

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.

Ancillary Problem - No One Noticed The Candidates?

Another problem I see here that no one has yet pointed out is with the voters themselves. If it was truly a problem that people were voting in the wrong districts/precincts, then that means they would have been voting for the wrong LIST of candidates.

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!

I loved the part

where they say that recounts aren't needed due to the wide margins of victory. Did these braniacs ever consider that maybe the reason for the wide margins IS THAT MORE PEOPLE VOTED THAN REGISTERED.

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

Ya, I go to UCI here in Orange County and I know that only 3 (myself, my gf, and my roomie) of the 20 people I know who even care to register, voted. My friends and I saw some scandalous result like this coming a mile away what with other "success" like this having occured in tests and other area around the nation. How could we not see this coming? Just think about it: 1)Needless, expensive upgrade to a faulty, lesser secure technology 2)OLD poll-workers who still believe computers are the internet teaching younger and older voters alike how to use he polls if the voters are to lazy to watch the video [ocvote.org]. 3)The majority of active voters are people of the same demographic. 4)The interface is user-UNfriendly. Watch the video. Access codes, wheels instead of arrows, and a physical end-all-and-submit-ballot-whether-or-not-your-actu ally-done button. It was either doomed from the beginning or planned to fail.

Reality Check Kids..

So the election officials panic at the problems in 2000 and run out and the newest, slickest gadgets they can find. Somebody should give them some valium, have them count to ten, and show them how NASA does procurement.

You don't use untested technology for something this important. The perception is that all the old voting systems are inadaquate. What a load of bunk. In the Twin Cities, we use optical scanners, which are fast, easy to use, and hard to screw up. The scanning machine can even complain instantly if you do something silly like vote for two condidates in the same race. I'll stop rambling now.

Party affiliation ???

Can someone please explain to an ignorant Brit:

• After signing in, each voter received a ticket bearing his or her precinct number and party affiliation from a poll worker.

What is this about party affiliation? Is that talking about political parties? The way that I read that is that the ticket issued by the worker somehow contains information about the political party that the voter is (presumably) disposed to vote for. If that is true then it is anything but a secret ballot.

I suspect (and hope) that I have misunderstood something here -- can someone please explain.

Printed receipts would have allowed a recount

Perfect example of why printed receipts are needed.

Here we have an election where the results were obviously wrong, yet no recount is possible.

The fact that the fraud is not alleged and that election was not close enough for the error to matter is irrelevant. What happens when the election is close?

There has to be a way to check the results.

Re:I guess nobody cares....

Maybe this is a reflection of society's attitude in general. I sense that a new level of apathy has developed over the last decade or so. Our politicians have stooped to such lows that they have no credibility left at all, and by association neither does the whole political system. We assume that politicians are lying and impotent, but we don't react with horror any more, because we just take it for granted. We assume that the election system is hopelessly broken and probably blatantly rigged, but we don't care anymore. What's the good of worrying about it if we feel there's nothing we can do?

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.

Wrong access code?

Wow. Less than 10 posts on this when the one above it has 200 some odd. This must be some kind of record for the least-cared about story to ever hit the front page.

Not neccessarily. I think it may be because they're giving us the wrong access code or something. At least, all of my posts in this thread so far have shown up under an adjacent story which is posted on the same web site.

I swear, these electronic messaging systems are just too unreliable.

-- MarkusQ

P.S. And darn it, why can't I get a simple paper reciept when I post?!

Re:I guess nobody cares....

Actually, despite the timestamps on the story I'd swear this story didn't even show up for me a couple hours ago, when the Kodak lawsuit story was at the top, followed by the SCO one. This is definitely a story I'd have clicked on.

Glitch in the Matrix?

Re:Thanks /. for another misleading headline

The article clearly states that there was no intentional misconduct here, just that voters were given ballots for the wrong precinct. So, some precinct showed more tallied votes than registered voters, but its not like anyone voted more than once.

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.