ACLU of Ohio Sues To Block Paper Ballots 243
Apu writes in to inform us that the ACLU is trying to block an Ohio county from moving from touchscreen voting machines back to paper ballots. While it may seem like Cuyahoga County — which includes Cleveland — is moving in a good direction from the perspective of ballot security, the system chosen tabulates all votes at a central location. This means that voters don't get notified if their ballot contains errors, and thus they have no chance to correct it. The ACLU of Ohio is asking a federal judge for an injunction against any election in Cuyahoga County it they move to the new system.
Voting is a serious activity (Score:5, Insightful)
A frivolous lawsuit.
Disenfranchising the minuscule number of people who cannot fill out a paper ballot pails in comparison with the threat posed by computerized voting systems. The ACLU has their priorities all wrong.
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Why American voters put up with a system that does not give them the chance of a recount (or even confirming that the terminal cast your vote correctly), is beyond me...
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:5, Insightful)
We just don't have the correct amount of oppression or corruption from our government yet. We're actually quite a long way from that point at the moment. But one sign of that tipping point approaching is when hundreds are made to suffer when a few act. That is to point out that when the Revolutionary war happened, there really weren't that many people acting in revolt. But when they did, the oppressive and corrupt government was to come down on everyone which ACTUALLY made the war start. There were plenty of people loyal to England and the British Empire. There were lots more who were indifferent and only cared about their daily lives. But that all changed when these indifferent people became victims of war, then they had to fight or die.
So you see, we're rather far away from that point. To make revolution even more unlikely, our educational system churns out products good enough to be workers, but not quite good enough to think for themselves, and there is certainly no real emphasis on history because if there were any, even the 'workers' would be able to realize there are some pretty big problems going on.
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think you need to practice some (self-)education yourself.
Go back and investigate literacy rates in the New England colonies circa 1750. You'll very likely be surprised. Hint - it was very likely the highest anywhere in the world at that time.
Next, go and grab a handful of the essays and debates of the time. It shouldn't be difficult. People were debating the merits of rebellion in person and in print all over the place back then. Once you have a good number of these treatises, essays and debat
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Except that the story of the American revolution is taught throughout the k-12 years. Often I find that the real lessons of history go over kids' heads because of an emphasis on dates, names, places, facts. Content knowledge that is necessary but not sufficient. Kids' knowledge and understanding of historical events doesn't equip them to look around and see when similar events and situations are coming to pass. Pattern recognition is generally regarded as a math skill, and in math classes we mostly use
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And as far as history goes, we're missing out on the best available information in understanding human behavior and reducing human tragedy both now and in the future. Instead, we continue to hold ourselves as 'mysterious' and
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It has long been observed that the people of the US regard themselves as powerless to change anything at all. Commonly spoken expressions such as "you can't fight city hall" have dated back more than four decades and probably more.
"you can't fight city hall" was copyrighted in 1946. The Great Depression had only "ended" a few years earlier and the country had moved right into WWII, with the strict rules and rationing that went along with it. Back then, millions of Americans were literally powerless to change anything.
The expression literally means "you can't fight bureaucracy" and this was true in an age where compliance was considered patriotic... Not to mention that this was right around the time McCarthyism was building up to a f
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[x] Americans are powerless to change anything
Yeah, I'd say those are both true today.
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they should be notified of their error immediately and be allowed to correct it. You are wholly wrong here.
A bad system vs. a bad system. Except the paper ballot system is likely easily corrected by pulling the scanner machines out of the centralized location and placing them in the polling venues. In stark contrast the systemic flaws seemingly designed into most electronic voting systems.
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting back to the error getting corrected at the polling place... I saw this on several occasions having grown up in a neighborhood with a lot of seniors. When you have trembling hands, mistakes can be made. I don't see why having trembling hands should mean their vote gets disqualified as if that means they're stupid or something. There's a lot of valid physical ailments people can have that might lead to a mistake, and I personally have seen optical scanners onsite at polling stations catch them and allow the person to correct them.
Voting is indeed a serious activity, serious enough to warrant a system that concerns itself with making sure that everyone's vote gets counted accurately whether they make a mistake or not.
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:4, Insightful)
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I worked as a poll clerk a few years (decades....) ago. Any elderly people who had a problem marking their ballot could ask for help. They would be allowed to take someone into the booth to help them, a friend, family, or even a the poll clerks might help, though thay were not striclty supposed to. In
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:5, Interesting)
In oregon, all votes are mailed back to each respective county clerk. The mailing envelope is opened, (it has your name and signature on it) and saved separately. Then the "secrecy envelope" is opened, with your ballot in it. Then you can know that your vote was counted, but they don't know what you voted for. Then, a team of people go over the ballots to count them (along with machines as well). Every vote that is handled has to have 3 people present while it is handled, to ensure fairness. (I believe that they can't all be of the same party). Paper ballots are never destroyed, so recounts are easy, and votes are verifiable. The whole process is really stinking easy, no driving to locations to vote on a day you have a bunch of meetings, school, etc. HUGE voter turnout. Basically, the whole state does voting the way that most states do "absentee" voting.
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Paper ballots are never destroyed, so recounts are easy, and votes are verifiable.
Never destroyed?
Where are you from that they have the last 50 years worth of ballots saved?
Ballots get destroyed after a set amount of time that (AFAIK) varies depending on the municipal/county/state law.
For example, there was a big fuss over the Ohio ballots from the 2004 election, because their destruction date was set for Sept 2006*, but the 'there were election problems' folks still wanted to do more recounts. IIRC, they delayed the destruction, but I don't recall what was finally done with the ballots
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Having your vote tallied by someone in running a machine in front of you defeats the whole purpose of confidentiality. They know exactly what I voted for, since they are right there at the machine.
That's how it was when I voted in '06, but there was no confidentiality issue. The ballot was optical (fill-in-the-bubble), and when I was done I put it back in this little folder or under a cover sheet or something, and then gave it to one of the poll operators, who then fed it into the machine right in front of me, with the cover still on it so she couldn't see. The machine verified the ballot was filled out correctly and I was done.
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And how do you ensure a secret ballot in the system you outlined? If the voter wants it to be non-secret or is being pressured to prove his ballot by some third party...
all the best,
drew
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So, according to the ACLU, all ballots were unconstitutional until the introduction of computers into voting?
The ACLU has got it wrong here, it's not just a case of one bad versus another bad, it is a case of one system where people who don't notice their mistakes will have their votes disqualified versus a system that is open to tampering on a massive scale. The ACLU (and you) need to develo
Re:Voting is a serious activity (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen this work. (Score:2)
In what way is that not sufficient?
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With old-fashioned paper votes, you never got feedback if you fucked up. I worked as a poll clerk in a few elections in Australia. The "spoiled votes", invalid for whatever reason, were 1 or 2%. Many of these were obviously deliberate -- no numbers or ticks at all. Only a very small number looked like real errors. And these were on quite complex senate voting forms with 50 or more candidates.
A
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Yes! (Score:2)
So like good programmers, we're going to leave the current version in place (no matter how buggy it is) rather than upgrade to something else with different bugs until we've got every last possible bug worked out.
My answer is ... (Score:2)
We're against everything that has errors, so we're against anything distinctly human, which is why we like technolog(&#$#$OOO@ no carrier
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I don't know if
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And yes, I do have a problem when our system needs so much work to account for people who are barely functional. The average voter isn't sufficiently educated, and when you get someone who can't even figure out how fill out a ballot, does voting even mean anything?
It's almost impossible to make an informed decision with access to all the resources in the world
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Indeed. But with a little common sense, and the willingness to devote an entire day to the issue (make election day a national holiday) then it seems entirely possible to have the system quite transparent. I never got any response to my last message about a highly sane voting system (at least prior to the centralized summing of the votes from the precints). I will post it again. If I could get any comments on it, I would appreciate it.
This will assume an electronic ballot making machine. Please note it i
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One of the ways they double-check the machine is by feeding through a random sampling of ballots and checking the totals on the sample.
Correction:
Obviously this does not eliminate proble
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Critique: Time required. It would take days to have to manually display a single ballot at a time. There is really no reason not to use a machine to count the ballots. In fact, these machines already exist and have been used for years. Actually, they have been used for over a Century since at least the 1900 census.
One of the ways they double-check the machine is by feeding through a random sampling of ballots and checking the totals on the sample.
Correction:
Obviously this does not eliminate problems occurring at other levels
Ballot switching/stuffing is still not resolved and can occur at a 'lower' level.
Well then work at a lower level. Do the initial counts at the polling place. There is no reason for that not to be feasible. It should certainly not take more than a few hours at most average-sized polling places. Then the task is adding a column of numbers at each higher level (the sums get passed onto the next higher level). That is well known skill, and one that can eailly be checked by other concerned parties.
I'm against both (Score:2)
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I don't think "central location" is a good way to tabulate the votes though. It would be easier to manipulate votes at a single location by a few people than it would if the tally is distributed across many people and locations, plus it distributes the work load in parallel so that sub-totals are quick. At least it would be much harder to hide with so many different perso
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The idea of the central tabulation facility scared me a bit, but I wasn't sure exactly why. Now that I've thought about it
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Give 'Em Bingo Blotters (Score:4, Funny)
2 cents,
QueenB.
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If someone cannot take the time to devote a minimum amount of effort to fill out a ballot properly, perhaps they should not vote at all.
A frivolous lawsuit.
Disenfranchising the minuscule number of people who cannot fill out a paper ballot pails in comparison with the threat posed by computerized voting systems. The ACLU has their priorities all wrong.
That's not the point. The point is pulling all these in a central database makes it absolutely trivial to rig an election. There's a reason people are asking
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spare us the snobby elitism (Score:2, Insightful)
Voting is a serious activity, and votes should not be thrown away over trivial errors if they can be easily corrected. And unless you never make mistakes, perhaps you should not be throwing stones in glass houses.
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You haven't seen some of the ballot papers used in Scotland. To save money, the polling stations chose to have two votes on one ballot paper. On the left column, you had twenty candidates, of which you had to select in order of preference. On the right column, you had a smaller number of candidates of which you could only pic
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I'm not sure how to compare slot machines to voting machines. With slot machines, you generally give away your money and are then told how much you can have back, if any, without any choice of your own.
Oh wait, now I see!!! Voting machines can operate in the same way: you give it your input, then it decides what to do nex
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You must not be from the U.S. In most states, we vote on something every year, not just every four. Last year, I voted on at least 8
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WRONG. Why can't the system used be better than the touchscreen system that runs on voodoo and responds with winks and nods, AND be better than the scann
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Please explain why someone's (in)ability to accurately mark a ballot on the first try should be more relevant to the practice of democracy than the vote they intended to cast.
Secret motto (Score:5, Funny)
Ohio! Committed to throwing elections since 1803!
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* Voters drop their ballot in the box themselves, instead a poll worker has to 'reset' the voting booth after the voter leaves by taking the vote and dropping it in the box before the next voter uses it.
* Some voters get special "not" votes, where they select all the candidate they DON"T want to vote for rather than the on they DO want to vote for. Which ballot they get can be at the discretion
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I've told people here that I see no problem with the Secretary of State having a campaign reminding Ohioans to vote by saying things like: "Your vote counts! It's worth at least four California votes and six Texas votes!"
Oh Bother (Score:3, Insightful)
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They aren't. It's an incorrect heading (surprise). The ACLU is objecting to voters not knowing that the paper ballot they filled out will not scan correctly. They want the scantrons (or similar devices) at the polls, so you can verify that the ballot can be read. As is, no record will by made of the ballots until they are at a central location.
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For the 800,000th time, it ISN'T that paper ballots are bad, it's that a crappy system that may or may not count all votes correctly IS bad. Why settle for a slightly less crappy system when a better system could easily be put in place? Did Rush Limbaugh ran
And yet a new five-year study... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And yet a new five-year study... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I want a unique timestamped paper receipt which I can look up later to verify my actual votes! NOTE: This *IS ALREADY IN PLACE* with retail credit/debit card sales.
I want the NSA (yes, them. http://www.nsa.gov/home_html.cfm [nsa.gov] ) to certify ANY electronic voting apparatus used in the US and to further guarantee its accuracy.
This means they would be one the ones doing the recounts
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Allowing a voter to verify their vote "after the fact" from any location (or by direct examination of a receipt that leaves the polling place with them) makes vote-buying (or coercion) much too easy. Albeit, this is already a problem with absentee ballots, but we should not make it worse. However, there are schemes that
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But as a voter, that is so much less of a fear to me than the ability for someone or an entity to be able to electronically rig an election (if not just part). Allowing the voter to lookup to "verify" their vote choices *after the fact* is the point!
How do I know if my vote was electronically changed to a different choice than the one I made? Buy looking it up!
Using statistics to prove a system is secure sure sou
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We are in complete agreement that voters should be able to verify how their vote was count
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So that they can't be forced to vote a certain way or else?
all the best,
drew
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According to the study, all of the voting methods tested were susceptible to various types of voter error, including missed votes and voting for the wrong candidate.
Mod that dude down, he is not informative at all.
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huh? (Score:2)
At least paper can't lie. (Score:4, Insightful)
With a compromised e-voting machine, you could walk in and have the machine say "Thanks for voting for candidate A" while it adds a vote for candidate B.
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Keep it decentralized and get over this "instantaneous statistics" bullshit that everyone is so fucking hyped up about. Who cares if you have to wait till the next day to find out who won? You have t
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It is simplistic to think that PAPER = SECURE, just because it's paper.
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Your focus is too narrow. Nobody says "paper ballots are secure". We say "it's far more difficult to swing an election with paper ballots without it being detected and corrected than with electronic systems."
For an individual precinct, it can be argued that paper is subject to (within an order of magnitude) similar levels of manipulation for particular insiders as electronic system
They aren't against paper but Central Count Paper. (Score:5, Informative)
The crux of their argument is that central counts unlike precinct count and even mediocre touchscreens offer the user a warning when they overvote or undervote for a race thus warning them that they ballot may not be counted and thus giving them a chance to fix it. Their argument is that this lack of a warning (however poor) is likely to cause many errors that the voters are never aware of.
So strictly speaking they are not against the use of paper ballots (it is my understanding that they favor them) just against this particular type of scanning system.
Re:They aren't against paper but Central Count Pap (Score:2)
Mod parent up, and also tag the story "badtitle". Because, well, it's completely wrong.
Re:They aren't against paper but Central Count Pap (Score:2)
Yes, voting is serious, and yes, we should check our own work. But we all make silly mistakes and typ0s sometimes, so
In Arizona (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, by the ACLU rules, voting Republican is a source of voter error, and reason for the ballot to be rejected.
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The ACLU focuses mainly on First, Fourth, Eighth, and Fifteenth Amendment issues, something you'd know if you actually checked their web site. They also don't do much with Amendments Three, Seven, Nine, and Ten because, for the most part, those are mainly settled law these days. Sadly, with the current
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As a non-USAian I find nothing 'civil' about the anarchy espoused by many slashdotters who label themselves "libertarian".
BTW: Over here in Oz, the conservative party are called 'liberals', they are exceptionally good mates with GWB's administration.
My City Was Gone (Score:2)
The paper ballots aren't the problem (Score:2)
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Time to write the ACLU (Score:2)
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Excellent (Score:2)
Seriously, though, my head is spinning from the shenanigans going on here from all directions. In 2006, the county BoE had fubared my voter registration, and I got stuck voting provisionally despite bringing ample identification with me, and despite having lived and voted in that precinct in every general election for the past seve
ACLU Sues Over Paper Ballot Counting Method (Score:2, Informative)
whatever happened to hand counting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, if you want to vote anonymously, you can't get feedback about whether you filled it in correctly. But, then, you aren't in elementary school anymore.
Stupid people have no problems filling out LOTTERY (Score:2)
Interesting.
Having grown up in Cuyahoga County... (Score:2)
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They do, in California. You can get up to two replacements if needed.
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In addition, it shouldn't take too much effort to have the machine spit out ballots with anomalies for hand counting.
The other concern is balancing handicapped access and anonymity. Still, touch screens aren't exactly friendly to the visually impaired by default either.
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Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
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