Voting Machine Glitches Already Being Reported

Neovanglist writes "CNN, FOX, and MSNBC are reporting that voting machines in three states (Ohio, Indiana, and Florida) have already been showing issues, both in the machines themselves and in the training of poll attendants, causing many districts to switch to paper ballots." From the article: "Voters put the Republican congressional majority and a multitude of new voting equipment to the test Tuesday in an election that defined the balance of power for the rest of George W. Bush's presidency. Both parties hustled to get their supporters out in high-stakes contests across the country, Democrats appealing one more time for change, and appearing confident the mood was on their side. Republicans conceded nothing as their vaunted get-out-the-vote machine swung into motion." If you're in the U.S., and you haven't voted already, go do it!

Paper ballots

What is wrong with paper ballots?!!!??!? Canada seems to be able to handle paper balloting followed up with results within 24 hours, so what is the deal with all of the money and risk associated with trusting our politics to hackable solutions?

I was out this morning at 7:00am voting and predictably, two of the ten voting machines (20% folks!) at our location would not take their programs...... Take their programs! And how many times do we have to be shown how easy it is to hack the system? When I left after voting, we were still looking at machines that were not working.

Again, paper ballots folks. It's a simple, cost effective solution that is easier to secure than electronic voting. I have yet to see a valid statistical study that demonstrates that electronic voting is inherently more reliable/statistically valid than paper ballot voting. How much is this move towards electronic voting costing the US taxpayer? Was this a favor for political contributors? I think that the evidence is pretty strong for it which might give even more credibility to the FBI in their new focus on corruption in Washington DC politics.

Re:Paper ballots

Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?

They can get confusing, especially in major cities where you have dozens of things to vote on. With millions of potential voters. Electronic voting is a good thing, unfortunately it's been horribly implemented. There's no need to be a Luddite on this topic, just the opposite in fact. However, given the current state of things.... paper all the way for 2006!

Re:

Illinois voting ballots utilize a BLACK MARKER ARROW system instead of Hole Punching.

The Black arrow is much easier to work with than hole punching.

Re:Paper ballots

The black arrow rules. No room for debate about "voter intent" and you can read the ballots electronically for quick tabulation, while still having an easy to interpret yet difficult to alter paper record. Alameda County in CA has ditched (at least for now) its Diebold machines in favor of the black arrow ballots and it made me feel much more comfortable that my ballot would be counted. Also, the machine into which you insert your ballot will reject it if you do something stupid like try to vote "yes" and "no" on the same ballot issue.

Re:Paper ballots

They give us pencils up here in Canada. We don't punch holes, we place an "X" in the box for the candidate that we choose.

If you "X" covers more than one box, your vote is considered spoiled, and therefor not counted. The boxes are large enough (about 1/2" square) that an X will fit comfortably inside.

And it works for us.

Re:Paper ballots

If idiots here can't punch all the way through a fucking card, do you really expect them to be able to stay within the lines with an "X"? We have a lot of R-Tards here, I don't know if you've noticed that or not. Let's take the braindeadest of fucks, who have proven that they can't figure out a physical paper ballot and put them in front of a poorly designed computer that probably wasn't calibrated properly by the idiot poll workers.

Re:Paper ballots

I'd much rather have someone semi-competent who actually examines the pros and cons in detail and makes a decision

That sounds like a great idea, I wish we could try that.

Ideal vs. Real isn't a fair comparison.

I'd much rather have someone semi-competent who actually examines the pros and cons in detail and makes a decision

That would be a great system. I agree with you; that idealized government would probably be far superior to the reality of a direct democratic system.

However, the real question is, would a direct democratic system be inferior to the reality of our current representative system, which functions nothing at all like how you describe?

Having every citizen decide based on a 5-sentence position statement, seems like it might be better than letting a handful of citizens decide based on that same 5-sentence position statement and a large wad of cash.

Re:Paper ballots

I am so sick of people trotting out this tired meme. It's always said so smuggly, like the rest of us are idiots for calling the US a democracy. Here in Michigan, I just today directly voted on five state ballot inititives. During past days I've also directly voted on funding proposals for local schools, libraries, fire departments, and other public services. Many times, proposed local ordinances also go the voters. These things have a greater affect on my life than most of the federal bills that get shuffled around by elected officals in DC.

No one's hiding the fact that the United States is a republic ("the Republic, for which it stands..."). But it's also a democracy. And I would argue that the democracy part is more relevant than the republic aspects.

Re:Paper ballots

Actually, if people is too stupid to punch all the way through a card, maybe it's a good thing they can't vote...

What a great idea! Why stop there? Let's issue IQ tests too...perhaps require a short essay. If you commit any grammatical errors, then you're not allowed to vote!

That is, unless you is too stupid.

Seriously though, the laws enacted by our government affect everyone, even the stupid. If idiots are having problems voting, maybe it's not their fault. Maybe the voting system should be idiot-proof. Now...IQ tests for the candidates, that's another story. ;-)

Do you have a newsletter?

Maybe the voting system should be idiot-proof.

I am interested in these idiot-proof voting machines of which you speak. Please send me your catalog for your full line of idiot-proof products. I am particularly interested in idiot-proof power tools and nuclear weapons, and any other products which allow stupid people to do important things with complete safety and security.

Re:Paper ballots

Having worked as a Poll Clerk in several Canadian elections, I can confirm that this works very well and the results are delivered very quickly.

There are two people per polling station (a Poll Clerk and a Depute Returning Officer), and each polling station has 200-400 people alloted to it.

Then when the election is over, each team of two begins to count their 200-400 ballots. The Depute Returning Officer takes the votes out of the sealed box they were put in, and reads off the votes out loud to the Poll Clerk who fills in what is basically a giant spreadsheet.

There can be representatives at each station of each of the candidates, and they are allowed to place a vote into dispute if for some reason they don't like it. It then isn't counted immediately but gets placed into a different pile (to be counted later by Elections Canada).

It takes only about 3-5 seconds to take the ballot out of the box, read it, and record it. No team needs to count over 400 ballots or so.. and this happens simultaneously across the entire country, so we get our results very quickly!

Oh, and as a bonus the position is nicely paid (DRO gets a little more then Poll Clerk because it's his responsibility to return the ballots to Elections Canada after the count). It's a great way for students to earn some extra money as well as learn about how democracy works.

Re:Paper ballots

We use paper ballots, with markers and Scantronic machines. It's a bit like a large-print SAT. You mark your ballot, then feed it into the machine, which scans it, spits it back out if it's not sufficiently clear and valid, and otherwise counts it and also keeps it in the box. It would be pretty difficult to end up with a ballot which was incorrect but valid (since there are large keep-out areas between where you make marks), and it's not hard to make the correct mark (you need to fill in a broken line with a marker), and the machine is going to reject anything that a human wouldn't read unambiguously the way the machine reads it.

What makes it a good system is the digital discipline: there's a lot of separation between valid states, and the transmitting end has a much narrower valid range than the receiving end does. In order from the ballot to make it out of the voter's hands, it must be very clear; if it gets into the box, it's considered valid and counts for whatever it's close to.

Re:Paper ballots

It's the same in Mexico. And with about 4 times the population of Canada the ballot collection and counting seems to scale up ok.

I dunno that I'd hold up Mexico's electoral system as an especially functional that inspires faith in the electorate.

Re:Paper ballots

I'd put it on a comparable level to the US. Only difference being the visibility of corruption.

Re:Paper ballots

Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?

Again, that's a problem with voting machines, not paper ballots. Why do machines have to tally the votes? Don't give the bull about them being more efficient, cause they aren't. This has been proven by manual recounts taking less time than the machine ones, and the undeniable fact that other countries that do it the old fashioned way manage to have their results out quicker than the US.

It's really simple: You take a ballot. You mark it with an X inside the box for who you're going to vote for, either at home or in the voting booth. If you don't trust their pens, bring your own. It's up to you to make the [X] readable to the poll worker who tallies the votes. Not a machine. You put the ballot in an envelope inside a curtained-off area (so no-one can see who you vote for), and walk up with the envelope to the supervised poll urn, and drop it there. When the box is emptied, the ballots are taken out of the envelopes, and two people look at each ballot. If they agree, they both note down a valid vote for your [X] (or for blank, if you exercised your democratic right to vote blank). If one of them thinks the vote is invalid, or there's any disagreement, the vote is put aside for review by overseers. It's very easy. Millions do it every year. No machinery involved, except for an incoming-only telephone to report the tally upstreams.

Re:Paper ballots

Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?

Some A are B does not imply all A are B. There are many good books on elementary logic that can help you out if you do not understand this.

What you are pointing out is that it is possible to have badly-implemented paper-based voting systems.

What you need to prove is that it is possible to have electronic systems that are not subject to absolutely trivial tampering.

Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result. Election law should specify the standard form of the ballot, and should mandate that different companies make the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system used at each polling station. Both the touch-screen system and the ballot counting system would maintain independent totals, and of course the paper ballot would be preserved for hand recounts, which would take place automatically if the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system differed by more than one vote.

The first purpose of electronic voting systems should be the use of technology to introduce more redundancy into the system to create more tamper-proof ballots. Any use of an electronic vote-counter that does not have a paper trail means that simply flipping a few bits can change the outcome of an election, and it is all happening inside a single black box where no one can see or verify what is happening. That's not democracy.

Re:Paper ballots

No, then you know that the machine printed out votes for all the people you voted for.

The only way for you to know that the votes going to the counting device are the ones you selected is for you to get a human-readable copy which you then insert into the counting device. Then, of course, you still don't know that the counting machine is on the up-and-up...

Basically, the vote of record needs to be something human readable and unambiguous, thereby opening the door for verifiable, auditable recounts.

What I'd like to see is an electronic voting machine that prints out two copies of my completed ballot, one for the counting device and one for me. These should each be marked with a hash comprising the timestamp of the vote, the contents of the vote, and the specific machine on which I voted. This hash should be recorded by the counting device and associated with the votes cast, such that I have the option to verify my vote against the vote tallied (which would compromise my voter anonymity, of course, but only at my discretion).

A system like that would be an advantage to electronic voting, since it would be essentially impossible to implement in a pure-paper scheme, and it would provide a level of verifiability that doesn't currently exist.

Re:Paper ballots

Awesome.

Then you can take your printout to your boss at work and show him you voted the way he told you to so he won't fire you. Threw your printout away? Fired. Voted wrong? Fired.

There's a reason that there's no record of who you personally voted for. A long as it's possible, there exists the potential for voter coercion.

Absentee ballots

As someone who basically agrees with you, something has been bothering me. How is this different from absentee ballots? Sure, you have to sign the back of the envelope, but can't he be with you watching to make sure you vote the "right" way?

Re:Paper ballots

1) Number of candidates and issues on the ballot. In my local election there were 25 races to be decided. In other local elections I heard of as many as 38 ballot issues. That makes for a lot of paper. We did it before, but electronic voting is a huge improvement over carrying the typically 1-3 11"x17" sheets and trying to mark them and maintain any kind of privacy. (Yes, the ballots really were printed on that size sheet in amazingly large type.)

2) Multiple voting locations. Here we have early voting for the two weeks prior to the actual election. On election day everyone has a polling location they must be at to cast their ballot. However, during the early voting period, anyone can go to any of the early polling locations in their county. Thus I was able to cast my early ballot at the polling location that sets up in the lobby where I work, even though I work in a completely different City from where I live. It also meant that I could cast my ballot on my lunch hour at my convenience, rather than having to drive all the way across town during voting hours to vote at the Elementary School location near my house. Having this flexibility, with paper only, used to require that every early voting location had to keep enough ballots on hand for every voting district in the county. This was a huge pile of paper, and many, many "excess" ballots that were never used, but had to be tracked and destroyed to make sure they were not abused.

3) Multiple languages. In many jurisdictions ballots must be provided in the speakers native language, usually Spanish, but just in our local school district there are 21 different languages that they try to integrate. With electronic balloting you can provide all of these, much easier and with much less expense and chance of mis-use of unused ballots.

In short, there are many reasons that electronic voting can be a huge improvement. It just needs to be implemented properly. And the kicker is that implementing it properly is relatively cheap, easy, and fast. Implementing it improperly, like it generally has been, is harder and can only be defended as a means to rig elections.

Re:Paper ballots

What's so difficult about it? You get a bunch of people together after the polling station closes down, burn the old ballots and make up new ones.

I mean, obviously that can be accomplished quicker via electronic means.

But the point remains, it's not the machine itself that is responsible for the fraud per se, it's the people who have access to the machines after the polling stations close. Paper ballots have the exact same problem.

Vote because some of us cant..

Dont forget to pour one out for your 500,000 homies in washington DC who are disenfranchised and not represented in congress and therefore wont be voting for anyone besides our corrupt crack-smoking city officials and thus would gladly change places with any of you. :D

Re:Vote because some of us cant..

I cant move! Stupid ankle bracelette..

I think...

...it would be hilarious if Ohio once again reported a majority for George Bush tonight...

Re:I think...

They'd better - I voted for him!

Rolling coverage of voting precinct issues

CNN has what they call 'The Ticker [cnn.com]' in which they are listing incidents at polling places and general election-related events. The stories are short and to the point and a great way to see what is happening across the country at polling places including an assault by a poll worker on a voter.

Each story is timed-stamped so you know how fresh/stale the story is.

You've done it

Well, Slashdot, you've done it. After all the stories of insecure voting machines, I opted for a paper ballot. I sat in the corner with the old folks who shun technology, but at least I know where my vote went.

Re:You've done it

Straight into the trash bin where Diebold wants it to go.

Re:You've done it

You sound awfully sure that your paper ballot can't be tampered with in any way whatsoever.

I'm awfully sure that some script kiddie moron can't alter tens of thousands of paper ballots instantly with a fucking Excel hack.

cam i underline that comment?

go vote if you have not voted yet. no excuses

if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?)

the gore bush fiasco back in 2000 should have finally once and for all taught everyone how much their vote really does matter

imagine the state of the world today had the vote tally been slightly different back in 2000

if the government does something you don't like from 2007-2008, and you do not vote today, then go find a mirror, and look at yourself for blame

Re:cam i underline that comment?

If I bothered voting I'd simply turn in a blank ballot, defeating your argument anyway.

The voice I have is one of disgust and contempt at the system in general, and I feel I can express that quite well without going out to a voting station and performing in a purely symbolic gesture when the significance would be lost at the counting office as it would just get thrown away.

if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?)

Please explain the logic of this. I hear this argument used every election and no one's bothered justifying it. Please back this statement up with a reason.

Re:cam i underline that comment?

If you want to vote a blank ballot, I'd suggest finding which third party most closely matches your beliefs and vote for them instead.

It is true that the third parties don't win, but this does two things:

1. If a third party starts getting enough votes, it will convince one of the mainstream parties to co-opt the issue giving them votes. This is a good thing. Third parties may not win but they force the main parties to stay in touch with the electorate. (As it happens we're a bit disconnected from that at the moment, and the third parties provide a Nuclear Option, which is that if one of the two main parties disconnect from voters and refuse to reconnect, a third party can supplant them. I still consider it a high probability that a third party will emerge sometime in the next decade.)
2. You are doing more than just saying "none of the above", you are saying what kind of "none of the above" you're voting. A Libertarian none-of-the-above is very different than a Green none-of-the-above. Also, since you basically know the candidate won't win, you don't really have to know anything about the candidate; it doesn't matter if the Libertarian candidate is the typical loon they seem to nominate, what matters is the fact that you voted Libertarian. (I use that party in this example because A: I trend that way and B: My goodness do they ever nominate loonies, which I can say since I trend that way.

By the way, I have practiced what I preached before. I also personally recommend that you only do this for races that you truly don't care about or where the conclusion is forgone, but you are of course free to vote any way you choose.

Testing time?

Let's see... if voting machines are required for one day every two years, doesn't that leave 729 days (assuming no leap year span) to schedule things like TESTING and TRAINING?

Add Pennsylvania to the list

While listening to the radio this morning on the way to work, a number of people called in with problems all over south-central PA. Some voters had to be turned away because the machines wouldn't work at all. The majority of them reported pressing to vote for their party, but all of the selections for the other party became highlighted. (For those who are ready to decry evil republicans for rigging the devices, the people who called in wanted to vote party-line republican but all of the democrat candidates highlighted instead - even after multiple attempts.) Some called in to say that they had no problems, but they were few and far between.

This whole notion of going electronic for the sake of going electronic, which is what it feels like, is bullshit. For almost two decades I've been using the "fill in the oval" voting method and it's worked fine. Sometimes change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good idea.

Today?

I guess no one else (not even the judges- hah!) got the flier I did saying due to computer issues the election was going to be postponed till Thursday, huh?

I witnessed the Problem TODAY and here is the Fix

Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.

I re-tapped the square for "Jim Davis", this time using my nail instead of the tip of my finger, and the check mark moved from "Charlie Crist" to "Jim Davis".

Want to know how to fix this? Don't put the most important square as the FIRST box that someone has to click. Make it something UNIMPORTANT or better yet, give us a TEST / CALIBRATION SEQUENCE for each user before any voting can begin.

Never assume your average user knows how to use your newfangled touch-screen machines.

Re:I witnessed the Problem TODAY and here is the F

> Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.

Maybe the power of Crist was compelling you?

Stay informed on voting irregularities

Some links to stay informed and also to report voting irregularities:

ProtectOurVotes.org [protectourvotes.org]
Election Protection 365 [ep365.org]
Video The Vote [videothevote.org]
VeektheVote (cellphone video reports) [veekthevote.com]

National hotlines:
1-866-OUR VOTE (1-866-687-8683) (website here)
1-888-SAV-VOTE (1-888-728-8683)(voting machine problems)

Also dailykos.com (liberal) has some good coverage, and I know I'll be watching Jon Stewart tonight for his comedic (and often insightful) coverage.

Vote by mail

It's the best solution. Oregon has had this for a while. It's an option in California (you can get permanent absentee voter status and have a ballot mailed to you automatically for every election).

My understanding is that Oregon has seen an increase in voter participation since adopting the vote-by-mail system.

no suprise

The windows based ones here in michigan are all having problems. I talked to 3 other people in different voting places and they all noticed that the electronic machines were not working with some kind of error window popped up on the screen.

Where I was the official was so pissed at the machines he said loudly to someone on a phone... "The paper ballots dont need a reboot! why should we use this junk?"

Voter Fraud?

I don't know what they're talking about. I've voted several times today and the machines are working great!

Heck, I'm in Cuba and I've already voted six times

God Bless Diebold and their Open Access voting machines!

A wild guess

polls consistently shows democrat winning from a few weeks but a few days before the elections, a poll showed a republican progression and another one still showed democrats winning by a large margin.

My guess is that, to the world's (and US ?) surprise, republicans will win by a small margin, explaining it by the last day of campaign.

And now the scary part : people will buy it.

For the record

Just for the record, I had no problem voting this morning in MD on a Diebold machine. It did give me pause, but everything seemed to work just fine. The only "glitch" that happened while I was there was a woman who was screaming her head off that once she touched a candidate, she couldn't change her vote. Problem was that she just didn't read the frickin' instructions on the machine.

So, that was my experience. Judge as you will :)

Famous last words

From the CNN story...http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/07/vot ing.problems.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

"History has shown that the machines are far more accurate than paper so we're quite confident in it," Cobb said. "There is absolutely no reason to believe that there will be any security issues, any hacking going on."

Apparently somebody doesn't pay attention to history. I recall more than a handful of reports where machines were recording negative votes, more votes than registered voters, and even in this very same story, machines not working and poll workers not knowing how to use them. Somebody also apparently didn't watch the "Hacking Democracy" documentary or those reports on hacking the Diebold machines.

Paper ballots don't crash, pens don't need instructions, and any damned fool can put the pen and ballot together, and the same damned fool can read and count them.

For those who say that there's no point in being a luddite and refusing to accept electronic voting, I say this: in this matter, I'll be a luddite, thankyouverymuch.

Remember, "To err is human; to really fuck it up takes a computer."

The foxnews.com story has the expected spin...

Here's Fox News' roundup [foxnews.com] on the voting shenanigans.

It leads with coverage of the voter intimidation in the Virgina Allen/Web race (in which registered democrats are receiving calls informing them, incorrectly, that their polling place has changed), but does not list the candidates or parties involved. And the description of the incidents was written to make them sound vague:

The reports are sporadic at best, but officials said all will be investigated. One law enforcement source said the FBI is in contact with elections officials in Richmond, who forwarded "three" instances of something that looked "irregular" to them. Of those three, the official said, two look to have been provided to Virginia election officials by secondary sources, and the accounts of what happened were not particularly descriptive.One such instance appeared to consist of a phone call -- a voter answered the phone prior to leaving for the local polling place and the caller asked who the voter was planning to support, then gave the address of a supposed polling station. The address was not correct, leading some in Richmond to think the voter was purposely misdirected. Tracking this handful of reports is going to be "difficult," the source said.

Note the "use" of "quotes" around "single" words when they're really not "necessary."

Okay, so they're not naming names, right? But the second report in the Fox News article gets right to the point:

In New Jersey, Republican Tom Kean Jr.'s New Jersey campaign office was reported vandalized. A chain and padlock was placed on the door and keys were broken off in the locks at the side entrances. "It appears the Democrats have already resorted to Election Day dirty tricks," said Kean campaign manager Evan Kozlow, who said the "desperate ploys" will not prevent the campaign "from informing voters that Bob Menendez is under federal criminal investigation and is unfit to serve in the United States Senate."

<Borat>very nice.</Borat>

And then Fox News found it necessary to report some graffiti with a Republican's name in it:

Graffiti that included a Communist-style hammer and sickle along with the name of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., was spray-painted on an overpass and a department store outside Springfield. Weldon's campaign accused backers of Democratic challenger Joe Sestak.

...but no mention whatsoever that Colorado Democrat candidate Jay Fawcett's HQ was also vandalized overnight.

And more naming names:

In New Jersey, voters in at least seven jurisdictions attempting to vote for Republican Tom Kean Jr., and found their machines "locked" for Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, according to GOP Committee attorney Mark Sheridan, who called it a "disturbing and developing trend" emerging at the polls.

Compare this to Fox News' coverage of the incidents reported last week in Florida and Texas, in which people who tried to vote Democrat had their votes changed to Republican. Oh yeah, there wasn't any (please post a link if I'm wrong).

And then back to giving vague details that don't mention party affiliation:

In Louisville, Ky., one poll worker was arrested on charges of assault and interfering with an election after he allegedly choked a voter and tossed the voter out the door. Election officials called police, and the voter wanted to file charges, said Paula McCraney, a spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Clerk.

My experience today. Silicon Valley CA area.

I voted. With a touchscreen. And I think a lot of fears for voting problems were solved by the system they had there. There was no "OMG DIEBOLD" label. (Post voting research turned up the machines were 'Edge VeriVote' systems) I got my strangely notched smart card from the attendant, and went to the terminal. They had six at my location (I live in a relatively small town), arranged in a circle, each machine had its own "privacy blinders" so only the voter could see the screen. They were on their own stands, and all six went to power outlets, and nothing else. The circle of machines was in the open, and the seals on the machines had blatant security tape. Each machine faced inwards, so had anyone gone to the 'hackable' portion of the machine, five other people would have instantly seen it. To "hack" these, you would have had to tell two dozen people "EVERYONE! LOOK OVER THERE FOR A FEW MINUTES!".... just to start.

After casting my votes on all the people, and measures, and propositions, it put up a screen to review. I confirmed, and then it printed the ballot on a roll of paper in a locked box for me to visually confirm. It had a form of "voter id" hash on it, and a "polling location" as well. Then at the bottom, a multi-row barcode and a few other visual/human readable 'checksums'

Perfect? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe it was a good fake, and I'd have to watch the paper rolls getting moved. At least there is the appearance of a paper-based audit trail as well as solutions to many of the other concerns I've seen raised here, and many other forums.