Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Nov 12, 2006 04:30 PM
from the there's-your-smoking-gun dept.
from the there's-your-smoking-gun dept.
Catbeller writes "The AP is reporting that Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people) discovered that the electronic voting system hadn't registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him ... because he cast it himself. The Machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36." From the article: "Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said the issue had been discussed but no action taken yet. 'It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals,' Payne said. 'The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available.'"
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In one word... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In one word... (Score:5, Funny)
PWNED!
You're both wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
If things go wrong with just 36 votes in a town of 80 people, what do you think this means for an entire country voting electronically?
Re:You're both wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
Even more scary... why is a town of 80 using electronic voting at all? Shouldn't they get a gas station first?
Re:You're both wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
> at all? Shouldn't they get a gas station first?
We have cleanest prostitutes in region.
Re:You're both wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
If the errors are random then it doesn't matter how many votes there are, the expected error is the same. Statistical variance affects the actual error.
Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a second this is all digital - THERE SHOULD NOT BE SAMPLING ERRORS!.
Statistics has nothing to do with this - or else you will find that 3+2 = 6 some times and 4 other times. On average you'd still get 5 but...
Re:Wait a second... (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. How many cash registers would IBM sell with these error rates?
In fact if you want accurate voting machines maybe we should just refurbish some old registers, put the candidates names on the buttons and you have the paper receipt for backup.
Re:Not necessarily a 3% error rate (Score:5, Insightful)
The machine should provide feedback that a vote has been accepted and counted, otherwise make it clear this did not happen. Somebody should at least pull out some simple unit testing. http://nunit.org/ [nunit.org]
Re:Not necessarily a 3% error rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Errors in digital systems are usually systematic errors that will occur again under the same circumstances. With the exception of intermittent hardware glitches: those are random but tend to grow more frequent as the bad part deteriorates further.
So once a voting machine is known to give false results, it should not be assumed that it was a one-time error. Debug it or go back to paper.
the funny thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the funny thing (Score:5, Funny)
thats preposterous!
Re:the funny thing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:the funny thing (Score:5, Funny)
And don't even need a weapons permit to drive. Amazing.
What happened to his wife's vote? (Score:5, Interesting)
so its his fault how? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said
WTF? Blame the guy for his own vote not being counted!!
News at 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you need a voting machine for 80 votes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but who in their right mind would blow money on a voting machine for 80 votes.
Our election officials have gone mad !
I think I can tally 80 votes in less than 15 minutes so it's not as if "time to tally" is at issue.
Accuracy is certainly not at issue either.
I think the US must stop having elections driven by locals and have a federally mandated independant voting "authority" that answers only to the judicial branch. Politicians must not have any say in the way it is run and the legal standards must be very stringently applied.
The HBO special really did shock me more than I expected it to. Unless we have utmost confidence in our voting system, we will alienate our society.
Oh, while we are at it, we should also go to a preference system as this two party system just means can never hit your own party where it counts without voting for the dark side.
Re:Why would you need a voting machine for 80 vote (Score:5, Informative)
Until there is a viable independantly managed standard, it's impossible for citizens to truly trust the outcome of elections. Given that fellow citizens have died to save our democracy, anything less that the utmost trust in our voting system is to show fallen the utmost disrespect.
Other countries have very strict voting rules. If the shennanigans on the HBO special were to have happened in any other true democracy, they would have been rounded up in election fraud arrests the next day. It's that serious.
Re:Why would you need a voting machine for 80 vote (Score:5, Interesting)
see http://www.afsa.org/fsj/feb01/carter01.cfm [afsa.org]
We mandate the democratic election standards through aid funding to needy countries, yet we don't meet the same standard ourselves.
Go figure.
Cthulhu for California Governor (Score:5, Funny)
the poll worker--some asian dude--told me to put the ballot in the lockbox
slot. I had trouble getting it in because one of the pages was bent so the
guy grabbed the ballot and moved them. On top was my write-in: CTHULHU
in big black letters. He paused. Looked at it, looked at me. Swallowed. And
I said "Thank you" and left.
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
You must be thrilled then (Score:5, Funny)
evoting = 100% acuracy requirement (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone care to draft legislation to send to our reps?
The system works fine (Score:5, Funny)
And the count came out correct. I don't see the problem.
Doesn't matter that it's only one vote... (Score:5, Insightful)
With one vote that wasn't counted among a town of 80, that's an error rate of 1.25%, based on population.
So if that error rate is taken nationally... the USA has about 300 million people, with a 1.25% error rate in vote counts, there could be as many as 4 million votes that are either lost or counted for an opponent if the same sort of problems can occur... 4 MILLION!
That's enough to sway the outcome of almost any national election.
It's much worse than that (Score:5, Informative)
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2646802&CMP [go.com]
More Arkansas voting problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Waldenburg isn't the only Arkansas mayoral race with odd results. In the town of Gateway, 199 votes were cast in a mayoral race for a city with only 122 residents. In Pea Ridge, 3997 votes were cast in a mayors race for a city with 3344 residents.
http://www.nwaonline.com/articles/2006/11/11/news
Gateway and Pea ridge use machines from Election Systems & Software. I don't know what machines were used in Waldenberg.
Unverifiable for counted-as-cast (Score:5, Informative)
Diebold's Accuvote TS machines have a history of failing the counted-as-cast test, starting with the NEGATIVE 16,022 votes awarded Al Gore in Volusia County's 2000 election. (At the time, Global Elections made the machines. Afterward, they were bought up by Diebold, who were instead infamous for their insecure ATM machines. Ironicly, Their "success" in the voting sector is selling more ATMs to bank chains such as 5th/3rd.)
According to the "HACKING DEMOCRACY" HBO Documentary, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Elections threw out the signed paper audit tapes used in the 2004 elections, despite the legal obligation to file them for 14 mounths after a presidential election. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting is seen retreiving the tapes from the election board's warehouse trash, with signatures, and it shows hunreds of discrepencies from the "official" tape they printed afresh for her.
In my own experiences here in Butler County Ohio, I have no confidence in the results of our elections: suspicous to say the least. This year's 2006 results [butlercoun...ctions.org] deny every Democrat candidate any victory in each race, despite the larger state [state.oh.us] totals [wkrc.com] (including non-electronic voting counties) giving the win to a Democratic Governer, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Senator. But what makes the local results [wkrc.com] anomolous is that the House Representative an local offices were awarded to Republicans, and the county itself is largely a 'welfare county' whose largest City (Middletown) is founded on a failing steel industry. The disparity seems more closely tied to the voting machines than the voter demographics. Creepy.
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please note (Score:5, Interesting)
NO freakin kidding.
We had the same thing happen in Arizona a while ago--the guy voted for himself, and his wife voted for him too.
Final count: Zero.
We don't even have electronic voting here.
I should point out that nothing came of it, either.
Re:Please note (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not disputing that this happened, yet I'm definitely not taking your statement at face value.
It Just Might Change the Outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
Now one thing that should be noted at this point is that, in a town of only 80 people, there may be a good number of people who have voted for him and are unwilling to acknowledge it for fear of personal retribution (this is why we have secret votes). If everybody who voted for him had to acknowledge their vote before the box got opened, then we'd be degraded to a soviet style voting system where every vote is done in public, the implicit threat of a political officer quietly taking note of everybody who votes 'incorrectly'.
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't that be like
Sorry, I'm not an american, but I though you people didn't mind spending money while fighting for democracy. But maybe I misunderstood, and all that money is for fighting for something else.
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please note (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Please note (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Please note (Score:5, Funny)
If I said "the sun is bright" would that be modded as funny?
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
You do not know that. (Score:4, Insightful)
If other votes could, then enough votes to change the election could have.
It all starts with verifying a single vote.
Re:You do not know that. (Score:4, Insightful)
3) Is this the only instance of an error?
4) Is this the only office for which there was an error?
5) Is this the only machine in which there was an error? (If not, how widespread is it?)
Besides, with a dead tie between the other two candidates, there's even an important question for that particular office:
6) Was the error a failure to count his vote, or was his vote counted for the wrong person?
Re:You do not know that. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have to say that the first question you really ought to be asking is:
1) What caused this error, and could the problem be systemic?
Until you have answered that question adequately then you can't really say whether the error changed the outcome of the race. Perhaps it was a simple screw-up that just meant this single vote didn't get counted, but perhaps it was a systemic error that means that none of the counts are valid. Dismissing this until the nature of the error has been adequately determined is remarkably premature. It probably is nothing of consequence, but there is every reason to go to the trouble of finding out that that is the case.
Re:You do not know that. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, with a sum total of 36 votes counted. Your belief that the result of this investigation would not change the outcome of the election contradicts this statement: if there were only 36 votes period, then when this man's vote is "fixed", the race ends 16/15/1, and there will be no runoff. Either there were more than 36 votes, or the outcome changes.
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
As others have pointed out, who cares that he wouldn't have won? The votes should be accurate purely out of principle. Even if the leading candidate is winning with 99% of the votes and the losing candidate is 1 vote off, we must know what happened to that one vote so that the system can be improved.
However, in this case I think those missing votes certainly did change the outcome. The other two candidates got 18 votes each. If there are several votes missing for Wooten, which candidate got the benefit of those misplaced votes? This results in a runoff election on November 28th instead of declaring a clear winner already.
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want to know, is why is it that we are not spot checking ALL system across the nation? It strikes me that all systems should be checked. What is amazing is that all closed systems AND both major parties seem to fight this.
Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)
When confronted with such large numbers, it has become standard practice for accountants to concern themselves not with each individual dollar but with verifying flow for any particular transaction. That is, what matters is whether the balance is positive or negative, not specific dollars in the process.
Fixed that for you. Now how do you feel?
Re:I did a similar thng in maryland. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I did a similar thng in maryland. (Score:4, Informative)
The actual, exact breakdown of the write-in names is usually not calculated (and therefore can't be released), except in presidential elections, where write-ins above a certain number (a relatively low threshold, at that--somewhere around 1000 IIRC) are counted and recorded.
That's why they put a first grader in a box... (Score:5, Funny)