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Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count

Posted by Zonk on Sun Nov 12, 2006 05:30 PM
from the there's-your-smoking-gun dept.
Government United States Politics Technology
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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Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count 25 Comments More /

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  • In one word... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frobnicator (565869) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:32PM (#16816400) Homepage Journal
    Oops.

  • the funny thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by f1055man (951955) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:33PM (#16816406)
    about the article is that his wife was the one who told him he got zero votes. She asked him if he had voted for himself to make sure it was wrong....err, someone's going to be sleeping on the couch.

  • What happened to his wife's vote? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nick Gisburne (681796) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:38PM (#16816446) Homepage
    So he voted for himself, but his wife went to check the vote for him. Okay, so who did his WIFE vote for?!

  • Why would you need a voting machine for 80 votes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ozzee (612196) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:43PM (#16816520)

    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)

        by ozzee (612196) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:39PM (#16817122)
        The U.S. voting system does not meet international mandated guidelines for a "democratic" election yet we say we are the "greatest democracy on earth", go figure ....

        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.

  • Cthulhu for California Governor (Score:5, Funny)

    by myth_of_sisyphus (818378) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:48PM (#16816574)
    I wrote in "Cthulhu" for Governor and the optical scan machine was jammed so
    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."

  • The system works fine (Score:5, Funny)

    by Subm (79417) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:11PM (#16816846)
    The system works fine. I voted for the other guy 18 times and each time the machines worked perfectly.

    And the count came out correct. I don't see the problem.

  • 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)

    by neomage86 (690331) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:39PM (#16817120)
    According to the actual article it says 8-9 other people claim to have voted for Wooten (the canidate who had 0 votes registered. Out of a town w/ a population of 80 (and with less than 50 people actually voting) that's over 20% error. Completely unacceptable

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2646802&CMP [go.com]

  • More Arkansas voting problems (Score:5, Interesting)

    by esnible (36716) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:55PM (#16817244)
    CNN's coverage of this story puts it under the 'offbeat news' category: [ http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/11/zero.votes. ap/index.html [cnn.com] ], as if this is some colorful rustic joke.

    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/ 111106bzelectioncontinued.txt [nwaonline.com]

    Gateway and Pea ridge use machines from Election Systems & Software. I don't know what machines were used in Waldenberg.

    • Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WhatAmIDoingHere (742870) * <sexwithanimals@gmail.com> on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:39PM (#16816458) Homepage
      It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!

      • Re:Please note (Score:5, Interesting)

        by slughead (592713) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:22PM (#16816958) Homepage Journal
        It doesn't matter if it changed the fucking outcome! The point is that VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED!

        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:5, Insightful)

      by LuckyLefty01 (803490) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:39PM (#16816460)
      It doesn't matter if it was abject fraud or not. Either way it needs to be determined why his vote wasn't counted, and then the issue needs to be fixed. Just because it's not intentional doesn't mean it's okay for votes to go AWOL.

    • Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Frequency Domain (601421) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:40PM (#16816480)
      It doesn't need to be fraud to be disturbing. It means the machines don't do their fundamental job, to wit, correctly counting votes. Even if nobody was trying to manipulate the vote, that should scare the hell out of you.

    • Re:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nacturation (646836) <nacturation@gmaOPENBSDil.com minus bsd> on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:44PM (#16816532) Journal
      Had his vote, and the votes he assumes had been cast for him (because his friends said they did), he still wouldn't have received enough votes to win the election. Further, it's not clear he would have received even enough votes to change the *outcome* of the election (there will be a runoff due to two other candidates having won the same vote count).

      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)

      by WindBourne (631190) on Sunday November 12 2006, @05:55PM (#16816658) Journal
      If there is one error on the machine, why would it not be possible for there to be more? In fact, it is possible that 20 of the votes were for him, which would mean that he won. Until the check this machine, and hopefully, several other machines from other areas are checked. If there is a failure, it needs to be determined if it is in one machine or is system wide.

      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:You do not know that. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Coryoth (254751) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:03PM (#16816754) Homepage Journal
          Which brings up two fundamental questions all election officials must ask:
          1) Did this error change the outcome of a race? That is the first consideration, because if it didn't then the severity of the error is vastly reduced.
          2) If this error changed the outcome of a race, was it intentional? That is, was the outcome of democracy subverted, and done so with fraudulent intent?

          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:Please note (Score:5, Insightful)

          by AJWM (19027) on Sunday November 12 2006, @06:42PM (#16817146) Homepage
          But when scaling up a transaction to even just hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medium sized transaction, it becomes impossible to count _every_ dollar. It's just a statistical impossibility.

          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?

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