Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count 672
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.'"
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?
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Re:You're both wrong... (Score:4, Interesting)
And what, 8 bars? Yeah I grew up near towns like that - farmers have to go someplace. (Our town was the MAJOR metro area - having maybe 10,000 people. ;-) )
Re:You're both wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
> at all? Shouldn't they get a gas station first?
We have cleanest prostitutes in region.
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Actually, if errors are random, the more votes involved, the lower the expected error. Statistical variance.
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.
So the buttons fire stochastically? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you suggesting the buttons and tally counters of a voting machine react according to some probabality curve such as stochastic?
Somehow that flies in the face of digital accuracy, code predictability, database integrity, system security, and application reliability, doesn't it?
We're talking about straight-forward button-press counting systems here, not some sort of complex interest accruals or tax filing analysis. There are no heuristics, there are no inference engines, and there is so little code
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Welcome to the wild and wacky world of commercial software development.
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After watching the HBO special (which was very slanted, to say the least), it is clear to me that their electronic voting machines suck. Here are some interesting tidbits I learned from the pseudo-documentary:
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Why should they be? Once the votes have been anonymised, the more openness, the better. In an ideal situation, any voter should be allowed read access to the data and processing routines. The voting should be secret, the counting should be public.
Regards,
--
*Art
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"Wooten got the news from his wife, Roxanne, who went to City Hall on Wednesday to see the election results. 'She saw my name with zero votes by it. She came home and asked me if I had voted for myself or not. I told her I did,' said Wooten, owner of a local bar."
The guy's wife didn't even vote for him.
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.
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In other voting news (Score:4, Interesting)
In late-breaking Tuttle news, utility clerk Juanita Coffey has won the vote for the city pumpkin decorating contest. City manager Jerry A Taylor [tuttle-ok.gov] is quoted as saying:
It is important to note that there have been no allegations of voting irregularity, despite Jerry's 22 years of technical experience.
You will also be pleased to hear that unlike the progressive clamor across the rest of our great nation, the good folks in Tuttle, Oklahoma seem to have reddened their necks further and elected three more Republicans [tuttletimes.com] to the statehouse.
This is a fitting opportunity to remember the great Jerry A Taylor, so deserving of his $5000 pay rise for his legendary competence [tuttletimes.com]. I wonder what he is up to these days?
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the funny thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the funny thing (Score:5, Funny)
thats preposterous!
Re:the funny thing (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:the funny thing (Score:5, Funny)
And don't even need a weapons permit to drive. Amazing.
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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!!
I did a similar thng in maryland. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
News at 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
They use a voting machine for 36 votes? (Score:3, Funny)
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That's why they put a first grader in a box... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Why would you need a voting machine for 80 vote (Score:4, Interesting)
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Al
This gives us Al at 5, Bob at 7, and Chuck at 6. Chuck calls in help from his two friend, Dave and Ed. Now, they don't really have anything to offer, but Dave is blind and Ed is in a wheelchair, so everyone feels bad about putting them last. The election now comes to:- Al, Chuck, Dave, Ed, Bob
- Al, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Bob
- Bob, Chuck, Ed, Dave, Al
Chuck still comes out to six votes, but Al is now at seven, so Chuck wins the election. While this is an admittedly silly example, since there are more candidates than voters, it is an illustration that an unpopular third party candidate can still change the outcome of the election. In fact, there's a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [wikipedia.org]) which specifically states that there is no completely fair voting scheme. The unpopular third part falls under the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" section. In order to eliminate this problem, you have to give up one of the other attributes. In practice, most people who truly fix the third party hole wind up with a system where you can cause a candidate to lose by voting for him.Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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This gives people a good reason to vote for "third party" candidates as you could, for example, support both the Libertarian and Democratic candidates by voting against the Republican and any other candidates.
I think it would also give the politicians a much better view of the thought process of the voter, there's more expression po
Do they really need it? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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I wonder if Arnold would get the vote if you wrote in something like:
'Conan The Governator'
Asians and Cthulhu (Score:3, Informative)
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Not geeky enough, sir!
Clearly, our Asian election official was aware of the cults within his ancestral homeland which worship the Cthulhu. Recall from The Call of Cthulhu:
"What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China ... There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and
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evoting = 100% acuracy requirement (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone care to draft legislation to send to our reps?
Write-in votes frequently don't get counted... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Because of the "winner takes all" nature of the electoral system, it is poss
Re:Doesn't matter that it's only one vote... (Score:4, Insightful)
All that we know is that an entire class of votes (for this candidate) are absent. That's FAR more worrying to me than a 1.25% error rate.
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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.
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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.
Logical Result (Score:3, Interesting)
(1) any candidate that gets 2 votes reports as zero to avoid revealing a singleton voter which might reveal the vote of a member of the electorate
(2) as above but to avoid having to report vast number of candidates (the system may not make a distinctyion between the niber of voters and the number of candidates
(3) In small electorates only candidtes that get above teh "deposit" threshold are reported as having any votes.
A few facts from the incident in question might help to find other resons why there is nothing to see here.
Better late than never (Score:3, Interesting)
If the 30-40% of eligible non-voters "won" over the winner of the candidate who got the majority of yes-voters, it would really turn things on its head. Imagine, a Republican getting 37% of the vote (winning), the Democrat getting 33% of the vote (loser) and the Unanimocracy voters getting 40% of "Other."
I'm a fan of that decision.
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.
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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:4, Informative)
As far as "not one single vote", that isn't going to happen. There are just too many little things that could go wrong, and some of them eventually will.
The law [eac.gov] [Vol 1. Section 3.2.1] states a test of 1 in 500,000 "ballot positions", per processing step is acceptable. They do not measure voters, but rather ballot positions. A ballot position is the number of candidates and the number of other votable issues on a ballot. Steps include things like the electronic recording; the paper trail; transferring data to jurisdiction HQ; etc.
For example, if there are 3 people running for mayor, that is 3 ballot positions per voter -- assuming no other races. If there were 7 bond issues (yes and no spaces), that is another 14 ballot positions. Add in things like other races, referendums, etc. and what looks like a small election can have 30-50 "ballot positions" per ballot. Multiple that times the number of voters then the number of steps and it adds up fast.
To be fair, the target is 1 in 10,000,000 and in an election this small, they should have gotten it right.
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Re:Please note (Score:4, Insightful)
Because a computer is a deterministic machine, where for any given input you will get certain output, and only that output, and nothing else (or your computer is broken.) Quantum computers are not like that, but we don't yet have them either.
There is absolutely no reason to NOT expect a 100% correct accounting of all votes cast. The "power loss" scenario doesn't hold water. The voting machine can write the vote into the Flash (and/or print it on a tape), read it back from the Flash, compare, and if all is well then it tells the voter that he is done and can go. If not, summon maintenance. How often banks miscount your money? How often your Visa card incorrectly charges you? How often your paycheck is wrong? Almost never, barring software errors. But a voting machine is so simple, it can be mathematically proven that the algorithm is correct (and it can be also easily tested.)
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.
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I think most people are willing to acknowledge that it won't be 100% reliable.
That's why they want a voter-verified paper ballot as backup.
A system that isn't perfect is OK, 'cos that's reality.
A system that is far from perfect, and is designed to deny verification, is unacceptable.
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)
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Engineers will generally (if they're halfway competent) do the best job they can with the resources at their disposal. Fact is, the engineers themselves are a resource, a tool. In any technical organization, somebody in management is responsible for selecting the engineering staff and providing them with project goals, adequate resources, and the requisite guidance
Voting machines are
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.
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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 think (but do
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?
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7) In a town of only 80 people, why did they feel the need to spend money on an electronic voting system in the first place?
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.
HAVA (Score:3, Informative)
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Are you assuming that none of the other candidates votes were incorrectly tallied? Are you also assuming that none of Wooten's votes were incorrectly assigned to another candidate?
If Wooten truely had 9
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:Please note (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Please note (Score:4, Interesting)
And it's cute that banks lose small amounts of money...but you can bet your arse that if an ATM was mistracking money, there'd be an investigation as large as neccessary to find where things fubar'd, and in the end someone will be fired.
Why isn't that done with votes?
And of course the real question is why are voting machines blackboxes? Democracy only works if it is seen to be practiced...ie, if it is open and transparent. The mechanism of democracy (voting) needs to be that, almost per definition.
You know what? Strike the 'almost'.
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You're COUNTING. vote = vote + 1
You are not doing any calculations, which I agree may indroduce errors. You are counting. Of course the systems are not perfect because humans are involved, but the machines themselves should be able to fucking COUNT. It's not like they're counting particularly fast, either... each individual machine handles maybe one vote every 2 or 3 minutes.
If I vote for person A, then person A's vote count should increase by 1. There is NO acceptable scenario where that would not w
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