States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines

Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.

Slashdot

Slashdot should buy at least one - and add a Cowboy Neal option to all the screens.

Re:Slashdot

Nice one, uh, . . ., user 992278.

Refund

Get a refund. Alternatively, use them as catapult ammunition and return them manually.

Catapult?

This is totally wrong. Any geek knows that you should use a trebuchet.

Let me see ...

Wide use of these machines was adopted in the 2000 election: Winner=George Bush

Even more are used in the 2004 election: Winner=George Bush

Now they throw them out just in time for the 2008 election because George Bush might win again if they didn't.

Re:Are you sure you want to plant that seed?

Yeah, in the future please don't use the term "3-way" and "George Bush" together. Thanks.

Take A Deep Breath, Everybody...

I don't like these machines either, and am glad they're gone.

But before you all go out into the street to dance, let me remind everyone that those paper ballots aren't exactly hand counted... those too are counted by... say it with me: ELECTRONIC machines. They have software. They are connected to a network. They have to store their results on media at some point.

It doesn't make one "bit" of difference whether a vote is tallied as a bit, or a missing (or hanging) chad... the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.

Re:Take A Deep Breath, Everybody...

But before you all go out into the street to dance, let me remind everyone that those paper ballots aren't exactly hand counted... those too are counted by... say it with me: ELECTRONIC machines. They have software. They are connected to a network. They have to store their results on media at some point.

Ahh yes, but the key point here is that I filled out a physical piece of paper that is *also* stored and can be counted later. Yes, cheating can and does happen but it's a lot fucking harder to fill out millions of bubble sheets and methodically insert them into various districts while removing the good ones than it is to have a piece of software print the physical sheets for the manual recount for you -- oh wait, there are no physical recounts because that doesn't exist w/the new e-voting machines.

Where was the complexity?

The thing about voting machines that always confused me, beyond running Anti-virus software on them, was what made it so complicated.

You have a voter, whose admission to the booth is controlled by the same people who have controlled access to ballot papers.

The voter is allowed to vote once.

You have a list of candidates/selections - this is a ballot. A voter can only vote for a candidate/selection from the list.
You have a list of ballots for a given election that a voter can vote on.

ADD UP THE NUMBERS TO FIND THE WINNER.

Adding in a "double check" of a paper validation (which could be done via OCR as the forms will be standard) also sounds pretty trivial.

When I first heard about voting machines I thought that it was about the most trivial problem that anyone had ever had to solve... and yet they've completely screwed up.

So seriously, can anyone tell me what is so hard about automating a paper process that has ticks in boxes?

Let the government create the machines.

I know it's a pretty alien thing to say on a primarily American forum, but I would suggest that the government make the voting machines. They pay for them now anyway, and the process could be open then. Just spec it to be open, let Diebold or some other company make the machines through public bidding. Some things do not need to be free-marketised, especially the ones that are crucial to your democracy.

If the government would design them (or pay designers to do it for them, more likely) then there would be no reason to keep the design a secret because the government does not need to compete.

It would be interesting to know who thought it was a good idea to have voting machines created by a company who has shareholder value as its bottom line instead of upholding democracy.

Give them to the schools

I think they should give them to the College students as a pet project they would earn bonus points if they can find out how fraud was carried out, along with proof. Would even be a extra grade if they can find out which state / county used that particular box too.

I can dream damn it!

Re:Does it run on lennix?

Of course not. With Linux it would not need antivirus software. [xkcd.com]

Re:Does it run on lennix?

I realize this is a joke but one has to wonder... wouldn't this be a great opportunity for the open source community to figure out how to salvage the hardware on these machines by replacing the software with something Open and less prone to errors?

Re:Does it run on lennix?

They have already done that and it is called pen and paper.

I understand that you see every problem as a nail, because all you have is a hammer. The problem is not how to get the best electronic voting system. The problem is how to get the best voting system.

And the 'best' should mean the best for the people and the voting process, not the best for the news media and Fox News.

The most important thing is accuracy, not convenience, not speed and to a certain level not even price.

Nothing wrong with using electronic voting

"They have already done that and it is called pen and paper."

Nothing wrong with using a machine, either, and like everything else, it should be an improvement. The problem isn't that they were using machines, the problem is that the software apparently sucked, and there weren't enough auditing procedures in place to satisfy watchdog groups (though lets face it, like you, short of pen and paper, some watchdog groups won't be satisfied with anything, no matter how well made). Machine does not equal bad here. Poorly designed machine equals bad. You're essentially taking a luddite position.

"And the 'best' should mean the best for the people and the voting process, not the best for the news media and Fox News."

What the hell does Fox News have to do with it? What did they have to do with states buying voting machines that suck?

Re:How fast...

t*9.81 m/s

Re:2004 US Presidential Election Stolen in Ohio

Actually, it's not Ohio Governor Ted Strickland you need to really thank for this, it's Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who came in with Strickland (who had previously specialized in election law).

By comparison, her predecessor Ken Blackwell was one of those involved in guaranteeing the electoral votes of Ohio would go to Bush. Which of course had nothing at all to do with the fact that white suburban precincts had plenty of voting machines and about a 10 minute wait while poor black urban precincts had 5 hour waits and college campuses closer to 6 hour waits.

Re:SHOW/QUEUE/ALL

Long waits definitely skew the results if people waiting in line are at risk of losing their jobs due to showing up late for work or taking too long of a break to vote. Last time I checked, Ohio has no law requiring employers to give time off to vote, and I know (second hand) that if there is such a law it gets ignored frequently.

Re:2004 US Presidential Election Stolen in Ohio

Don't forget that people went to jail [bradblog.com] for rigging the recount in Ohio. The big question is, why rig a recount if the regular count wasn't rigged in the first place?

Another question is, why does a company who make ATM machines which don't lose a cent in millions of transactions and have a paper trail fail to do the same for voting machines?

Don't forget this wonderful youtube clip:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UvEuqYyDoE

Re:2004 US Presidential Election Stolen in Ohio

You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.

Which is why standard counting practices include having multiple unaffiliated people count the same ballot stacks independently to confirm any recorded result.

Re:2004 US Presidential Election Stolen in Ohio

In Belgium I once was a wittness in social elections. These elect the uniun representatives and some other people.

The process was that one person took the paper that said they could vote, another person wrote down who visited. Another gave the person a voting ballot and one person said the persons name aloud. That is 4 people for just giving out the ballot. A person was only allowed to touch one sort of paper and the person calling out the name was not allowed to touch anything.

There were also representatives of each union who were not allowed to touch anything, but could intervene if they saw something that was not according to procedure. They would then tell this to the president of that sitting and to the other unions who then had to all agree with the measures taken by the president.

Counting was done in different stages.
1) Counting the people who got a ballot
2) Counting how many ballots were there. This can not be higher but can be lower then the amount of people
3) Counting the actual votes.

Much more counting before and after. Was it foolproof? Absolutely not, but it was foolproof enough. And this was done in almost each and every company in Belgium.

A similar procedure is used for national elections where there are no voting computers. It works and it is auditable by anybody. There are traces all over the place so if something goes wrong and things DO go wrong. And it is cheaper in the end, even if you have to pay "volunteers".

Re:2004 US Presidential Election Stolen in Ohio

You believe you can trust in paper just because it is widespread and been in use for a while. But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc. You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.

Paper can be misused as well... But at least people generally know how paper works. It's a physical medium. You can count actual objects. You can find actual objects that have been stuffed in a waste-basket, or see actual object being stuffed into the ballot-box. We've had a couple hundred years of trying to accurately count paper ballots and have generally worked out the bugs.

The big problem with electronic ballots is not that any given machine was insecure or poorly designed, it's a fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to electronics and computers. Large chunks of the population still don't know what a hard disk drive is, or how software works, or how easy it can be to tamper with an electronic device like a voting machine. People don't understand why it is ok to bring one of the old paper-ballot machines home before an election, but it isn't ok to bring an electronic one home.

Folks here on Slashdot are generally fairly familiar with technology. Folks here typically at least know what source code is and why you might need to be able to read it in order to certify that a machine is or isn't secure. Many, many people out there have absolutely no idea what source code is.

Re:2004 US Presidential Election Stolen in Ohio

But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc.

Yeah, but those problems can not be applied on a global scale, are trivially to be understood by any voter and are trivially to detect, just stay at the voting place and look at the box. Also counting is done by multiple people, so deliberate miscounting is easy to detect as well. To sum it up, paper voting (the one with a pen, not the one with obscure lever machine) is *by far* the most secure voting mechanism we have and most importantly it is the *only* voting mechanism we have that can be verified by the common voter.

Electronic ballot machines were brought to eliminate these problems.

Electronic ballot machines don't solve any problems, they introduce a shitload of new ones and most importantly they introduce a system that is trivially be manipulated by third parties and impossible to understood by the common voter and thats where the crux is. A voting system has to be understood by the voter, if it can't, then you can throw you democracy right out of the window, since your whole democracy will depend on the trust of a tiny few people who control those machines.

Re:2 ideas

1) Novelty themed restaurant, where you place your order by "voting".

Slightly offtopic:

In Amsterdam we used to have a bar called the "stock"-bar where the price of items was (inversely) determined in real time by the number of people ordering it.

Pretty nice idea, but people ended up drinking a lot filthy "exotic" drinks. I guess that doesn't invite people to come back...

Re:2 ideas

Well, I did essentially get a meat pie the last time I used one of them. Thank heavens for term limits...