Researchers And Registrars Debate E-Voting

Paper Trail writes "There's a fascinating discussion going on right now over at SiliconValley.com. A group of computer scientists, journalists, voting activists, and county registrars are discussing the e-voting mess in an online forum that runs all this week. The panel is a who's who of e-voting: Avi Rubin, David Dill, David Jefferson, and registrars from San Bernadino and Riverside, CA. They've even got Scott Ritchie from the Open Vote Foundation. The question they're hoping to answer: "What's your assessment of the risks related to the use of electronic voting machines -- in the areas of verifiable voting, errors, recounts and manipulation -- not in the computer lab, but in a real-world setting? And how do those risks compare with current voting systems and other low-tech options?""

Electronic voting machines aren't the problem

[Frequanaut]

It's the people who hate democracy:

See here for more [dkosopedia.com]

And yes, I know it's a partisan site, but it's just collecting news stories, look past the commentary.

Probably their association with Chicago

[Anonymous Coward]

Mechanical/lever machines are associated with the Kennedy voting fiasco in the 1960 race between Nixon and Kennedy.

Simplifying greatly, the people who tabulated the votes from the lever-operated machines were pro-Kennedy. Vote tabulation was done by opening the machine up, and reading numbers off a little odometer-style readout. When the numbers were written down, the Kennedy numbers were written as higher than the machine recorded, and the Nixon numbers as lower.

However, the Democrats weren't the only people rigging that election. Downstate Republicans did their share of double-voting, including many people from conservative St. Louis hopping across into Illinois to vote in that state, as well as their home state.

Re:said it before -- I'll say it again

[Shakrai]

They break, and spare parts are expensive since they're not in current production

Then put them back into production. And if they go out of production what do you suppose is cheaper? To contract some local guy in a machine shop to make a part or contract some coder to try and figure out a closed source system because you needed a replacement part and it broke something?

The numbers on the counters are manually recorded, then manually transferred to a central registrar. That's two places with human intervention, and opportunity for error or, more remotely, fraud

They are phoned into the Board of Elections by the poll workers (at least one from each party) after the polls close. This isn't the "certified" tally but it's the one that is released to the news media for the nightly news/morning papers. Once the Board of Elections receives the machine back they open it up (again with a supervisor from both political parties present) and certify the tally. With at least two people doing every task the odds of error are small -- and fraud is damn near impossible.

The manual processing takes time, and like it or not, people want to know results sooner than the morning paper.

This is why you have the unofficial count from the poll workers and the later certified results. Electronic touchscreen systems will not change this. The count isn't "official and certified" until they manually count the absentee and challenge ballots.

And as far as fraud goes -- which system do you trust more? The system that relies on two public servants sworn to uphold a scared trust or the system that relies on private vendor companies with lovely quotes like "I'm committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to the President". This is a no brainer people.

In Alaska

[RealAlaskan]

In Alaska, we vote on bubble sheets. Fill in the oval next to the candidate you want (or dislike least). A machine reads the ballots and counts the votes, giving the instant, error-free [1] readout everyone says they want, and the bubblesheets are still there, to be audited at leisure. It seems like the best of both worlds.

It should be error-free, but, in our local election last week, the machines somehow managed to count 11 more ballots than were cast. That's where the paper ballots come in: they're human readable, and humans are auditing and handcounting them right now.

Re:said it before -- I'll say it again

[Kwantus]

The numbers on the counters are manually recorded, then manually transferred to a central registrar. That's two places with human intervention, and opportunity for error or, more remotely, fraud

Amazing -- 'cause that's how we count ballots in Nova Scotia. I would never trust a machine to do a count. [votescam.com] How we get around human intervention/error/fraud at the count:

There are at least four witnesses to the counting: the deputy returning officer and the poll clerk, who are nominated by the two leading parties, and at least two from the public (who are usually, but not necessarily, agents of two different candidates)

All the totals get printed in the newspapers so the witnesses can check their own poll and anyone can check the sums

Your system does nothing like that. Even where the ballots are counted by hand, all the numbers disappear into Voter News Service, which then reports what it wants [votefraud.org]. (I don't know what's replaced VNS [wikipedia.org]. I understand it was dissolved after it so badly botched the con in 2000. It was a pretty secret society and its successor can be expected to be even more so.)

People want to know sooner than the morning paper

I REFUSE, as a voter, to buy into the horserace psychology. That's just hype created to get the whole scam over with and out of the news cycle. I want a proper count more than I want instant falsified results.

The results don't take effect for months; why the fuck the indecent hurry?

BTW all I get out of the forum anchor [prospero.com] is "cyclic link". I guess konqi users are locked out >:(

Re:said it before -- I'll say it again

[dahorowitz]

I was trained as a poll worker in NYC a few years ago (I was a student at the time, and had nothing better to do with a random Tuesday), but let me tell you, after going through the process, I have way less faith in the lever machines than I did as an innocent yet ignorant voter.

First off, as people pointed out above, the numbers are manually tallied at the end of the evening. The poll workers use a key to unlock the machine, and little windows appear with the individual tallies. These tallies are transcribed to a paper 'canvas,' and then transcribed again at the Board of Elections office. Granted, the voting machines are not reset until the election is certified, so it is possible to return to the source to review the count, but it is just as likely that an innocent error such as that caused by transposing two digits may never get caught.

More importantly, however, is that similar to touch screen voting, much of what happens with a lever machine during an election is of the Big Black Box variety. Beyond a master counter which is supposed to advance one count for every person who voted, there is really no way of knowing if the machine is functioning correctly. It is wholly possible that a counter for a particular candidate or ballot measure is malfunctioning, resulting in an undercount or overcount. More importantly, no individul record is kept of each vote (similar to the touch screen systems), so it is impossible to go back and 'recreate the voters intent' as you can with paper/optical scan systems.

Further, these machines are getting old and are notoriously unreliable. These machines jam somewhat frequently, and the 'official' method of clearing these jams is to force the red handle (the master voting control that unlocks/registers the votes for an individual voter) back and forth until the machine is operating normally. Of course, each time you do this, a new 'vote' is registered on the machine--presumably, it would be treated as a blank ballot, but once again, with the black box nature of the lever machines, one never is quite sure.

Finally, there is the people aspect. In NYC, there are so few registered Repulicans (particularly in Manhattan) that it is quite common practice for the Board of Elections to designate a Democrat as a 'Republican for the day.' In other words, a precinct that is supposed to have two Democratic and two Republican poll workers may end up having three Democrats and one Republican, or even four Democrats and no Republicans working!