E-Voting Glitch Alters Election Outcome 139
An anonymous reader writes "According to a local news source, 'A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a Democrat enough votes to bump a Republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.' Any ideas on how we can check for similar problems in other close elections?"
Its been said before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not just a glitch, it's failure (Score:5, Insightful)
By referring to these problems as glitches, the media are downplaying the severity of the problem. Regardless of the candidates, if voting can not be reliable and verifiable people lose trust in the process and the outcomes will always be questioned. We either want democracy in the United States or we do not. But using technology that fails in its basic function should not be acceptable.
Re:How to correct glitches (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to see their code to make sure that it does just that.
Before everyone screams go back to paper... (Score:5, Insightful)
of course there were a high percentage of the voters that were like that too...
Anyways, the best perfected machine (read most accurate) for counting votes should be the one we use. It should be the 99.9% accurate reflection what the votes were.
So what I say is, how can we tell these closed source systems work to 99.9% accuracy? Oh we can't.
So we're just supposed to close our eyes and trust the outcome we see on TV? Oh we are... hmm ok.
Makes me feel all tingly inside!
Re:Not just a glitch, it's failure (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't red vs. blue (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't about red team vs. blue team, or sore losers, "desired results" or any of the other nonsense that is being thrown about to cloud the issue. I happen to be a republican, but I'm adamant about wanting this looked into. Why? Because honest matters more to me than "winning."
The way I was raised, if you cheated you didn't win, no matter what the score board says.
I have yet to hear a rational reason why anyone should oppose doing whatever it takes to make sure elections are fair, unless they are either cheaters or suspect that their side cheated and value victory more than integrity. What bothers me is that there are so many people in both parties that seem to fall into the later category.
-- MarkusQ
Manual recounts (Score:1, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there is no other solution than manual recounts. Not only in "close elections" because how do you differentiate a "far" (not "close") election from a large "glitch"? The only solution is to always do manual recounts--or just always count the ballots manually in the first place, skipping the "e-counting" step altogether.
The only way to make sure the votes are counted correctly, is to have a group of people representing all of the competing parties to witness and take part in the actual counting of physical ballots, look at each other while counting, compare the results, when they differ start from the beginning, and finally agree on one exact result. We cannot trust electronic counting the same way, because no one can witness and observe the counting process, no one can see the electrons being shuffled to eventually form a final outcome, just like we can see the paper ballots being shuffled and counted by people observed and verified by other people.
It doesn't even have anything to do with the source code being open or proprietary, the system being secure or vulnerable or the hardware being robust or faulty. It has nothing to do with the system being trustworthy or "trusted." The point is that being able to observe and verify the entire process we don't need to trust anyone or anything in the first place. And it means that the only way to have a solid democracy based on an e-voting system is to always do manual recounts, which obviously makes the whole e-voting idea quite counterproductive, to say the very least.
Not just software either (Score:4, Insightful)
They are complete failures of the software, ...
These are system failures. The entire workflow and resulting system design is plagued with deficiencies that many have reported. The software is only a tiny part of the problem. And, while e-voting greatly increases the number of potential failure points (many of which aren't software related), it's not just about e-voting. We have moved more rapidly to e-voting because of an equally bad paper-based design (punched cards with poor visual layout), but an election can also turn on something as seemingly trivial as washable thumb-print ink in Afghanistan [cnn.com]. In every one of these cases, the state of the art at the time was much better than the poor systems that many people actually got. The major problem as I see it, at least in the US, is lack of pressure from vigilant voters on decision makers who should know better.
Re:Its been said before... (Score:3, Insightful)
What we need is some form of write only media that can be cached for later verification. Paper is just the most redily available form that I know of, not to mention that it is already widely accepted.
But the TV said it was OK (Score:3, Insightful)
But the guy on TV said it was all OK. Those people complaining about the voting machines are just sore losers. At least, that's what I think he said. It was the guy that does the news right before the show with the girl who swears a lot.
-- Joe Average
Re:Massive voter fraud in a paper count (Score:2, Insightful)
What people don't understand, and it's not their fault because they're never taught it, is that vote manipulation is easy. It's trivial.
And thus, we do everything in the open.
We have ballots sitting out in the open where everyone can watch them given out. We have ballot boxes locked with keys that have known locations, and we have the boxs sitting in the middle of the floor. We have voter registration rolls sitting on the table, open, and we watch workers making marks next to the names as people get their ballot.
It's a secret ballot, but almost every single aspect of the process is completely open and transparent.
You can sit there and watch the blank ballots get unsealed from the box. You can watch the ballot box, set up, empty, and yes they really will show the public that it's empty. You can watch each ballot get handed off to someone on the list who identifies themselves get crossed off, you can watch them take their ballot, you can't watch them mark it, you can watch them put it in the locked ballot box, you can sit there and stare at that ballot box until the polls close, and they crack it open. Then you can watch each ballot get counted. You can watch them add up the totals, and post them on the door. Then you can watch the news and see the totals from your precinct.
Or, at least, you used to be able to do all that.
Computers and Paper are both alterable (Score:5, Insightful)
Two scenarios, then:
1. Honest computer glitch gets discovered when paper ballots don't match up;
2. Dishonest computer manipulation gets discovered when paper ballots don't match up, although paper ballots aren't necessarily correct, either.
If you take the position that most (if not all) of these issues are honest glitches (as the emachine defenders often do) then you should be thrilled to have paper trails, as they'll uncover the glitches -- just like what happened in this circumstance. Really, it's delightful to see what can happen with a paper trail backup, isn't it?
On the other hand, if you know that the "glitches" are usually manipulation -- then you're probably going to avoid paper trails like the plague.