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No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes 56

Posted by pudge from the score-one-for-sanity dept.
In the Washington state gubernatorial election, the hand recount has begun, and Snohomish County -- which had nearly 100K votes cast on Sequoia electronic voting machines -- won't have to print up and count them all by hand, as had been previously thought by county officials. Instead, they will print up the totals from each of the 937 machines, and compare those to the grand total. (The statewide hand recount is expected to complete before Christmas, modulo court challenges.)
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No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes More

No Hand Counting of Electronic Votes

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  • That wouldn't matter anyway (Score:5, Insightful)

    by b00m3rang ( 682108 ) * on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:02AM (#11040146)
    Unless the printouts were done as each voter voted, there's no accountability. Of course printing out the total from the machine is going to give you the same total that the machine gave you.

    There is no way to recount the electronic "votes"

    • It does matter. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      It's just a matter of how stupid/apathetic they think the voters are.

      Hypothetical scenarios:
      If the voters are stupid, then they'd print everything out and do a full manual recount.

      If they are very stupid, then they'd do this.

      If they are completely stupid, there wouldn't be a recount.

      The end objective is to convince the voters that everything is fine and they can resume their normal programming.
      • Sure, but there's nothing to recount that's worth recounting in the case of the elctronic votes. The votes were cast electronically, tallied electronically, and stored electronically. If the votes are inaccurate or have been tampered with, the damage has already been done to the data set. Unless there was a printout made after each voter voted, verified by the voter that the paper version matches their electronic vote, then there is no way to recount them.
        • D'oh! You missed my point completely.

          They think the voters are too stupid (or apathetic) to realize it is technically pointless[1].

          The method of recount they picked is just a matter of _how_ stupid/apathetic they think the voters are.
          • Gotcha, and sadly you're right.

            I had to cringe when the lady at the polling place said, "This machine is not connected to the Internet, and there's no modem, so there's no hacking at all. When the first voter came in, I printed out a zero tally tape and showed it to the voter to make sure there were no votes already in the machine."

            First of all, why should I trust her that she actually did this zeroing out of the machine... on her word? And second, how do I trust that the first voter actually /did/ read

  • What!? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by krymsin01 ( 700838 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:02AM (#11040148) Homepage Journal
    Instead, they will print up the totals from each of the 937 machines, and compare those to the grand total.
    Uh, and how does that help out? Maybe I'm being dense, but that doesn't seem like it'll diagnose any kind of problem that would matter...

    • Re:What!? (Score:3, Funny)

      by KDan ( 90353 )
      But it will save so much time! Think about it (but don't think too hard, you might hurt yourself) - no hand recount needed!

      Daniel

    • You're not being dense (Score:3, Informative)

      by roystgnr ( 4015 )
      Because they've made recounting the votes impossible (the "vote" is whatever the voter got to look at, which for most electronic voting machines is an ephemeral pattern of lights on a screen), they're recounting electronic copies of the votes instead - the honest people are just hoping the copies match the originals and the dishonest ones are hoping nobody calls them on the distinction.
    • Uh, and how does that help out? Maybe I'm being dense, but that doesn't seem like it'll diagnose any kind of problem that would matter..

      1. It doesn't
      2. Not dense at all (see the Insightful mod)
      3. It won't

      -and sorry, but I can't resist-

      4. You must be new here
    • I only helps a little. I don't think the machines actually store individual vote records, so printing the totals is the best they can do (printing individual receipts now, would just waste money, time and paper because it would just print them according to the totals). However, by printing each individual total, they can now check that the accumulator software works correctly by adding the totals by hand. They should come out to the same total that the accumulator software gave them. You think that stuf
    • If the totals don't match, then there's obviously a problem, and they can investigate further.
      • False negatives: without counting the actual ballots, if the totals do match, does that mean that there isn't a problem?
        • What actual ballots? They do not exist. This is the inherent problem with a lack of a paper trail. That's the problem. If they had actual ballots to count, they would do that.

          Presumably -- and all evidence I've seen points this direction -- the totals each machine prints up would be identical to the number of "ballots" for each candidate the machines would print up, if done individually.

          The idea is simply that printing and adding the votes by hand would be a. a waste of time, b. a waste of money, and
          • Thanks for clarifying - it was too easy to infer, inaccurately, that the only problem you identified in this farce was the possibility that electronic totals could mismatch.
            • Yeah, sorry, you're right. I was trying to be brief and build on previous articles and shared knowledge ... I only meant to imply that hand recounting is a waste of time given the current state of lack of a real paper trail.
    • It won't matter whichever way they do it. The machine will have stored the votes the way it was programmed to store them (whether that was correct or not is open to debate). It's not going to make much of a difference if they print out each ballot and hand count them, or if they just let the computer give them an aggregate, the totals would be the same. This does assume that there is not some huge blunder in the adding process in the machine, but I don't think that is too much to expect. Where the real
    • Maybe I'm being dense, but that doesn't seem like it'll diagnose any kind of problem that would matter...

      Well, if the machine gives a substantially different total than before, you've definitely got a problem that would matter! Using this a test for vote tampering is likely to have a very high false negative rate, but a very low false positve. Not massively useful, but not completely useless.

    • Re:What!? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sckienle ( 588934 )

      Actually, this is exactly the process of recounting votes in the old pull the lever machines. They did not keep individual votes either. The recount was to make sure the process of tallying the votes "up stream" from the machines was correct; or really to check the math and communications of the humans doing the sums based on the reported numbers called into the election offices. The difference between then and now is that our parents trusted those machines, and we here on /. don't trust the electronic v

      • Re:What!? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Shakrai ( 717556 ) *

        Actually, this is exactly the process of recounting votes in the old pull the lever machines

        The difference between then and now is that our parents trusted those machines, and we here on /. don't trust the electronic versions.

        Except it's a lot harder for somebody to tamper with a mechanical machine that relies on mechanical rollers then it is for somebody to tamper with two lousy lines of code (out of a needlessly bloated program that probably has hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines) to tam

    • Easier to hack the one machine that counts up all the votes than a significant number of the 937 machines that record the votes?

      Of course, we could have had open-source voting machines made by a reputable company, but no...

  • Nice and ironic (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 09, 2004 @04:14AM (#11040178)
    Related Topics: Compare prices on Republicans
  • ...modulo court challenges.)

    2/3 of Slashdot just had their eyes glaze over at the sight of weird computer speak.

    The other 1/3 is still trying to figure out what the result of that function would be. Is it a function? What were the parameters again? Dammit.
    • Technically, the expression is:
      (real time to recount) = (estimated time to recount) in base (court challanges)
      Which means:
      (estimated time to count).
      (court challange).
      (esitmated time to count).
      (court challange).
      .
      .
      .
      so on until (court challanges) is reached.
      Thus the base transfer is complete.
      The result is (court challanges)*((time to count)+(time to challange))

      There, was that confusing enough? I rewrote it twice.

      (of course, if this is a simple division moduli, the result is anywhere between 0 and (court chal
  • Unless all of the machines are just the equivalent to dummy terminals of some larger machine, each one kept a separate tally that had to be added up for the county.

    They're just double-checking to see if the end total is correct.
  • We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes.
    They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.

    That's Monday...

    • Forget the "voting" machines and any numbers they generate. Recounts can't be done without ballots.

      Discussions about paper trails, auditing and such are for future elections. Only votes (not necessarily ballots) which have an origin which can be proven should be accepted. All others should be discarded. Without being able to prove the provenance of the "votes" it cannot proven that there was no monkey business. That's a lot of what having an open and fair election is about - proving there was no mon

    • We're down to the wire on having any recounts affect any electoral college votes.
      They all meet on December 13th to discuss and submit sealed votes.

      But we're not talking about the Presidential election, not in this state at least. Washington state's gov race could go on for years, AFAIK.

      Ohio, on the other hand, is another story entirely [votecobb.org]. And even if the electors pick Massa Dubya on Monday, the results must still be certified by Congress on January 6, 2005. If the Green/Libertarian recount push discover
    • This is only about the Governor race, since Kerry already won WA. Yeah Canada-Land! Boo Jesus-Land!
  • woudnt it make sense to pick 10 machines at random(or something), and then do a hand count for each machine, and compare that to the electronic total? If they all match, than youre probably ok. THis is just stupid.
    • Um, no. What you are suggesting is a sampling method to find a significant degree of error. Unfortunately all sampling methods have a known margin of error associated with them. When you see results from most political polling you will have about a 4% margin of error and a 95% reliability. Meaning 19 out of 20 times the actual result will be within 4% of whatever they said it was, plus or minus.

      The problem with this particular case is that the margin of victory is absolutely tiny (42 out of about 2.8 milli
      • I don't see why this would cause a problem. I don't think you understand what the other poster suggested.

        It's not a sample we want. We're not after statistical estimate. All we want to do is confirm that it's fairly unlikely that any of the machines gave the wrong count.

        We assume that anyone who wanted to rig the election by using faulty machines would rig more than one machine. If there are 100 machines, and 10 of them are rigged, then rigourously testing 10 of them, bu comparing the actual count w
        • I think you misunderstand what I said because you basically made my argument yourself, though you came to different conclusions.

          It's not a sample we want. We're not after statistical estimate.

          Um, only testing some of the machines to draw conclusions about all of them is using a sample (10 machines out of however many there are) and the results would be a statistical estimate of the performance of the rest of the machines.

          roughly a 70% chance of hitting a compromised machine. Enough to deter fraud for

          • In that case, you're measuring the wrong value.

            We don't want to be 100% confident that 99.9985% of the machines are working. We want to be reasonbly confident that 100% of the machines are working correctly. If one of them is out by a single vote, then the whole count is invalid and needs to be recounted in full. It's not like we're recording approximate values. A count of votes is an integer count of discrete values. 100% accuracy is a requirement.

            If any one of the machines is faulty (i.e. gets t
            • If any one of the machines is faulty (i.e. gets the count wrong by 1 or more votes), then it's highly likely that all of the machines are faulty. Testing a sample will reveal this.

              Perhaps if it is a problem of design then all of them will be faulty. If it is a problem of equipment failure it could easily be isolated to a single machine.

              If one of them is out by a single vote, then the whole count is invalid and needs to be recounted in full.

              Exactly my point. A system of sampling cannot exclude the po

              • Exactly my point. A system of sampling cannot exclude the possibility that a single machine miscounted a single vote with 100% certainty. You MUST verify ALL votes and ALL machines.

                In which case, the closeness of the election has very little bearing. Even if the winner by 10% you'd need to check most of the machines to get that level of certainty.

        • But, there's NOTHING to recount! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by b00m3rang ( 682108 ) * on Thursday December 09, 2004 @02:07PM (#11043965)
          Let's say a person votes for candidate A, their screen shows candidate A, and the vote is recorded for candidate B. EVERY TIME you "recount" that machine, it's going to give you the wrong vote. Unless there's a printout that the voter can verify, and then place into a ballot box, ther IS NO REAL RECOUNT.
          • I'm assuming there's some sort of actual countable paper trail. It would be foolish not to have one ;)

            Sorry. I hadn't read the article. Yup, it looks like they've been really stupid here. Still, it would make sense to print hard copies from at least one of the machines to be sure it actually gets its own count correct. It won't guarentee it has recorded the vote correctly, but some of these machines are so bad that it's worth checking it got the count right.
  • so it isnt really a hand recount then, right ?
  • Not true, in nevada our electronic machines print out a paper reciept that they keep, so they could print out those results for proof. Not sure how many other places have this in place.
    • San Bernardino County, CA did all electronic voting AFAIK. At least that's what it said in the booklet. The ones in my polling place did not print a voter verifiable paper trail, so I would have know way of knowing who my vote went to. I refused to use the machine and voted on a paper ballot, so at least my vote was more likely to be counted for whom I voted. Until all of the voting machines provide such a paper trail, I usually recommend to people that they insist on a paper ballot. It's not that I exp
    • If every state had those machines, then I would not have a problem with electronic voting. Our machines in Orange County, CA do not have a paper receipt, so I for one voted on paper. Unfortunately, most people don't understand the issue enough to demand paper.
  • having lived in Snohomish County, my view point:
    The Electronic voting machines, were terminals and each machine output a smart card and I turned in the smart card to the poll worker. You could take the record on the card and compare it to the record in the machine. But truly, then the issue becomes the integrity of the system, and I am a lot more concerned with Mail-in ballots and forgeries than i am with e-voting systems.
    • I honestly have to agree that mail-in votes and the infamous "Dead people voting" issue need to be worked on, and fraud weeded out far more closely - as near as I can tell, e-voting is reasonably effective and most of the hiccups have been caught and corrected. However, without clear looks at the source code of such machinery, there is no reliable way to know. Thus the calls for open-source vote-counting technology.
  • Because the trustworthyness of the machines which collect the votes and subtotal them is beyond doubt, right? What if they're really just KILLER ROBOTS FROM THE FUTURE?
  • I note that pudge believes that "sanity" has scored one here, by not actually recounting the ballots, but jumping in somewhere arbitrarily in the counting chain that makes sense only as an artifact of the counting product, not the actions of voters. Who's keeping this score, pudge? Can anyone see the tally, or just people inside the party?

  • Have a national biometrics database connected to your SSN, name, etc.

    Require every voter to submit to a comprehensive biometrics exam and tag their vote with the data. Second, anyone who accesses the system to have any interaction with the results whatsoever has to submit to a biometrics scan that gets their DNA, finger prints and retina scan as well as name and all that. Do not allow mass deletion of any data without at least five third parties and the press observing the action and recording it for publ

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