Florida Literally Scraps Touch-Screen Voting

Kaseijin writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is getting his wish. The New York Times reports the state will replace touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan models by July 1, 2008 — the most aggressive timetable of any jurisdiciton rethinking this approach to voting. The touch-screen machines most likely will be sold to other jurisdictions or stripped for parts."

Translation:

[urcreepyneighbor]

sold to other jurisdictions

We don't trust 'em, but you should!

Re:Parts?

[rizzo320]

There's a version of linux for just about everything :-)

Re:Translation:

[noidentity]

So you'd prefer that his decision be imposed on everyone? Let each district decide what machines they want to use. sold != forced to buy

Auditing.

[headkase]

I'm stunned that in the first place a system that could not be 100% audited was allowed to be used in the first place! Seriously, even though politicians don't seem to give a damn what you think the voting process is supposed to be a key-stone of democracy. If you can't trust the ballots you can't trust the system. It's fundamental.

Paper?

[Froster]

Are paper ballots really that complicated? If there are multiple referendums or positions to be voted for, just use colour-coded ballots and ballot boxes. All this trouble with voting machines is just ridiculous.

As a Canadian, I've never voted with anything other than a paper ballot, and I have never had a reason to question the voting process as a result.

Re:ah my eyes!

[pnewhook]

there should be a paper trail which is key to our voting process. You fill the circle in with a marker, slide the ballot in the dealy, it counts, and you can do a manual recount if needed. That's what is truly required.

That's exactly how it worked the last time I voted. I marked the paper, the paper was scanned by the counting computer, the counting computer gave me a receipt to tell me what candidate it had counted. No no manual counting (which is rife for abuse) unless needed, and I get a verification that the machine counted correctly. Can't get much better than that.

Re:Will the new system be any more reliable?

[Firethorn]

How is filling in a bubble, oval or line next to your choice 'far less intuitive to the user than a touch screen system'? People have been filling out standardized tests for years.

In addition, it's far easier to handle breakdowns - the markers, whether pen, pencil, or felt, can be replaced quickly and easily. They don't go bad often if they're of a decent quality. Paper ballots are pre-printed and can be replaced. You can have a lot of optical scanners, if one goes down, disregard it's count, feed the ballots it's collected into another(back at HQ).

I've heard of down rates being over 10% with the touch screen machines. Vote counts being outright lost, or worse, corrupted.

Re:Translation:

[Pete LaGrange]

These should be returned to the manufacturer as unfit for intended purpose and a full refund extracted.

Re:Translation:

[lenski]

My favorite use for touchscreen ex-voting machines would be to drive a printer that generates human-readable ballots. Said ballots would be perfectly fine to count either by optical-scan readers or normal unaided humans.

Touchscreen "ballot printers" would go a long way toward eliminating overvotes and reducing undervotes (since a voter must be permitted to abstain from a particular race or issue).

As long as the Official Legal Ballot is durable and readable by unaided humans. The human can then manually scan his/her selections on the paper ballot before committing it to the official count. If the touchscreen system failed to record the voter's intent accurately, the voter can place the the machine-printed ballot in a rejection pile and fill in a paper ballot using manual methods (pencil, pen, etc.)

The point is that the voter must be able to audit his/her voting selections on the official legal record before committing it to the secure but open vote counting process.

Re:Parts?

[arivanov]

You do not like the fact that it has a f*** 16 hour built in UPS? Would you mind sharing whatever is that you are smoking...

You've been Punk'd

[transami]

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Oh you poor beguiled Floridians. You've just been taken for the old bait and switch. If you had paid attention to the debacle of the last presidential election you would know that it was the optical scanners that were compromised, not the touch screens! An in-depth statistical analysis was undertaken by a mathematics professor of the exit polls compared to the "counted" tally. A vast number of anomalies showed up in Ohio in districts with optical scanners. Calculating the odds of those discrepancies show that it was less likely for Bush to have won that election than for him to have been hit by lighting and win the lottery on the same day (paraphrasing of course).

Re:Translation:

[AuMatar]

The decision not to use highly insecure and completely unauditable machines to elect our leaders with? Yes, that decision should be forced an everyone.

Much better idea

[WindBourne]

is to turn a few of them over to so of the crackers, reverse compile them, and lets see exactly how many bugs there are? In particular, I want to know, were the elections valid. For that reason, I suspect that the courts and the pubs will fight the idea of turning ANY of those over to an academians or crackers.

Re:Translation:

[tftp]

It is much easier and cheaper to just print a stack of paper ballots at your local printer shop. These guys have fast, high speed machines, designed for printing in large volume, and the cost of each copy is tiny. But this touch screen machine would have to use some HP or Brother laser printer, and they cost real money per page printed, and your control over blank ballots is very loose (anyone with a laser printer can make his own; professionally printed ballots can't be easily forged at least because most of voters don't have commercial printing presses in their homes.)

Besides, many people are still uncomfortable with computers - and I would be also uncomfortable if once in a year (or less often) asked to operate an unknown computer that is all flashy and touch-sensitive and you have zero training on it, and the results affect the fate of the nation. I would rather ask for a paper form, a pen, and some time alone to read what the form wants from me and what do I want to mark. All government forms come with instructions on how to fill them, and I usually read the instructions.

So in my opinion a computer here is an unnecessary middleman who costs money to buy and to operate, and adds to the confusion of voters who never saw the thing before and will thoroughly forget the experience by the next time they vote. If you want to vote, take a paper form, mark the candidates, and drop it into the box - that simple. After the station closes the scanner can read the forms at amazing speed, which allows you to run the same batch on two different scanners, and if the results differ then you recheck. Modern OCR is very, very good, and you can always tell the scanner to set aside all ballots that the machine is "unsure" about. Those can be counted manually, and there won't be too many of those.

If you want to reuse old voting machines, donate them to libraries and turn them into thin terminals for Internet access. Or something similar - not related to voting at all. We neither need nor want computers to be used for voting by voters; it's just too large a can of worms. After the paper ballots are collected, then feel free to count and recount them in any approved way, with or without machines.

Re:Translation:

[Kadin2048]

Uh, please give me one good reason why municipalities should be given the option of using highly insecure, no-physical-record, easily hacked "voting" machines in elections that influence the entire nation?

By your logic, we should allow states to allocate their delegates to the Electoral College by coin toss, cockfight, or single combat, if a bunch of political appointees in that state think it's a bright idea.

I think we should rigorously enforce some sort of minimum standard of quality for elections. Above and beyond that, sure, states can choose what brand and type of machines they want. But we all have an interest in making sure that elections are fair, unbiased, and transparent. Auditless electronic voting systems prohibit that by design, and for that reason they ought to be illegal. Leave them for supermarket taste-tests where they belong.

I agree.

[lenski]

(As stated by others in this thread) There is no need for an expensive middle-man in the voting process. Having comparatively delicate machines involved adds no security to the process.

My reason for making the suggestion about transforming DREs into very expensive pencils is that local governments are notorious for their inability to face the economic "sunk cost" problem: They claim that they paid lots of very limited money for the machines and they insist on Getting Their Moneys Worth. They also say that getting ballots printed is Very Expensive.

My wife and I, along with our friends in the hand-counted-paper-ballots coummunity are having a difficult time getting past the local election officials who just love their precious machines and think of paper ballots as backward and out of date. They Want To Be Perfectly Modern Government Officials.

Nearly every computer professional or security professional that is asked about electronic voting answers that it's either insecure or too expensive. Statements to that effect accelerate as they flow between the ears of local election officials.

Here's further support for your thesis:

I've stated elsewhere in this thread and other places that electronic machines constitute a perfect way to bias voting paterns in a perfectly legal way: Favored/wealthy precincts are allocated plenty of voting machines, while unfavored/not-wealthy precincts receive inadequate allocations. The result is that some voters have a strong time-based disincentive from voting. This amounts, in my opinion, to a denial of the vote to selected groups of people.