davidwr writes "The St. Petersburg, FL, Times reports that Florida is going back to paper ballots, but with a twist. They are printing the ballots on-demand, right there at the polling booth. This isn't machine-assisted voting where a touch-screen fills in your printed ballot for you. It's just a way to save printing costs and reduce paper waste. 'Without ballot on demand, poll workers at 13 early Hillsborough voting sites would need to stockpile stacks of every possible ballot type. With ballot on demand, poll workers can print out a person's distinct ballot type when he or she arrives to vote.'"
I believe this will cause the improvement of printers in general when they have to procure printers on a large scale that must have ink that is easily changed, cannot jam, and can handle heavy card-stock paper. I look forward to those existing in 20 years to catch up with that idea. It's going to suck until then though. According to the article, these are also at the "Early Voting Stations" which tend to be a county court house or such and not for election day which will use pre-printed ballots. It pro
If you can print up your own ballots on any printer, what's to stop you from printing up extra ballots at home and slipping a few extras in the ballot box. Once they are in there, they would be hard to tell from the authentic ones. I hope they are incorporating some kind of security features into these ballots, and aren't just using standard inkjet printers on standard inkjet paper. The paper ballots we use up here in Canada are printed on special paper, to ensure that people aren't printing up extra ballots. Each printed ballot is accounted for.
I don't think that the "paper trail" folks ignore it at all. At any given polling station there are (always?) various observers from all interested parties to watch the poll workers.
These machines will jam or run out of ink with no geeks around to fix it.
I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.
The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.
They will be pre-filled in for the Republican candidate. To save you the time of thinking that your vote will actually be counted towards the candidate you intend to vote for.
Your post is deranged, so I'll respond to your.sig:
An individual's pompous pronouncements on internet fora should be proportional to that person's ability to use the local language.
Upon completing my liberal education, the real learning began.
Of course the p.o.d. ballots are an accident waiting to happen. The whole point of printing the ballots ahead of time is to ensure to the extent possible *ahead of time*, i.e., with time for corrective action to be taken, that there will be no systemic failures
Of course the p.o.d. ballots are an accident waiting to happen. The whole point of printing the ballots ahead of time is to ensure to the extent possible *ahead of time*, i.e., with time for corrective action to be taken, that there will be no systemic failures.
You also know ahead of time how many ballot papers you need, because you know the number of people entitled to vote ahead of time. If you have unused ballot papers you can just recycle the paper.
I am impressed by the spectacular cheapness display
I guess the scumbags understand they'll need to come up with a new approach if they want to steal another election. You can only hit a mule between the eyes so many times before it figures out what the baseball bat is for.
Forgot? You mean when Daley got all those dead people to vote for Kennedy in 1960? Interesting observation, but off-topic and irrelevant. Graveyards have turned out for one candidate or another before, and no doubt will do so again. They can't often change things on a national scale.
Technology is the subject of discussion, and how much easier it makes perpetration of widespread electoral fraud. Daley managed to flip one county in a dead even election, and would probably be caught if he tried it today
It would be very interesting to read the threat analysis for this scheme, which doesn't have decades of world-wide experience behind it like print-in-advance ballots do, with all the associated gubbins such as secure printers and individually numbered ballots which are audited and counted and signed for every time they change hands. (Even with proper ballots there's an interesting question: if there are 1,000 voters and there has never been a turnout of more than 300 in this area, how many ballots do you pri
Call in a mathematician and get them to figure out how many ballots should be needed to keep costs to a minimum, assuming you leave open the option of printing more ballots, in case the 5/1/0.01% probability comes back to bite you---whether printing it off with a printer on-site, or keeping a large-scale printer on standby in the event that it looks like you are to run out.
The maths isn't exactly difficult---with sufficient historical data, one learns all that's necessary in high school, at least down my way.
That said, we have compulsory voting down our way (Australia), so it's not really an issue that comes up. For that matter, does the risk of printing ~600 sheets of paper too many matter that much? It shouldn't be a problem.
There's no particular reason to suppose that just applying proper statistical theory will produce the right answer. Because elections aren't like that. For example, the next door ward to mine typically had a 19% turnout. For years and years and years.
We knew that if we could get the turnout up to 29%, by persuading just one person in ten to come out and vote for us instead of sitting at home, we'd take the seat. But we never had enough bodies on the street to actually fight that ward.
Just print out 1000. It doesn't cost that much compared to 300 ballots, or 600 ballots, or however many ballots you think you might need. And print out a couple extra incase somebody makes a mistake and needs an extra ballots. For a voting area with 1000 voters, just print out 2000 ballots. That will make sure you have enough. The cost of the ballots is miniscule, and compared to the cost to buy computers in other voting districts, is nothing. You can probably print all the ballots for a single riding
Just print out 1000. It doesn't cost that much compared to 300 ballots, or 600 ballots, or however many ballots you think you might need. And print out a couple extra incase somebody makes a mistake and needs an extra ballots. For a voting area with 1000 voters, just print out 2000 ballots.
Since the major cost tends to be setting up the printer in the first place you may well find that there is no difference in cost between 1000 and 2000 because 2000 is the printer's minimum order. You might even find tha
(Even with proper ballots there's an interesting question: if there are 1,000 voters and there has never been a turnout of more than 300 in this area, how many ballots do you print, bearing in mind that you'll almost certainly lose your job if you print just one too few, but on the other hand people will be upset with you if you end up wasting two thirds of your print cost?)
Your just under 300 printed one at a time on an inkjet probably costs more than just over a thousand on a regular printing press. Als
I like this move. With all the diebold problems and election computers found to be wanting, nobody has really addressed the question: "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"
Sure, it's slow to count but not overly so. While US ballots are more complicated than UK ballots they still take just over a day to count. If you can't wait that long, you're just impatient.
If you want a quick answer, just use exit polls. Until Bush's election fraud, these were a reliable way of having an idea of who has won the election.
We already have a well evolved security procedure for handling paper ballots. Why are people so quick to throw that away a proven solution and to try a totally closed computer system off a random vendor to solve a problem that never really existed anyway? I'll leave the answer is an exercise to the reader.
Here in Belgium we have electronic vote for more than ten years. I've seen recently a study comparing paper and electronic machine costs.
I don't remember the figures precisly but it was something like:
The cost per vote on paper 2 US$ The cost per electronic vote 5 US$
I always been extremely suspicious about these electronic voting machine. Especially those running Windows (Desktop PC) with accessible serial ports like those we have here.
The good news is that the government plans to get rid of it (at least for a part of the country) and go back to the much safer (and cheaper) paper.
1) 'Hanging chad' is what is wrong with paper. What do you do with multiple markings or corrections on a ballot? What if someone's out of ink or doesn't press hard enough? Or changes her mind and tries to cross out the initial selection? Electronic voting can force the voter to make a clear, unambiguous choice while paper cannot. 2) Ballot stuffing should be much harder with e-voting. The machine can enforce hard limits (1 vote per minute or whatever) and perform basic sanity checks like making sure the poll
Electronic voting can force the voter to make a clear, unambiguous choice while paper cannot.
It can also force them to do things they may not wish to, but the person who designed the election thinks they should so. e.g. what happens if you have multiple elections on the same ballot. With a voter wishing to vote in some, abstain in others and "spoil their vote" with others. The simple solution is to give them individual ballot papers for each election if they want to take some of them home to use as toilet
An election official, who should never be working at their designated voting location, has to be very careful that they don't get seen by anyone. If for some reason there arn't enough people around then multiple video cameras watching the ballot box are a far more useful application of technology.
Also every voting station I've ever seen has representatives from each party as well as other volunteers. Nobody ever gets left on their own and the ballot boxes are in plain view in front of everyone.
This is a really great idea. I really, really great idea. This is the kind of "duh" stuff that all of our modern technology is supposed to help fix.
You know what would be an even better idea? Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. This would help prevent counterfeit ballots. Of course, since you can't let these machines break down, the cartidges would probably have to have an internal sensor that shuts down the printer when the ink level gets low. Maybe, just to be safe, they would have to kick in when about 60% of the ink is gone. We need to protect the voters, after all....and really, how many tax-payers pay attention to the money their government spends on ink?
Both (special paper and ink) would be better. Otherwise, someone could steal (or reproduce) the watermarked paper, run off a bunch of ballots that will scan incorrectly, and put them back in the pile. If special ink were required, they would have to steal or reproduce that as well, making it more difficult to interfere.
... and maybe the printers should run on non-standard electricity. And they could require some special atmosphere for the ink to properly dry. And then the ballots could be coated with some sort of toxic substance that, when handled, kills the person touching it in seconds. Only the specially powered printers operating in the specially formulated atmosphere can properly remove the toxic coating so that the ballots can be safely handled.
Seriously, the point of this idea is to save money. Inventing custom
There are already several companies making $8000 / gallon specialty ink distributed in highly secure cartridges tied to specific printers and designed to self-destruct before they have used 50% of their contents.
You don't need a government contract to buy them. All you need to do is go to Staples [slashdot.org].
Both (special paper and ink) would be better. Otherwise, someone could steal (or reproduce) the watermarked paper, run off a bunch of ballots that will scan incorrectly, and put them back in the pile. If special ink were required, they would have to steal or reproduce that as well, making it more difficult to interfere.
Most of this is already in place. You might just as well go the whole hog and make the election about who can put the most specially printed and watermarked ballot papers (other wise known
I don't get. We have had, in theory, the protocols to make cryptographically secure verifiable & anonymous e-voting for years now, and yet it hasn't been implemented.
A bunch of hungover CS undergrads with 24 hours till their deadline, would come up with a better e-voting implementation than the hopelessly naive excuses spewed up by diebold et al.
Its the verifiable & anonymous that's hard. Perhaps you have a point if you assume that the machines are working as intended, the programs written correctly, and the code running on the machines is the same that was certified.
Maintaining formal control over evoting machines, given the number of district and varying forms uses, can't help but cost orders of magnitude more than just using paper votes with an electronic counter, like they do here in RI.
Diabold shows what happens whenever cost-to-impliment-correctly is significantly more than cost-to-look-like-you-satisfied-the-contract.
Simple. This is America and that cannot happen. Well unless of course you read a history book, but don't believe that history nonsense, its all lies anyways right? The head in the sand mentality will stop anyone from looking at this with a critical eye the same way the evoting nonsense slid through. I just want to beat people senseless when they pull that "it can't happen here" card. I'm sure there are millions of people who would be more than willing to describe why "it can't happen here" is a really
There are a few points that should be made here that many people are missing. This on demand system will be used in early voting (before the official election date) where a voter can show up at any voting location in a county to vote. This is a problem since each precint needs a different ballot, for the congressional districts which vary by district. So they needed a way to give a person a ballot for their precinct, without having to have perhaps dozens of different ballots at the early voting locations. On the main election day, ballots will be preprinted, since everyone in a precinct uses the same ballot. As far as concerns about anonymity, it should be only necessary to type in the precinct number into the computer connected to the printer, not any of the voters identifiying information.
Paper ballots will be a definite improvement and certainly the move back to paper ballots should be appreciated. There needs to be a paper trail to verify that votes are being properly counted. Since one cannot see inside of a computer to verify that their vote was recorded onto the disk, it is essential to have a user verifiable paper ballot. Computer voting machines make rigging elections just too easy.
Pre-printed ballots have a security code on them (otherwise anyone with a decent photocopier could make 100 of them). It's theoretically possible to link the ballot number to the person but quite hard.
The worst are postal ballots are 100% traceable, and 0% verifiable. In the UK they forced postal ballots on us for a couple of years (closed the polling stations) - you had to fill in your vote then sign and date the form!! So much for anonymous ballots... (only ref. I can find these days is an old blog: http [blogspot.com]
ink (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to good ideas which don't stand up to the reality of 5-6 old people monitoring a station.
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According to the article, these are also at the "Early Voting Stations" which tend to be a county court house or such and not for election day which will use pre-printed ballots. It pro
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Re:ink (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
ballot box stuffing (Score:2)
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Re:ribbons (Score:2)
The world of tomorrow, YESTERDAY
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These machines will jam or run out of ink with no geeks around to fix it.
I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.
The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.
Re:ink (Score:4, Insightful)
Job Security.
Parent
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Think thermal printers used in point-of-sale equipment. Not inkjet or office laser printer.
What happens in case of... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Don't challenge the machines! No Senate candidates for you!
For your added convenience (Score:5, Funny)
Re:For your added convenience (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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An individual's pompous pronouncements on internet fora should be proportional to that person's ability to use the local language.
Upon completing my liberal education, the real learning began.
Of course the p.o.d. ballots are an accident waiting to happen. The whole point of printing the ballots ahead of time is to ensure to the extent possible *ahead of time*, i.e., with time for corrective action to be taken, that there will be no systemic failures
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You also know ahead of time how many ballot papers you need, because you know the number of people entitled to vote ahead of time. If you have unused ballot papers you can just recycle the paper.
I am impressed by the spectacular cheapness display
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Forgot? You mean when Daley got all those dead people to vote for Kennedy in 1960? Interesting observation, but off-topic and irrelevant. Graveyards have turned out for one candidate or another before, and no doubt will do so again. They can't often change things on a national scale.
Technology is the subject of discussion, and how much easier it makes perpetration of widespread electoral fraud. Daley managed to flip one county in a dead even election, and would probably be caught if he tried it today
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The USA is a republic.
Threat model (Score:2)
(Even with proper ballots there's an interesting question: if there are 1,000 voters and there has never been a turnout of more than 300 in this area, how many ballots do you pri
Re:Threat model (Score:4, Interesting)
Call in a mathematician and get them to figure out how many ballots should be needed to keep costs to a minimum, assuming you leave open the option of printing more ballots, in case the 5/1/0.01% probability comes back to bite you---whether printing it off with a printer on-site, or keeping a large-scale printer on standby in the event that it looks like you are to run out.
The maths isn't exactly difficult---with sufficient historical data, one learns all that's necessary in high school, at least down my way.
That said, we have compulsory voting down our way (Australia), so it's not really an issue that comes up. For that matter, does the risk of printing ~600 sheets of paper too many matter that much? It shouldn't be a problem.
Parent
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For example, the next door ward to mine typically had a 19% turnout. For years and years and years.
We knew that if we could get the turnout up to 29%, by persuading just one person in ten to come out and vote for us instead of sitting at home, we'd take the seat. But we never had enough bodies on the street to actually fight that ward.
Until the year we did. R
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Since the major cost tends to be setting up the printer in the first place you may well find that there is no difference in cost between 1000 and 2000 because 2000 is the printer's minimum order. You might even find tha
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Your just under 300 printed one at a time on an inkjet probably costs more than just over a thousand on a regular printing press.
Als
What's wrong with paper (Score:3, Insightful)
I like this move. With all the diebold problems and election computers found to be wanting, nobody has really addressed the question: "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"
Sure, it's slow to count but not overly so. While US ballots are more complicated than UK ballots they still take just over a day to count. If you can't wait that long, you're just impatient.
If you want a quick answer, just use exit polls. Until Bush's election fraud, these were a reliable way of having an idea of who has won the election.
We already have a well evolved security procedure for handling paper ballots. Why are people so quick to throw that away a proven solution and to try a totally closed computer system off a random vendor to solve a problem that never really existed anyway? I'll leave the answer is an exercise to the reader.
Simon
Re:What's wrong with paper (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Belgium we have electronic vote for more than ten years. I've seen recently a study comparing paper and electronic machine costs.
I don't remember the figures precisly but it was something like:
The cost per vote on paper 2 US$
The cost per electronic vote 5 US$
I always been extremely suspicious about these electronic voting machine. Especially those running Windows (Desktop PC) with accessible serial ports like those we have here.
The good news is that the government plans to get rid of it (at least for a part of the country) and go back to the much safer (and cheaper) paper.
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2) Ballot stuffing should be much harder with e-voting. The machine can enforce hard limits (1 vote per minute or whatever) and perform basic sanity checks like making sure the poll
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It can also force them to do things they may not wish to, but the person who designed the election thinks they should so. e.g. what happens if you have multiple elections on the same ballot. With a voter wishing to vote in some, abstain in others and "spoil their vote" with others.
The simple solution is to give them individual ballot papers for each election if they want to take some of them home to use as toilet
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Also every voting station I've ever seen has representatives from each party as well as other volunteers. Nobody ever gets left on their own and the ballot boxes are in plain view in front of everyone.
Even in our
Money-making opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
You know what would be an even better idea? Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. This would help prevent counterfeit ballots. Of course, since you can't let these machines break down, the cartidges would probably have to have an internal sensor that shuts down the printer when the ink level gets low. Maybe, just to be safe, they would have to kick in when about 60% of the ink is gone. We need to protect the voters, after all.
Re:Money-making opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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Both (special paper and ink) would be better. Otherwise, someone could steal (or reproduce) the watermarked paper, run off a bunch of ballots that will scan incorrectly, and put them back in the pile. If special ink were required, they would have to steal or reproduce that as well, making it more difficult to interfere.
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Seriously, the point of this idea is to save money. Inventing custom
Re:Money-making opportunity (Score:4, Funny)
I think you're missing the point.
There are already several companies making $8000 / gallon specialty ink distributed in highly secure cartridges tied to specific printers and designed to self-destruct before they have used 50% of their contents.
You don't need a government contract to buy them. All you need to do is go to Staples [slashdot.org].
Parent
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Most of this is already in place. You might just as well go the whole hog and make the election about who can put the most specially printed and watermarked ballot papers (other wise known
if it is red ink ... (Score:2)
Cryptographic verification (Score:4, Interesting)
A bunch of hungover CS undergrads with 24 hours till their deadline, would come up with a better e-voting implementation than the hopelessly naive excuses spewed up by diebold et al.
Re:Cryptographic verification (Score:5, Interesting)
Its the verifiable & anonymous that's hard. Perhaps you have a point if you assume that the machines are working as intended, the programs written correctly, and the code running on the machines is the same that was certified.
Maintaining formal control over evoting machines, given the number of district and varying forms uses, can't help but cost orders of magnitude more than just using paper votes with an electronic counter, like they do here in RI.
Diabold shows what happens whenever cost-to-impliment-correctly is significantly more than cost-to-look-like-you-satisfied-the-contract.
Parent
Anonyimity Failure (Score:2)
And then what keeps someone from paying off those who voted as instructed, or beating the hell out of someone who didn't vote as instructed?
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That's interesting (Score:2)
Duh ? (Score:2)
So what? The old people are still old (Score:2)
A few things people are missing (Score:3, Insightful)
Paper ballots will be a definite improvement and certainly the move back to paper ballots should be appreciated. There needs to be a paper trail to verify that votes are being properly counted. Since one cannot see inside of a computer to verify that their vote was recorded onto the disk, it is essential to have a user verifiable paper ballot. Computer voting machines make rigging elections just too easy.
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It's theoretically possible to link the ballot number to the person but quite hard.
The worst are postal ballots are 100% traceable, and 0% verifiable. In the UK they forced postal ballots on us for a couple of years (closed the polling stations) - you had to fill in your vote then sign and date the form!! So much for anonymous ballots... (only ref. I can find these days is an old blog: http [blogspot.com]