Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad 174
phorest writes "One would have thought the choice of Ohio lawmakers to move away from Diebold touch-screen voting terminals would be welcomed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Instead, the group is warning the elections board that their alternative might be illegal under state laws. 'The main dispute is whether a central optical scan of ballots at the board's headquarters downtown would result in votes not being counted on ballots that are incorrectly filled out. The ACLU believes the intent of election law is to ensure voters can be notified immediately of a voting error and be able to make a second-chance vote.'"
You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
- Roach
Simple = Better (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh Please.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Optical scans have historically been regarded as the best, and practically everyone who went to school since 1960 has filled out a scantron sheet.
The ACLU is a bit off base here, IMO.
Off topic....the "Related Links" this time were interesting.
Compare prices on YRO Products
What, exactly is a YRO product?
Could someone tell me why we need it at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell is wrong with that system? It's in effect in nearly every other country. What is so terribly different in the US that this system won't work as flawlessly as it works everywhere else? Pardon the blunt question, but is it too hard to find enough people intelligent enough to effing count slips of paper?
What the hell is the deal about it all? We're wasting billions of dollars every year on worthless junk, flying our politicians around to pointless debates and toilet seats to boot. I don't think spending a few bucks to get good ol' paper elections done, which are tried, proven and simply and plainly working, is going to break the budget's back!
Re:Simple = Better (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
paper
pencil
optical scanner
end of fucking problem
really
i expect this wisdom to enter the brain of bureaucrats everywhere sometime around 2050
hopefully we won't be a theocracy or fascism by then, hastened along by malignant voting schemes
Persistent need to leave holes (Score:1, Insightful)
Why?
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You'd think ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Simple = Better (Score:3, Insightful)
There's also the slight difference in the cost of labor in India versus the U.S.
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh. Everyone points to paper ballots as a guarantee that votes will be properly counted. May I point out that rigged elections predate electronic voting by many centuries?
Ok, so your hybrid system allows you to double check. But when do you double check? If we can't trust the electronic system (and if we did, what's the point in having a dead tree backup?) then you end up with the loser demanding a hand count every time. So you might as well do it by hand to begin with. Except that's too expensive.
It doesn't even matter what process you use to count ballots. What matters is that the process occur out in the open. It's as easy to do that with electronic voting as with paper ballots. Easier even, because it's easier to track the workflow. Harder to repeat the 1960 voting in Chicago, where the ballot boxes took a suspicious amount of time in transit.
Re:Persistent need to leave holes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Simple = Better (Score:5, Insightful)
About half the time, someone responds, explaining how U.S. elections are more complicated than those in Canada, because U.S. elections usually feature a dozen or more separate items to vote on; in addition to national elections (up to three at a time), there can be a dozen state, county, and municipal elections, plus votes on city propositions, bond packages, and constitutional amendments (almost every year in Texas). It's simply not possible to count all of this quickly and accurately by hand in one day.
To this post, someone from Canada usually responds, asking why we have to vote on all that stuff, and wondering why we don't let our elected officials decide some of that for us.
To which someone else responds, pointing out that our system of government doesn't work the same as Canada's; once we elect someone we are pretty much stuck with them for two, four, or six years, so if our officials start doing things we don't like, we don't have the opportunity to call new elections and replace them. We also only have two viable political parties, so it's less likely that we agree with our elected representatives on every issue. Thus, we like to have a chance to directly vote on more items than most other countries. Also, to increase the likelihood of high voter turnout, we combine elections to minimize the number of election days. In Texas, I believe there can only be three election days a year: the March primaries (if needed), and the May and November general elections.
------
So, in summary, this concept and its responses have been beaten to death. If you feel the same way I do, do as I will and start modding all "Canada votes like this, why doesn't the U.S., too?" redundant.
Re:Could someone tell me why we need it at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
And among a significant percentage of the US population, especially those in charge of huge piles of public money, everything is always "better" when done with technology. And did I mention the huge pile of money these people have to spend? Everybody likes new toys!
Re:You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only other alternative is the "check this box" kind, which requires human counting (again subject to rigging) and takes ages to count. Now, I can wait a day - even a week, for my election results, but with a large turnout it would take even longer than that, and then there'd be less time to certify and recount if there was a problem.
Again, people complain every single election; maybe you don't remember it, maybe sometimes it's worse than others. There's nothing new here, it's happened since the dawn of... uh... electing... things.
Re:Persistent need to leave holes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
By the same token, you can design an electronic voting system so that every step is an open book. And I promise you that a zillion geeks and computer scientist will have nothing better to do than spend hours picking nits with your system. This is a level of double-checking no paper system can claim.
Any system is trustworthy to the degree that it is transparent.
Define democracy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, democracy is the best system of government available. Still, the question isn't one of "is the general population aware of voting issues", it's "does the general population actually care about voting issues"... That question leads to some pretty depressing answers.
Re:You'd think ... (Score:2, Insightful)
1. The Vice President
2. The Speaker of the House
3. Their own state governor.
4. Any member of Congress.
When this is your voting public, how do you expect them to (a) understand, or (b) work up the gumption to care about voting issues? To most people, something's not an issue if they don't see it on headline news at 6.
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
The most reasonable assumption is that at some point, no matter what voting system you use, someone will compromise it at some point, so the best thing to do is design the system so that the least damage will result. Paper ballots fit this requirement much better than electronic systems do.
Re:Simple = Better (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you believe that Canadians have the opportunity to boot elected officials we don't like at any time??
Narf
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:2, Insightful)
And why on earth should you ever be alone with the ballot box? Not to mention that the box should be locked and sealed anyway.
After the last voter has voted and the polling station closes, you dump the ballots on a large table and start counting. Everyone is allowed to stay and watch: party representatives, concerned citizens, international observers...
You can even add a surveillance camera or three.
Re:You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
One problem was that hundreds and thousands of those ballots hat the cut off paper still dangling on it, or that some were only slightly cut, but at several places (as if the voter had a second thought and pulled another lever, but none of them consequently enough).
The main arguments against paper-and-pencil-voting seem to be:
1) The ballots can't be counted fast enough for the Late News to report the results.
2) People with disabilities such as blind people need help to vote and can't check the results themselves.
Argument 1) doesn't hold in my humble opinion. I would rather like to have correct results than early reported ones. Being able to watch the count was in my own country (the former East Germany) the base for all later convictions of Voting Fraud for the leading figures of the former communist government. Also some other frauds (like the one during the voting for the town council of Dachau near Munich) were detected because people were able to compare their own counting results from the public count with the ones later reported by the Voting Commission.
Argument 2) raises a valid point, because Braille printed ballots are much larger than normal prints, and some german towns have already ballots printed on half a square meter of paper. Printing them additionally with Braille further would increase them. On the other hand it was allowed anyway to just cut out that part of the ballot with the votes one had casted and throw everything else in a shredder. So this is still possible.
Fraud proof? (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes."
Old Stalin was not the first and not the last to know this. It doesn't matter what kind of elaborate systems you think up to make elections fraud proof - in the end there will always be successful efforts to change the results, no matter what you do.
So you might as well stay with the pen & paper method. At least there the evidence of fraud is a bit harder to get rid of then opposed to changing some numbers in a machine.
Re:You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
So if they can't count the votes in a week, its OK to have someone in power who stole the election? And to top it off, how about someone who puts lives in harms way because they are the commander in chief?
Seriously, I'd be fine waiting for a month or two and maybe even longer to determine who is correctly elected president of the United States.
Secondly, if it was done by hand you have to remember only 50,000,000 people voted in 2004 for the presidential election. If you were to hand count the votes by an official. If an official was responsible for counting 1000 votes then you would only need 50,000 people nation wide helping out.
Which means you'd only need 1,000 officials per state which is a drop in the bucket.
Of course it wouldn't work exactly like that... California, NY, and Texas would need a great deal of vote counters and RI and Alaska would not, but vote counting by hand would not be that difficult if you distributed it correctly. You wouldn't need a month, but at the most 2 weeks and I think the wait is worth it.
The problem is that most Americans are impatient, but don't realize the election affects them for the next four years.
Re:Persistent need to leave holes (Score:3, Insightful)
Cap the number of registered voters allowed per precinct per election worker and per actual polling station and eliminate the inequalities and bullshit. Eliminate the publicly paid for partisan primaries if you want to save money.
Seems like a simple management principle to me, don't manufacture efficiencies of scale at the expense of the quality of what you are trying to do. In other words, treat people like people and not like just another cog in the wheel.