The State of Electronic Voting In the 2008 US Elections 223
Geek Satire writes "Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately. The 2008 US elections have avoided many well-known problems of the 2004 and 2000 elections, but many problems remain. O'Reilly News interviewed Dr. Barbara Simons, advisor to the Federal Election Assistance Commission, to review electronic voting in the 2008 US elections, discussing the physical security of storing and maintaining election machines, the move from electronic back to paper ballots, and why open source voting machines don't necessarily solve problems of bugs, backdoors, and audits."
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:5, Insightful)
Help America Vote? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am hoping with an all Democrat government we will get a "Help America Vote" act that actually helps America vote.
It's a shame we have to wait until a party comes to power that benefits from better voting for the government to fix the problem.
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because clearly, no one likes Republicans, and they only stayed in power due to vote manipulation. Just like how the faked the moon landing. And they were responsible for the JFK assassination.
Seriously, I would like them to abolish the two-party system entirely, and by proxy the electoral college. I really think most people are generally moderate in their views, but are forced to pick sides they may not wholly agree with and make assumptions about members of the other party, who may sometimes fall closer in line with their views.
Is it that hard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:4, Insightful)
Was there ever a time when you could guarantee that every vote counted?
Sure.
It's easy as pie when the number of votes per polling place is small.
Re:Is it that hard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should you be confused? When you have a problem domain that encompasses strict accuracy, strict accountability, a strict audit trail, strict legal requirements, etc... etc... How could you possibly believe it could be anything other than hard?
Counting votes only small part of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
When the only electable candidates are those chosen by the mainstream media, and controlled by special interests, I would say most emphatically that voting or democracy doesn't "work". Voting machines should be the least of our worries when it comes to the integrity of our political system.
Paper??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Each candidate is allowed to have an observer at each polling place, and at the counting of the ballots. This system is fairly simple, fairly transparent, and all the votes get counted. It also scales well (more voters = more polling places). Why do you need electronic voting or voting machines or anything else besides a paper ballot and a pencil. I'm honestly curious why this wouldn't work in the US.
Re:Is it that hard? (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I the only one that is completely confused by how difficult it seems to be to make an electronic voting machine and have it actually work?
First, I'd like to point out that it is nearly impossible to make an electronic voting machine of any kind and prove to everyone that it works given the standard limitations on voting in the US. This limitation is that there is no way to prove to anyone how you voted. Given that limitation, and all the possibilities for sabotage (hardware and software), proving that your system works is nearly impossible. (I am aware that there exists cryptographic methods of doing this, but I sure wouldn't trust Diebold to set it up right.)
However, more importantly than that, and referenced in the article (sorry, I did read it), the voting system has to not only be provable to computer scientists, but Joe Average has to have faith that it counts accurately as well. This is pretty much impossible without voter verified paper ballots.
Re:Paper??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello fellow Canadian Citizen.
I wondered this myself, here is the short answer:
The Americans don't just vote for a president, they vote for a billion and one other things at the same time. Sheriffs, Propositions, Senate, House, Governors, Who gets a puppy this year, etc, etc.
Combine the multitude of voting decisions with the need for accessibility for the impaired, and it's easy to see why they are looking for faster, easier, more accessible ways for people to cast their votes.
Oh, and they have over 10x the population we do, electronic voting certainly tallies properly.
All that said, I agree with you, and I think the US should just suck it up and go back to paper. Having votes count properly is worth the time, cost, and effort. The new guy doesn't come into power for 100 days, they have all the time they need.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:5, Insightful)
a) As someone who's counted votes at a small location before, no. Easier, maybe, but you can't be sure that things are counted properly unless you have no more than about 100 total ballots. You'll certainly be able to get close enough that there's a clear winner though. But mistakes get very easy to make very quickly, especially with an activity as repetitive as sorting paper.
b) Small polling locations rule out malice how? Not only would it be trivially easy to swap sides of a few ballots, but it would be just as easy to attribute it to carelessness in the event that it was discovered. Especially when there are a bunch of senior citizens counting alongside you
I'd trust the reliability of the Scantron-style ballots long before something hand-counted. Touchscreens - only if there's a paper trail (preferably one that's easily read by both machines and humans, which is easy enough).
Writing safe-to-use software for electronic machines isn't overly complicated, given sufficient oversight both in terms of accountability and physical security around the machines that will run it.
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you referring to these Democrats [heritage.org], or these ones [economist.com]?
YOUR vote is not the point! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately."
God, not this fallacy again! Why do so many otherwise intelligent people think that as long as their own personal ballot got counted then all is well? Don't they realize that 1000 fake voters in swing state X can mean that their own vote, whether counted or not, is moot?
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:5, Insightful)
You could... you know... not vote for either of them. My ballot had two third-party candidates listed in the presidential race, plus a write-in spot. I've seen pictures of other ballots that had at least half a dozen third-party candidates listed, plus the same write-in spot.
The problem isn't the lack of options, but all of the media telling us that there ARE only two choices. I'd bet just about anything that if, for example, Bob Barr (libertarian candidate) would have taken a fairly significant chunk of the votes had he been given equal airtime and if there wasn't the general perception that only two parties exist. Probably double-digits in the popular vote in one election cycle, and then becoming a legitimate contender in the second when people are aware that other options exist.
The two-party system is caused by the same sources perpetuating the stagnant economy - the plethora of 24-hour news organizations. Most people believe what they hear on TV*, so as long as they continue to be told that we're entering the second great depression or that there are two and only two candidates exist, people will spend or vote accordingly.
*which is the real problem, of course. But good luck solving laziness.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:3, Insightful)
so then just increase the volunteer-to-voter ratio. but i still don't think that provides a guarantee against election fraud.
between the voting location and each county's ballot-tabulating location ballots can be "lost"/"misplaced." and even if a ballot arrives at the tabulation building, there's no guarantee that the machine will correctly count the ballot, or that it'll even be fed into the machine. even if they're hand counted, human error or deliberate fraud could still cause votes to be miscounted. and between the county and state bureaucracy the numbers can be manipulated once again. each time the tabulation results are reported up the government bureaucratic hierarchy, you have new people handling the election results, which introduces yet more opportunities for tampering and manipulation of the figures.
you could monitor the ballot counters with surveillance cameras and review them after the election, but that's still only a limited guarantee that a vote is correctly counted. the best thing to do is for the final tabulation results to be uploaded to an online server so that each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants. this puts the responsibility for assuring that each vote is counted into the hands of whoever cast the ballot. it also establishes more public oversight over the electorial process.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct. It's important not only that voters have faith in the system, but also that the system actually has a good record of counting votes. And that is a difficult task.
I think that having individuals check on their vote might work, but I don't see how you could do that and retain anonymous voting. I mean, you could retain anonymous voting and just let them check, but it would be nigh impossible for them to prove that their vote was counted incorrectly.
Re:What we need to do. (Score:3, Insightful)
WORST... IDEA... EVER. I do not want to live in a country ruled by porn sites. It would be more interesting at first, but would quickly become disgusting.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:1, Insightful)
Grandpa McCancerFace? Wow, ageism and insensitivity to a very serious disease in one pretty package. Mods, please hammer the parent poster to the ground; that kind of rhetoric is no different than calling Obama President Negro.
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:3, Insightful)
It benefits *every* party to have more accurate voting.
Not necessarily. It benefits the Republicans to keep turnout low by a number of means, which they regularly use, or have used. This isn't universally true of Republicans, though almost so of Republican politicians.
This election Charlie Crist, Republican governor of Florida, extended the hours of early voting and caught hell from members of his party because of it. They as much as admitted that high turnout would ruin any chances they might have.
There are plenty of cases of Republican Secretaries of State, for individual states, who distribute voting machines in such a way that precincts with large minority populations are underserved, precincts in which the democratic party has a higher percentage of supporters.
This doesn't mean that the Democrats are innocent of any of this sort of stuff, but recently the republican side has been much more egregious about it.
Re:Living in Texas, I cannot be sure (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have x votes for candidate one and y votes for candidate two, and candidate one is winning by x-y votes, the last (x-y)-1 votes you count will be irrelevant to the outcome. Even if they were all for candidate two, candidate one would still be the winner. That isn't disenfranchisement, it's just simple, unavoidable, arithmetic. In practice, since polling is fairly accurate, you can usually safely extend this to situations where the outstanding votes could change the outcome; but are virtually certain not to(this is why counting continues, and why media calls are occasionally wrong).
Because of the electoral college, the fact that the US votes on several different time zones, and the fact that states are called at different rates depending on their closeness and the efficiency of their electoral apparatus, the process can look and feel unfair to the last to be counted; but that isn't actually the case. The election would turn out the same way no matter which order you counted the votes in, it's just that in practice, states usually come in in a particular order, and you can usually determine the result from partial information.
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:3, Insightful)
Again, no. Democrats even did it this election. How many states have they sued Nader in because they were afraid of there being an alternative to vote for? The only difference was the strategy employed. Republicans tend to do voter suppression in the form of intentionally making lines longer by removing machines from certain areas that lean to the Democrats, and giving the machines to areas that tend to lean Republican. Democrats outright prevent people from running for office so they can present themselves as the "lesser of two evils" to unconvinced moderates for the purpose of getting votes. Both are forms of voter suppression and both very actively deploy the tactics in every election.
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm certainly not going to defend the Democrats election tactics against the Greens. I've been in plenty of campaigns that were targeted by them. I don't know how many states they sued Nader in, I can't seem to find it for this election, it was 20 in the last one.
Democrats outright prevent people from running for office so they can present themselves as the "lesser of two evils" to unconvinced moderates for the purpose of getting votes. Both are forms of voter suppression and both very actively deploy the tactics in every election.
No they aren't both forms of voter suppression. One is voter suppression, the other is legal wrangling. The whole idea of getting Nader off the ballot is to get those people to vote Dem, not to get them not to vote. Again, I'm not saying that the Dems should be doing this, just that it isn't the same as voter suppression. Republican voter suppression hits Green supporters as well.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:3, Insightful)
That won't work. If I can find out how I voted, then somebody else can also. It's important that can't happen. [nbcbayarea.com]
And it still doesn't solve the problem of actually knowing the vote was counted. You know it was saved correctly, but there's nothing stopping the software from disregarding the saved ballot and computing the results some other way.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:1, Insightful)
> each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants
Unfortunately this opens up the possibility of vote-buying/manipulation.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:3, Insightful)
Touchscreens - only if there's a paper trail (preferably one that's easily read by both machines and humans, which is easy enough).
Maybe not as easy as you think. [slashdot.org] Watch the videos; they've come up with some very clever ways that the voting machines can tamper with the paper trail.
I'd much rather use scantron cards, so that my paper trail can't be messed with. But there's a couple extra precautions I'd still like to see implemented:
1) Counting the ballots by hand should be mandatory. In fact, the people counting the ballots should have no access to the voting machine tally, lest they feel lazy and simply agree with the voting machine.
2) The voters should be required to feed the paper ballot into the machine themselves, to ensure that none of the vote counters are maliciously "losing" any of the voter's ballots. The design of the machine would also have to ensure that it couldn't maliciously spit out the paper ballot after the voter has walked away.