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."
Living in Texas, I cannot be sure (Score:5, Interesting)
My vote was paperless. I have no idea if my vote was recorded properly or if it wasn't manipulated in some way after the fact. The only indication I have that it wasn't was the fact that the race was really close and several republicans lost seats largely due to "straight ticket" voting. (many people are hating republicans you know)
One thing will help stop some election fraud -- aggressive criminal prosecution.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Counting votes only small part of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
What voting does is:
1. Ensure that a candidate pays some attention to the rest of the country.
2. Convince the majority of the armed forces of the country that their is an EASIER, CHEAPER, less DANGEROUS way to remove the current political leader than starting a revolution. (No, it won't work if the country is spit geographically and the minority knows it will never convince the majority of their point of view, but it will work for 90% of the problems like say a moronic Republican government that destroys the economy, the environment, the international ties, etc.)
3. Ensure that the candidate is not below average intelligence. (Yes, GWB is not below average. Not above average, but not below either).
As such, democracy works REALLY well. In the past 200 years each and every candidate has at least tried to figure out what the voting population wants, none have been below average intelligence, and we have had only a single civil war (despite a corrupt "I am not a crook" president and a two attempts to impeach).
My story about voting... (Score:3, Interesting)
That being said, we have lots of republicans mainly because that's what their parents are, or church has told them to be.
My polling place was a church
On the side outside it says "Make sure you pray before your cast your vote." You can take that however you like. I walk in, on my lunch break, to cast a vote towards the popular vote as I know where I live it counts for nothing, and fill out the form. It is one of those "connect the line" charts.
Let me set a mood first... There is a woman around 90 years old who is reading the paper to validate people are who they say they are. This woman cannot see my face on my drivers license - she didn't even look, even though, for some reason it said "Check identification" on the line where I signed.
I over looked that
I take my form over to my cardboard booth and connect the dots
I take my form over to the machine to put it in... it looks like it is from the 60's and could probably survive a nuclear blast.
There is a red light on the machine. There are two statements on the machine.
"If the light is red, the machine is busy, please wait for it to turn green."
"If the light is green, please insert your ballot.
After waiting about 2 minutes with an impatient look on my face, a woman in her 70's comes over and in a very decrepit and very "talked down to" tone of voice she says... For the sake of my fingers, she will be Decrepit Old Lady - or DOL
DOL - "go ahead and put your ballot in, they looked at it this morning and said the light is just stuck on and will work just fine"
Me - "Ok, but is there some sort of way that I can tell who I voted for - I see some receipt looking things there coming out of the machine, will that give me my results?"
DOL - "If the machine makes a beep your vote has been counted." Me - "For some reason I highly doubt that, but given the record of this state, my vote doesn't count for much anyways. I can assure you my cantor would be very aburpt if I had to wait one second to vote"
DOL - "If the machine makes the noise, your vote is counted"
Me - "Again, I doubt that"
And I put my ballot in. Nothing got printed, the machine just made a noise. I think the moral here is:
If you leave the ignorant in charge, then whoever "fixes" the polling machine has complete control over your vote.
Ok, i'm done... Sorry for making it that long.
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting/ [wikipedia.org]
I think that the two-party system is a natural outgrowth of only being able to vote for one candidate. Instant-runoff voting (a system where you can rank the candidates you want to vote for) would work out far better, if only because lots of people would choose their favorite third-party candidate as Number 1, and have an established party that they don't hate somewhere further down as a safeguard. In our current system, we waste our vote if we don't pick the winner. A duopoly follows.
Yep, an absolute joke (Score:4, Interesting)
I would disagree with the thread's premise that we've avoided the issues of 2000 and 2004. These issues are still going on, this time in Minnesota. Senator Norm Coleman was ahead of Al Franken by over 700 votes when all the votes were counted on the 4th, and EVERY DAY his lead is getting eroded, and the recount hasn't even started yet. Somehow Minnesota precincts keep finding "missed ballots" for Franken, and the current lead has now shrunk to 288 votes. Every single "lost vote" found so far has gone to Franken, and not one to Coleman. That is exceedingly suspicious, especially given the fact that they use optical scanners in that state, and bad ballots are instantly rejected when the voter tries to cast them, giving the voter a chance to do a new one correctly. This isn't hanging chad Florida, but it is very likely fraud.
Additionally, you have widespread reports of people getting to vote without being asked to show any identification, you have black panthers with nightsticks patrolling Philedelphia polling places... voting really is an absolute joke these days.
I do believe Obama actually won the presidential election based on the huge margins, but most races are much closer than that, and it's really impossible to have any confidence in any close races anymore. And with black panthers in the polling places, I worry that eventually we won't even be able to trust the big wins either.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:3, Interesting)
Number the ballots sequentially, and have them printed by a central authority that puts anti-counterfeiting measures on the ballots.
When a voter arrives, grab a ballot at random (shuffled deck) and issue it for punch card voting.
At the end of the day, you know how many people voted due to the log book. You know how many ballots you should have. You know which number ballots were issued (but not to which voters to preserve anonymity).
This makes it harder to lose ballots because each step of the way up knows how many ballots there should be, and ballots can't be swapped for different ones.
how about science? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that anybody likes CS theory; Computer Science is actually well suited for dealing with voting issues!
This including recommending the BAN of computers on security grounds.
Human vote counting systems can be developed (and even simulated and tested.) CS work on distributed systems could be useful (or at least prove impossibility of finding ideal solutions.)
Math nuts have been working on voting systems that beat the silly 2 party mess. Voters understand reality show/web ratings as well as Olympic ratings they can vote by ranking.
Me, I think a simple hand count of subsets (randomly defined) TWICE and then a repeat on sets that do not match would work reasonably well.
While we are at it, new problems could be proposed, such as limitations on redistricting instead of developing algs to maximize a party's influence at the expense of sensible district boundaries. Could be something as simple as limiting districts to 5 sided polygons or equal area (doesn't have to be easy to solve; you know parties will spend money on maximization software, the key is to make that less useful to them.)
Other issues such as digitally signing ballots (which would be a good idea as a method for validation of money; naturally, not 'fool' proof but better than the easy to duplicate stuff that exists now... They can clean $5 and reprint $100 bills from it and fool most places.)
Going a little off topic; I'd like to see a representation study showing what ratios are most effective for communicating with your rep. The foolish USA capped the rep count long ago - its not like the reps would be any less effective if there were more of them (at least it would cost more to bribe and lobby them.)
General rules or guidelines as well, like saying that power should be proportional to how diffuse the representation is, etc.
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
This was just an exploit of crappy programming and an ineffective paper log on Sequoia's part and not an indication that the principle of a paper trail is flawed. For instance, in the case when the voter leaves before actually casting their vote and it is then voided could easily be avoided by making the voter aware that their vote hasn't been cast until X. If they don't bother to ensure that X happens, it's their fault. It's equivalent to handing your ballot to someone without staying to watch them drop it in the machine. If that is still too complicated for people, there can still be an optional paper equivalent.