Another Election, Another Slew of Voting Machine Glitches 388
An anonymous reader writes: As Election Day in the U.S. starts to wind down, reports from around the country highlight another round of technological failures at the polls. In Virginia, the machines are casting votes for the wrong candidates. In North Carolina, polling sites received the wrong set of thumb drives, delaying voters for hours. In Michigan, software glitches turned voters away in the early morning, including a city mayor. A county in Indiana saw five of its polling sites spend hours trying to get the machines to boot correctly. And in Connecticut, an as-yet-unspecified computer glitch caused a judge to keep the polls open for extra time. When are we going to get this right?
Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Toronto does, and counts electronically (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:3)
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So how does that let a blind person vote unaided (the original reason electronic voting machines were "invented")? And how does that fix the large number of people that don't fill in the bubble completely or otherwise spoil or partially spoil their ballot? And what happens when someone stuffs the ballot box with extra votes?
How does a blind person see the touchscreen? How is this an improvement over a paper ballot with fixed braille next to each option?
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How does a blind person see the touchscreen?
touchscreen isn't the only e-voting possibility. And a "blind" person can read. At least in most cases. Completely blind (everything black) is pretty rare. I know "lots" of blind people that can read. They just need each letter to be 6" high, or thereabouts. Easier on a screen than printing out papers of variable size.
How is this an improvement over a paper ballot with fixed braille next to each option?
I've never seen a braille ballot. Where are you where those are available? http://www.accessiblesociety.o... [accessiblesociety.org] Though theoretically required, 20,000 polling places are violating the law
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We'll "get it right" when we knock off the electronic BS and use what has been tested to work, marked paper ballots. It.Just.Works.
Yeah, you should go talk to a guy named "chad" down in Florida about how paper just "works"...he used to hang around a lot...
Or perhaps you could go talk to the absentee voters...if they actually exist. Or are still alive.
Oh, and we'll actually get it right when we stop electing liars in office who win elections based on empty promises. You know, bullshit like how they're gonna "get it right"...
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We'll "get it right" when we knock off the electronic BS and use what has been tested to work, marked paper ballots.
It.Just.Works.
This area you mail in you votes, there are many errors one can make to have your vote(s) tossed out, today I wanted to go to the polls and vote only to find that you just don't do that, it's snail mail only.
At least it's not electronic.
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"Your vote for has been recorded"
* added to terror watchlist*
*Candidate Y count +1*
No paper trail, no accountability... No democracy.
Corruption? (Score:2)
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What's wrong with that picture?
Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
The eletronic machines would not have it if they used actual physical buttons.
They would not have this issue if the program was on a ROM chip.
Not a problem if the voting machines had a internal encrypted flash memory.
No glitch if used the two first on this list
And that could be solved by software as well.
But for some reason diebold think that they should do all this stupid flashy show instead of actually designing something actually reliable and safe.
Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
What makes you think they aren't doing exactly what they planned on doing? All of your solutions require that the software not be malicious in the first place. Paper, black pen.
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Whoah, it's almost like software is hard or something.
15 - 50 errors per 1000 lines of delivered code, industry average (McConnell), or 0.434 for 32 projects scanned by Coverity. Or 0 for 500k for NASA, with a nearly unlimited budget.
The voting on the thing, that's some software. The transmission and collection, that's another software. The intermediates, drivers and such, that's one more software.
Any software can be softwared by software. All it takes is one software in the middle of two other softwar
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The eletronic machines would not have it if they used actual physical buttons.
They would not have this issue if the program was on a ROM chip.
Not a problem if the voting machines had a internal encrypted flash memory.
No glitch if used the two first on this list
And that could be solved by software as well.
But for some reason diebold think that they should do all this stupid flashy show instead of actually designing something actually reliable and safe.
Which ROM chip is it? Which crypto key did it use? Did it encrypt properly? How do I see what's in the flash?
Paper suffers from none of those problems.
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You walk into the polling station, check in at the desk with the voter registration card you received in the mail and your government issued ID. If you didn't receive the card then you just need to go through a more thorough ID check, but the result is still the same. Your name is crossed off of the list and you are handed the appropriate ballot and shown to a nearby booth. Once in the booth you pick up a pen and mark next to the correct names, fold it up and walk over to another group of volunteers near
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Ineligible voters are a red herring. The way voting works is basically immune to ineligible voters, assuming a modicum of competence. To vote, you have to provide your name and address, which is cross-referenced against a
Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike the bits in computer memory optical scan ballots can be recounted by hand if necessary. The error rate may not be zero but for most elections it's low enough to be below the threshold that would change an election.
Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
AND, paper ballots allow one to recover from gross errors. Electronic ballots do not.
The only kind of "electronic voting" that I would support would be one that allowed the voter to fill in his ballot on the computer terminal and then PRINT the ballot. The voter then reviews the PRINTED ballot, and then drops it into the ballot box. Immediate results, which is what the BigMediaMoguls want, to do breathless "breaking news" bulletins, AND a scanable paper ballot which would be the OFFICIAL ballot.
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And there are such machines, but they are shunned by secretaries of state around the country.
Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I guess having electronic voting machines AND working printers is an invitation to failure, especially when a few dozen Sharpie pens is ... what, fifty bucks?
I realize this is heresy, but even though I've been working with PCs on a daily basis for THIRTY YEARS, not everything needs to be computerized.
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Agreed.
Computers are making us stupid. The average store clerk can't even count change without the computer prompting him.
Stupid people who rely on computers want to hand over their very existence to computers.
What next? Computer dating?
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And society ran fine without computers for quite a few thousand years, so really, not anything *needs* to be computerized. Well, except computers, have to be, yeah, computerized.
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The only qualm that I have with the mail-in balloting that I do (and usually drop-off at the polling place the day of the election) is that I have to sign the outer envelope. The ballot itself has no distinguishing marks on it, so when it's removed from the envelope and put in the stack with all of the others it's effectively anonymous.
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A few years ago, some researchers found that with ohio's electronic auditing system, that you could reasonably determine who cast a vote based on the time it was cast and the order it was recorded.
Their fix was to obfuscate it and not make some of the information availible. Ohio still has a paper trail brought to us by a bunch of activist early in the switch to the electronic machines (my district had it from the start). In the review section of casting your ballot, it prints in paper in a window and you ve
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Back in the day when we had polling place elections here in Oregon the ballots were numbered too. But the numbers were on a tear off tab that was removed before the ballot was dropped in the ballot box. The number were there for auditing purposes because then they could take the torn off tabs and the unused ballots and account for every ballot that was printed.
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There will always be errors.
Which is why I objected to saying "It. Just. Works."
That's a silly objection. Errors that can be detected and corrected without much difficulty qualifies as working. As opposed to the electronic voting machines that are currently used in the US, where you have no idea if it recorded your vote correctly.
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Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Informative)
I have voted in over twenty elections using optical scan, and there have never been any problems. If there were problems they can be fixed by a manual recount.
As for the other problems you mention, they have nothing to do with paper vs. electronic. It's just bad organization.
Here's how we do it where I vote. You walk into the polling place, and you tell the nice old lady your address, She looks up your address on a paper printout, and when she finds it you tell her your name and she crosses it off with a red pencil and hands you your ballot. You go into the voting booth, which is nothing but a curtained aluminum frame with a table in it; the table contains a stack of markers. You mark off your ballot, go to the exit desk where the address and name procedure is duplicated with another nice old lady. Then you drop your ballot into a dropped box under the watchful gaze of a policeman. When the polls close the printouts go into another locked box and it's all driven over to the counting center under police guard.
There's literally nothing technological to screw up voting, counting or recounting, except that every polling place has to have a special machine for visually impaired voters. If that goes wrong the procedure is to bring a trusted person to fill out your ballot.
Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:3)
Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked as an election judge in Colorado and in Pennsylvania and in both states I got paid between $100 and $150 a day for election day, and got paid for the training. It's not a bad way to spend a vacation day. Get paid for the vacation day, and the hundred and some bucks from the county, and get that vibe you get being a part of the democratic process. Plus, for places with electronic voting machines, it's good to have a technically oriented person there, because it is, after all, a computer and setting them up is usually not easy for non-techies.
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Our voting procedure is very simple. I walked up, told the person my name, they looked it up and had me sign on the correct line. Then, I went to another person at the next table to get my ballot and a folder. I went to those folding tables with sides for privacy and marked in the little circles to indicate who I wanted to vote for. Next, I put the ballot in the folder and walked to a machine. I put the ballot in the machine and it pulled it in, scanning in my vote. I'm unsure what happens to the pape
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I have voted in over twenty elections using optical scan, and there have never been any problems. If there were problems they can be fixed by a manual recount.
Great, so how does that stop someone stuffing ballot boxes? Anonymous paper ballots are vulnerable to stuffing and loss.
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Great, so how does that stop someone stuffing ballot boxes? Anonymous paper ballots are vulnerable to stuffing and loss.
Ballots must be anonymous to guarantee an uncompromised election. Preventions against stuffing the ballot box is a local check and balance. It's hard to lose a paper ballot once they are in the lock box.
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Ballots must be anonymous to guarantee an uncompromised election.
So every election before the Civil War was compromised? Vote fraud increased, not decreased after secret ballots were started. Reality proves you wrong. Yes, I understand that in unstable places, secret ballots are required. That's why they were good during open war, and reconstruction after. But with a stable society, open voting gives a less compromised result. If you can't verify the election, then it's compromised. Every secret ballot is compromised. Open ballots are less compromised than secret
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Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
The theory is sound. The theory [of] electronic voting is that it's "better" than paper. But the reality for both is different.
The reality is that paper is better than electronic, and always will be.
You raised the issue of ballot-box stuffing. AC pointed out that a paper system can be observed by candidate surrogates. How do you "observe" ballot-box stuffing if the system is electronic? The answer is simple: you can't.
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You missed the important point. By eliminating unnecessary components, you eliminate sources of error. If there are no thumb drives, then you don't have to worry about the wrong ones being sent. If there are no touch screens, you don't have to worry about miscalibrated screens recording the wrong vote. If there are no computers, you don't have to worry about crashes, bad software, or power outages.
Other elements of the system show careful thought. For example, by asking for address, then name, you elimin
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By eliminating unnecessary components, you eliminate computer election fraud. If there are no thumb drives, then you don't have to worry about computer election fraud. If there are no touch screens, you don't have to worry about computer election fraud. If there are no computers, you don't have to worry about computer election fraud.
FTFY. But I'm just making a point. I do agree with your original statements.
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You're using quotes which attribute the text to the original author and hoping bold face will suffice to highlight your differences with his/her opinion. Who is to say whether those tags will survive. And what's the point, anyway? Why not just quote the text and use your own words to express your view? I do have this off-topic opinion: I'm sick and tired of "FTFY" and wish it would end. Optimism.
Anyway I live somewhere in Oregon, and am happy with mail-in ballots. Easy. Get to ponder the thing for awh
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I never said "it just works". What I said amounts to "it works for a good reason."
The reason I'm concerned about tech deployments is that like anything else you have to have experienced people running them and you have to practice to be good at it. Experience matters.
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Except that marked ballots work *better*. We're all listening if you can tell us specifically in what ways electronic voting works better, and how those advantages (if any) sufficiently offset the myriad of problems.
Feature (Score:5, Interesting)
...not a bug.
They've proven elections can be hopelessly unreliable and the electorate still won't care.
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Eh, why should they? They don't put any opposition candidates on the ballot to vote for.
Vote by mail. (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh. I voted by mail a week ago. Got a paper ballot. Had lots of time to look up details on all the issues, including the judges, some obscure issues, and the people I'd never heard of.
Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.
I highly recommend it for everybody.
Re: Vote by mail. (Score:2, Funny)
I'm at least 80% sure your vote wasn't tampered with.
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Yeah, no one could ever tamper with the mail.
So you start with a fairly reliable delivery service, add in severe federal penalties for tampering with the mail, then additional severe federal penalties for interfering with an election.
If you are worried about tampering (or if you didn't send your ballot in time, they must be postmarked the day before the election) you can deliver them yourself to any polling place or the election office on voting day. If you still don't trust that a paper ballot delivered to the polling place will be tampered with, y
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Yeah, no one could ever tamper with the mail.
But, but... that's a felony.
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Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.
It's also much easier and lower-risk to vote fraudulently by mail. Even if someone comparing the signatures detects a forged vote, it will be pretty much impossible to find the person who forged it.
I much prefer showing up at a polling place and marking a piece of stiff paper or light cardboard, with volunteers (all political parties welcome) watching everything. I want the ballots hauled away in locked boxes
Re:Vote by mail. (Score:4, Insightful)
Meh. I voted by mail a week ago. Got a paper ballot. Had lots of time to look up details on all the issues, including the judges, some obscure issues, and the people I'd never heard of.
Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.
I highly recommend it for everybody.
And how do you know that your vote was received and accurately counted?
I voted by mail against a certain president. Twice. Didn't make any difference and I had no way to know if my vote was even taken into account as there is no feedback mechanism.
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Or Arizona.
Liberals bash Arizona for various things, but the voting system there is far more progressive than what we have here in blue-state New Jersey, where there's no mail-in ballots, and there's electronic machines with no paper ballots.
Just use (Score:3, Interesting)
a system like Oregon's mail ballot.
Until we do an open federally sponsored voting system, no one is going to engineer a solution properly.
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Get rid of the electronic voting machines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Electronic voting machines are a solution looking for a problem. Good old paper ballots work just fine for elections and are easily recounted if necessary.
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I'm still on the fence, on this.... As much as we rely on computers for in modern society (even life and death scenarios, such as computer systems warning about dangerous drug interactions when you're given a prescription), it doesn't seem impossible to get electronic voting done securely and properly.
The big problem seems to be a lack of understanding of the technology and security issues on the part of the folks who selected "approved" voting machine systems?
For example, all of this talk about touch scr
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Cost-Benefit.
Your stated advantage is loss of paper ballots.
Your stated negative is "to get electronic voting done securely and properly"
I think paper ballots win. More security staff is a much larger payout than developing a fully trusted and accountable complex computer system.
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When you vote via computer, you're voting via proxy.
Would America allow the following idea:
"You walk into a polling station. You tell a person there everybody you want to vote for. That person disappears into a back room, comes back a minute later, and assures you your votes have been cast as you directed."
If the answer is 'no,' then you also must be against computer voting, because it's exactly the same. You are directing a system to cast a vote, then trusting it to do so.
Paper ballots and proper electi
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The secret ballot is not something I'd be willing to give up easily. If everyone knows how you voted it's possible for your employer or your family to pressure you over your vote.
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That comparison is caused by everyone comparing what they actually experience and deal with to any paper experience.
That's because they don't experience the paper fraud. It's been going on for the past 150 years, even since we moved from open voting to secret ballots, so there's been a lot of polishing of the fraud machines from the tow parties.
Ever wonder why there were so many parties (3, not as many as places with transferable votes) when we had open voting, and the same two since secret voting was used? The solid fraud locked in the two main players.
But the stuffing and such is hidden and can't be seen. Electron
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The difference is committing fraud with paper ballots is a high labor endevour that has to be committed in each precinct. With electronic balloting all it takes is one computer nerd like me to change many ballots.
Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Every ballot creates a new Bitcoin address (polling locations keep track of the generated ballot addresses) with a negligible fraction of bitcoins.. Every vote sends a tiny fraction of bitcoin to whatever addresses are represented by candidates. Only transactions from ballot-list addresses are counted. Candidates with the highest amount of bitcoins in their voting addresses from verified ballots win. Any screwups or attempts at fucking with the votes could be seen on the blockchain.
There's probably 1000 different ways voting can be done anonymously while still being verifiable using the blockchain. Don't ask me to solve all the problems - but they are solvable.
I believe the whole point of the 'closed source' ballot bullshit we have now is the same reason we have a ridiculously bloated war on terror. The real purpose is to concentrate power in the hands of the few. They make us believe our votes are counted.. but they haven't been counted right in years.
Re:Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Use Bitcoin Blockchain technology.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I'm a computer professional and I don't trust computers for voting and counting votes. It's too easy to do stuff behind the veil of the interface that you have no idea is happening. Even if it's open source unless you personally vetted and loaded the software you have no idea if it's what you think it is or not.
Paper ballots and hand counting is something that anyone smart enough to mark a ballot can understand and it's easily scalable.
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We'll Get This Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
when we stop using computers to count votes.
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Oh you silly, short-sighted partisans. The Republicans can still barely take the Senate in a midterm election with a highly favorable map and 38% voter turnout. I'm so impressed. How do you think they'll do in 2016 with a much less favorable map and massively higher turnout, meaning massively higher young/female/minority turnout?
For my part? I'd like the Republicans to get enough control to build a wall with Mexico before demographics kill them, they collapse entirely, and we move into the next party sy
Restating the obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)
Marked paper ballots. Done. Braille versions can be made for the blind, different language versions (what, voting based on a person's preferred language, that's just crazy) and so on. Optical scanning is old, tried and very well tested technology, and you can always fall back to hand counts.
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There have been multiple places where the total paper ballots cast exceeded the number of eligible voters. Paper changes the fraud, but does *nothing* to stop it.
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Absentee ballots are a much bigger problem and the biggest source of election fraud. No identity check, no chain of custody. And for some strange reason, none of the politicians who are crying about "voter fraud" seem to ever bring it up.
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But there's no problem printing out fraudulent absentee ballots, one per registered voter. And duplicates are discarded, but with 20% voter turnout, you'd get a 80% win. There hasn't been that level of abuse yet, but there's little to keep someone from finding out the "real" results,
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When I've voted absentee, I've had to fill out a form for every election saying that I will be voting absentee and where to mail the ballot to. Sure, there's no verification on that, but the attack isn't a simple mail merge, you need a separate address for every one of those forged ballots, such that it won't raise suspicions with the person manually handling those requests (it's a paper form).
You presume more confidence than I have in the government that 1,000,000 absentee voters a the same address will be noticed as an irregularity. That, and it's likely that if you got a ballot and filled them out without having pre-registered as absentee, so long as you don't vote in person, your absentee will be counted. That's how it worked in the two states I've lived in and looked into the absentee system.
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There have been multiple places where the total paper ballots cast exceeded the number of eligible voters. Paper changes the fraud, but does *nothing* to stop it.
Stuffing a ballot box with fraudulent paper ballots is risky, and relies on many people to be effective in multiple polling locations.
Falsifying electronic records requires a few people at a strategic points, and can be impossible to detect.
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Ballot stuffing is actually pretty easy to protect against, and the method of voting doesn't do anything to change that equation. It's just as easy to telegraph votes on a voting machine versus paper. Also, voter fraud is really risky compared to the payoff. It's easy to get caught. It just takes one election judge to unravel a scheme to defraud. And it's much easier and less risky to disenfranchise voters to effect an outcome; history shows us that.
As to why the counts are off, in most cases, it's confusio
Re: When are we going to get this right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Glitches, or on Purpose? (Score:3)
How hard is it to make a voting program?
How easy would it be to "skew" results of said voting program one way, or the other? I'm not a conspiracy nutter, but it does make me wonder from time to time...
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How hard is it to make a website that cannot be hacked?
I voted today using a real paper ballot (Score:3, Interesting)
I voted today using a real paper ballot which I placed into a real ballot box in the state of TN. Very satisfying. Not easy to do however, the state wants to force voters to use electronic black box voting machines. The precinct worker and the local supervisor tried to tell me that I could not vote using a paper ballot. I told them I had checked with the state election division (which I had done) and an election attorney confirmed that my right to vote using a paper ballot would not be denied. They actually called the secretary of state office on election day to confirm.
It is not possible to verify a vote using an electronic black box voting machine. As Ronald Reagan said "Trust but verify".
Chicago fraud (Score:2)
Meanwhile:
http://abc7chicago.com/politic... [abc7chicago.com]
Quite ironic given the republicans argument for voter ID is democratic fraud. I wonder if anyone will go to prison?
btw, before anyone calls me a democrat, I hate both parties intensely.
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The 2000 election judges that didn't show up this morning all received phone calls yesterday telling them they were "ineligible" to be election judges and could face sanctions if they showed up.
It's as if someone didn't want the polls in these Democratic precincts to open this morning. My guess is "True the Vote", a "grass roots" "voter integrity" organization who has a history of coming to polling places in minority communities and simply challenging every single voter. Until the police come and they mo
Bring back the lever machines (Score:2)
We still use lever machines for school budget voting. They just work, they provide actual privacy, and they are simple to operate.
When are we going to get this right? (Score:2)
When are we going to get this right?
The question mistakenly assumes that this is not exactly the intended effect.
Come to Australia! (Score:2)
As yet unspecified computer glitch? (Score:2)
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Computer related issues tend to be nasty enough when you are strongly motivated to get it right, face consequences if you don't, and have access to considerable talent.
A computer related issue where the customer mostly doesn't care, the harm of failure minimal, and the state of the market 'unmotivated at best, malicious at worst'? Even omniscience would have trouble under those circumstances, and those are basically the situation.
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$OS.
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1. Educate yourself.
2. Vote, and make your voice heard. Oh wait, shit.