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Politics Government Technology

North Carolina May Redo State Election 44

Posted by michael from the do-over dept.
goombah99 writes "The North Carolina Observer reports that due to failure of computerized voting system to properly record votes after its memory cards filled North Carolina may have to redo the November 2 statewide election. They believe 4400 votes were lost and from this have decided that only the State Ag commissioner race must be re-run. Still it's going to cost them a lot, indeed its going to cost them about the same price as 1000 new voting machines (3 million dollars) , or about $750 for every lost vote. Guess they wont be able to afford a paper trail system now."
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North Carolina May Redo State Election More

North Carolina May Redo State Election

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  • If they actually get around to doing another election, how will they collect votes this time?

    There are few times that you get a "second chance". Wonder if they'll make the same mistake twice...

    • Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Golias ( 176380 )
      A state agriculture commissioner election do-over, not on Election Day, when there is no election for President or any other high office going on at the same time?

      Don't worry. 17 people will show up, all relatives of one candidate or the other. I think they will find a way to get it done.
      • For those who don't remember, our previous (elected) Ag commissioner, Meg Scott Phipps, is now is the Federal Pen for doing some bad things. Ag Commissisoner does a lot of stuff in North Carolina, and if the republicans win it, it'd be a big upset.

        I'll gladly vote again.
        • I'll be there too. I just hate that the State Govt. and the Counties are going to spend that much.

          Four years ago everything was going good for the State, Two months after taking office, Gov. Easly (D) annouced the State was nearly bankrupt. He has done a good job getting things under control. His predecessor(D) and the legislature (D controlled)were at fault. The scary thing is how those incumbant legislators keep getting re-elected after screwing things up like that. Some voters really are stupid.

          If I ha
          • I'm a republican (just letting you know :-p) ... but I like Easley (not as much as Ballantine, but that's another story)...

            Grandparents' post shows a big problem: People don't care about local/state politics anymore. Let me tell you what: Ag Commissioner will MOST LIKELY affect NC residents moreso than who is Sec. of State, or Sec. of Defense, Sec of Education, et cetera.
            • I am a Republican also, and live in NC (High Point). I like how Easly handled the financial troubles, when you add the effects of several big hurricanes, it was a job well done. As the son of a soils professor I have a good understanding of the Ag Commisioners job. He is actually more important than half the Legislature, and all the appointees.

  • Vindicated (Score:4, Insightful)

    by schlach ( 228441 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:06AM (#10853680) Journal
    I feel that this is going to make a lot of us look a little less paranoid. I've been telling people for years about how bad it is, some of them have been interested, but it's so easy for people in this country to kind of roll their eyes and insist that everything will always work and everyone will play by the rules, because they wouldn't let it happen any other way.

    We can use this as an example of just one of the many problems on Nov. 2, and if they end up doing a new election, how costly it is to make mistakes or use untrustworthy technologies in voting. Then segue to Florida and Ohio...

    • 3 million sure would help OVC (Score:4, Informative)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:30AM (#10854005)
      Apparently the state is willing to cough up an unnesseccary 3 miilion now and then. Shame they did not just give it to the Open Voting Consortium. The OVC systems are open source and have paper trails. They even cost less to buy let alone the cost of redoing an election.

      OVC needs the support too (cash and serious programmers). Visit their web page [openvotingconsortium.org].

  • What kind of idiot engineer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:09AM (#10853713)
    Designs a machine to continue to receive and process votes even when such votes can't be stored!?!?

    Does that REALLY have to be spelled out in the design document? (And was it?)
    • So the article says "The counter hit 3,016 before the warning message came up. It went on and off, as Sanderson worked the control panel to accept more votes" Okay, so you had stupid user error:

      "But county elections workers said the message was hard to see. Sanderson said a precinct worker could easily miss it while setting the machines.

      L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he sa

      • Heck, as soon as the first vote that couldn't be saved comes in, the machine should refuse to allow any more voting until the election official rectifies the situation.

        And what's with voting machines that require memory configuration, anyway? I'm not sure I would ever buy such a machine if I were making the decision. With the number of volunteers that are responsible for operating these things, they shouldn't be any more complicated to set up than my iPod. And even that is probably too complicated, cons

        • Heck, as soon as the first vote that couldn't be saved comes in, the machine should refuse to allow any more voting until the election official rectifies the situation.
          Better, it should stop after the last vote that it can save, rather than the first one that it can't.

          Not rocket science. But, given that some precincts had these machines and others didn't, possibly election rigging.

          -- MarkusQ

      • L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he said, with no explanation of what to do if it pops up."

        It never ceases to amaze me how many users accept this sort of excuse. Users shouldn't be so quick to accept the blame for badly designed user interfaces. Sure, we can't expect all users to be competent design engineers, but a large number of them should be smart enough to understand

  • I like honesty (Score:3, Insightful)

    by adamh526 ( 725423 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:17AM (#10853826)
    Jack Gerbel, president of the California company, said in response to the letters that the machine was set incorrectly to store too few votes. He called the problem "a mistake of omission" on the part of a UniLect software engineer. But he said that a warning message should have appeared on the machine when it was full.

    At least these guys can come out say what went wrong. Do we have any statement yet from Diebold or ES&S? Forgive me for asking, but how hard is it to count votes? This isn't the 80's anymore - hardware is cheap. I'm having a hard time figuring out why storage is apparently such an issue here. I can't remember the last time an ATM machine forgot/lost my PIN number. Powerball machines leave adequate paper trails. Come on.

    Maybe the recounts in New Hampshire [votenader.org] and Ohio [votecobb.org] will shed some light on the issue.
  • Municipalities no doubt *hate* to have to redo an election. So I'm sure the result of this snafu will be to ensure that either, A) This sort of fuckup of our votes never happens again, or 2) They can't be compelled to redo an election the next time this sort of fuckup of our votes happens.

    Anybody wanna take a guess at which of these outcomes is vastly more likely than the other?

  • If I were North Carolina (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:36AM (#10854079) Homepage Journal
    I would be rereading the contract, fighting to get my money back, and think hard about suing for damages.

    Does the manufacturer really have no responsibility for these costs at all? $3 million is a friggin' lot of money for tax payers to spend for something UniLect screwed up.

    This blows my mind. Yes, an error message "sort of" pops up in among all the other commands. And here I am worried that I'd better make it super-obvious when an error might cause a score to be lost in an educational training drill. AARGH!

    From the article:

    The counter hit 3,016 before the warning message came up. It went on and off, as Sanderson worked the control panel to accept more votes. If the machine worked during early voting as it did on Tuesday, the message could have appeared hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

    But county elections workers said the message was hard to see. Sanderson said a precinct worker could easily miss it while setting the machines.

    L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he said, with no explanation of what to do if it pops up.

    • Re:If I were North Carolina (Score:5, Insightful)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:46AM (#10854216)
      I have read elsehwere the company makes two models a 3016 vote model and a 10,000 vote model. The county bought the cheaper ones. Thus presumbably they cant sue because they were aware of the different machine types and since they had the option to contact for more capacity. On the other hand they could sue for the sloppy inadequate warning system, but it might be hard to win. My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.
      • My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.

        That's not the greatest example, since they were using the machine as instructed. It's more like if your Isuzu had no gas gauge, but a little gray light that would *occasionally* blink on and off again when you got down near empty, and when you hit empty the engine would fall out.

        One can argue that you should have known that would happen (it was in the instruction manual!), but it's also a bla
      • I don't see how memory is an issue.

        Lets assume that there will be 10,000 people voting on your machine for (at most) 100 offices or local issues. A simple bit vector approach would be 100 x 10,000 = 1 Mb. Of course, we need to allow for memory requirements for the GUI and related programs, but having these things "run out" of memory is ridiculous.

        The only way I can see that memory is a problem is if they are storing each record in .doc format.
        • That was my first reaction, but then I realized that the voting machines may be keeping more data than simple votes. Who knows what information about the votes and/or voters the machine is storing?
          • That is true, but I fail to see how much more information they'd need. Perhaps a timestamp and some information to spit out for audits?

            Even if they "needed" more memory, I'm sure the citizens of NC would much rather their elections department sprang for the 64 MB model instead of having to pay $3,000,000 to do the election over again.

            Even then, these things should be writing to the flash cards after EVERY vote. Marxist Hacker 42 [slashdot.org] noted there is no need to keep ~3,000 votes in RAM.
            • Even if they "needed" more memory, I'm sure the citizens of NC would much rather their elections department sprang for the 64 MB model instead of having to pay $3,000,000 to do the election over again.

              They don't have a choice about redoing the election. The only choice they have is whether to spend the money to upgrade the machines. They might prefer to retrain the poll workers.

              And I agree, they should backup the ram after every vote.

        • I think you're over-simplifying a bit (some items have more than 2 options; each ballot probably has a unique ID and a timestamp; the records may have to be word-aligned, etc), but it's an excellent point. With today's hardware, a voting machine should have no problem storing 10,000 ballots. It's a ridiculously low requirement, in fact.

          My guess is that the 3,000-vote model doesn't actually have any less storage space - it's just configured not to use the full amount of available space.
  • NOTE: The following is word-of-mouth, and its trustworthiness should be taken into account thereby.

    On Friday I received a phone call from a good friend who works at CBS - I've known her for years and she is a Producer for some of the news programs, one well known one in particular. She tipped me off that the news media is in a "lock-down" and that there is to be no no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2nd. She said similar "lock-down orders" had come down last year after the invasion of

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Just like to say that I read your reply and find it informative. Thanks for taking the time. Nonetheless, I find it highly unlikely that Bush won this election fair and square, and with the tendency among Republicans to accept criminality when it is one of their own who is the criminal I am at the very least extremely skeptical of the election results.
      • With a nearly 52% against slightly under 49% split in the electorate, this was undoubtedly a close election.

        Please try to keep up, despite nearly half the country voting against him, Bush clearly has a "mandate" and much political capital to spend.

    • You might want to read Keith Olbermann's take [msn.com] on his supposed involvement in the "lock-down." Not disputing the rest of your post, but the part about Keith being in hot water, well, doesn't hold water.

  • I'm waiting for florida... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @11:31AM (#10854872) Journal

    After Bev Harris [blackboxvoting.org] catching the elections officials red-handed disposing of ballots, poll-logs, and other interesting documents on Tuesday, I suspect things may get interesting down there as well. Even more interesting, it's the same people who had -16K votes for Gore in 2000.

    Who knows, it may even make the newspapers someday.

    -- MarkusQ

    • Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MarkusQ ( 450076 )

      How odd. Someone modded the parent post "overrated" even though it (at this point) hasn't had any other moderation.

      I suspect who ever did it didn't bother reading the linked article (which details the events to which I refered). In short, they went to pick up copies of the records to which they were granted under their Freedom Of Information Act request. They were instead given newly generated records (the printer had date stampted them). They pointed this out, and were told they would have to come ba

  • They're called Patriot Voting Systems???? Maybe UniLect's engineers have been indoctrinated by the sponsors of the PATRIOT Act....
  • I'm confused. What is the advantage of paper? Everyone keeps saying "OH, it's necessary," but why?

    If the voting machine spits out a piece of paper the voter gives to some random person, does that make the voting process any more secure? The paper doesn't identify them, but they could look at the piece of paper and know what they punched and somehow find voter fraud? Then, they can feel safe that this piece of paper won't change, and the random person will put the paper with no hanging chads in the ball
    • I'm confused. What is the advantage of paper? Everyone keeps saying "OH, it's necessary," but why?

      Because what is being mesaured is the voter's intent. Paper as an audit mechanism would confirm to the voter that his intent was properly recorded, at least for puroposes of auditing.

      If the voting machine spits out a piece of paper the voter gives to some random person, does that make the voting process any more secure?

      yes.

      The paper doesn't identify them, but they could look at the piece of paper and
      • Well, punch card machines are a piece of shit, no doubt. Optical scan are better.

        Ever since my kid (who is usually in the 99 percentile) got a 0 on a standardized test, I've been leery of opscan systems.

        Optical scan can screw up if the voter doesn't mark the ballot properly, it seems about as difficult as punching a hole properly. At least in Georgia the standard was whether or not light came through the hole, so pregant chad wouldn't have been a problem to count.

        My favorite system is to use the e-ter
    • I'm confused. What is the advantage of paper? Everyone keeps saying "OH, it's necessary," but why?

      Currently, without a paper trail, voters must trust the machine to record their vote correctly. The machine could swear up and down that it recorded your vote for candidate X, but how do you know it didn't (accidentally or maliciously) secretly cast it for candidate Y? The vote is recorded on a memory card that the voter cannot view personally. And even if they could, they probably wouldn't understand whic

      • I don't know about you, but when I voted i signed in and they took my name as having voted. There's your audit trail.
        • I don't know about you, but when I voted i signed in and they took my name as having voted. There's your audit trail.

          But this audit trail will only tell us the total number of votes, not the number cast for each individual candidate. This is an inadequate audit trail because it will fail to catch cases where one candidate's votes are increased by the same number another candidate's votes are decremented. And even when it does manage to catch a problem where the vote total recorded by the machine does no

  • What's wrong with just having a do-over in the county or precints that used the botched machine?

    If you know who the 3000-odd people who voted first are, simply invite the 4000-odd people whose votes didn't count to re-vote.

    If you don't knoow, take them away from the total and invite all 7000-odd people to re-vote.

    If you didn't vote on Nov. 2, or your vote isn't one of the ones that was lost or one of the unlucky 3000, you can't vote the 2nd time.

    It's a lot cheaper.

    The only downside is that people will
  • I hope it doesn't happen much, but I am so glad it happened. I truly think that it will take the visibility and expense of a few redone elections to get the point across that electonic voting terminals need paper trails and other security features. This is not wasted money if it prods us into having better elections.

    Washington State [thenewstribune.com] is having a similar problem with its Governors Race. Less than 300 votes separate the candidates.
  • You vote. I don't care how, but you vote. It will probably be electronic, with a paper receipt in a secure container. There will be a paper receipt given to you with a serial number on it and an encrypted account of your vote as a verification. You go home, and off the internet, you type in your serial number, and a pin number, and viola, your vote shows up as recorded. If it wasn't recorded, or recorded incorrectly, you go to your local voting office, and raise hell.

  • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) *
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I wrote a little calculator [bolson.org] to help analyze the economies of voting machines. One of the problems of the recent election was that there weren't enough voting machines to go around, and cost may have played a factor. I heard from my country clerk that new HAVA complaiant DRE voting machines were often costing about $4000 each. Even if you estimate that they could be built for as little as $500, they're not economical. I combined the recent Ohio statistic of 100-200 votes per machine per election to arrive at

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