Florida Election Ballots to be Printed On-Demand 143
davidwr writes "The St. Petersburg, FL, Times reports that Florida is going back to paper ballots, but with a twist. They are printing the ballots on-demand, right there at the polling booth. This isn't machine-assisted voting where a touch-screen fills in your printed ballot for you. It's just a way to save printing costs and reduce paper waste. 'Without ballot on demand, poll workers at 13 early Hillsborough voting sites would need to stockpile stacks of every possible ballot type. With ballot on demand, poll workers can print out a person's distinct ballot type when he or she arrives to vote.'"
ink (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to good ideas which don't stand up to the reality of 5-6 old people monitoring a station.
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According to the article, these are also at the "Early Voting Stations" which tend to be a county court house or such and not for election day which will use pre-printed ballots. It pro
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Florida apparently uses heavy-stock paper for their ballots. Other jurisdictions do not.
Re:ink (Score:4, Informative)
ballot box stuffing (Score:2)
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So no, there wouldn't be an issue of someone outside the poll workers stuffing the box. They woul
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No, we don't.
Session token (Score:2, Interesting)
How do you tell which ballots are fake??
So you're talking about a replay attack [wikipedia.org], where someone reuses a challenge (blank ballot) to stuff a box with multiple responses (filled-in ballots). Here, we thwart replay attacks with a session token.
Each polling place has a pair of public and private keys, such as RSA or ECC. Each ballot is printed with a barcode containing a session token. The token includes a code representing the polling place, a ballot serial number, and possibly some other information, along with an encrypted hash of this infor
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Failing that, a re-vote.
Re:ribbons (Score:2)
The world of tomorrow, YESTERDAY
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These machines will jam or run out of ink with no geeks around to fix it.
I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.
The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.
Re:ink (Score:4, Insightful)
Job Security.
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Think thermal printers used in point-of-sale equipment. Not inkjet or office laser printer.
PC LOAD LETTER (Score:2)
It would be so much easier just to go back to monarchy or dictatorship!
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What happens in case of... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Don't challenge the machines! No Senate candidates for you!
Two words: Geek Squad. (Score:2)
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For your added convenience (Score:5, Funny)
Re:For your added convenience (Score:4, Funny)
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An individual's pompous pronouncements on internet fora should be proportional to that person's ability to use the local language.
Upon completing my liberal education, the real learning began.
Of course the p.o.d. ballots are an accident waiting to happen. The whole point of printing the ballots ahead of time is to ensure to the extent possible *ahead of time*, i.e., with time for corrective action to be taken, that there will be no systemic failures
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You also know ahead of time how many ballot papers you need, because you know the number of people entitled to vote ahead of time. If you have unused ballot papers you can just recycle the paper.
I am impressed by the spectacular cheapness display
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Buy stock in thermal paper companies. it's coming with POD ballots or with paper trail for voting kiosks.
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Printing at site sounds like a reasonable idea, they should not forget to have oversized ballots printed and on display so people can check the validity of the ballot t
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So what? Printed paper is dirt cheap. Even if you overprint ballot papers by a few hundred percent you are still talking several orders of magnitude less in terms of "leftovers" than unsold copies of just about any newspaper (Which will often also contain "inserts" with much better quality paper and printing.)
Buy stock in thermal paper companies. it's coming with POD ball
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You don't know in advance (Score:2, Insightful)
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In which case, they're sent to the right one. You can't (at least not in California, where I've worked the polls for over twenty years) vote in any random precinct, you have to go to the one you're registered in.
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Forgot? You mean when Daley got all those dead people to vote for Kennedy in 1960? Interesting observation, but off-topic and irrelevant. Graveyards have turned out for one candidate or another before, and no doubt will do so again. They can't often change things on a national scale.
Technology is the subject of discussion, and how much easier it makes perpetration of widespread electoral fraud. Daley managed to flip one county in a dead even election, and would probably be caught if he tried it today
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The USA is a republic.
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Threat model (Score:2)
(Even with proper ballots there's an interesting question: if there are 1,000 voters and there has never been a turnout of more than 300 in this area, how many ballots do you pri
Re:Threat model (Score:4, Interesting)
Call in a mathematician and get them to figure out how many ballots should be needed to keep costs to a minimum, assuming you leave open the option of printing more ballots, in case the 5/1/0.01% probability comes back to bite you---whether printing it off with a printer on-site, or keeping a large-scale printer on standby in the event that it looks like you are to run out.
The maths isn't exactly difficult---with sufficient historical data, one learns all that's necessary in high school, at least down my way.
That said, we have compulsory voting down our way (Australia), so it's not really an issue that comes up. For that matter, does the risk of printing ~600 sheets of paper too many matter that much? It shouldn't be a problem.
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For example, the next door ward to mine typically had a 19% turnout. For years and years and years.
We knew that if we could get the turnout up to 29%, by persuading just one person in ten to come out and vote for us instead of sitting at home, we'd take the seat. But we never had enough bodies on the street to actually fight that ward.
Until the year we did. R
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In other words, it would have worked for "years and years and years", except for one year where this wasn't the case? That is why you have to keep a backup supply of ballots ready---there is always a minimal chance of an outlier appearing. That said, deciding what to do the next year would be a bit tough.
Statistics can't predict everything, but it can minimise costs over long periods of time. Human involvement doesn't make something immune to statistical analysis, though it may increase the variance suc
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Since the major cost tends to be setting up the printer in the first place you may well find that there is no difference in cost between 1000 and 2000 because 2000 is the printer's minimum order. You might even find tha
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Your just under 300 printed one at a time on an inkjet probably costs more than just over a thousand on a regular printing press.
Als
What's wrong with paper (Score:3, Insightful)
I like this move. With all the diebold problems and election computers found to be wanting, nobody has really addressed the question: "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"
Sure, it's slow to count but not overly so. While US ballots are more complicated than UK ballots they still take just over a day to count. If you can't wait that long, you're just impatient.
If you want a quick answer, just use exit polls. Until Bush's election fraud, these were a reliable way of having an idea of who has won the election.
We already have a well evolved security procedure for handling paper ballots. Why are people so quick to throw that away a proven solution and to try a totally closed computer system off a random vendor to solve a problem that never really existed anyway? I'll leave the answer is an exercise to the reader.
Simon
Re:What's wrong with paper (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Belgium we have electronic vote for more than ten years. I've seen recently a study comparing paper and electronic machine costs.
I don't remember the figures precisly but it was something like:
The cost per vote on paper 2 US$
The cost per electronic vote 5 US$
I always been extremely suspicious about these electronic voting machine. Especially those running Windows (Desktop PC) with accessible serial ports like those we have here.
The good news is that the government plans to get rid of it (at least for a part of the country) and go back to the much safer (and cheaper) paper.
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They probably are going to use laser printers. I went to the county election board office to vote last election because I was working and it was closer then driving all the way across the county to vote at my normal precinct. They printed my ballot on the spot for me. It took about 10-15 minutes longer then if I walked into my normal precinct but it was still faster then driving across the county and back to the job
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What is that supposed to mean? Toner is much cheaper than inkjet ink per page, colour or black and white. Laser printers are often faster than inkjet printers too. Toner is less prone to smudging and dries sets much instantly, unlike ink which take a little while to completely dry.
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Ink costs more then champaign if you buy it by the same size bottle. If you compare it to what it does, Ink get way more mileage then vintage champaign. So the cost comparison isn't complete until you figure the use into it. A bottle of champaign, vintage or not, won't print a million documents.
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I can't even be bothered to point out exactly why your comments are so stupid any more, if you think this makes sense: "If you compare it to what it do
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You comparison did not take into consideration the productivity of either liquid. Once you put that into context, it doesn't seem that expensive. If
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In that case champaign must be a total rip-off, it puts my productivity right through the floor.
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2) Ballot stuffing should be much harder with e-voting. The machine can enforce hard limits (1 vote per minute or whatever) and perform basic sanity checks like making sure the poll
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It can also force them to do things they may not wish to, but the person who designed the election thinks they should so. e.g. what happens if you have multiple elections on the same ballot. With a voter wishing to vote in some, abstain in others and "spoil their vote" with others.
The simple solution is to give them individual ballot papers for each election if they want to take some of them home to use as toilet
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Also every voting station I've ever seen has representatives from each party as well as other volunteers. Nobody ever gets left on their own and the ballot boxes are in plain view in front of everyone.
Even in our
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Exit polls have self selected samples. They are decidedly unscientific, and should have much higher error ranges than the poll salesmen give them. People who want to be polled get polled, those who don't don't. Go watch some exit polls. In the last election I saw two or three people waiting to be polled. People who wanted to be polled had gravitated to people with clipboards.
So why did a few counties in 2000 have such skewed exit polls when other elections did
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As for people who cannot read English? They shouldn't even be voting in the first place. All schools in the US teach English reading and writing. All immigrants who become citizens and possess the right or ability to vote, have to read and write English as part of their citizenship test. So this leave for the large part, illegal voting and people who were too stupid to care enoug
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I know The US doesn't have an official language but it has codified English as the language in several laws. The most notable is the commercial rules and regulations for interstate commerce. In order to get a commercial drivers license and work in interstate commerce,
Money-making opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
You know what would be an even better idea? Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. This would help prevent counterfeit ballots. Of course, since you can't let these machines break down, the cartidges would probably have to have an internal sensor that shuts down the printer when the ink level gets low. Maybe, just to be safe, they would have to kick in when about 60% of the ink is gone. We need to protect the voters, after all.
Re:Money-making opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)
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Both (special paper and ink) would be better. Otherwise, someone could steal (or reproduce) the watermarked paper, run off a bunch of ballots that will scan incorrectly, and put them back in the pile. If special ink were required, they would have to steal or reproduce that as well, making it more difficult to interfere.
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Seriously, the point of this idea is to save money. Inventing custom
Re:Money-making opportunity (Score:4, Funny)
I think you're missing the point.
There are already several companies making $8000 / gallon specialty ink distributed in highly secure cartridges tied to specific printers and designed to self-destruct before they have used 50% of their contents.
You don't need a government contract to buy them. All you need to do is go to Staples [slashdot.org].
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Most of this is already in place. You might just as well go the whole hog and make the election about who can put the most specially printed and watermarked ballot papers (other wise known
if it is red ink ... (Score:2)
Cryptographic verification (Score:4, Interesting)
A bunch of hungover CS undergrads with 24 hours till their deadline, would come up with a better e-voting implementation than the hopelessly naive excuses spewed up by diebold et al.
Re:Cryptographic verification (Score:5, Interesting)
Its the verifiable & anonymous that's hard. Perhaps you have a point if you assume that the machines are working as intended, the programs written correctly, and the code running on the machines is the same that was certified.
Maintaining formal control over evoting machines, given the number of district and varying forms uses, can't help but cost orders of magnitude more than just using paper votes with an electronic counter, like they do here in RI.
Diabold shows what happens whenever cost-to-impliment-correctly is significantly more than cost-to-look-like-you-satisfied-the-contract.
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Cite?
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"Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier. Read it.
I've worn out three copies, and I've also read Handbook of Applied Cryptography and several other texts, not to mention the fact that I read much of the research literature that's published. Designing and implementing cryptographic protocols is part of my day job, and if the consulting rates I command are any indicator, I'm quite good at it.
Since in all of the reading that I do have yet to see a single proposal for a cryptographically secure electronic voting system, I repeat: Cite?
Duh (Score:1, Interesting)
Only difference is, sometimes the vehicle, which is supposed to bring the ballot papers on demand from paper factory, is also out of order...
Anonyimity Failure (Score:2)
And then what keeps someone from paying off those who voted as instructed, or beating the hell out of someone who didn't vote as instructed?
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No voting system, however well designed, can correct for fundamental deficiencies in society in and of itself. That's still no reason not to develop a good system in the fir
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Madcow.
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That's interesting (Score:2)
Duh ? (Score:2)
So what? The old people are still old (Score:2)
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Prepare for delays in Florida (Score:2)
What a wonderful clusterfuck this is going to turn out to be.
Our new hanging chads. (Score:2)
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This is Florida (Score:2, Funny)
WTF (Score:2)
A few things people are missing (Score:3, Insightful)
Paper ballots will be a definite improvement and certainly the move back to paper ballots should be appreciated. There needs to be a paper trail to verify that votes are being properly counted. Since one cannot see inside of a computer to verify that their vote was recorded onto the disk, it is essential to have a user verifiable paper ballot. Computer voting machines make rigging elections just too easy.
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It's theoretically possible to link the ballot number to the person but quite hard.
The worst are postal ballots are 100% traceable, and 0% verifiable. In the UK they forced postal ballots on us for a couple of years (closed the polling stations) - you had to fill in your vote then sign and date the form!! So much for anonymous ballots... (only ref. I can find these days is an old blog: http [blogspot.com]
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