Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad 174
phorest writes "One would have thought the choice of Ohio lawmakers to move away from Diebold touch-screen voting terminals would be welcomed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Instead, the group is warning the elections board that their alternative might be illegal under state laws. 'The main dispute is whether a central optical scan of ballots at the board's headquarters downtown would result in votes not being counted on ballots that are incorrectly filled out. The ACLU believes the intent of election law is to ensure voters can be notified immediately of a voting error and be able to make a second-chance vote.'"
You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
- Roach
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Re:You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
One problem was that hundreds and thousands of those ballots hat the cut off paper still dangling on it, or that some were only slightly cut, but at several places (as if the voter had a second thought and pulled another lever, but none of them consequently enough).
The main arguments against paper-and-pencil-voting seem to be:
1) The ballots can't be counted fast enough for the Late News to report the results.
2) People with disabilities such as blind people need help to vote and can't check the results themselves.
Argument 1) doesn't hold in my humble opinion. I would rather like to have correct results than early reported ones. Being able to watch the count was in my own country (the former East Germany) the base for all later convictions of Voting Fraud for the leading figures of the former communist government. Also some other frauds (like the one during the voting for the town council of Dachau near Munich) were detected because people were able to compare their own counting results from the public count with the ones later reported by the Voting Commission.
Argument 2) raises a valid point, because Braille printed ballots are much larger than normal prints, and some german towns have already ballots printed on half a square meter of paper. Printing them additionally with Braille further would increase them. On the other hand it was allowed anyway to just cut out that part of the ballot with the votes one had casted and throw everything else in a shredder. So this is still possible.
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Your first argument is not entirely accurate. No one is suggesting that fraud is acceptable if the results are fast.
As for your second argu
Re:You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only other alternative is the "check this box" kind, which requires human counting (again subject to rigging) and takes ages to count. Now, I can wait a day - even a week, for my election results, but with a large turnout it would take even longer than that, and then there'd be less time to certify and recount if there was a problem.
Again, people complain every single election; maybe you don't remember it, maybe sometimes it's worse than others. There's nothing new here, it's happened since the dawn of... uh... electing... things.
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Better to stuck with the system that wasn't anywhere near as controversial.
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Re:You'd think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
So if they can't count the votes in a week, its OK to have someone in power who stole the election? And to top it off, how about someone who puts lives in harms way because they are the commander in chief?
Seriously, I'd be fine waiting for a month or two and maybe even longer to determine who is correctly elected president of the United States.
Secondly, if it was done by hand you have to remember only 50,000,000 people voted in 2004 for the presidential election. If you were to hand count the votes by an official. If an official was responsible for counting 1000 votes then you would only need 50,000 people nation wide helping out.
Which means you'd only need 1,000 officials per state which is a drop in the bucket.
Of course it wouldn't work exactly like that... California, NY, and Texas would need a great deal of vote counters and RI and Alaska would not, but vote counting by hand would not be that difficult if you distributed it correctly. You wouldn't need a month, but at the most 2 weeks and I think the wait is worth it.
The problem is that most Americans are impatient, but don't realize the election affects them for the next four years.
One thng you need: software freedom (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that difficult. But people in positions of political power are disincentivized from doing the right thing. This includes talking to technical people who advocate for free software voting machines [counterpunch.org] so that we can end up with machines that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots which are stored for manual counting and are built on a free software system so that the county/state can get programmers they can trust when things don't work correctly. Having a choice of proprietors is just picking your monopolist and then hoping they'll do what you want when the contract is signed.
Instead of spending millions on a new proprietary system that will not adequately address local needs issues (and thus cause great embarrassment for the clerks who chose them), they could spend money (even with other states and counties) developing voting machines they can maintain and inspect as much as they like. Counties and states can purchase the required black box testing themselves, they don't need ES&S, Diebold, etc. to do this for them.
In this particular case, the ACLU's fear—voters not being immediately notified that their ballots are invalid—can be dealt with by a computer which scans (but doesn't count) their paper voter-verified ballot. Not only can most voters have an opportunity to read their paper ballot, they could plug in a pair of headphones into the computer and have the computer read them their ballot back and then determine if that comports with their intended vote. Then after this proofing (human and/or computer) each voter has a reasonable expectation that their ballot is valid and accurately reflects their intention.
I was part of the appointed group that recommended a set of voting machines for Champaign County, Illinois' elected County Board. Due to some not-completely-honest measures about only hearing from "approved" vendors, and a bunch of poor choices, I was pushed into picking the least-worst which happened to be a set of ES&S machines (one scanned and/or produced a paper voter-verifiable ballot, the other counted that paper ballot and physically retained it in a locked cabinet). Champaign County ended up with ES&S machines, only one of which had been approved for use by the state (in the state's bound-to-be-bullshit testing regime). The hurdles to overcome aren't ridiculously difficult. It will be hard to get some people to understand that it's beneficial to have local control over the voting machine so the machines can be reprogrammed to meet local needs (including changing the software to accommodate non-first-past-the-post voting, and generally fixing bugs or adding enhancements a county decides they want after the voting hardware contract is signed).
One thing that would really help (nothing like the power of a good example) is a free software voting machine that works just like the ES&S paper ballot scanning machines. These machines have a remarkably simple interface, good and adjustable voice, clear display, and headphone jacks. But these machines run on proprietary software which ES&S isn't willing to relicense (despite being their customer). So you're stuck with them for "support" and that means hoping they'll share your county's idea of what your voting system should do.
Concur (Score:2, Informative)
I was in the same position: Asked to come in as a technical consultant to look over the proposals for the electronic voting system to be used.
Again, it was "least deficient" when I made my final recommendation. ES&S at least tried to look like they were supplying a system that following the boilerplate RFP (Request for Proposals, a govt term meaning "I want a system to do this; waddaya got?"). One item that particularly stood out was the following:
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1. The Vice President
2. The Speaker of the House
3. Their own state governor.
4. Any member of Congress.
When this is your voting public, how do you expect them to (a) understand, or (b) work up the gumption to care about voting issues? To most people, something's not an issue if they don't see it on headline news at 6.
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Re:Persistent need to leave holes (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why do we even need "code"? My aunt works at the town hall of a small town of about 600 people, when election time comes around they fill out a piece of paper and it goes into a wooden box. When the voting is over, an official counts the ballots by hand. I'm pretty sure we've been voting since before we had computers, but I did go to public schools I could be wrong... why not check out what we did 30-50 years ago and.. well, do that?
I suspect most people reading what you wrote will say to themselves 'How quaint, only 600 people' and then move on, but they may lose the point that maybe the government shouldn't be trying to scale the polling places to handle more than a relatively small number of people at the precinct level. If States simply capped the size of a polling place to handle a few thousand registered voters, then a lot of these problems go away and you just need to worry about finding volunteers to staff the polling places
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Has anyone here actually ever voted? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are very simple manual fixes to the system, but that largely ignores the other problems with the American voting system, namely the lack of run-off features which encourage voting for a likable candidate rather than a perceived front-runner.
What I rather like as a fix however is a system like the British have used for a long time where the party in the majority elects a representative to le
Define democracy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, democracy is the best system of government available. Still, the question isn't one of "is the general population aware of voting issues", it's "does the general population actually care about voting issues"... That question leads to some pretty depressing answers.
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Seriously though, that seems to be one of the most common criticism that people have about democracy: that other people don't care about the same issues they do.
Simple = Better (Score:2, Insightful)
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They use the optical scan ballots where I used to vote (I just moved last month), and they're very easy to use, and very accurate.
Re:Simple = Better (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's also the slight difference in the cost of labor in India versus the U.S.
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Re:Simple = Better (Score:4, Funny)
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Could you please cite a current reference for your statement.
It seems either out-of-date or simply false. I don't believe they've used hand-counting for a while now.
Indeed, India seems to have got a better handle of this than we do in many ways:
Indian voting machines [wikipedia.org]
Their system isn't without issues. But it seems to have handled fraud rather well. Furthermore, it's a rather interesting that they have electronic voting, instead of computerized voting which is what the US seems to get stuck wi
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Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Corrupting election based upon manual systems requires a huge amount of effort and in countries
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Australia has complex ballots as well - potentially far more complex than yours. We do use manually-counted paper ballots. We deal with it by breaking them up into separate ballot papers, which are counted separately, and indeed into separate elections as well. So we have separate federal, state, and occasionally even local elections, along with separate referendums where required.
A federal election has two separate ballot papers. One for electing the local member of parliament, and one for
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lawsuits (Score:3, Funny)
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http://vote.nist.gov/ballots/il_chicago_20041102_01.pdf [nist.gov]
One ballot = 90 contests.
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Ohio wants to do the scanning in a central location, which is approximately equivalent to co
Re:Simple = Better (Score:5, Insightful)
About half the time, someone responds, explaining how U.S. elections are more complicated than those in Canada, because U.S. elections usually feature a dozen or more separate items to vote on; in addition to national elections (up to three at a time), there can be a dozen state, county, and municipal elections, plus votes on city propositions, bond packages, and constitutional amendments (almost every year in Texas). It's simply not possible to count all of this quickly and accurately by hand in one day.
To this post, someone from Canada usually responds, asking why we have to vote on all that stuff, and wondering why we don't let our elected officials decide some of that for us.
To which someone else responds, pointing out that our system of government doesn't work the same as Canada's; once we elect someone we are pretty much stuck with them for two, four, or six years, so if our officials start doing things we don't like, we don't have the opportunity to call new elections and replace them. We also only have two viable political parties, so it's less likely that we agree with our elected representatives on every issue. Thus, we like to have a chance to directly vote on more items than most other countries. Also, to increase the likelihood of high voter turnout, we combine elections to minimize the number of election days. In Texas, I believe there can only be three election days a year: the March primaries (if needed), and the May and November general elections.
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So, in summary, this concept and its responses have been beaten to death. If you feel the same way I do, do as I will and start modding all "Canada votes like this, why doesn't the U.S., too?" redundant.
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I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one...
With 2 parties, they winners had to compromise with lots of people in order to get elected, so you end up not so much with "the favorite" person, but the "least unfavorite"... the one who is likely to piss the fewest people off.
With 10 parties, you don't have to compromise as much, so you end up with someone who will piss m
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Do you believe that Canadians have the opportunity to boot elected officials we don't like at any time??
Narf
Attention-Deficit Disorder (Score:2)
Who said it has to be all finished in one day? Give them two weeks and let them do it correctly. The problem is we are all obsessed with finding out the results within 24 hours, as though it were a sporting event or something. In order to garner the most advertising revenue, the television networks have turned politics into a spectator sport that takes place every four years, like the Olympics. People apparently no
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Oh Please.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Optical scans have historically been regarded as the best, and practically everyone who went to school since 1960 has filled out a scantron sheet.
The ACLU is a bit off base here, IMO.
Off topic....the "Related Links" this time were interesting.
Compare prices on YRO Products
What, exactly is a YRO product?
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It's not how your vote was counted that makes the difference. It's how everyone else's vote was counted that makes the difference. Since you cannot know how everyone else voted, you cannot be sure that the result is correct. Most people's social networks are smaller than the margin for error; so even if you checked up your friends' and families' votes, they co
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Suppose the voting goes something like this:
This gives us an actual result of: Conservative, 7; Labour, 4 (11); Liberal Democrat, 3 (14); Green, 3 (17); Indie, 2 (19); BNP, 1 (20). But the result is declared a
Could someone tell me why we need it at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell is wrong with that system? It's in effect in nearly every other country. What is so terribly different in the US that this system won't work as flawlessly as it works everywhere else? Pardon the blunt question, but is it too hard to find enough people intelligent enough to effing count slips of paper?
What the hell is the deal about it all? We're wasting billions of dollars every year on worthless junk, flying our politicians around to pointless debates and toilet seats to boot. I don't think spending a few bucks to get good ol' paper elections done, which are tried, proven and simply and plainly working, is going to break the budget's back!
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Here in WA we are about to move to completely absentee voting sometime in the next year or so. The system that we use is similar to a scantron. We fill in the generously sized square with a sharpy, and the ballot is then mailed into the elections office where it is scanned and stored until at least the time when the election is certified.
It works well over all.
The problem though is that it is virtually impossible to know that a give
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And among a significant percentage of the US population, especially those in charge of huge piles of public money, everything is always "better" when done with technology. And did I mention the huge pile of money these people have to spend? Everybody likes new toys!
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There are things that need no improvement. They are already good enough, and the "improvement" often is none. For reference, see XP and Vista.
And the money thing... isn't there a sizable debt to take care of? I know, nobody likes paying bills and paying off that mortgage is less fun than buying a new computer, but some things just have to be done.
Why do we have such irresponsible politicians these days?
No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
paper
pencil
optical scanner
end of fucking problem
really
i expect this wisdom to enter the brain of bureaucrats everywhere sometime around 2050
hopefully we won't be a theocracy or fascism by then, hastened along by malignant voting schemes
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Sigh. Everyone points to paper ballots as a guarantee that votes will be properly counted. May I point out that rigged elections predate electronic voting by many centuries?
Ok, so your hybrid system allows you to double check. But when do you double check? If we can't trust the electronic system (and if we did, what's the point in having a dead tree backup?) then you end up with the loser demanding a hand count every time. So you might as well do i
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
By the same token, you can design an electronic voting system so that every step is an open book. And I promise you that a zillion geeks and computer scientist will have nothing better to do than spend hours picking nits with your system. This is a level of double-checking no paper system can claim.
Any system is trustworthy to the degree that it is transparent.
Re:No. Electronic. Voting. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
The most reasonable assumption is that at some point, no matter what voting system you use, someone will compromise it at some point, so the best thing to do is design the system so that the least damage will result. Paper ballots fit this requirement much better than electronic systems do.
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And why on earth should you ever be alone with the ballot box? Not to mention that the box should be locked and sealed anyway.
After the last voter has voted and the polling station closes, you dump the ballots on a large table and start counting. Everyone is allowed to stay and watch: party representatives, concerned citizens, international observers...
You can even add a surveillance camera or thre
irresponsible technophilia (Score:2)
electronic > mechanical > paper
beginning and end of discussion. all other observations you can make fall secondary to this overriding observation and do not modify or reverse it
we should always use paper. forever. in all countries
faith in the democratic process is not something you want to mess with simply because computers are neat-o
# of attack vectors: (Score:2)
voting is not a problem that needs to be solved better. the K.I.S.S. prinniple is something all programmers can appreciate: keep it simple stupid
please lose your technophilia on this question of voting, faith in democracy is way too important in this world
electronic, mechanical even, merely represents a more complicated way to do something
unnecessarily
with marginal benefits outweighed by serious problems
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You sir are an Optimist.
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After 2004, we formed a voter advocacy group in NM to study the problem.
Now, if you don't think this is a crucial issue for the future of our government (and consequentially, your entire future in this country), you haven't been paying attention.
We studied the various systems, looked for vulnerabilities, and came up with a legislative proposal that resulted in this system. We educated Governor Richards about it, and got it implemented in time to use it for th
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Let's do *one* thing right. (Score:2)
For God's sake, let us as Americans, do just one thing right before the year is out. This year has been dogged by negative news from A to Z. I certainly need a break.
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I got laid last week. Does that (ahem) count?
Get the facts (Score:2)
Second, the one thing that electronic voting equipment does really well is informing the voter of "stupid" errors. If you have voted for more than one candidate in one race it can complain at the voter and force him/her to fix the error immediately. If you fill out a paper ballot and vote for two candidates in the same race the error won't get discover
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10 years ago called they want their tech back (Score:2, Informative)
You filled in an optical-scan ballot and put it in the machine.
If the machine detected an over-vote or a spoiled ballot it spit it out. This was a clue to check your ballot for errors.
If you insisted on voting that way anyways there was a manual override.
It didn't care about undervotes, it rightly counted those as abstentions.
At the end of the day, the election judge turned a key and it spit out an unofficial tota
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At some point we, as a society, just need to step up to the reality that illiterates don't matter. It's irrelevant if you can't read because you're retarded, or just because you don't care to learn. You don't know enough to intelligently vote, and most everybody doesn't really care if you get to or not. Just some loud and shrill people like to scream about things at the top of their voice. The what doesn't matter nearly as much as
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The only thing missing was machine-assisted voting for those who couldn't read [an optical ballot] or mark an optical ballot.
He wasn't talking about illiterates. Blind people can't fill out a Scantron form, but they can use a computer with an audio or Braille interface which can fill out a Scantron sheet for them. He was saying the system he used didn't have this, but it could easily be added, and everything would work great (except that blind people couldn't verify their printed ballots before casting them, but they're a small enough minority that I wouldn't consider this to be a serious pro
To help explain why the issue is complicated: (Score:2)
Keep these points in mind:
Okay, I know this is America, but ... (Score:2)
Okay, either this is a rather new thing the lawmakers came up with for No-I-Give-Up-Tell-Me reasons, or it's a poorly crafted law with unintended consequences, or the ACLU is reading a lot into the legislation that simply doesn't exist. One thing I know, however, is a vote is a vote, in any nation on Earth. Second chances are strictly disallowed.
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Voting error usually means that there was some problem, technical or otherwise, that prevented the voter from communicating the vote to the tabulator. This can be as sinister as intentionally losing ballots that vote for an opposing party. It can also be as benign as the voter accidentally checking one box, erasing it, and checking another box, an
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And this, right here, is yet another reason to ignore the ACLU. There's already a perfectly good term for this: "spoiled ballot." It's been in use, probably, for well over a century. There's no reason, other than stupidity, to invent such an unintuitive term as "second chance" to replace the current, well-understood one of "spoiled ballot." Proof, if su
Ultimately, here's the problem ... (Score:2)
My letter to the ACLU (Score:3, Interesting)
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The Associated Press reports today that the ACLU is pressing Cuyahoga County, Ohio, not to go through with a planned switch from electronic voting machines to optical-scan paper ballots. This is a terrible position to take, and it is honestly enough to make me question whether or not I should renew my membership for the year.
While I appreciate the ACLU's hard work for voting rights in many areas, the simple fact is that electronic voting machines may be the single most pressing problem our electoral system faces. They are by their very nature unaccountable and amenable to large-scale election fraud. Any move to abandon these machines (which are manufactured and operated almost exclusively by private companies with right-wing ties) should be applauded, not suppressed. This is an issue of particular note in Ohio, given that electronic voting machine fraud in that state in 2004 may well have been responsible for the outcome of that year's Presidential race, with its terrible consequences for our nation.
I sincerely hope that the ACLU will reverse its position on this case and take a strong stand in favor of paper ballots. Silence on this issue is a barely acceptable position for America's leading civil rights organization; supporting the wrong side in this battle is not acceptable at all, to me and I suspect to many other people who have supported the ACLU for years. If the ACLU persists in opposing the planned Cuyahoga County move, I will regretfully conclude that I can no longer support this great organization.
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While there may have been problem with the 2004 Ohio vote, electronic machines were not the cause because they weren't used.
In 2004 70% of Ohio counties had punch cards, the rest had scantron, and about 3 or 4 had old style "Shouptronic" machines. Ohio counties did not start adopting DREs until 2005.
Why the obligation to force people to vote? (Score:2)
Ballot machines should be limited to printing (Score:2)
No networking, no outside connections, no storage of information, just a printer and a stack of cards.
This gets you electronic counting, full paper trail, accountability, etc.
Of course the politicians may actually be eyeing up the possibilities for cheating when there's no audit trail....
Egad. Voting machines are peanuts. (Score:2)
If you are a high ranking manager for the Dark Side then here are several realities which color every last one of your actions and decisions. .
1. You are a psychopathic creature who looks human but who doesn't grasp the concept of compassion.
2. Destruction and misery are your bread and butter on a very fundamental level. It's an addiction.
3. The Earth is in for a big change. It may include sudden glacial rebounding, (if the Gulf Stream cuts out, most of Europe will be under ice), comet
If somebody can't fill the ballot out correctly... (Score:2)
Now, even the smartest people can make an accidental mistake, but there will not be a pattern — a disproportional number of accidental mistakes among supporters of a particular candidate or party.
If, on the other hand, the disqualifying mistakes are due to wider-spread illiteracy, then, maybe, it is a good thing, that those votes aren't counted?..
Yes, I am for discounting the stupid people's votes...
The only problem is, without the system
Speaking as someone of such state... (Score:2)
Fraud proof? (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes."
Old Stalin was not the first and not the last to know this. It doesn't matter what kind of elaborate systems you think up to make elections fraud proof - in the end there will always be successful efforts to change the results, no matter what you do.
So you might as well stay with the pen & paper method. At least there the evidence of fraud is a bit harder to get rid of then opposed to changing some numbers in a machine.
What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Score:3, Interesting)
Count the fucking ballots by fucking hand in the fucking polling station in the fucking presence of the fucking candidates.
There is no machinery, therefore no systemic failure modes that are not universally comprehensible. By definition, none of the candidates trust each other; so they'll all be watching extra-hard in case anyone else makes a mistake. There are more than one person there, so disputes can be resolved easily: if a majority cannot agree that a ballot is correctly filled, it is rejected. No ballots can get lost because they stayed in the polling station the whole time. The process can be parallelised in each polling station, so the final result is available as soon as the slowest count is completed.
I'm missing something here... (Score:2)
When did marking an X become too difficult?
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No. The problem will not go away just because you are using Open Source software, because you are not going nearly far enough.
At the end of the day, there are still only a minority of people who are in a pos