Letting the Voter Count
 

This election will be very close. Integrity of polls (the system and the equipment) has been a major discussion among science publications. Like it or not, many jurisdictions are still using suspect systems. Some having installed new systems that were worse than the old. But its new and high tech - therefore it must be better. Top of the suspect list are these electronic systems that violate basic voting security.

The voting system must meet two 'criteria'. First, the vote must be written to (stored on) a 'write once' media. Paper does this. Paper votes cannot be modified without detection. Most electronic systems violate this principle.

Second, the voter must be able to confirm his vote is as he intended. Again paper does this.

The problem with paper has been how the paper system worked. For example, those butterfly ballots that earned a bad reputation is directly traceable to how that equipment was setup and how it was maintained by voting officials. For example, those plastic holes that channel the punch into a butterfly ballot must be periodically replaced so that punching is clean and sharp. Maintenance that must be conducted before voting booths are delivered to polls. Poll official must periodically clean out paper punches so that the 'punched out' paper does not clog punch holes. Both problems are said to have existed in FL. Both require human training which is often not done - the bean counter mentality.

IOW the real problem was humans, including a FL Sec of State who was clearly partisan. It was not the machines so much as it was top management - the people who install, train, and conduct the voting. We did not go after the people and their failure to establish standards. Instead we hoped to solve problems with different equipment. We went after the symptoms rather than the reason for voting problems - top voting officials (ie FL Sec of State who did not do her job even years before the election).

Using conventional paper ballots creates secondary problems. A long, painful vote counting takes time. Other corrupting factors occur with too many hands on the ballots. So conventional paper does have serious drawbacks.

Lever voting is an old and expensive method that is often being replaced by electronics. And then the electronics which is often nothing more than an embedded PC - with all the problems created a system created to be cheap rather than secure. Greatest weakness in electronic voting is firmware. Diebold voting machines characterize the electronic machine problem where even source code was leaked. If their hardware is anything like their other secure electronic systems, then engineering is by people still 'wet behind the ears' - questionable. I have very little confidence with anything by Diebold because I have seen previous designs.

Most people really don't know how voting is accomplished even in adjacent counties. For example, NJ once used lever voting in all counties. Today, most of NJ uses electronic voting except in some sothern most counties, in a county adjacent to PA, and a spot near NYC. PA still uses punch ballots in at least eight counties. Other voting methods in PA include lever type, optical, and even one PA county will use electronic. Maybe 12 counties in Ohio use punch card ballots. Almost 40% of IL uses same as well as almost all of Utah. FL uses a combination of electronic and optical. More than half the counties in western TX use old fashion paper ballots. GA is 100% electronic. Optical appears to be the most common choice in western states including all voting in OK. I will be voting on a butterfly ballot.

With so many voting methods, many don't meet the two 'criteria'. One method is to vote, then physically carry that ballot to a confirmation machine. If that vote does not read as intended, the voter requests a new ballot and starts all over again. Few systems, short of paper ballots, meet both 'criteria'.

Do we store counts on a disk drive? Major violation. Completely unacceptable. Disk drives are not a write once media - easily corrupted without any indication of that corruption.

Four years since the 'powers that be' subverted the people and decided a president by political 'confrontation'. Jimmy Carter's organization (that monitors voting overseas) says FL is again ripe for another fiasco. Why? 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. That top management (be it the presidency, Congress, Supreme Court, and both political parties) did insufficient to solve these problems. Step one would have been to demand the two 'criteria' up front be required in every poll. It is not. Instead, all four were happy to do nothing - not establish minimal standards in part "because it is hard" - which always gives ultimate power to the political party power brokers.

One of the better arguments I've heard against voting is that if the election is close enough for your vote to count the election will be won by other means. Sus. Co. Lever Action Voter

I love your style man. :biggrin:

Sounds like a great argument in favor of voter apathy to me. "Don't bother folks, the election is being fixed, anyhow." Yet one more way to take the power out of the hands of the people.

Last time it was decided by the Supremes, this time, the blue screen of death? :eek:
Well, of course. They won, so why would they change a system that's served them so well and could be manipulated to do so again, if need be? That would be dumb.
The responsibility to see things are fixed, lies with the fuckee, not the fucker. Not Gore, the voters, we the people.
The ones that should have been raising a stink for the last four years, were too busy trading the future away to China, through WalMart, for shiny beads and trinkets. After you spend billions of your kids money and thousands of your kids, to keep the oil market open, China will outbid you with the money you gave them at WalMart. Come to think of it, you're too stupid to vote. Go away. :mad:


Disclaimer-Of course those remarks were not directed at any of the esteemed members or lurkers of this board. :eyebrow:

The ability to get the vote precisely right is up to the taxpayers' will to do so. No system that includes human counting will ever be completely accurate. All you can do is the best you can do.

Electronic machines in Montgomery Cty PA are very reliable and they post the count from each machine at the end of the night. My ex was an election official so I've seen it. This is a pretty good system. It is pretty hard to massively fraud these things as far as I can see. The human counts of the past are much more likely to be inaccurate.

Whose machine are they using? And how does that machine make a recount or some other confirmation method possible?

Whose machine are they using? And how does that machine make a recount or some other confirmation method possible?

A large turnout in any precinct followed by unconfirmed voting recounts may create problems on the scale of the FL fiasco. Much of this is traceable to voting officials (political appointees) who have as much technical knowledge as women do about skin creams. The fate of a country does not depend on half truths and outright lies from the Pond's Institute. But it does depend on machines that can produce verifiable confirmation - ie a paper record - for the recount. Unfortunately, many voting machines that meet the 'paper record' requirement do not produce paper records that can be used for a recount. Still waiting, for example, is the manufacturer of those voting machines in Montgomery County PA that were reported to be This is just the reasoning that scares me - decisions made without machines even conforming to a standard. A visual examination deemed sufficient to declare reliability. Exactly the mental attitude of politically appointed voting officials that would be symptoms of the problem. That problem begins with political parties who control the elections.

Much of this is traceable to voting officials (political appointees) who have as much technical knowledge as women do about skin creams.

Please, please, please make this one of your standard repeated phrases! :thumbsup: That's awesome--WAY better than "mental midget" or "god's chosen president" or even "85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management."

I don't remember who produced the machines (not Diebold), but all election officials in Pennsylvania are elected, not appointed.

I just remembered we use paper ballots and optical readers here, we used levers in upstate NY.

We use paper and pencil and every town count is rigourously observed throughout. A re-count is easy although clearly here in the UK the numbers are a great deal smaller than in the US so it might take longer. So what? How long did your last one take to reach a final number few people actually believed in?

I would feel much more confident in a paper ballot where I fill in the ovals with a number two pencil. You can run it through the scanners as many times as you want, and the "chad" won't fall out. You can have a permanant record that you can go back to as many times as you want. You can even count them manually if you want to double-check the results of the scanners. Also, before I turn it in, I can visually see that my vote has been cast the way I want it to.

I have almost no faith in the electronic machines that my county has switched to in the last two years. (Not Deibold.) I trust my county officials are honest and mean well, but that's the only faith I have in the whole system. The technology is unproven. In fact, all the evidence points to the possibility of flaws in the technology.

The problem with paper ballots is that they encourage more human error. A machine only does what you tell it to do, but it does it accurately if you tell it the right things; a human is guaranteed to make mistakes.

As we have become a 50-50 nation, and demand even more accuracy in counts, the only way we can be assured of an accurate count is through machines.

You can't convince me that a paper system can't be "gamed" in just as many ways as a machine system. Or that a box full of paper ballots isn't as subject to gaming as a sealed electronic machine.

I'd have to disagree. All the things that make computers great are also what make them easy to mess with. It's very easy to change data in an electronic format versus a paper format. A couple keystrokes and you can change a thousand ballots. With paper it would take all day to do the same thing.

Tampering isn't even the thing I'm most concerned about. It's computer glitches. What happens if the computers crash? Typically, districts lean pretty heavily toward one party or another, so if a power outage, line surge, or system failure causes all the votes from one district to be lost, that could turn the election. With paper ballots, you would have a record of the votes.

Well I'd have to disagree right back. Add a system of electronic auditing and it becomes much much harder to mess with that data. Mark the vote with encoded timestamps, put incoming data in several different places, etc. Smart people have come up with a lot of ways to ensure data integrity. They've thought of that stuff.

It would, indeed, be a good thing if they added a system of electronic auditing, encoded timestamps, and redundant storage. They haven't. In fact, they haven't added a system of human auditing - they say that the code is a trade secret, and nobody can see it, and object to any testing of the system that they don't conduct themselves - with good reason. Independent testing regularly fails.

So, in essence it falls back on the same old problem.

The technology is more mature than the operators.

Sad really.

I'm a big fan of technology, and far from a luddite, but technology can fail. When it fails, it's almost always because it was implemented poorly by humans. As Happy Monkey mentioned, this stuff hasn't really been tested yet. And the big test is an election that will impact the world.

Sure, in theory, an electronic system can be set up to allow secure and accurate voting. However, in reality, that system will be run by temporary employees who have received just an hour or two of training in its use. It will be created by companies that hide their work, and it will be implemented by election officials who don't necessarily have technology backgrounds.

A hybrid solution, like scanners that read paper ballots is really the best of both worlds. You can use the machines to quickly tabulate the results, but the paper is still there in case there are screwy results or questions.

I am also a major fan of technology having even soldered together the ICs to make a computer long before PCs even existed. But I am also an engineer who must see major advantages to justify the more technically complex systems. The electronic voting only complicates the system without addressing or solving the original problems.

Yes paper only ballots can also be 'gamed' (as Undertoad notes) because (in part) too many hands are on the system. Paper only ballots, once sufficient, are not longer appropriate for large voting numbers and where voting error in hundreds (and maybe thousands) of votes was quite acceptable. We are also talking about storing and processing tens of tons of paper.

Posted up front were two necessary standards for making a poll work properly: Arguments should have started with these standards. Then have expanded to include the other standards I intentionally did not provide.

For example, (third point) voting must be anonymous. One must be able to vote without anyone knowing how that unique vote was entered. For example, if you walked away with a copy of how you voted, then others could intimidate your vote. The wife should be able to vote as she pleases without the husband having any say. Wife should not be able to prove the the husband that she voted as he demanded. One should not be able to 'sell' his vote. Also a vote must be completely untraceable meaning that time stamps on a voting record violate that anonymous voting principle.

Furthermore and fourth, a voting system must have the ability to confirm the entire voting record. An audit must be possible to both verify the count and verify the security. Punch cards locked in a ballot box do this. Should the punch cards be read by a machine, then a recount can be preformed on those punch cards. Currently the only voting method that appears to meet these voting criteria is optical voting machines as well as the older mechanical voting machines still being used in NY, CT, LA, most of eastern and Pittsburgh area PA, and western VA.

Fifth, the entire voting system must be secure. In Scientific American (if I remember the source correctly), authors literally walked into voting machine storage areas and opened doors to voting machines. No one challenged them. There was no log of everyone who entered and left the building.

Yes, I suspect so many are so technically naive (deficient) as to be enthralled by electronic voting rather than first learn the standards (principles) on which good voting practices are based. Above are some basic standards that all voting systems must be dependent on. Moreso, we have a serious problem with the requirements of a system. Even HAVA money was not even spent? Where has the administration been for almost four years (besides spending all this time and massive monies not even authorized to invade a nation that was a threat to no one)?

If voting is done electronically, then voting machines must be literally hardwired. The computer is a dedicated hardwired circuit, it features in-circuit confirmation that each 'hardwired' computer responds to (a unique code input results in a unique code output so that any machine without the hardwired chips would not verify - and I have not explained this sufficient to be understood), and the votes are written to a write once memory. A memory complete with security codes and the only place where the candidates names are provided to the machine. For example, a write once memory chip could then replace massive paper, contain code that traces that chip directly to a unique machine and that unique machine configuration, is handled minimally (not be gamed like paper ballots), and is treated with all the security required of ballot boxes - complete with security handled by multiple people simultaneously.

Most every electronic machine I have read simply violates (and grossly) the principles of secure voting. Using disk drives and software program is a gross violation of secure voting principles. You have no way of knowing how your ballot is being written into the write many times and easy to manipulate memory. If every machine has the same hardwired voting machine - a computer that is literally only programmed unique only by the voting names on that write only IC (voting machine does not even have firmware), then we know your ballot is being written to the memory chips by the exact same hardware also operating in all adjacent counties. Either all voting machines are fraudulent - or none - and the same secure hardware (just like lever voting machines) is used every time.

Recount literally involves reading every vote from memory chip and the corresponding error detection codes. Recount instead becomes a confirmation process where all hardware and the data in that memory chip is verified by secure and independently random codes. IOW recount becomes a security audit as well as a count of votes permanently stored in a write only memory device.

Optical voting also has great advantages. First you vote. Then the vote is physcially taken to a machine that reads your vote media. Furthermore, your voting media (punch card, smart card, etc) is locked into a ballot box where a recount can be performed completely separate from the machine that original accepted and tallied your vote. Of course, the voter leaves 'anonymously' with no record of how they voted so their vote cannot be sold. You literally see what your voting media says how you voted when you submit that voting media to the separate hardwired counting machine. Two separated methods of tallying the vote so that a recount is secure and separate from the original counting machine.

Just some of the many ideas for voting - using principles that all electronic voting machines violate.

Diebold sells the AccuVote-TSX which provides no paper (or other) record to make security auditing possible nor any method where the voter can confirm his vote is being properly registered. AccuVote-TSX meets the paper record requirement by simply printing the final totals on paper - violates the reasons why that paper record is required. Voter is given a voter card that permits access to the voting machine just once. Diebold uses the Windows Operating System rather than a secure and dedicated embedded software program. Diebold is also the machines that created massive failures in a SanDiego county electronic last April when the hardware drained batteries of power before voting could even start. Probably good that the batteries did not die during voting. CA decertified all Diebold AccuVote machines in four counties for numerous problems with security, auditability, etc. UT believes Montgomery County is using Diebold machines.

Second large manufacturer is Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. Diebold and Sequoia claim to own 80% of he market. But ES&S claims to be the world's largest maker of electronic voting machines. Ironically, ES&S was founding by Todd and Bob Urosevitch. But Bob is now president of Diebold.

Provided above are but some five standards that a voting system must meet. Does your poll? Unfortunately, even good standards for polls - four years after the FL fiasco, still don't exist nationwide. Voting remains a hodge podge of some juridictions with people who learned the standards and logic; and other jurisdictions where officials are impressed (emotion replaces logic) only because the machines are computerized.

:thumbsup: Excellent post. It's appalling that the current electronic machines weren't laughed out of the room when first shown.

That's because it wasn't technicians looking at them.

I said precisely the opposite: I only knew they were NOT Diebold.

Now having checked, they are Sequoia.

Nice points tw. Every system can be gamed, requiring a certain amount of trust or at least mutual distrust between parties. With paper ballots and optical readers at least gaming is detectable. A couple election cycles back Bridgewater twp was the last to get their ballots into Montrose. It took something like 8 hours to travel maybe 5 miles...

I don't remember voting for election officials when I lived in Montgomery County. Do every county (in and outside of PA) elect their voting officials?

Well, I'm in NC, and don't know if election officials are voted in or appointed, but I have never, in the three states I've voted in, seen an election of electors. I mean, not even on the ballot.

Dumb luck? Let's see... Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, (and now) NC.

Yes. There are three officials at every polling location: a judge of elections, a majority inspector and a minority inspector. Often there isn't enough interest in the job and the parties fail to run someone, and in that case the position is nominated. My ex won minority inspector in that way - when the Ds failed to run anyone, she asked a few people to write her in, and won with 5 votes.

This election happens in odd-numbered years which are the "less important" elections and so, less memorable and people often don't vote in them.

Thanks, TW. I've read a bunch of articles on electronic voting, over the last 4 years and none of them put it all together.
Question - When the votes are written into a write once memory, is it every choice I make goes into a permanent field after the guy before me and before the guy after me? Or does a vote for Joe Blow get routed to Joe Blows field?
The reason I ask is because my poll (Delaware County, PA) keeps a record of names (signatures) and the booth used, in the order they vote. Hence, sequential data fields could be easily matched to the voter list. :confused:

TW's standards are a theoretical machine, not a real one, so we might as well add some way of randomizing the order of votes on the media.

The machine is theoretical because the standards - at least those developed by scientific study - do not exist. HAVA money mysteriously was not spent (as have many other programs authorized by Congress). Curiously, Iraq has cost far more than the $87billion authorized. That Iraq bil, estimated to be currently in the neighborhood of $200billion, must come at the expense of other things - such a doing research so that the 2000 FL fiasco does not happen again. How does one build an election machine on HAVA standards when HAVA standards do not exist? Money to create HAVA standards never appeared. And since the government debt is so high (in excess of what it should be if budgets were under control), one can only assume all those unspent moneys went elsewhere. Ross Perot said it best. If he did accounting as this government does, then Ross Perot would be in jail.

Privatize SS - another lie. The SS money has long been spend on current bills. Where is the cash so that private investors can reinvest their own SS accout? It too is accounting fraud. The money has been spent. But not on HAVA.

Maybe the powers that be are happy to have less secure voting practices? House of Representatives or the Supreme Court tend to rule for the powers that be. And yes, it is possible that the House of Representatives gets to choose the president next time. Just another good reason not to have secure voting that can be audited.

From the Washington Post of 20 Oct 2006:

This will turn out to be a Democratic scandal, since the GOP already owns the source code.

The scandal is that the source code isn't open in the first place.

Apparently some of these electronic machines make winning by write in voting almost impossible. They use a wheel and click deal to put each letter in individually.... yay 2 party system...:mad:

I used this machine (or one of its evil cousins) for the primary in September. I specifically asked to use it, and I asked the poll worker to rig for blind user. I did ask him to NOT disable the screen, but that option was available. I put on the headset and conducted my vote through the keypad like the one on the phone 1-9, 0, * and #. I did try to write in a candidate. It was agonizing. I had to spell out the name by using 2 for a, 22 for b, 222 for c, 3 for d, 33 for e, etc. Then every choice had to be confirmed with * or #, I forget, but it wasn't consistent. At one point # was confirm/continue and later # was go back. Idiots.

I asked him about my "receipt", which was printed on a roll of paper like a register tape (tits on a boar to a blind voter...). No braille was available.

The whole process was brutal. Even when I used my hearing and sight the machine was clunky at best. They did have a ups on the system, I didn't see any exposed ports, but I wasn't trying to crash the machine, just inspect the tidiness of the setup. I'm...underwhelmed. It's a tablet pc with a touch screen, running windows (that's a guess, but an educated one). It looked somewhat "ruggedized" but I doubt it would enjoy a fall from the wispy tripod it was setup on. It's gonna be ugly.

Politicians will give speeches about "technology" - but when the government says "technology" they mean "shitty technology" . . .

Our ballots here are going to be in Spanish, English, and Navajo. That should prove interesting. I think I'll vote all in Navajo. :p

Do Navajo have latin letters? What is font for Navajo? It sounds like a comic question. But the question is serious. How does one read Navajo?

Voting machines in Ohio, due to spending money on products from companies such as Diebold and ESS, do not meet minimal security standards. As was obvious in original posts here, those computer voting machines are defective. But those who are 'computer literate' (?) bought them anyway. Why? If computerized; therefore it must be better? Why do we need immigrants? View what political party appointed officials did in Ohio? Simple research shows why all 'less than two year old' voting machines are defective. From the AP by Julie Carr Smyth on 14 Dec 2007: This voting official did not purchase these machines; she inherited the problem. After doing simple research, Ohio's voting machines, bought years after above (2004) The Cellar posts, have problems defined in these posts.