Yeah, but you guys know how to do empire like no other country around today. It’s not a fair comparison. 
They mostly won’t, or at least not to any significant degree. I imagine that both will run concurrently: vote electronicly for the sake of efficient and timely counting and use the paper ballots as a fall back for whatever reason.
Have every voter vote at an electronic machine, and he is returned a slip of paper that records the vote he has just made, if he is Jewish from Palm Springs, Florida, he naturally voted for Buchanan. He looks at the slip, confirms “Buchanan” and then hits the “Confirm” button on his machine. He then places his reciept in a locked box somewhere on the premises, preferably in immediate proximity. He is done, is vote is cast.
The first polling results are electronic, and, most likely, will be the last. If there is any reason to believe they’ve been buggered with, those locked boxes can be opened and counted, and they will be the final arbiter: if the paper ballots disagree with the electronic tally, the paper ballots are favored.
The closer we get to a time when there is never any discrepency between the two, the closer we will get to trusting the machinery, for good reason. They will have proven themselves.
Is there a system currently available which is more trustworthy than the ‘draw an X’ ballot paper? If not, why not stick with what we can trust?
Oh, “lockbox”. That’s what Gore was talking about!!
Favoring the paper ballots over the electronic count will just have people whining that the paper ballots were tampered with.
So the complaint is that they’re still tampered, but they’re less electronic?
(FWIW, the unofficial race to count votes in British elections probably helps ward off some frauds, because so many people are involved in a very concentrated way. The very real issues are over things like frauds involving postal ballots)
I’m neutral about them to be honest…I neither trust nor distrust them. They are a company who is selling a product…to the government. So, do I trust or distrust the government OVERSIGHT on the project? I would lean toward distrust, but then, I ALWAYS lean towards distrust when talking about a government project. After all, I’ve worked as a government contractor on and off for something like 20 years…I know the process.
I’ve certainly seen evidence that many of the eVoting machines have flaws…some glaring. However, I don’t think its some big conspiricy…I think its standard government incompetence and lazyness in following through the checks to ensure their RFP’s are well thought out, and the product delivered is what they wanted. I’ve seen very little actual evidence there is some vast Republican conspiricy, and a lot of evidence that the machines, flaws and all, are simply business as usual in the government contracting for services world.
-XT
Exactly. This is really a pretty simple solution. Why is it so hard to implement? It boggles my mind. Tens of millions of people use an ATM card to deposit or withdraw cash every day in this country alone, and the vast majority of the time it works without a hitch. I’ve probably used my card tens of thousands of times to get money, buy groceries, make reservations online, you name it, and not once have I had a problem. many of the ATM machines are even made by Diebold, for crying out loud. I bet a lot of people would love to hack those! Why is an electronic ballot counter such a difficult thing to accomplish? What is so much more complex than an electronic network that lets me use a plastic card to draw money or make purchases that immediately deduct money from my personal checking account from anywhere in the developed world? I just don’t get it.
Does anyone have any evidence that the Pubs have done more cheating than the Dems? I always thought it was the other way around, but before you ask for a cite, I’ll admit that I have none. Just seems like there are more stories about Dems cheating these last few years.
But for those who take it as fact that there is more Pub cheating, cite please? And please let’s limit this to some hard evidence, not speculation.
Anyone who would attempt such a thing should be medicated. Immediately, by whatever means necessary. You’d have to be crazy, you will surely end up in a 15 page train wreck being nibbled to death by ducks.
Internet Voting vs. Large-Value e-Commerce
Why it’s not the same thing
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0102.html#10
Basically, you can’t re-do votes the way you can transactions, names would have to be attached to votes, and you can’t disprove a claim the way you can a transaction.
Personally, I don’t care which (or even if) one party is more prone to cheating. I don’t want anybody cheating.
I’ll be content with any system that reduces the potential of fraud and mistakes to the minimum possible in this imperfect world. The electronic voting machines as they are now are not that system.
Interesting. Thanks!
How oftern does Canada have every office federal, provincial, and local office up for election on the same ballot?
http://www.bradblog.com/ This site discoverered the problems long ago and has dedicated itself to airing the proble. They are in concert with Kennedy in his public assessment of th e voting machine problems.
Insiders from Diebolt claim the owner of the company stated their job in 2004 was to elect Bush. EE& S ,one of the other major producers of machines ,is his brother.
Before the election in 2004 .I saw an ninterview with one of the guys in charge of polling during the election. He stated there was no way the 2000 polling could have been so far off. They tripled their polling to make it mathematically rediculous for their results to be wrong. They were. Something stinks.
Your welcome! I actually wondered about that myself.
While I don’t necessarily buy into any conspiracy theories about such machines deliberately being used to tilt an election–in fact, I’d think states that could afford them would be most affected first–I too am very nervous about the new machines. As I posted a few times in the 2004 election threads, I’m a pollworker who has to deal with the 1962-vintage Shoup hulkin’ big gray machines o’ freedom, and we know those puppies pretty well.
You can’t vote twice on said puppies. You can’t vote for the “wrong” party during a primary. You can look over the your entire vote (see the little black lever pulled down next to the name and the big black X next to it?) before you pull the big red lever that records your vote and then resets the machine for the next voter. Once it’s reset, nobody can tell what you did and nobody can change it; and I suppose the only way you could “hack” those puppies would be to go in and vote repeatedly, voting and resetting and working the lever like you were a 1920s style switchman on the New York Central, but even if the little old ladies sitting four to a table a few feet away didn’t notice–and they’re sharp in eyes and tongue–the coordinators or the Mandatory Cop surely would.
And as they hauled you away, we’d just deduct all but the first vote from the little counter that ticks up for each voter and keep the machine going. There ain’t nothing the Machines of Freedom have not endured.
More prosaically, New York state mandates full-face ballots, meaning all the offices and names must be visible at once. The Shoups have plenty of room, and the faces can even be color-coded by party. How a computer is going to cope with this I don’t know.
They must be bears to fix, but I love 'em. They just work.
Yep, I’ve only had one break down in three years of working the polls (and there’s ten or so at each polling place, so that’s one out of about seventy or so I’ve seen). And the roaming bands of techs are always on call, and like the subway guys said about the old Redbirds before they became the Reefbirds, you don’t have to ship the whole sucker back to Bombardier to fix it–with the right tools and experience any mechanic can do it. They carry around real toolboxes and lots of extra levers and stuff, and they’re usually done in a few muinutes.
When (I’ve worked with computers too long to say if) the voting computers break down, will there be enough certified folks to fix it? I don’t think such folks will want to work for the Board of Elections (motto: digital watches are a really neat idea!) for the whole year like the mechanics do, or volunteer to be on call for a seventeen-hour day in some gritty parts of the city dealing with indignant pollworkers who think the whole “upgrade” is as wasteful as when they tore down Penn Station, or even work for the laughable “wages” they pay us.
BTW, my old link from 2004 doesn’t work anymore. If you’re simply dying of curiousity and have a LOT of time to kill, here’s a link to our PDF-of-course training manual with sexy Shoup close-ups on pages 22, 36, 39, and 65, and the ultra-patriotic and properly multiethnic video! Hot Shoup action can be found around minutes 3 and 27.
Nonsense. I believe by far the biggest influence in the rush to computerize the actual voting process in U.S. elections was the televised clusterfuck in the manual, post-election punch-card review in Florida’s 2000 presidential election. Most of my fellow Americans felt that anything would be better than to go through that again.
We were wrong.
But the thing is, there is no valid reason whatsoever that electronic and software engineers couldn’t have produced a highly reliable, highly cheat-resistant system. There is nothing necessary beyond well-established technology. The problem we’re seeing – and contrary to the gloating Republicans who will always be deliriously happy when they are the beneficiaries of cheating and/or fuck-ups – is a combination of maximizing profits even on a public-interest program with the need to produce a low-cost system that precincts can afford. Maximizing profit is just fine when it comes to consumer products and the like, but maximal profits usually mean minimal quality, and in a public-interest situation like this in times of low taxes and thus low government budgets, it’s not at all surprising we’re getting such shitty, untrustworthy and easily hacked systems.
I know the Über-free-market drones will scream like little nancy-boys who’ve had their lollipops stolen, but we should have insisted that these e-voting machines be engineered (at least) by the Federal Government, perhaps as a NASA project. In all my thirty years as a software engineer in many commercial, industrial, government, and defense organizations, only in NASA and in actual military program offices (as opposed to defense contractors) was there any genuine, thoroughgoing, institutional desire and respect for quality engineering.
The Feds should sue Diebold’s and other sloppy e-voting machine vendors ass back to the stone age and give the job to NASA or similar agency, such as Livermore or even the Naval Research lab.