This time in the New York Democratic Primary. Link.
Jeez guys, when are you going to dump them? Like justice, democracy only works if it’s seen to be democratic.
I’ve read the linked article in its entirety. Where’s Diebold mentioned?
Diebold has nothing to do with it. We’ve used the machines here in San Diego County for a long time and they’re perfectly accurate. You’ll notice if you actually read the article, BTW, that it says that the unofficial numbers were different from the numbers on the machine, which is how they knew the unofficial numbers were wrong–that is, if you claim that Diebold voting machines are inaccurate, the whole thing falls into a black hole and it’s like the primary never happened in the first place.
BTW, those machines print out a couple copies of the tally, which is quite official and 100% reliable (assuming that the proper safety and security methods are undertaken, which I wouldn’t trust that county to do). Back when all of the votes were taken on the Diebold machines here, poll workers had to hang up one of those copies by the door to the polling place after wrapping it up. (During this last primary, they were only for disabled voters, and we didn’t have any show up at our precinct so not a soul voted on them. What a waste.)
Anyway, your beef is with the county in question, not the machines. The machines are fine.
You noted the question mark, didn’t you? The brand of election machine was not mentioned in the article at all.
But really, elections must be transparent and I’ve yet to see a better method than pencil and paper.
But even pencil and paper can be rigged.
More to the point, one of the reasons that I doubt, strongly, that this involved a Diebold machine is because NYS is already a year delinquent for being in compliance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. NYS has been using for decades, as the linked Op-ed piece says, mechanical punch machines that have given good service.
Contrary to the linked piece’s assertion that the machines are old and unreliable - they’ve given good service, and provided a recountable paper back-up. But, one reason that NYS has been lagging so far behind the HAVA deadlines is that the current machines don’t meet the requirements, and none of the newer machines match the old ones for ease of use, reliability, and the ability to recount votes.
The real problem with the old machines isn’t that they aren’t handicapped accessible (though, that’s the specific provision of HAVA that I understand them to fail to meet the standards for), it’s that their continued maintenance presupposes a tool-and-die industry that is no longer there. So maintenance is getting more expensive, and the people with the skills to do the work are becoming more and more rare.
The NYSBOE had been deadlocked for years, now, over the replacement machines. And much of the deadlock seems to have been based on little more than a hatred for the name Diebold. And that’s what has the hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal aid for new machines still locked up - because the BOE wouldn’t get off it’s collective ass and admit that the old machines were going to have to go away. It took a Federal court judge threatening the whole BOE with contempt to get them off their asses and finally approve a list of ‘accepted’ machines for the local BOEs to consider.
Sure did. When you figure out what the hell you’re pitting, get back to us. o.k.?
Are you kidding me? So if I posted a Pit thread titled “Quartz - Goat Raping Syphilis Carrier?” you’ll be gazing at that question mark, perfectly content?
Heh. Been watching too much Fox News, Quartz?
NYC uses the good ol’ fashioned lever-pull booths, not one of those suspect computer systems by Diebold or anyone else. If there was an error – and it seems likely – then it was human error either in counting or in voting.
Honestly the ballots were a little bit confusing. Took me a few minutes to make sure I wasn’t inadvertently voting for Kucinich or Edwards instead of Obama*, due to the placement of the names and the levers. But I do tend to be a tad paranoid when it comes to getting my vote counted (gee, can’t think why!) and so was probably second-guessing myself too much.
- Ironically in an ideal world I’d’ve gone for either one of them over Obama. Since neither was a real option, however, Obama was my guy. I think it’s a shame that they were still listed on the ballot, since both had dropped out. What’s the point of confusing people like that?
It really can’t be avoided - the primary registration deadline had been months ago, so anyone who wanted to even consider a run, had to go through the hoops, then, to get their name onto the ballots. When the registration period ended, the BOEs printed up ballots, based on the information given them by the state’s parties.
I believe, too, that the printed ballots, then have to be vetted by the state BOE, before they can be approved.
Once approved they wait for the election day.
Events happened between the deadlines, and the polling date, and made some things obsolete. As long as NYS insists on pre-printed ballots, there’s no way to avoid the possibility that someone will have dropped out by the time that the primary actually happens.
Besides, why should the state bear the cost of reprinting the ballots every time someone drops out of a primary race, when even at the most the ballot is only going to be a for a fraction of the state’s voting population.
How did you know? 
But the complaints about American voting machines - and Diebold ones in particular - are pretty near continuous. So why don’t you jolly well do something about it? The system we have here in the U.K. isn’t perfect, but I believe that it’s a great deal more transparent and accountable than yours.
[quote=Quartz]
But really, elections must be transparent and I’ve yet to see a b$
Actually, the Diebold machines are much faster and much more reliable
than hand-counting. Have you ever tried to count votes by hand? It is
NOT easy to keep the numbers straight.
Where is this supposedly omnipresent damnation of Diebold voting
machines? I’ve installed and maintained them and done test-runs on them
and I can assure you that they’re perfectly accurate. I would trust them
about five times more than hand-counting. I really don’t see any reason
why anyone would rail against them unless they were sore about a
particular election result (tough shit, dude) or delusional.
And since we now know that Diebold has nothing to do whatsoever with the
link you provided, can you give us a link that actually supports your
argument? You don’t have to do it immediately–we’ll wait til you come
back to earth.
How about this study: Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
They even have a video on YouTube.
Those aren’t Diebold machines!
Those are the old lever-curtained-booth type machines. They were used in many, many places back 30-50 years ago. (We now have one of them in our voting museum here.) But most jurisdictions smaller than NYC have gotten rid of them.
In fact, it’s well known that if you still have some around, NYC may be in the market to buy them. Even non-working ones, for parts. That’s the only way they can get parts and replacement machines nowadays.
As for why they haven’t replaced them, I imagine it’s largely a cost issue. We’re looking into replacing machines, and the cost is a big factor here. And we’re about 1/24th their size! Money to actually implement HAVA is lacking, and is distributed oddly – much more of it seems to go to ‘red’ districts.
Also, FEC certification seems to be a moving target. Were you to enter into a long-term contract for a certified machine, it’s quite possible that by the next year they no longer meet the new certification guidelines. That makes you really hesitate, when you’re considering spending millions of your taxpayer dollars.
[QUOTE=Hostile Dialect]
Where were you in 2004 or 2006? That was the cause celebre on the SDMB and the reason that John Kerry lost the election, particularly with regard to Ohio. It was also the reason the Democrats were not going to take their presumptive majority in Congress. Just search “diebold” and “ohio” and you’ll find a veritable treasure trove of threads about this sort of thing. Here’s an example, started by humble ol’ me in 2006.
For my part, I think the whole thing is overblown, and I always have. I asked for proof of cheating many times, and all I got was suppositions, opinions, and excuses: “We can’t prove that there was cheating because the machine leaves no paper trail”, or “we can’t prove there’s no cheating, because the software leaves no traces”, or other stuff like that. But they knew, sure as hell, everybody knew that the fix was in, until the Democrats took over, then the silence was deafening.
But it’s election time now, so it’s time to ramp it up again. God knows what the excuse will be when Obama wins. It’ll probably be that the Republicans tried to steal the election but, being Republicans, they were too stupid to do it and Obama eked out a win or some such idiocy.
Until then, remember: a vote for Obama on one of these machines is a vote for McCain. Or, perhaps, you could actually trust your fellow man and ignore the conspiracy theories for a change and just vote.
Oh, and when you do vote, vote for Obama. Let’s overcome the cheating!
You mean the thread where you got your ass handed to you as just about everyone agreed that the main thing we all wanted was an accurate and verifiable voting mechanism (i.e. paper trail, for instance), and that we still felt that way even though the Dems won? The thread where many of us stated we wanted all voting related shenanigans stopped, and the committers tossed in jail, no matter which side was responsible? That thread?
Not quiet at all. I’m pretty damned sure that the Dems are going to take the whitehouse, and increase their numbers in both houses. I STILL want a fucking paper trail, and if a Dem wins a seat in which there are questions about the process, I want it thoroughly looked into, even if that costs said Dem their seat. Is it that hard to grasp? Oddly enough, the OP bitched about the same thing as you just did after the last election, and got the same answers (from Evil Captor and rjung, for instance) I’m now giving. He was wrong then, and you’re wrong now.
The excuse will be "If anyone on the Dem side does anything to impede someone from voting or anything else to keep every vote, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise from being counted. Toss them in jail. If the Reps do it, do the same to them. Build more jails if needed. Do recounts, revotes, etc., as necessary to correct the problems caused by those now sitting in jail.
Or, we could simply provide a method of verifying that who we intended to vote for is who we actually voted for. T’ain’t rocket science.
A lot of us hope that one of the many things he tackles is the voting process. The same group of us would rather he not become President than that he become President through any sort of manipulation.
Again, as I’ve said before (even in your linked thread), our desires are very simple to understand.
Without escalating the emotion in this thread - can you explain where that verification has been in the past? The two ballot styles I’ve used, in the past, are either the NYS lever machines, where the voter never sees the actual ballot - and has to trust that the workers setting up the machines did so honestly and competently; and OCR ballots, like the SATs, where if someone gets to the OCR software, it would seem to me to be very simple to introduce a software ‘fix’ to distort the voting totals.
I agree that voter confidence that his/her vote will count for what he/she wanted to vote for is vital; but the majority of the rhetoric that I’ve noticed (and I’ll confess I’m not going out to dig up every shred of discussion on the topic) has made the implicit assumption that it’s only recently that this sort of dodgy voter fraud has become possible. Which seems to me to be very far from the case, historically.
And, again, I’m very frustrated by the way that the issue, here in NYS, had ended up with the state BOE holding the good hostage to the perfect.
Irrelevant as long as the proper physical security measures are taken. In San Diego County, every way in and out of the machine is covered in tamper-evident seals, and there’s a specific process for how, when and why to remove them and where to put them. There are also experienced people working with you (most of the precinct inspectors–there’s one full-time at each polling place–have probably been working at polls for anywhere from 20 to 60 years, somewhere or another) and there’s a troubleshooter who makes the rounds and ends up hitting each polling place every couple of hours to make sure everything’s OK. Sure, when you’re in a Princeton IT lab with all the time in the world and all the tools you need at your disposal, it’s easy to take advantage of the security holes inherent in every piece of software. The situation is a little different when you’re surrounded by people worried about getting their vote counted and you’re under the watchful eyes of the poll workers. (By “poll workers”, I mean the people working for the Registrar of Voters; if they mean people working for a specific election, then yes, it’s a big problem that they have unsupervised access. But that’s not a problem with the machine.)
All that said, I appreciate that you ponied up and actually gave a relevant cite. I’ll grant you (being no great champion of Diebold either way) that it’s simply not reasonable to let just anyone get all the time they want on those things–but that’s the nature of physical computer security. You wouldn’t want everyone and their mother to kick it in your server room completely unsupervised, either.
Anyone who thinks the Diebold is incapable of leaving a paper trail has clearly not been in the same room with one after the polls close. There’s about half a tree per machine of paper trail, and that’s with zero activity on the machine all day. It prints out the entire ballot with tallies after each vote. That’s enough paper trail to color an elephant black-on-white if everyone actually uses them.
No, I think you have that wrong. If there is an inconsistency in the vote count, there is always some sort of vast conspiracy behind it. At least, that’s what I seemed to hear during the last two presidential elections.
Are you SURE someone didn’t hack into those machines and install a virus to eliminate Obama’s votes? 
What I’m actually disappointed about is that we’ve gotten these bad results from NYC’s “old reliable” mechanical booths, and we’ll still get the same conspiracy theories the next time an electronic booth spits out an error.
We didn’t get bad results from the Old Reliables. The machines were accurate: that’s how people knew there was a problem.
I don’t know WTF the results came from, but those guys, the estimators, they had the bad results.