Do the flaws in electronic voting machines render American elections unreliable?

Great Debates
1

So this thread on slashdot about a supposedly overheating voting machine deciding to cast a load of votes for one of the candidates of it’s own bat. Following stories like this about technical faults remaining unpatched and corrupting elections years after they were discovered and the known ease with which these machines can be hacked, these don’t seem like a reliable way to keep track of votes.

And of course, all that relies on the companies behind them being honest and incorruptable. As the software is all proprietary they are effectively the sole arbitres of the winners of elections, so they have to be beyond reproach for the results to be believable. Hence the fuss over the chief at Diebold pledging to deliver his home state for Bush in 2004. He obviously meant as a rich private donor and activist, but it quite rightly undermines voter confidence.

Diebold also got themselves a massive fine by the SEC. They’ve also been a favourite of people showing how easy the machine are to hack, how likely they are to send false counts and so on.

Sequoia Voting Systems, owned through secretive offshore vehicles which obscure their true ownership, although some conspiracy theorists have tries to link them to Hugo Chavez of all people, and was previously owned by an Irish fraudster. Turns out you don’t need ID to run the machines that count votes. They also bribed a supreme court judge, which didn’t stop them operating. Their Southeast Regional Manager also got convicted for bribing officials in Louisiana. So again, being a convicted felon might stop you voting in some places, but it won’t stop you profiting off the vote. That last case was especially sinister, as the bribes paid by “Rocco” Ricci to Jerry Fowler exceeded the value of the contract, meaning the bribes weren’t paid just to win profitable business.

ES&S is another one with mysterious ownership, and their subcontractor Vikant is owned by a Belorussian, from Europe’s last dictatorship, who has issued death threats to reporters investigating his company. An ivestogation into ES&S was also killed on the election of Ronald Reagan.

Even the minor companies, like Electec, fromerly Shooptronic, named after Ransom Shoop, convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in a murder case related to the election business. That company was involved in the Florida election in 2000.

So I see no reason to have blind faith in American election results.

2

Not all districts use electronic voting machines. Alameda County, California actually stopped using them and now uses a version of optically-scanned paper ballots. Partly because of the issues you mentioned.

3

Clearly a problem that would be solved by simply requiring [del]electronic voting machines[/del] every voter to have a photo ID! :dubious:

… that’s right, it fillets it chops it dices slices
never stops lasts a lifetime mows your lawn
and it mows your lawn and it picks up the kids from school
it gets rid of unwanted facial hair
it gets rid of embarrassing age spots
it delivers a pizza and it lengthens and it strengthens
and it finds that slipper that’s been at large under the chaise lounge for several weeks
and it plays a mean Rhythm Master
it makes excuses for unwanted lipstick on your collar
and it’s only a dollar step right up it’s only a dollar step right up
'cause it forges your signature …

Tom Waits Step Right Up

CMC fnord!

4

When I go in that booth and push a bunch of buttons, I have zero proof of what is being actually recorded. That’s enough for me not to trust the things.

Yes, I understand that the software is “certified” (Hahahahaha…).

There has to be physical paper that can be hand counted if necessary. I’m not talking about a tally printed at the end of the evening. I’m talking about paper filled out, or at least verified, by the voter. Nothing else is sufficient.

5

Generally, I agree. But I wonder: Where were all the complaints when, over many decades, mechanical voting machines were used? I remember such machines being used in Pennsylvania in the 1970s. They didn’t leave you a paper record. But I don’t remember anybody complaining about possible fraud.

6

I don’t like electronic voting machines because they are computers and computers can be hacked. All of them. It just requires time and access. Voting machines are usually only used every two years. That’s more than enough time. The voting maching software is proprietary (eyes only) and the manufacture’s employees can access the machines any time they want.

The average poll watcher is not a software expert. They would have no way of telling if the machine was working properly or not except if it didn’t boot up.

Paper ballots take longer to count but there is a “paper” trail if verification is needed.

Say NO to electronic voting machines.

7

With those mechanical machines, you can open the back and see an understandable mechanical mechanism and can verify that they work as they’re supposed to. Granted, you can’t do that yourself, but election officials did, to retrieve the voting tape at the end of the evening. And there are observers from both parties.

If you don’t buy that, well hey, maybe they shouldn’t have been trusted. Maybe people were too naive and trusting back then.

8

When you use a mechanical booth, you physically move levers which you can feel are in turn moving internal parts of the machine. Plus, you hear the clicks of the dials turning.

It’s pretty hard to hack mechanical dials.

9

It would be possible to create a purely electronic voting system that was truly secure. That’s not any of the electronic voting systems we have in place now, though, and it takes more math than most people are comfortable with to prove they’re secure, so even then, the public wouldn’t have much faith in them.

It is also possible to create a partially-electronic voting system that’s truly secure, practical, and comprehensible to most voters. And a few places do have such. Given that this is possible, it’s a travesty that such systems aren’t implemented everywhere.

10

How about this old design? Glass globe in a wooden frame. Everybody can see what goes into it. Open, count and tally, all in public view, at the end of the day, and the whole precinct knows this precinct returned X votes for A and Y votes for B. (No doubt there are still magician’s tricks that could be used for stuffing it, one ballot slip folded inside another, etc., but it makes it harder.)

11

I think it would be easier to prove whether an analog electronic device was working properly or fraudulently. It would still take an electronic engineer to be confident. And if they aren’t careful, a mislabeled component could trick even them.

Mechanical analogs, on the other hand, are relatively easy to see and understand by a much wider array of people. And the machinery should be visible to the voter who could even take a photograph of it if there was an extra or missing or different part that did not appear on the government’s website about how the machines work.

12

Piece of paper in a box, polling station manned by a bunch of local elderly and retired, counting done by a bunch of teachers and council officials in a big hall - everything transparent, everything overseen and verified by all parties seeking election.

Anything else is bullshit.

13

Exactly. It works fine in other countries. I won’t claim that it’s absolutely foolproof, but it’s closer to it than anything else.

14

Would hand counting really be feasible when there are dozens of questions on each ballot? There were 26 separate items on my ballot in November 2008, and there were around 70 total that the county was responsible for counting. That was just one general election in one year. In the primary that year, there were 180 separate items that the county had to tabulate, and back then there were only two parties to choose from (now there are six with ballot access).

15

^this.

I have been a poll rep in elections where there was one selection on the ballot. The counting took four hours or so. Counting ballots that have 26, 70 or 180 separate items on them would be exponentially more time-consuming. Unless you want the counting to take weeks (if not months) you have to have machines count them.

16

You can have machine readable paper ballots. That way they can be hand verified if there’s any question. And election officials would be less likely to try to rig the machines if they know that the evidence is available on paper.

Probably the best thing is to count paper ballots by machine while also hand counting a smaller but statistically meaningful random subset. Then, if there’s a meaningful discrepancy between the two counts, hand count all of the ballots.

17

That’s what happens in Wisconsin. Take a look at Democrat echo chambers screaming “fraud” after the Walker recall election.

18

Isn’t this conflating an election with a whole lot of other stuff?

Why not go crazy and give people two sheets of paper, or two sections that can be serrated - one for the election/s that is actually being called, one for the next dog catcher/life guards/dog poop patrol. It really is not beyond the wit of man.

Or maybe it suits if elections are so ‘difficult’ only electronic machines can possibly do the work.

19

Because the election that’s actually being called is the election for dog catcher et al.

And the partially-electronic systems I was referring to have something like a voting machine marking up a piece of paper in a way that’s readable by both humans and machines (such as filled-in bubbles), then prints the paper out behind a sheet of glass where the voter can see it, and asks the voter if it’s correct. If so, then it’s fed into the ballot box. If there’s doubt about any election, humans can then open the ballot box and hand-count the ballots (or count them using a different machine, or whatever).

20

Here we use the optical scan paper (bubble sheets). Results are generally available withint 3 hours of poll closing and we are one of the few Florida counties whose hand-recount exactly matched the machine count during the 2000 election fiasco. Our Supervisor of Elections is a very vocal advocate for transparent elections and refuses to switch to pure electonic systems. Fortunately for us, he is unopposed for re-election this fall. Seems like it really shouldn’t be that hard.