Of Course, It's Going To Be Florida, ... Again!

[rjung]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I can survive if Bush wins. It will suck as hard as anything has ever sucked but I can accept it and go on with my life. I CAN’T accept not knowing if it was legitimate. Siddhartha Buddha, man if the US can’t be sure that it’s election results are accurate then what the hell have we become?

A nation run by Banana Republicans?

Y’know, people accepted the Florida 2000 fiasco in relative calm (not counting the GOP aides rioting against the recount); if people believe the 2004 election was gimmicked, especially in Florida, I don’t think they’ll take it so peacefully this time around.

@Diogenes the Cynic

I would rather lose legitimately than win illegitimately.

Sure, but that’s because you’re not a Bush-kissin’ Republican.

[RTFirefly]

@zev_steinhardt

There is a way that we can have both the instant gratification of knowing who won right away (barring recounts, of course) and yet maintain a paper trail…

Have an ATM-style touchscreen present the races/refereda one at a time on the screen, asking the user for their vote on each. At the end, a summary screen comes up showing who the user voted for and offering a “confirm votes” button (and a “change votes” button which would take the user back to the races/referenda). Once the user confirms, a paper is printed out with their votes. The user checks to make sure that the paper has the votes they wanted and then takes the paper and sticks it in a “ballot box.” That way we maintain a paper trail, but avoid “butterfly ballot” type issues.

Zev Steinhardt

Works for me:

@RTFirefly

Why can’t voting be like this? You could enter your intended votes into a computer, and the computer could laser-print the bubbles on a ballot to be fed into an optical character reader.

[BrainGlutton]

Another thing we need is to revive exit polls. Exit-polls a statistically significant sample of the voters, and it provides a check on the official vote count – at least to the extent that, if the one result does not square with the other, a red flag should go up.

[Mehitabel]

Yeah, but everybody I know lies to them, or at least refuses to answer. Let 'em wait like everybody else.

[Merijeek]

@Mehitabel

I like Zev’s idea, but I don’t see it happening without money from Washington. Lots of money.

Not really. (Almost) Every single gas pump nowadays already has that technology…including the thermal printing.

-Joe, smart

[BrainGlutton]

It gets worse . . .

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&e=4&u=/ap/20040728/ap_on_el_ge/florida_voting

Touchscreen Vote Records Lost in Florida

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

By HILARY ROXE, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI - A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County’s first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines, raising again the specter of elections troubles in Florida, where the new technology was supposed to put an end to such problems.

The crashes occurred in May and November of 2003, erasing information from the September 2002 gubernatorial primaries and other elections, elections officials said Tuesday.

The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen’s group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.

<snip>

The loss of data underscores problems with the touchscreen voting machines, the citizen’s group said. “This is a disaster waiting to happen,” said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. “Of course it’s worrisome.”

The group is concerned about the machines’ effectiveness, following revelations about other problems with the system. Last month, state officials said the touchscreen systems used by 11 counties had a bug that would make a manual recount impossible. Earlier this month, a newspaper study indicated touchscreen machines did not perform as well as those that scanned paper ballots.

Also Tuesday, election reform groups asked a judge to strike down a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them.

State election officers say manual recounts are not needed since the machines tell each voter if they are skipping a race, known as an undervote, and will not let them vote twice for the same race, known as an overvote. The officials also maintain that the computer systems running the machines can be trusted to count the votes accurately as they’re cast, and give the final numbers when needed.

But lawyers representing the ACLU and other groups said the state should require a paper trail in case a physical recount is needed, as it was in the 2000 presidential race in Florida.

<swnip>

Election supervisors from some of the 15 counties using touchscreens had asked the state if they would need to go through the laborious process of printing screen images of each ballot during a recount.

The Division of Elections then ruled that state law only requires a recount to determine voters’ intent, and that it is impossible to question voter intent with touchscreen ballots.

Florida counties without the touchscreen machines use optiscan technology, in which computers read voters’ pencil marks on paper ballots, and would be able to do physical recounts in tight races.

Administrative Law Judge Susan B. Kirkland has 30 days to make her decision after receiving the hearing transcript, which is due back in 10 working days.

[TeaElle]

So what’s the answer here?

The vote is just over 90 days away. The technology is in place in Florida and it’s broken.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come with an actual, workable solution to ensure that the votes of Floridians don’t go up in a puff of smoke when the servers get overtaxed at 6:30 p.m. on Election Day, when all the after-work voters show up.

Paper ballots for everyone? It seems like it would be easy, but as someone mentioned, we still have two major party candidates for Pres/VP and two minor party candidates on all 50 states’ ballots. Other candidates are likely on the Florida ballot this time around as well. Then there is a hot and heavy U.S. Senate race, multiple Congressional races, state legislature races and local elections.

In short – a ballot design nightmare. The people who couldn’t figure out how to put the pin through the silly circle next to the candidate of their choice last time around would be flummoxed by which box to put the X into, and when Ralph Nader or Michael Badnarik won West Palm County, it’d be a 2000 all over again.

There’s the slightly better choice of having a ballot that looks like:

President/Vice President: ________________________________________
Write in one (1) of the following pairs:
Bush/Cheney (Republican)
Kerry/Edwards (Democrat)
Cobb/LaMarche (Green)
Nader/Camejo (Independent)
Badnarik/Campagna (Libertarian)

But then those who are unable to write would have to ask for assistance, and may be embarrassed enough at the prospect to avoid voting altogether. And those whose reading comprehension skills are around a first grade level and/or those who can’t read and follow directions would write something entirely different on the line and again, controversy about spoiled ballots and voter intent and so on.

So I’m stumped. Who has a better idea?

[furt]

Scary warning sign heard on the radio:

A spokeswoman forthe company making the machines said that there’s no need for printouts because “the system cannot fail.”

That’s either a conscious lie or someone utterly ignorant of reality.

This is raw, bipartisan governmental incompetence.

[Hazel]

@BrainGlutton

Another thing we need is to revive exit polls. Exit-polls a statistically significant sample of the voters, and it provides a check on the official vote count – at least to the extent that, if the one result does not square with the other, a red flag should go up.

But in Florida in 2000, the exit polls had Gore winning. As it turned out, some of the people who reported that they’d voted for Gore were among (a) those whose votes were not counted or (b) those who were misled by a faulty ballot into voting for Buchanan.

[BrainGlutton]

@Hazel

But in Florida in 2000, the exit polls had Gore winning. As it turned out, some of the people who reported that they’d voted for Gore were among (a) those whose votes were not counted or (b) those who were misled by a faulty ballot into voting for Buchanan.

Exactly. Like I said – results that should have raised a red flag.

[Duckster]

NBC News reported tonight that the Florida GOP is issuing a brochure to all Republicans to obtain their absentee ballot as soon as possible, regardless of whether they will/will not be away from home on election day.

Anyone in Florida to corroborate the story from a local point of view?

[BrainGlutton]

I just started a related GD thread: “Do we have time to get paper trails on electronic voting machines before November?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5121804#post5121804

From “How They Could Steal the Election This Time,” by Ronnie Dugger, in The Nation, August 16, 2004 (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger):

Not surprisingly, the starkest resistance to the voter-verified paper trail comes from Florida, where more than half the citizens will have to vote on touch-screen systems in November. The President’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and Jeb’s Secretary of State, Glenda Hood, express unqualified confidence in the trustworthiness of the DRE systems and militantly oppose providing a paper-ballot trail for them. Hood has denied that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with in the software, saying: “The touch-screen machines are not computers. You’d have to go machine by machine, all over the state.” A spokeswoman for her says flatly that “a manual recount is unnecessary.”

This past spring a powerful state senator proposed to make it illegal to recount votes in the DRE systems, but she backed down when called on it by activists. Then Ed Kast, director of Hood’s division of elections, who has since resigned, sought to achieve the same purpose by diktat, issuing a formal ruling that, despite the extant state law requiring recounts under certain circumstances, supervisors of elections do not need to recount DRE ballots. The ACLU and other groups have sued to invalidate that ruling; a spokesperson for the state Republican Party excoriates the suit as a left-wingers’ “ploy to undermine voters’ confidence.”

Representative Robert Wexler, a Democrat from the southern tier of the three big counties on the Atlantic, which for election scandals is to Florida what Cook County is to Illinois, sued state and county election officials in state and federal court to require the VVPAT on DREs. He argues that allowing some voters to have manual recounts but not others violates the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore compelling equal treatment of voters (although the majority specified it was only for that election). To date his suits, opposed at every step by the Bush Administration in Tallahassee, have gotten nowhere. If he loses, half the voters in Florida, those voting on DREs, will be denied the manual recounts that the other half can have.

The Bush forces in Florida geared up for another purge of released felons from the voter rolls. Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections for Leon County, admits with shame that the state’s felon purge in 2000 resulted in more than 50,000 legal voters being disenfranchised. The state elections division identified 47,000 more suspected felons, a list disproportionately heavy with blacks, and asked that local election supervisors purge them. The Bush people refused to make the list public, but were ordered to do so by a judge. Only then was it discovered that the list excluded felons who are Hispanic. In Florida Hispanics tend to vote Republican. This dandy error was “absolutely unintentional,” the Bush people said–while abandoning the then indefensible list. Miami Herald columnist Jim Defede wrote that Hood–an “amazing incompetent or the leader of a frightening conspiracy”–must resign.

“What are we going to do if there’s a close race?” Wexler asked in the Orlando Sentinel. “The voting records of these machines will have disappeared in cyberspace.” He told me angrily: “Apparently their motives are to suppress the vote in Florida in a number of different ways. They are refusing a paper trail on a computerized voting machine. They are again preparing on the felons–they’ve got a new and improved process. I don’t trust 'em to do the right thing.” This summer, Representative Alcee Hastings, whose district includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, exclaimed, “Any way we cut it, these people are going to try to steal this election.”

The Miami-Dade Reform Coalition asked Jeb Bush to audit the touch-screen machines this summer. Bush’s spokesperson rebuffed that as “an accusation du jour.” Undeterred, Democratic US Senator Bill Nelson of Florida demanded, “Why not do an audit when so much is at stake?.. The national election for President could ride on the results coming out of Florida.” Senator Nelson even sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that the federal government audit the machines.

[BrainGlutton]

Update: I just got a phone call from (a recording of) Governor Jeb Bush, urging me to make sure I’m registered to vote and that my registration is up-to-date with my current address, and advising me I’ll soon be getting a registration form in the mail. I assumed it was a state-funded service, but, after Jeb was done speaking, another voice came on and said, “This message is paid for by the Republican Party of Florida.” Now, I’m a registered Democrat and that information is publicly available from the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Office. I can only infer the RFP is calling everybody regardless of party affiliation. I wonder why? Possibilities:

1. The RFP is genuinely concerned, out of a sense of civic responsibility, that all eligible Floridians of all parties are properly registered to vote this year.

2. The RFP is doing this for the sake of public relations and repairing the damage wrought by the latest “felons list” flap.

3. . . . I can’t think of a 3.

[ElvisL1ves]

You can’t imagine Jeb screwing up?

[Equipoise]

They found the lost records. Isn’t that just so precious.

Lost Florida Voting Records Found

02:50 PM Jul. 30, 2004 PT

MIAMI – Miami-Dade County elections officials said Friday they have found detailed electronic voting records from the 2002 gubernatorial primary that were originally believed lost in computer crashes last year.

Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the Elections Supervisor office, said **the records were found on a compact disc in the office. ** “We are very pleased,” he said.

When the loss was initially reported earlier this week, state officials had stressed that no votes were lost in the actual election. The record of the votes had been believed lost during the crashes in April and November of 2003, and county officials had said they did not have a backup system in place until December.

The lost records marked the latest in a series of embarrassing episodes involving Florida voting since the turmoil of the 2000 presidential race.

Despite the discovery of the disc, local activists expressed skepticism.

**“There are now more questions than before,” said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. “I certainly want the disc, I certainly wish someone would test the original disc they are now claiming they found and determine when that disc was made, where it came from, whether it’s been tampered with and if anyone’s opened it.” **

A team from the state Division of Elections was sent to Miami earlier this week to work with local officials to see what happened and whether the information was retrievable. Kaplan said officials from the machine vendor, Election Systems & Software, were also in the office, though he said it was Miami-Dade officials who found the disc.

Kaplan said the backup disc was likely lost due to transition in the office within the past year. A new elections supervisor took over in July 2003.

Gov. Jeb Bush is “pleased they were able to retrieve the data,” spokesman Jacob DiPietre said.

Though election reform groups want random testing of both touch-screen and optical-scan machines during the state’s Aug. 31 primary, state officials say the machines already get rigorous testing.

“Touch-screen systems have worked successfully in hundreds of elections since 2002 and we expect them to do the same in the upcoming election,” said Alia Faraj, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees the state’s elections.

[rjung]

Someone wanna check the “last modified” dates on those “recovered” files, just to be safe?

[elfkin477]

@Andros_X

I’ll do you one better – use opscan forms. Paper ballots, able to be counted by hand or by computer. The difference? Don’t X the box, but fill in the circle.

It’s surprising to me why this hasn’t caught on – it’s cheaper, I’ll bet, than paying people to fix Access databases; the technology has been throughly proven; almost everyone who’s been in school since the 1970s has had to fill one out; and it’s countable both by hand and by computer.

This is what I was hoping since 2000 that they would use in FL (I know there’s at least one old thread in which I suggested it too.)

What could be easier than having a ballot set up like this:

Vote for one (1) presidential canidate:

-[blank space here] -> George W Bush (republican)
-[blank space here] -> John Kerry (democrat)
-[blank space here] -> Ralph Nader (libertarian)
-[blank space here] -> Space Ghost (cartoon talkshow host)

OR

write in __________________

That’s pretty much how the ballot is set up in my state most years- Looks like in Cleveland too. You take your magic pen and write across the blank space of your choice to make one of the arrows complete. In other years you’d fill in a circle next to the name of your choice with said pen instead. Either way, the pen is read by the optical scanner, and they have someone standing right there at the scanner as you feed it in to let you know if you spoiled your ballot some how so the machine rejects it. I assume you go back and do it again if you screw up, but I’ve never seen anyone have a problem.

Afterwards you still have the ballots to hand count if necessary, and the scanners can’t be hacked or have hard drive crashes. I guess it was too simple a solution, and not expensive enough for it to be used in FL

[Declan]

@TeaElle

So I’m stumped. Who has a better idea?

Someone mentioned using ATM style devices to vote , so how’s about actually using ATM’s , almost everyone has a bank card , the peeps that don’t or are challenged with them, go to normal paper ballots.

I am sure the bank software can accomodate the situation , and lord knows ,the banks know if your a citizen or not.

Declan

[CrankyAsAnOldMan]

@Andros_X

I’ll do you one better – use opscan forms. Paper ballots, able to be counted by hand or by computer. The difference? Don’t X the box, but fill in the circle.

It’s surprising to me why this hasn’t caught on – it’s cheaper, I’ll bet, than paying people to fix Access databases; the technology has been throughly proven; almost everyone who’s been in school since the 1970s has had to fill one out; and it’s countable both by hand and by computer.

You mean you wonder why it hasn’t caught on in Florida? Because, just as other Dopers have reported, that’s what we use here. The machine counts each vote immediately. It also rejects a ballot which has been voted incorrectly, which is better for the voter. If you loused it up, the machine will tell you exactly why (overvoted, left the thing blank, etc) and then you have the choice of asking the election inspector to override it (vote it anyway, knowing it won’t be counted) or to get a new ballot and try again.

At the end of the polling day, summarizing the results is a combination of doing things by hand (and maintaining hard evidence) and preserving the machine’s work. There is careful accounting to make sure the numbers in the poll books match the number of voted ballots as counted by the machine, and that every ballot that was there are the beginning of the day is there at the end of the day. Ballots are placed in a sealed box (and are kept for 22 months, or so, so they are there for recountability). Tapes of the results–looks just like a calculator tape or a store receipt–are printed out, sealed with the poll book and other papers, and sent to three different offices and also posted at the polling station. Results can also be modemed to the clerk straight from the machine. The memory card with the data is placed into a sealed bag and also sent on to the People In Charge.

[BrainGlutton]

It is possible to have an electronic-touchscreen system and still have a verifiable paper trail – provided the machine prints a paper ballot right after the voter makes his/her final entry – so the voter can see that the paper ballot accurately reflects his/her votes.

From “How They Could Steal the Election This Time,” by Ronnie Dugger, in The Nation, August 16, 2004 (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger):

Though no broad citizens’ movement has formed against computerized vote-counting, a nationwide backlash against unverifiable paperless voting has. The paper ballots used in the op-scan and punch-card systems already provide a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). The principal proposed security safeguard for the DRE system was invented, but not patented, ten years ago by computer scientist Rebecca Mercuri, now a research fellow at Harvard. In her solution, after voters record their choices on the touch-screen, they confirm them on a paper ballot that appears under glass and then push a button to cast the vote, causing the machine to deposit the paper ballot in a box that will hold it for recounting if that is ordered. The printer for the paper ballots for each voting machine should cost about $50; the total add-on could be $300-$600. Many jurisdictions also have the alternative of expanding or acquiring the relatively inexpensive optical-scan systems or other systems already in place that create paper trails.

Simple, obvious, and cheap. But, for some reason, Governor Jeb Bush, and his new appointed Secretary of State Glenda Hood, and our Repub-controlled state legislature just don’t wanna hear about this . . .

Not surprisingly, the starkest resistance to the voter-verified paper trail comes from Florida, where more than half the citizens will have to vote on touch-screen systems in November. The President’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and Jeb’s Secretary of State, Glenda Hood, express unqualified confidence in the trustworthiness of the DRE systems and militantly oppose providing a paper-ballot trail for them. Hood has denied that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with in the software, saying: “The touch-screen machines are not computers. You’d have to go machine by machine, all over the state.” A spokeswoman for her says flatly that “a manual recount is unnecessary.”

This past spring a powerful state senator proposed to make it illegal to recount votes in the DRE systems, but she backed down when called on it by activists. Then Ed Kast, director of Hood’s division of elections, who has since resigned, sought to achieve the same purpose by diktat, issuing a formal ruling that, despite the extant state law requiring recounts under certain circumstances, supervisors of elections do not need to recount DRE ballots. The ACLU and other groups have sued to invalidate that ruling; a spokesperson for the state Republican Party excoriates the suit as a left-wingers’ “ploy to undermine voters’ confidence.”