It’s been established that this was a localized glitch with the machines that was quickly caught and a solution created, but I can see it being used as fodder for more challenges down the road. Just thought people might want to know in case it does become a bigger issue, given that the GOP likes to grab onto any discrepancy that offers evidence of a “rigged election.”
In NJ, we had those old mechanical machines for a while (which were very satisfying to press and vote on, but I guess broke down a lot). Then, we switched to these machines where you really didn’t know for sure that it was voting how you intended. So, now we fill out paper and it gets scanned and can be used for a manual recount if needed.
Electronic voting machines are an advance that no one needs.
Yeah, we use those in MA (at least, everywhere I’ve voted) and I don’t understand what could be better. Seriously. You put it in the reader yourself, so presumably you’re getting results in real-time.
What a disaster. I can’t believe that Northhampton Country didn’t pick up this problem and had already settled a lawsuit against the voting machine company and went ahead with their certification process except that I can believe it. The county is not unique in this regard, the process of selecting voting machines is purely governmental because nobody else buys voting machines and elected officials make these decisions on a political basis. Without some 3rd party certification process the whole country is subject to this kind of nonsense which at best will be used to tell election CTs to stay home and not vote. We already know what some worse results could be and hopefully we don’t find out the very worst results.
Here in RI there was a recent effort to replace voting machines in the state because, now get this, they were old. Some of them 18 years old. Which means they were slightly more than 18 times, probably only 18 times in most of the towns. I suppose a machine which can’t be relied on to operate 18 times should be replaced, except there are no reported problems with these machines, which are mostly optical scanners. Of course the unreported problem is the hidden influence of voting machine companies. I will take some convincing to make me believe local election authorities, whoever they are in the random patchwork of voting jurisdictions across the country are deciding to spend money on new voting machines.
I have stated consistently over the years that voting should be done on 2 part paper forms that can be verified when reports of problems occur. If it takes a little longer to count votes and release the results it will be better than what happened in the 2020 election cycle. Nobody needs the results of close elections on election night, or the next day, or in less time that it takes to verify the results by a process that can be controlled and confirmed accurate. It will be rare that takes very long, and if not it is better to wait then report the wrong tally.
You are not including mechanical voting machines in the category of solutions looking for a problem? Corner cases aside, voting machines solve the problem of not enough money going to manufacturers of voting mahines.
Australian ballot paper:
Israeli ballot (separate slips of paper):
Speaking as an election judge, I’d say that electronic voting machines are really not needed. I will point out though that the machines used here have a paper record of each voter’s selections. This is displayed behind a window on the machine and voters are instructed to review their votes before hitting the “accept” button.
It used to be (only a couple years ago) that the electronic machines were needed for early voting, since voters in the county can got to any early voting location. Since there are local elections on every ballot, the total number of types of paper ballots sometimes exceeded 100 across the county – only the polling place at the Election Commission office was really equipped to handle so many types of ballots.
Now ballots are printed on demand, which greatly simplifies the process.
+1, well actually +2 for the emphasis.
However, electronic voting machines do solve the problem of people voting for the wrong candidate.
The pictures for Australia and Israel illustrate the one thing that the US does differently than practically everywhere - have a ton of different elections at the same time. It seems everywhere else has only one at a time. It’s the tabulating of so many elections at the same time that makes voting machine technology a major issue in the US.
In AUS we count paper ballots and the new government is sworn in within days.
In the US you count votes electronically and the new admin is sworn in with sufficient time to plan a coup months later.
Do all the down ticket results and plebiscites need to be counted on the night? Could they not be progressively done in the next week/fortnight …especially since counting the top of the ticket alone seems to be a supernumerary exercise?
Yes, our ballots are so complicated that it’s hard to see this kind of thing not sometimes happening, with a reasonable fix, as in this case. I wonder if this only became news because of the GOP making issues concerning other races.
These two retention elections seem not to have been seriously contested. The judges did not even seem to have put up campaign web sites. Voters had no real way to judge the candidates except for:
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Check the bar association recommendation (which I did, and both were recommended for retention)
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Check the party affiliation (which I did not until today) — one Republican, one Democrat.
Electing judges is a terrible idea. Having retention elections, which almost always result in retention, makes even less sense. If a judge is really deserving of being kicked off the bench, it should be swiftly done by the impeachment process, and not have to wait for the next once per decade retention election.
Northampton county did not matter as both were retained in state-wide landslides.
Not serious challenges though. Because, quite simply, if it was that easy to cheat, they would not be complaining about it, they would be doing it.
What makes you think they aren’t?
[quote=“OldOlds, post:3, topic:992820, full:true”]
Yes, and that has happened several times here in Minnesota.
But the paper ballots are easily recounted, either by machine or by hand. (In fact, my local elections office has a carefully maintained scanner/counter machine at the main office, and if any election is closer than a few hundred votes, they rerun the ballots on that machine to verify the numbers from the precinct machine. It’s so easy to do that they do so often.
Also, our state requires that after every election, a randomly-selected group of precincts are recounted both by machine & by hand, in public, to verify the accuracy.
A couple of other advantages for scanned paper ballots:
- people can vote as fast as you can hand out ballots to them – so waiting in line to vote is minimal. People can vote anywhere, in the booths, sitting at tables, leaning against the walls of the room even, if it’s busy. No chance of fixing elections by assigning fewer machines to precincts where the other party is favored, thus causing long waiting lines there.
- pen on paper ballots is so simple, nothing much can disrupt it. We once had the power go out in the building during voting – people just continued voting by candlelight (it was in a church basement; many candles were available). Voters put their completed ballots in a cardboard box and after the power came back on we fed them into the scanner. No halt to voting. Try that with your electronic voting machines!
No, they aren’t real-time results (though the technology could be designed to do that). But if numbers were known before voting ends, it could possibly affect the election.) Though our scanners in Minnesota do send periodic reports to the Elections Office (every hour, I think). But they only note turnout numbers, not showing the actual votes for candidates.
There are several problems with this:
- Most people won’t bother to do this.
- Many people can’t really do this. Usually, it’s a little receipt printer with tiny print, viewed behind a plastic window (often dirty). Many voters are older, with poorer vision.
- This step slows down voting, thus discouraging voters by long waiting lines.
- Recounts are made very slow & expensive, because they would have to be entirely by hand, reading off long rolls of those ballot receipts. And hope none of the machines were running low on ink!
And the most serious defect – there is no guarantee that the paper record shown to the voter is the same as the electronic counter kept inside the machine.
It would be trivial programming code to print showing the voter’s Democratic vote, but then record that as a Republican vote in the electronic counter (only do this every so often, to avoid detection).
All the results are taken from the electronic counter – nobody checks by reading through the printed tape to verify the count matches (and it would take days to do this, for each machine). I don’t know if it is ever done with these machines.
Some machines print the votes on that paper tape, and also print a paper receipt for the voter, showing his vote. That would be even easier to program cheating: they generally use 2 printers, just code receipt one to print the voters real choices, but code the internal tape printer & the electronic counter to record the vote differently. Then you couldn’t even detect this, even by reading the whole internal tape and comparing to the electronic counter.
All this is just complicating what could be so simple (and inexpensive).
Using an expensive electronic machine to show voters screens of candidates, accept their choices, and then print out a paper record of their choice.
All instead of just giving them a paper ballot and a pen to fill it out!
In the UK it’s not unusual to have a general election and local elections on the same day. You can end up with 4 or more ballot papers with MP, county, district, parish, mayor, police commissioner etc to be voted on.
The high tech solution used here is to have different colour ballot papers so they can be sorted easily. You make your mark and then place all the ballots in the same box.
The general election ballots are counted asap after the polls close. But the other ones are often left for a day or two depending on how many staff/volunteers are available.
The complex sample ballots, from this past Tuesday, for the various municipalities in my county, can be seen here:
Glancing through this, I am finding an alarming number of local offices where there was no candidate on the ballot other than the write-in option. This is mostly for auditors and tax collectors, but I also spotted one town council race with no one running, and another where you are told vote for four, but there are only two people running.
You also see ballots where there a separate election for both the temporary replacement office holder and the permanent person, for the same vote-for-one office.
On the third page in my link, it mentions a ballot mistake. While it is an Eastern Pennsylvania mistake, it is not the one mentioned in the beginning of the thread.
Too many elected offices!