Sure…that’s kind of what we all want. I want a pony too.
Why don’t they work properly? The answer to this is a bit more complex than most of the posters to this thread seem to realize. You have everything from the initial RFP (probably written by some non-technical government flunky) and initial review (based on cost most likely…i.e. the low bid probably won), then changed through several iterations (for every reason from the low bid actually couldn’t do the job to ‘Woops!’ from the government side as they forgot they needs these other 3000 features added, to ‘Woops!’ from the vendor side as they realized that it won’t work and needs 2000 more features modified, to ‘Hmm!’ from the vendor side because they realized that they can add another 5000 features and pad the bill more, to ‘Wait!’ from various other groups who want this safe guard or that printed thingy also added, to…well, to gods know what else). Then you have whatever passes for quality control and final testing and approval in the government for such a system…multiply all of that by every state in the Union having different standards, needs, requirements or other thoughts, and then dig down to the fact that in many cases it’s COUNTIES who are deciding based on their own criteria and you have…what we have. A hodgepodge system of truly mountainous fucked-up-ed-ness…
Toss in the anti-technology types and the politicians into the mix and you seriously want to know why we can’t get machines to work properly? I’m frankly stunned that they work as well as they DO at this point. We COULD have a really decent, secure and standardized electronic voting system here in the US…but we never will because there are simply too many strikes against it. So I say we go back to painted rocks dropped in one urn or the other. Oh, this wouldn’t be secure either…but it would cost less and all the anti-tech folks, as well as the pols, will be most satisfied.
Like in British elections? Any close result in a constituency here results in one or many recounts, with the numerical results of each being different. The variation typically is a few hundred votes or so, a winner gets settled upon, and because this is the first-past-the-post system for choosing individual MPs there’s no scaling up of the problem inherent with paper ballots. However, one constituency is a population of around 90,000, so you’ve got a potential for a disparity of millions across America.
Also, what about less-than-clear marks on ballot papers? Who decides which ones are considered valid votes, and which are counted as spoilt? It’s chads all over again…
It’s such an interesting topic that it needs two threads to fully explore all it’s possibilities! And if you combine them and put all of gonzo’s contributions into one massive post (of 2 paragraphs) then it will be almost like he’s fully participating, instead of putting in drive by links with a few random comments tacked on for filler!
How is it possible? There is some determinable number of ballots to be counted right?
So long as these standards are decided in advance and made explicit to all voters, with big posters all over the place – this is a valid vote, this is a spoiled ballot. I don’t see a problem.
The first problem with the chads was that in all the years I voted on punch card ballots, no one ever explained to me that I had to make sure that the chads had to be completely detached in order for the ballot to be properly counted.
Hey! I have a boss like that! His 5 minutes is used to describe time to drive between any two points in the Chicago area or in South Florida. Naperville to Vernon Hills? Five minutes, tops.
And while I cannot guarantee it, I have a strong suspicion that the problem SHOULD NOT be nearly as hard to solve as you think. Think about it. The problem really is that trivial, especially if you make security a separate problem.
C’mon, kids! People have been writing simpy shit like this for HALF A CENTURY! It’s not that hard to write simple, reliable code that can keep track of a couple dozen multiple choice questions in a few thousand transactions per precinct. Then you use the SAME CODE, maybe changing a couple names, in every other precinct in the county. You can even add a feature that prints out each voter’s choices twice for the price of a few more lines of code so they have a written record and so does the polling station.
At the end of the day an election official pushes the infamous GO button and everything at that polling station is totalled, printed out, and faxed and emailed to Election Central. The official, with a witness, boxes up the printout and all the receipts, seals it with something more or less tamper resistant, and physically carries the box to EC, where somebody places it in locked storage for later comparison. Except for one or two extra security steps, IT’S THE SAME FREAKING THING THAT GOES ON AT EVERY MODERN STORE AND BUSINESS IN THE COUNTRY EVERY FREAKING DAY! <–(exagerrated outrage)
A few things cause the real problems. You have every state, county, and municipality wanting everything done its own way. National standards could reduce it, but you have local parties who want to dick around with the process to give themselves an edge. [WARNING: Cranky old guy axe-grinding ahead!] You also have a bunch of young programmers who have never had to make a program work reliably and fast on a slow and small computer. These new-fangled computers that are fast as hell and have RAM out the wazoo make for sloppy, bloated, unreliable software. It’s too easy to do it wrong and to lose track of what is what and who is doing it. [/Cranky old guy]
OR, they could just fix the problems with punch ballots.
This is the thing that baffles me beyond question.
ATM machines almost exclusively use a physical button to indicate which amount or choice your are selecting. They never use touch screens because touch screens suck dick and work differently for different people with different sized fingers and of different heights.
Using a touch screen on a voting machine is monumentally stupid or corrupt. Have you tried typing on an iPhone? It’s a frustrating experience the first time you do it.
Human error. Simple as that. You could have a ridiculous number of checks and second-counting, as well, but the cost and logistics of implementing it start to rise dramatically, plus the delay in actually getting a result - one of the benefits of the British system and a reason for a trust in it is the speed and openness with which it arrives at results.
With a mark on paper, there will always be borderline cases. Literally borderline, i.e. is the mark actually in the box. A big mark in one box, but also a small one in another - was it a mistake or two separate marks? (And what if the big mark is a cross, and the small mark is a tick - do you account for misunderstandings of the necessary markings?) Almost no discernable mark except for a small smudge. A large mark which enters two different boxes. And so on.
So long as it’s open, I don’t see what the big need is for speed. Do the counting in public with witnesses from all sides. Take two weeks to do it. Fine with me.
I don’t think the rest of the voting public (or the politicians) are going to agree with you there. If anything there is a bigger and bigger drive to count the votes and get the results out in a shorter and shorter time frame.
And what is the source of this “drive”? What are its policy implications? So far as I am concerned, having a credible and accurate count far outweighs any need for speed, especially when there has been absolutely no showing that our political system needs any such speed. Count it, get it right. We’re adults; we can go on with our lives until you’re done.
Done in Britain. The public can watch at close hand, too. Still doesn’t prevent errors. As for a delay of weeks, this breeds public mistrust - there’s no good the result being 100% accurate if people suspect that it’s not, and a slow result will be fertile ground for such beliefs, whether or not there is good reason for them.
Well, my GUESS would be the citizens themselves demanding a quicker tally. I’m not sure if anyone has sat down and polled people on their desires on this subject, but based on the demand for up to the second results via the internet as well as cable news stations (who obviously seem SOME demand for such a thing) I’d have to say that the answer is that the demand and pressure are real. If you have statistics saying otherwise (i.e. that people are content to wait days or weeks for election results) then I will certainly read through them.
Right. I got that. But the key words there are ‘So far as I am concerned’. You do not represent the majority of citizens in this country…nor are you king or even God Emperor. While it is obviously true that YOU have no problem with waiting, and that accuracy of the count is your top priority, this isn’t the case with most other people…myself included. My guess is that, despite all the handwaving and hair pulling about election fraud, that it represents a relatively minor percentage of the over all vote. I’m also unconvinced that this vote fraud would be significantly better using older technology…and unconvinced it WAS better in the golden past. However, that’s just my opinion and it’s been more than slightly colored by the big deal that was made over this subject here on this board after the 2000 election…and even after the 2004 election.
That’s not the issue. It’s the economy. The market abhors uncertainty and 2 weeks on uncertainty would cripple the stock market, investors and lenders. I’m not sure anyone would be in favor of losing 10% of the Dow in the first 2 weeks of every other November.
XT, are you riding on me for offering my opinion in this thread? Does your suspicion that my opinion might be in the minority give you a license to invite me to shut up?
Offer me a reasoned, fact-based, policy-based reason why our society can’t wait two weeks for accurate election results. So far, all you’ve offered me is that society is made up of delicate Victorian maidens who will faint away from the stress of waiting.
I offered an opinion on the OP topic up thread. I’m not riding you, merely commenting on your assertions. I didn’t tell you to shut up, only to be realistic. Of COURSE the fact that yours is a minority opinion factors into how realistic your proposed ‘solution’ is.
Ah…‘fact-based’. You want me to offer you a ‘fact-based’ argument why your opinion on how things should work is wrong, ehe? Sorry…I’d say it would be more on you to provide a ‘fact-based’ backup for your assertions that people would go for a 2-week lag in getting the results…or that ‘accurate election results’ would either be worth the wait OR that they would, you know, be all that accurate regardless.
Is that what I’ve offered you? Well…if that’s how you read it. Mind, even if that WAS my point it seems to be along the same lines of what YOU have offered so far to justify your dreams of ponydome…
One issue is that any state that accepted federal funding through the Help America Vote Act has to meet the standards of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.
For better or for worse these standards have come to mainly focus on access for voters with disabilities (blindness, mobility problems, etc) to vote in a private and independent manner. Hand-counted paper ballots don’t meet those standards and requirements.
I’ve worked in data processing for a large bank, and ATM’s are far from flawless. We had errors occurring nearly every week in our network of ATM’s.
Just ask around – many people can tell you of a time when an ATM failed to work properly for them, or a close acquaintance of theirs. There have even been threads on here about ATM failures. They are far from flawless.
But in contrast to voting machines, every transaction is uniquely identified & verified during the transaction, every button press & machine response is recorded (may even be monitored in real-time), and the ATM & customer are filmed during the transaction. So most ATM errors can be documented and corrected pretty easily. But this won’t work for voting, when the secrecy of each persons vote is very important to the public.
with respect to the discussion about the need for a speedy, transparent count - one of the first clear signs of vote-rigging in last spring’s election in Zimbabwe was the delay in announcing the results of the presidential vote. the longer it dragged out, the less confidence people had in the results, because it was assumed that the reason for the delay wasn’t that there were difficulties in counting, but that the results weren’t in favour of Mugabe and his supporters were busy stuffing the ballot boxes, post-election.
speed and transparency are important factors in public confidence.