Punch ballots? with hanging chad and dimpled chad? where the machine recount can vary each time it’s run, because physically running the ballots through the readers dislodges hanging and dimpled chad each time? punch ballots that worked so well in Florida in 2000?
I think its pretty funny that many Americans are so pre-occupied in making sure that thier vote ‘counts’* that they wont vote for a 3rd party as it would be a waste or something, but they dont care enough to make sure that everything possible is done to make sure that their vote is counted and accurate !
*there was a thread where a sibling was going to vote in a different district from where he lives - just so it would count . His district was a foregone conclusion.
But if the ballots are always in the public eye and all the counting is done in public with counterchecking from candidates’ representatives, people would actually be able to see whether there was any monkey business going on.
Why yes, those are the very problems that need to be fixed. Instead, we threw the baby out and jumped into a new, far more complex, technology that is still buggy as hell.
Wow, errors nearly every week? Out of how many thousands of transactions per week? With machines that were far from brand new and were iffily maintained, some of which were outdoors? Sorry, but that comes damned close to ANYBODY’s definition of “flawless.”
You ever seen one of those large magic shows where the magician makes something like the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of a live audience? Even leaving aside whether people want this, I’m not seeing how you could possibly eliminate ‘monkey business’ in this way. Any system you put in place to do so would either not work (because people will find a way around your safeguards) or would simply be too expensive and time consuming to make a difference. And all to eliminate what? 1% fraud?
Some of those old systems were in place for years…and they were STILL ‘buggy as hell’. And there was still voter fraud issues with them, despite the fact they didn’t have any software or scary computer screens. I think people have a rather rose colored view of how good those old systems were. Even the paper ‘fill in the bubble’ ballots used to have a percentage of votes that weren’t counted due to people being unable to fill in the stupid bubble correctly. And this doesn’t even get into the fraud aspects or other irregularities issues, which we all know happened fairly regularly.
And approximately how many errors are we talking about this these new systems? I’ve seen some headlines, but they seem to be pretty sensationalized…sort of like the headline grabbing story of a kid struck in the chest by a baseball who dies. Considering all the wonky analogue voting machines I’ve seen in my lifetime I’d be interested in seeing what the real percentage of failure is in the new machines in comparison…or even compare the actual number of votes tossed out in days passed using paper ballots vs problems with the new machines.
I’ve never seen any proof that the new machines are any worse than what we had before…or that fraud is any more rampant today than it was in the past days of ballot box stuffing or accidentally losing a box of ballots that just happened to belong to one candidate or the other.
-XT
ATMs with touchscreens can (and do) have the exact same problem as shown in the video and explained by Folly. If the touchscreen is not calibrated, the screen will register the “touch” in the wrong position.
MeanJoe
Well, when we get down to it, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Why we really need standards isn’t because of the equipment but because we keep having things like confusing butterfly ballots and ballots where a straight, partyline vote doesn’t include a vote for a president. Local yokels screwing things up either with or without malice aforethought.
I agree completely and you’ve pretty much put your finger on the answer to the OP’s question. Why can’t we make voting machines that work right? Because every state and county decides on it’s own what it wants and how it wants to do it. If we had a federal standard for voting machines (whether electronic or paper/analogue) then we’d have a better chance of having a working system. Of course, then you’d have other problems and other concerns about a single system…but it would eliminate THIS problem anyway.
I’m not holding my breath for such a system…
-XT
Maybe we could just start voting at ATMs…
So, we’re talking about a situation in which all the candidates’ representatives are cooperating in fixing the vote?
No…we are talking about literally millions of votes and people being human. Since you are wanting to take 2 weeks to count all the votes that gives more time for things to go weird. Unless you are going to put all the ballots in the country under armed guard with constant video surveillance with motion detectors, infrared optical detectors and sharks with laser beams on their heads there is going to be the opportunity for misdirection or trickery.
And having gone to all this trouble (and taking weeks to determine the election), I’d be surprised if looking at the statistics you managed to improve on the suspected fraud by enough to justify the time or expense. I’m guessing the same number of votes would be tossed out due to errors or mistakes as well.
It’s clear that there is nothing I can say to convince you that your pet theory here would either work or be acceptable. How about we just agree to disagree and move on? Maybe you could start a thread on your vision of a new voting system and see if other 'dopers agree?
-XT
My “pet theory”? Would you care to describe it, since it seems to be so important to me?
I’m not suggesting that we mandate that the count take two weeks. “Two weeks” is just a random figure that, personally, wouldn’t bother me.
What I’m saying is that ensuring accuracy and verifiability is far more important than having immediate results.
One possible method would be to have the count be conducted orally in public by people, not machines (and perhaps with constant video camera surveillance exported to the Internet, why not?), with representatives of all candidates confirming the counting of each ballot. I’m sure it would take far less than two weeks at most polling places. And you wouldn’t need armed guards, because everyone could see exactly what was going on at all times.
Maybe it would go something like this:
*Election official 1, accompanied by representatives of all parties, goes to sealed ballot box, opens it, draws out one ballot and holds it up to the public and cameras.
Official 1: “One vote for McCain”
McCain rep: “Confirm one vote for McCain”
Obama rep: “Confirm one vote for McCain”
Official 2: Tallies one vote for McCain on a system that can be viewed by all present
… and so on until all the ballots have been counted.*
This seems very much like the system in Denmark as described by Mikkel in this thread – Let's come up with a foolproof voting method. - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
Counting in such a way will probably take longer than 24 hours, but so freaking what?
Somehow we all managed to hold elections before voting machines were invented without civilisation grinding to a halt or the stock market crashing.
Well, to be sure. They had fraud too…and they just dealt with it and moved on.
-XT
I presume tagos was talking about regular ATM’s, with a keypad, which seem to be pretty robust. Whilst these have their share of security holes, they’re also performing ten times as many functions as what a voting machine needs to do.
Election polling is very accurate. It has been used in many countries to dispute elections . The elections have been redone because of it. In America ,where we used paper ballots, it worked fine. Where there were voting machines the polling failed. Strange coincidence.
Got a cite for that?
But those are generally caught.
We use those machines here, and they will kick the ballot back out if the bubbles are filled in improperly, and an election judge will offer to look at your ballot and explain what the machine sees as a problem.
If you decline, and override the warning to feed your ballot in anyway, it’s still possible for humans to look at it, and often it’s clear what the voter intended. Only a much smaller percentage are truly unclear, like when the voter put an equal mark in both bubbles, or marked exactly halfway between them, or something like that.
http://www.freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf This discusses the methodology and the probability of polling being wrong. It was not wrong.