The failure of electronic voting machines we discussed yesterday (as reported by BradBlog and Black Box Voting) is now receiving mainstream media attention:
A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines — and possibly other new voting systems in Florida — according to the state capital’s election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.
Ion Sancho, Leon County’s election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold’s optical-scan machines.
After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold’s system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho’s machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.
”That’s kind of scary. If there’s no paper trail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fingerprint,” said Sancho, who once headed the state’s elections supervisors association.
Read the whole report.
One of the things that is going to give me an ulcer about this whole black box voting thing is that it has, to a large extent, already been framed as a left v. right issue. I understand why that has happened, as most of the discussion of the electronic voting issue is always done in the context of charges that the elections were stolen (in 2000 and 2004) and the brain-dead quote from the owner of Diebold, which I don’t think means what it has been made out to mean.
Furthermore, most of the people discussing the issue are decided lefties- from my personal correspondence, Brad Friedman and Mark Crispin Miller are good guys, but conservatives they ain’t.
At any rate, I have really decided this electronic voting movement is not a good thing- at least for now. I just don’t think that a system this open to fraud, with or without a paper trail (and to make matters worse, most don’t give receipts), is a good idea, and I rush to embrace every new technology there is. Furthermore, as I have stated before, the simple fact that it erodes confidence in the electoral process should be reason enough to can it for now.
TallDave
I can’t say this too many times – electronic voting is the worst idea in the history of democracy.
As someone who works in IT, I am very aware of how easy it is to manipulate electronic data. The ease of manipulating data is the whole point of electronics. It’s not a plus when you want reliable elections.
Steve S
It doesn’t matter. If you don’t want to have a perception of guilt, don’t give the impression that you are guilty. Frankly, what he said and did was so fucking blatant, especially his legal attacks on people trying to uncover how their product (BEING SOLD TO THEM BY WAY OF GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS) worked, I’d question if there wasn’t funny business going on.
If you’re a company selling product to government, you ought not to be involved in politics. That just seems so straight forward. Otherwise you run into a situation where pandering to the Republican Governor results in you losing all your contracts when the Democrat wins the election.
I think the evidence from the Cunningham bribery scandal, points to a MUCH LARGER problem.
Govt contracts should not be based on patronage.
capelza
In Oregon we have all voting by mail. I really like it, I mark my votes in pencil and mail it back. I guess that could possibly be open to fraud, but I trust it more than electronic voting.
I think that electronic voting is one of those fads created by technology (and possibly a heavy amount of lobbying by Diebold, et al). Sometimes it is okay to stick to the old ways. Being able to recount votes, even by candlelight :P, is a very good thing.
Mike S
So how do we remove it from the realm of partsanship? As long as it can be framed as such I don’t see how we can get any kind of ground swell against it.
And to be clear I blame my side of the aisle for making it a partisan issue. And I don’t think some of them would have made it an issue if they thought it worked in their favor.
Marcus Wellby
I tend to agree, though think electronic voting could — and should — be as secure as online banking. I don’t think the problem lies in the concept of electronic voting, but rather the execution. Not to sound conspiratorial, but it almost seems as if the current voting machines were designed FOR easy manipulation. The silence on many of the right over the issue also further adds to that impression.
Pb
Bah. Diebold is guilty. In the end, I don’t know that it really matters if they are guilty of being corrupt partisan hacks perpetuating voting fraud (probably) or just ridiculously criminally incompetent. However, they obviously should have known better. You know why? Diebold makes ATM machines. Screw them.
Clever
I would agree, for now. The underlying idea of electronic voting is NOT a bad thing, but both the politicization and the sheer naiivety of technology by some people makes it much harder to implement. The “no paper trail” has been argued mainly two ways: as a ‘cost saving measure’ [to those using it] or as ‘conspiracy ‘. Personally I believe it was sheer lazyness/incompetence on the part of the manufaturer [in this case Diebold], for if you look at the history of their voting software development [via the nefarious “Diebold Emails“] it is painfully obvious that the disparity of where the software should have been and where it really was became quite large. But there was still the bottom line…
One of the things that really amazes me is the idea that 1-3 companies should handle all electronic voting. I’m hoping that before the 2008 elections there will have been an Open Source voting breakthrough so that localities will be more in charge of their machines [via a certification process both for machine AND administrators] so that such a centralized failure cannot happen again.
If you’re interested in the emails, go thru the Bugtracks [ex- yr 2000]. I would feel dirty pushing such a product.
jg
If its presented to them as just a bunch of lefties bitching about stolen elections then it will be a non issue to them. Divide and conquer.
Marcus Wellby
And that is how it will be presented until the shoe is on the other foot. Should electronic voting ever give the impression of manipulation that leads to a President Hillary, you can bet your bottom dollar that the entire cable news and talk radio machine will declare electronic voting a “threat to democracy”. Of course, you will also have places like Kos and Air America declaring the merits of Diebold. Sad, sad days…
srv
As a techie, there is no paperless system that should ever be trusted. The people will choose to remain ignorant. Bankers have completely separate interests. They operate on uniform and strict accounting and federal regulations. You are never going to have that with voting.
I think that the future of our ‘democracy’ is dependent one of two things happening:
1) investigative reporting/blogging that proves large-scale EVM voter fraud
2) a successfull public hack of a republican congressional district (say, the OC voting 100% dem)
Anderson
Here’s a perspective that just occurred to me:
Diebold makes voting machines and ATM’s.
Can anyone seriously believe that Diebold would make an ATM with comparable security flaws to those of its voting machines?
What bank would buy such an ATM?
If dollars are worth protecting, why aren’t votes?
Anderson
Oh, Pb said that. No skimming comments within 30 minutes of caffeine intake, is my new rule.
Pb
Anderson,
Anything worth saying is probably worth saying again. :)
Mr Furious
It’s simple. A clear easy-to-understand and fill-out paper ballot that is optically scanned by the voter. My selections show up on the screen, and I then press “yes.” The paper ballot is then handed in, to be used in the event of a recount.
Results are collected electronically and instantaneously, yet verifiable with a paper trail.
In a perfect world, my ballot comes with a tab or the machine spits out a reciept that allows me to go online when I get home and verify my vote counted.
Same goes with absentee. Give me a number to go online and verify my vote was counted.
None of this touchscreen crap. Even if the machine gives me a reciept, how am I to know it’s not just mirroring my selections back to me, and then following some hack algorithm to skew the results at the end of the day?
Is there an obvious problem that I’m missing here?
Kimmitt
With all due respect, transparency and democratic norms are, these days, left v. right issues.
Paul Wartenberg
The idea of printed receipts has merit and needs to be pushed as a vital component to any electronic voting.
Like it or not, any voting system will have its flaws (I was in Broward for 2000, trust me the punchcard thing had to go). Optical scan, touch screen, pull-lever, pencil checkbox, whatever, the important thing is to make sure people can confirm their vote is accurate, will be counted accurate, and a printout receipt is a good way to do that.
docG
Because there are a lot more ways with a veneer of legality to screw people out of their money that there are ways to screw people out of their votes?
Seriously, Mr. Furious is on to something. There must be some way to make a system like that work, with some kind of printout for those w/o computers.
Paddy O'Shea
Too bad for the current administration Diebold doesn’t do polling as well. He’d probably still be in the 60s if they did.
But it does look like Bush’s current media blitz is paying off for him in a major way. The new NBC-Wall Street Journal Poll shows him rocketing up from 38% to 39%!
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10469950/
KC
I totally agree with you John. It’s unfortunate that it has become a left-right thing because it really shouldn’t be. A secure vote is something that ought to be important to everyone. That said, when I see stuff like the following, I begin to wonder if everyone feels the same way:
Now, I got that from http://www.alternet.org so be warned. However, if it’s true, it suggests some Republicans are more interested in limiting people’s ability to vote or double check their votes rather than in ensuring secure and honest elections.
Ancient Purple
Okay, John. Humor me.
What the hell did he mean then?
Anderson
Not unless Ohio is opting out of the U.S. Constitution, I think. This could be blatant enough to trigger the dusty old “republican form of government” clause.
stickler
Hear, hear. And not just on this issue; the Patriot Act strikes me as a huge giveaway of individual rights for ephemeral “security” in ways that should horrify ostensible conservatives. I lived in Seattle in the ’90s and remember a few (conservative/libertarian) neighbors who were convinced that Bill Clinton and Janet Reno were about to send the black helicopters over Fremont. These people hated Federal police powers.
Now that the President is a Republican, though, hey it’s all good. “More police power for the State? Cool! It’s not like the Feds would ever arrest ME, anyway…” “Oh, it’s great when Diebold rigs elections for US, because they’d never do the same for a higher, Democratic bidder…”
Real small-government conservatives should be consistent and loud about defending transparency in government. Not least because, frankly, “the Left” has generally been better about running an intrusive government over the last century. Current “conservative” dominance is fleeting. Powers you give Abu Gonzales will be used by President Hillary Clinton’s AG, too. Vote-stealing can be done for Republicans, or Democrats, or Communists.
tbrosz
Mr. Furious has pretty much nailed it.
Electronic voting machines that print not a receipt as such, (which implies something the voter would take with them, a bad idea), but a backup paper ballot. It would be easily readable by the voter, with names next to the marks, not just a cryptic set of dots. It would also be optically-scannable (blue text, black dots). These printouts would go into locked ballot boxes and stored just like regular ballots are. If everyone’s happy with the electronic results, they stay in storage same as regular ballots after the count. If a recount is demanded, they would be usable for both optical or manual recounts.
Everybody gets the instant results that electronic voting provides, and a cardboard ballot as backup printed out clearly by a machine, with no “fuzzy marks,” oddball fill-ins, scribbles, or hanging chads. If the printer doesn’t work, the voter would see that immediately, and something can be done right there.
This requires the massive technical effort needed to–what? Attach a printer to a computer? Cripes, how hard can this be? I can’t understand why this wasn’t done several years ago.
Ironically, until the famous “chad” problem, pretty much everyone was happy with the voting systems we had before.
Sojourner
It amazes me even more that they’re allowed to not hand over the source code for review by whomever the feds want to. Truly amazing.
SpinDizzy
Voting fraud is a fact. It is not a partisan issue. Both parties have a long history of engaging in it. Advancing technology just makes it that much easier. It will continue as long as we allow it. Most people don’t really care. Therefore the few people who really do care end up running things. Thus we end up with a government run by the few and for the few. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
W.B. Reeves
SpinDizzy makes a cogent point.
Al Maviva
I’ll be as freaked about electronic voting’s potential for throwing elections to republicans, as soon as my friends on the left join me in being freaked out about conventional methods of committing fraud like registering dogs as Democratic voters in St. Louis, paying “street money” to hustlers to “get out the vote” and using union labor to rig the old electromechanical machines in places like Philly and New York. Yeah, I care about the electronic voting machines but bringing up the Democratic cheating and any feasible methods of slowing it down (like requiring people to show ID at the polls) is shouted down as racist. The problem wont get better until everybody agrees to take it seriously, but that’s going to take the skewering of a lot of wrong assumptions, and if there’s anything we know about politics in the U.S. today, changing anybody’s mind isn’t really a possibility. Not now anyhoo.
Sojourner
I am SO TIRED of hearing this same stupid argument – it’s okay because the other guy does it. Or it’s okay because we don’t do it as much as the other guy.
This country really is becoming morally bankrupt.
stickler
Sojourner is right; AlMaviva is an ignoramus.
Back in the day (that is, before 2000), both parties rigged ballots. New York City had the Democratic Tammany machine; Philadelphia had a Republican one. Both parties have engaged in shenanigans since the very beginning. Only an idiot who believes what Sean Hannity tells him would be so stupid as to think “only Democrats do it.”
If clean elections are important (and if you want “democracy,” then you ought to think so), then they’re important for BOTH parties.
W.B. Reeves
Re: Al Malviva’s squawk regarding voter ID. The precise characterization made by the Judge ruling on Georgia’s voter ID law was that it constituted an illegal poll tax. This because the only acceptable ID was a valid state Driver’s License. At the same time that the GOP dominated legislature pushed this law through, they raised the fee for the license from $10.00 to $20.00 while reducing the number of locations where the required ID could be obtained. If this law had stood, a citizen’s right to vote would have become hostage to their ability to pay a fee to the State of Georgia as well as being dependent on their access to transportation. Such restrictions on the franchise are clearly at odds with Federal Law.
The law is economically discriminatory. The issue of race comes in when you consider that African Americans make up a large percentage of Georgia’s working poor. Considering this and the tawdry history of the Jim Crow poll tax in Georgia history, the GOP have no one to blame but themselves if folks suspect them of racial motives.
If the goal is actually the suppression of vote fraud, the solution is fairly simple. Distribute voter ID cards free of charge at the point of registration. I doubt the current Georgia GOP will be willing to do that.
This could cover a great deal of activity, most of which does not constitute fraud.
So has anyone been arrested, tried or convicted?
The old fashioned methods of vote fraud hardly compare with the potentials that electronic voting present.
John S.
Ironic that he was complaining in another thread about how nobody here will make a coherent argument.
If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
stickler
Pedantic post of the evening:
It’s completely unclear who “he” in that sentence refers to. Me? AlMaviva? Sojourner?
Sorry; I have another 65 final exams to grade tonight and this kind of thing is driving me up the wall. Some people have a way with words, other people … have … not … way.
Kimmitt
Um, tell you what — stop advocating voter ID as the be-all and end-all of voter fraud prevention, and we’ll take you seriously. Voter ID will not prevent tampering with voting machinery. Voter ID will not prevent people getting paid to vote. Voter ID, as practiced in many states, will act as a poll tax. The very fact that you suggest voter ID as a panacea for unrelated problems makes clear that you do not consider them to be actual policy issues but rather political footballs. That is, you obviously don’t take vote machine tampering seriously, so why should we trust you that it exists?
SpinDizzy
I’m a voter but I don’t really feel my vote counts or is even necessarily being counted. What do I do? I could blame the other party or I could blame myself or I could stop voting. Most of my friends don’t vote. They ask me why I bother. I don’t have an answer other than that I’ve always voted and I’ve always believed it’s part of being a citizen. But the people I vote against don’t want me to vote and they’re the ones in power. I’m not even sure the people I vote for want me to vote. I am certain the last two presidential elections were rigged and the Congressional members of both parties have drawn the electoral map so it’s almost impossible to get rid of them. The majority of people in this country are like me and disapprove of what our leaders are doing and feel powerless to change it. I’m not being cynical about this. It is just the reality of the situation. On top of greed and incompetence and blind ideology, outrageous lies and insults have taken the place of reasoned discourse. Now you tell me: why should anybody give a damn about voting under these circumstances?
Steve S
I know of nobody who supports any of that. So why are you bringing up this strawman?
Steve S
Honestly, I don’t think calling this a poll tax to get rid of it is the right approach.
The right approach is demanding the State give out ID cards for free. The lack of an ID card is a tremendous impediment to upward mobility in our society. You can’t get a good job without one, you can’t get a bank account. Do these people even have social security cards? Why not?
You want to help this issue, get people without an ID card, and demand the state make them available for free to all residents as part of paying your fucking taxes.
Yes, the republicans are using it as a excuse to keep voters away, just like they fought against the Motor Voter act of ’93. But you can turn it against them, and help poor people at the same time.
Steve S
Nope. It’s easy to rig the software to show who you voted for, but tally things differently. What are you going to do? You want a manual recount, you gotta have everybody come in and show who they voted for.
PAPER RECEIPTS ARE A BAD IDEA
The fundamental issue here is how you use the computers. The only advantage that computers buy you is in efficient tallying. That’s it.
So you need to vote on paper and then use the computers to tally that. But the SOURCE of the vote must be the paper. Everything is else is for efficiency sake.
In the event of a close election, you have the paper ballots to go back to. A paper tally or receipt is worthless, because a corrupted software system could corrupt that as well as the tally.
Let me ask you this. If you’re taking out a mortgage for $500,000 do you want all of your documentation, signatures and everything solely online, or do you want a paper copy you have to read, verify and sign at closing?
I work in IT at a mortgage company. Trust me, you want that paper to prove what you have.
Adina Levin
Here’s the difference: voting is anonymous, by secret ballot. Banking transactions are not anonymous. The record shows who did what and when. Therefore, it is much easier to audit bank transactions. I can look at my bank statement and observe that the $500,000 withdrawal on December 5 was not made by me.
A paperless evoting system is fundamentally un-auditable. You can’t go back and confirm that voter entry 34572 really represented a vote for George Bush, because you can’t trace it back to the voter who can confirm or deny it.
There are electronic logs. But a method of vote-hacking that changes the vote record can also change the logs. That’s why a voter-verified paper record is so important. The fact that the voter has confirmed that the paper represents their vote makes it possible to use the paper for audits and recounts.
stickler
I’ve bought two houses. The mountain of paperwork that I had to sign each time was daunting.
I hate ATM receipts too. Man, I’ve got too many of them.
But you know what? I’d rather fight the paper — and have the ability to scrutinize everything — than trust the Powers That Be.
Especially since most of them are running Microsoft sofware.
srv
The only elections most people care about are Federal, and if paperless ballots don’t come back, you’ll just have to accept the illusion of democracy. But this level of fraud has to be controlled very tightly. That means it has to be in the tallying firmware/hardware/software, and you would never risk it for congressional, State or local issues. President and Senators. Maybe Governors of major states, but that just entails too much risk of discovery.
srv
Oops:
… The only elections most people care about are Federal, and if paper ballots don’t come back, you’ll just have to accept the illusion of democracy. …
W.B. Reeves
Regardless, the Georgia Law as I described above was indeed a Poll Tax as the Judge so ruled. Is there any reason to avoid stating the fact other than dodging the racial dimension of the question?
Blue Shark
From the Original:
Correct results should have been:
Yes:2 No:6
However the results tape read:
Yes:7 No:1
…Also reads:
Kerry 53% Bush 47%
However the results tape read:
Bush 52% Kerry 48%
…IT MATTERS People
Blue Shark
From the Original:
Correct results should have been:
Yes:2 No:6
However the results tape read:
Yes:7 No:1
…Also reads:
Kerry 53% Bush 47%
However the results tape read:
Bush 52% Kerry 48%
…IT MATTERS People
bago
This person has it right. It is possible to secure data, and determine if it is tampered with, and the only way it can be broken is by a brute force attack taking hundreds of years on a distributed network, a little too late to influence the elections. Look up watermarks, hashcodes, and general crypto theory. You don’t have to be able to pass and track a message to a named individual to ensure its authenticity, just to an entry with a guid, which can be incorporated in a hash algorithm effectively giving every vote its own unique signature, which can be reconciled with paper receipts. With a public/private key method, a receiept could have the public key recorded onto it, along with a CRC/hash so only auditors with the private key even read your vote, and with your public key/crc you can datermine if your vote has been tampered.
The technology to secure a network using tunneling, IPSEC and encryption has existed for decades. It IS a solvable problem, and has been solved. The only answers are either incompetence or corruption. A trial should go underway. If they are corrupt, they should go to jail. If they are incompetent they should go out of business.
If you don’t believe that then you like corrupted votes.
bago
Also, since we have the technology, I think voice vots should be banned, all elected official must sign an affadavit stating that they’re read the law they are voting on, and all non-classified memos, email, and itineraries of all public officials should be made public. Elected officials should also have Sarbanes-Oxley applied to them, with completely open accounts while in office.
They are there to serve us, and we have a right to know what’s going on.
monchie monchum
When I first became aware of the dangers of electronic voting, I assumed that this should be a bipartisan issue. The fact that by and large it isn’t just leads me to be more suspicious of the motives of the Republican Party.
Oh, I’m also aware that Dems are not always angels either. I do remember Daley Sr. as well as various Dems in South Philly voting the dead. Also in Philly, I was personally affected by one of the most blatant, pre-electronic schemes to steal an election, the 1978 Charter change referendum. This was supposed to benefit then-Mayor Frank Rizzo, who was a Democrat but very right wing and who later became a Republican. Since electromechanical lever machines are difficult to rig on a large scale without a lot of people in on the scam, the perps just disabled almost all the machines that were going to black and liberal wards. However, the machines were repaired by the afternoon of election day, and Rizzo’s attempt to change the charter so he could run for a third term went down by a two to one margin.
Thank you, John, for making me aware that there is at least one Republican out there with a sense of fairness and ethics.
space
A few points:
On partisanship. This is a left/right issue NOT (mostly) because of the electoral outcomes in 2000, 2002, and 2004. It is a left/right issue because the right has largely blocked any attempt to fix the current system of poorly programmed, largely unsecured, and essentially unauditable electronic voting machines. Why do they do this? It would appear that the GOP at the least believes that the party benefits from a dysfunctional voting system.
On voting mechanisms. Paper ballots would be reviewable by voters through a screen and deposited into a box after approval by the voter.
Indeed, the terms “receipt” or “paper trail” are misnomers. Under a proper system, the “receipt” is the legal ballot, not merely “evidence” of the electronic ballot.
On the psychology of the GOP: “turnabout is fairplay”, The mentality of many rank and file Republicans is seriously fucking warped. What is clear is that, regardless of whether any persons associated with the GOP have in fact manipulated the results of past elections, many Republicans believe that they have and tacitly condone it.
Sadly, many Republicans choose to invoke either long past Democratic shenanigans (i.e. those of Tammany Hall or Joe Kennedy and Mayor Richard Daley) or patently absurd current “frauds” (Pet registrations? Don’t make me laugh in your face.) as a justification for any wrongdoing. Their pathetic insistence that if the shoe was on the other foot, Daily Kos would be filled with Diebold defenders only betrays their own lack of interest in protecting the essential mechanisms of democracy.
On “the brain-dead quote from the owner of Diebold”. This misses the point. I don’t care a whit what voting machine manufacturers claim. I want a system that CAN’T BE HACKED through reasonable means. I want a system where if the President of Acme E-Voting Boxes Inc. openly declares his intention to fix an election, it will be a non-trivial matter to do so and it will be a trivial matter to check that it did not happen.
I don’t want to trust anybody. The source code should be open source or owned by the government. Period. You want to sell voting machines? Use the government certified code or shut up? Go peddle yout propietary code to China.
Elephant Man
Having a secure election system isn’t about which party you belong to,it’s about basic fairness and democracy.
Read Bev Harris’s “Black Box Voting” (free on the website or you can buy a hard copy) and you’ll see that all the major parties have been cheating.
Just look at the Nov. 2 2004 elections that put Christine Gregoire into office. There were plenty of complaints about the voting machines that had no paper trail and no way to recount. It’s very possible that Democrats hijacked that election, and non-partisan organisations such as BBV have been pointing this out all along.
But–like everywhere except in Leon County, Florida–NEITHER Republicans nor Democrats are allowing anyone to examine the machines. THEY’RE ALL SCARED SHITLESS BECAUSE THEY’VE ALL BEEN AT IT.
As John Washburn posted on BBV, his tactic in Wisconsin is to demand that any election system be AT LEAST
Elephant Man
(sorry hit the wrong key)
John Washburn’s tactic in Wisconsin is to demand that any election system be AT LEAST as reliable and secure as a paper ballot system.
Makes sense to me.
Kirk Spencer
A digression onto the Georgia law. For what it’s worth, the law itself wasn’t quite as bad as it’s made out to be. For one thing, there was more than one acceptable ID. And the state made a special run of mobile registration vans, well-publicized, with a significantly reduced price for the cards. (Not driver licenses. ID cards.) I still objected, but not because the law was bad. No, the reason I objected was because it narrowly focused on voters at the polls. At the same time attempts to tighten absentee ballot controls and other known and regular routes of voter fraud were rejected.
Somewhere I saw a “rule of thumb” I’ll pass along. These days, it goes, Democrats prefer to commit fraud by addition, while Republicans prefer subtraction. That is, Ds add voters who aren’t legit, while Rs block legit votes from counting. Yes, there are exceptions, but taken in that light the Georgia bill (including what wasn’t done) looked to fit the stereotype.
Kirk
Rosencrantz
I fail to see how this is NOT a partisan issue. The two companies that count %80 of ALL votes are Diebold and ES&S. Those two companies are owned by brothers and BOTH are openly partisan Republican. In the 2004 election, vote totals were often wildly different from the exit polls and ALWAYS in favour of the Republican candidate. Every single time. Yet in areas that were auditable paper trails, the exit polls were exact. Then the exit polling company released their own study that completely ignored thier own data to jump to a conclusion they couldn’t even support. FINALLY, everyone ignored the hundred of signatures from academics all over the US saying the results were wrong and the election results need to be looked at.
When liberals cried fowl, and I suspect the honest unbiased independants did as well, the Republicans lashed out in the media which has become their “modus operandi” for almost a decade. The name calling started with Hannity, O’Reilly and Limbaugh and echoed through other media. Bush’s own campaign workers started a last minute voting activist group in order to infiltrate REpublican controlled committees to blame LIberals for voter fraud while completely ignoring the real problem.
The fact is that if it weren’t for liberals (bradblog) and honest independants (BBV), this issue would have NEVER come to light. So how is this NOT a partisan issue when every “error” managed to favour Republican candidates and REpublicans would rather name call and smear than protect democracy? Would the Dems have been any different had the results favoured them? Maybe…maybe not…such an arguement is irrelevant if you ask me. The system need to be fixed regardless and there would be plenty of Republicans out there makign sure the issue was out there. The difference is their media machine would help them.
If people can’t see the dangerous and scary repercussions of heavily partisan corporations being able to control election results…and a media who is too afraid to report this issue…then Democracy is already dead.
Rosencrantz
Kirk:
There has been only 4 actual reported cases in the last election of voter fraud, which you attribute to the Democrats. Four individual cases.
Adina Levin
Bago writes:
Everybody understands looking at a piece of paper to confirm vote choices, and using the paper to doublecheck the results of an election. A very small number of people with advanced math degrees will understand the cryptographic solution. A system that uses paper to check if a vote has been tampered with will have much more checking than a system that requires requires using a public key/crc.
The paper solution is better for voting in a democracy, since people will have more confidence in a system they understand.
Lee
I also work in an IT department.
No one here that I have talked to (left & right) thinks the current system of electronic voting is secure. Some even think electronic voting in general is a bad idea with current technology.
Because of that I would not say it is a right vs left but a partisan right vs everyone else.
Rosencrantz
Sorry, but one more thing. I am a Canadian who has been following this voting thing very closely. The way I see it, if companies like Diebold get their claws to deep in the US system then they will move into Canada too. Some say their machines are already here, which I have yet to look into.
Last Canadian Federal election, I went and voted. I was automatically registered to vote when I did my income taxes the year before. Also, “Elections Canada” enumerators came to my door over a month before the election to ensure I was on the list, and to add me if necessary.
Weeks before the election I received a paper in the mail which stated where I go to vote and the polling number, as each location has a number of different areas voting there.
My office gave me the option to leave early and vote if I so chose. Most offices do the same.
When I got to the location, I give the paper to the person at the door and they tell me to go to Table X, for example, where poll workers have a list of names of everyone registered to vote. There has never been a problem with the lists missing people’s names as far as i know of. They give me a paper ballot which contains only the names of candidates in my riding with a box beside each. Last year it was three names…many years it has only been two. That is it…nothing else is on the ballot. The people at the table (always at least two) scratch your name off the list with marker and then confirm you are off the list.
Each ballot has a serial number, and a tear-off receipt with the exact same serial number. After I mark my candidate I fold the ballot and give it to the elections worker. They rip off the receipt portion, hand it back to me, and then (if I remember correctly) they place it in the ballot box. They may have just handed it back to me after confirming it is a legitimate ballot, with a legitimate serial number (but they never write that number down or copy it, only confirm it is legit), and then I dropped it in the box myself.
Voting takes about 5 seconds, and federal results are always announced on the NEWS by 10 that night. There is no way to connect me and my vote to that particular ballot, however if I ever want to verify my vote was properly counted I can once the election is over and as long as I have that receipt. It couldn’t be quicker or easier than that and totally anonymous.
TallDave
Marcus.
tend to agree, though think electronic voting could—and should—be as secure as online banking.
Well, banking involves many, many complex transactions at high volume, every day, and people always know the transactions are supposed to be. It’s a perfectly reasonable application for IT — but still requires lots and lots of auditing by disinterested parties.
Voting is relatively infrequent, simple, secret, and low-volume and involves a result that is not known until tabulation.
If you withdraw $5,000 and the computer says it was $50,000, it’s immediately obvious there was a mistake. If a 55-45 vote gets reversed, it’s not.
TallDave
Oh, and as much as I dislike electronic voting, you people claiming Kerry won are not taking your meds.
Mr Furious
My system uses a paper ballot to generate the vote. It IS the source. It is optically scanned by the voter who then confirms his selections on screen and “submits”.
The original paper ballot is available for a recount, but should, frankly, be used to generate the actual official tally in the first place. Expediancy and logistics might prevent that, but I’d personally rather wait for results and trust them, then need to know who wins before I go to bed.
The reciept or tab I dream of in addition, that can be verified later (ie: tied to a specific voter) is for the voter’s piece of mind ONLY. Though in theory, if the election turned out questionably, and I went online to verify my vote, and saw incorrect candidates, by reciept could be linked back to my original ballot, proving the fraud.
This extra step maybe unneccesary and a nightmare. I’d certainly sacrifice it for a better, more accurate and verifiable original process.
With this system, I’m not even sure why you’d need a margin of error…
Ed
We need to take the issue out of partisan hands. Something on the model of The League of Women Voters, say ‘The League of American Voters’ representing citizens interested in the single issue of Fair Elections. The technology exists to make voting machines virtually hack-proof but they have no constituency, no lobbyists. Nobody is advocating for the dollars and the will to get them installed. The people in power (either party) have little incentive to invest in elections that might have a different outcome. We’ll have to force it on them.
After getting more secure voting, I’d also like the ‘The League of American Voters’ to take up running REAL debates instead of the charades we’ve been getting. And later, the big fight, redistricting.
Kimmitt
Yes, but that misses the point; the purpose of demanding Voter ID in response to unrelated issues is to implicitly level a poll tax. I can’t demand that Georgia do much of anything from Hawai’i.
W.B. Reeves
Kirk, could you provide citations for this info? I presume you live in Georgia as I do but your presentation contradicts my understanding of the law.
tbrosz
TallDave:
True, but it was amazing to see in 2004 how quickly the Democrats fell back in deep, abiding love with the electoral college again.
owlbear1
It became a ‘left vs righ’ issue when the Republicans REFUSED to investigate the problem.