Can You Count on Voting Machines?

[UpInArms]

Source: New York Times

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=politics&pagewanted=all

[dipsydoodle]

1. Hmm

[alberg]

6. There are 4 key points in the article

Clive Thompson’s article on voting machines takes far too many words to reach the obvious conclusions:

1.) It is not a partisan issue

2.) Existing touch screen systems are irredeemably flawed

3.) A voter verified paper ballot is the best insurance for fair and accurate elections

4.) Optical Scanning systems provide the optimal technology for reliably counting our votes.

And by the way, people can be capricious, computers can not be.

[Kelvin Mace]

9. You are correct on your four points100%

but I disagree with your end comment.

Poorly written software can be VERY capricious in a manner that makes Greek Gods look like complete pushovers.

See this list of software bugs for a good explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug#Heisenbugs

This is why any tech looking after these machines MUST be top notch and not the typical drek the BBV industry employs.

[roseBudd]

2. If everyone on DU clicks through to read this on NYTimes, we can make it MOST READ!

Being most read on NYTimes.com gets very prominent placement on every story page. While 4 paragraph summaries are nice, clicking through makes DU a rolling band of Nielsen families.

The data generated by traffic analysis in the online world is pored over by newsrooms.

[mac2]

3. Why can't we have paper ballots

available for those who don't trust the computer voting machines or they break down? Seems like common sense to me.

[dipsydoodle]

4. Because

you're not in the UK......lol. We, thankfully, have no alternatives.

[zalinda]

5. John Edwards has called for paper ballots. n/t

[screamcheese]

7. Volunteer!

I've worked on 6 elections, and although I don't trust the touch screen machines, I have confidence in the optical scanning technology which is what we use where I live. The machines are tested prior to the count to make sure they are working. We audit the results after the official count, comparing hand-counted batches against the machine results. In cases where there have been discrepancies, the error has always been HUMAN. The very few ballots that are rejected by the scanner because of questionable intent, are resolved by a team of individuals (one from each party). The "paper trail" consists of the ballots themselves and can always be referred to if questions or accusations arise. Conducting an election is an ENORMOUS amount of work, usually assisted by elderly citizen volunteers. The number of these dedicated folks is dwindling with each passing year, and advancing years make it difficult for older election workers to comprehend the new technologies and work long hours. People, if you want to ensure fair elections, you have to do more that whine about it. You need to get involved. VOLUNTEER. Especially if you advocate a hand count. Hand-counting is extremely tiring and the election worker's accuracy (no matter what their age) is seriously compromised by long hours of counting and recounting.

[Kelvin Mace]

8. Nice to some reasonable posts on this topic

Yes, OpScan is the BEST compromise solution to this problem, yet we have a number of activists bitterly opposed to ANYTHING other than hand-counted paper ballots. We have others who are actively thwarting attempts at real reform laws, because of paranoia and/or ignorance about what the laws we are trying to get passed actually say.

This is one of the reasons I have pretty much withdrawn from this issue. It is hard enough to fight Diebold et al, but it is almost impossible to fight them and other activists like She Who Is Not To Be Named and her minions.

I will tell you one thing about the Diebold "technicians" assigned to most locations who "fix" these problems. They have technical backgrounds on par with your average Best Buy floor walker. This kind of job requires an Alpha-Geek with extensive hardware/network experience who has a direct line to the actual programmers who wrote the code.

Not even close. I have spoken to these folks on the sly at dog & pony shows and when they were on the job (I didn't let on who I was), and they are about two levels above clueless. Turning it on and off, checking cables, and running canned diagnostics are pretty much the limit of their palliative abilities.

This is a clusterfuck waiting to happen, and despite being on the forefront of warning about this problem, many anti-BBV activists (the ones with the most money and media access) are making the problem worse with their solutions.

May Ceiling Cat protect us in November!

[flashl]

10. I am in agreement with the posts here.

A Presidential election cycle and day, can feel quite lonely given all noise from the armchair experts about elections importance.

[FlyingSquirrel]

11. K&R, and PLEASE click on the NYTIMES link!

Make it one of the "most read" articles to increase its prominence on the NYTimes website!

[DanG2012]

12. I did testing...

on those gawd awful diebold machines in ohio, pure junk.
did you know they run a modified version of winders ce ?

peace,
DanG