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January 6, 2008
Commentary on NYTimes: Can You Count On These Machines?
By Dave Berman
Originally blogged at We Do Not Consent:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/nytimes-can-you-count-on-these-machines.htmlSunday's New York Times Magazine has a 7800+ word feature story on electronic voting, "Can You Count On These Machines?" The column is already online, spanning ten pages on the NYT website. As I read it I excerpted many passages I thought I might want to comment on, collectively about 1/3 of the article. As I work through a second pass to lay it out for you here, I will try to limit that further. For starters I would say the article really doesn't provide much substantial new information and performs worse still as a matter of framing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html January 6, 2008
Can You Count On These Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
This article will appear in this Sunday's issue of the magazine.
...
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County...Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes...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.
...
Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices "flip" from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 - even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person "undervote" for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.
So opens the expose, providing a little background and clearly setting the stage for the no basis for confidence meme, which is never explicitly stated. In fact, for the appearance of balance, the article goes on to quote renowned electronic voting machine apologist Michael Shamos, who often gives the appearance of acknowledging real problems while simultaneously minimizing and discounting them with subtle reframing:
It's difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines "fail" in each election. "In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote," he told me. "But they're very disturbing to the public."
The majority of this article shows Shamos' quote to be ridiculous on its face. With such limited auditing of the machines we can't really know what percentage of them fail nor can we know the true extent of known failures. What we know is that our elections are unverifiable so the outcomes are necessarily inconclusive. Such inherent uncertainty is fueled by paperless electronic voting machines that prohibit the possibility of a recount:
During this year's presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren't backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don't?
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=genera_dave_ber_080105_commentary_on_nytime.htmGO DIGG IT!
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