Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 659 posts

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#81

Post by danielweber »

weaksauce wrote: post #43
danielweber wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sure looks exactly that way from the video. I've used that exact type of machine to vote in North Carolina (but this ballot is not from North Carolina). You have all sorts of people pounding on the screen all day. Remember the reason we all wanted electronic voting after the year 2000: because it gives absolutely clear answers, not necessarily better answers. (Even the best systems have errors because there are hu…

Electronic voting should be allowed but not unless it prints out a ballot with all your selections on it so you can verify and have a real paper trail; not some bit in a database that can be changed and most likely has been changed in the past based on grand jury testimony from one of the diebold programmers. As a programmer knowing how insecure programs are I want paper for something like this.

I've used this machine in another state, and it absolutely generates a paper trail. There is a rolling receipt going on the left-hand side of the machine behind glass that records every single button press you do, and scrolls out of view when you complete voting so the next guy can't see it.

It's not perfect, and not my preferred system, but it's pretty decent.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#82

Post by skrause »

pnathan wrote: post #34
morsch wrote: post #4

The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical. It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just wor…

(1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. (2) We are OK publicizing it. (3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about. --- But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)

I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion.

In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#83

Post by orenmazor »

jarek wrote: post #54
ars wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's quite the opposite: People get so worked up about these things because they don't tolerate it. If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares. Or that they don't happen...

what is this fantastic place?

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#84

Post by MartinCron »

ambiguator wrote: post #17

Seems like the obvious solution would be to close off the broken voting machine.

I got really into playing pinball a few years ago, and I got into the habit of turning of a pinball machine whenever it wasn't working correctly (mis-aligned flippers, whatever) so that other people didn't waste their quarters. Yes, it was kind of obnoxious. Sorry.

Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#85

Post by Alex3917 »

btilly wrote: post #77

There have been problems like this in every election with these machines. More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA! http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being…

"Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other."

Since when have Democrats been passing laws to prevent old white people from voting?

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#86

Post by ars »

jarek wrote: post #54
ars wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's quite the opposite: People get so worked up about these things because they don't tolerate it. If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares. Or that they don't happen...

> Or that they don't happen...

Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up.

If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#87

Post by anonymouz »

Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly?

The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines.

Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#88

Post by danielweber »

btilly wrote: post #77

There have been problems like this in every election with these machines. More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA! http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being…

exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair

It's absolutely not proof. It's, at the least, evidence. Exit polls are statistical -- in my dozens of times voting, I've never hit an exit pollster.

But if you say "the exit polls disagree with the official numbers, so let's go with the exit polls" you have substituted your official election mechanism with the exit polls.

Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

#89

Post by marshallp »

citricsquid wrote: post #67
pnathan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. (2) We are OK publicizing it. (3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about. --- But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)

> But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :) The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system. Everything that is…

The republicans are the party of liars. Who is more likely to actually commit these crimes? Republicans. Even the 4 votes thing you came up with is probably republicans spreading lies.
Post reply on HN