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Definitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.
I was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret ? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).
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…
I have no idea why other states don't do this.
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> 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 CEO's of the companies making these voting machines are all die hard Republican supporters, especially Diebold. Being that none of these machines are open-source, that's really the important factor, the political persuasion of the companies manufacturing the machines. The essence of democracy is an essential distrust of power, so yes, I'm concerned.
Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks. If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.
It's so funny to see that hardly anyone actually did anything more than just watch the video. The same "oh it must have been miscalibrated" is repeated up and down the comment page. Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.
Don't troll. You are bad at it.
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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 OP comes from a democracy, I highly doubt they do things like: - Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1] - "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2] - Another article on "True the Vote" [3] - Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4] - You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not repo…
What I've read[1][2] in regard to this incident is that it is most likely a calibration issue: i.e. the touch screen is improperly calibrated and as a result is not selecting the proper region of the screen. Now this is concerning because it likely means other machines could be or are miscalibrated. However the important takeaway here is that this is not some malicious attempt to rig the vote. If that were the case t…
Because the person who wishes to tamper with the outcome of the election only has access to (or, very likely, skillz to modify) the calibration template (which has to be reconfigured each election, hence is modified by more people), not to the entire source code and tool chain of the voting machine. Most attacks are not gigantic conspiracies with unlimited resources.
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> 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.
Other countries rely less on machines where this sort of thing is even possible. The fact that human-built systems are likely to contain errors is an argument for making these system as simple as possible. The fact that we use touchscreen voting machines in the U.S., with all the hidden errors (honest or malicious) they can introduce into the canvass, is insane.
California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise.
I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.
But even at that, when a state has a razor-thin margin in an election, it can be maddening to figure out what happened.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-c...
http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_reco...
The election to the United States Senate from Minnesota in 2008 was too close to call before the election, and even after millions of Minnesotans voted for one of three major party candidates, the margin between the top two candidates, Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman, was so close that the margin was only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the votes cast in the election. That election really underscored the slogan "every vote counts."
It's quite indefensible to use a voting system that doesn't leave a literal paper trail. The technology is well proven. But what really gives most election results legitimacy and staying power is a wide enough margin among votes cast by people who show up to vote that the old saying "Vox populi, vox Dei" can apply to the result. The people speak, and even the voters who didn't agree with the plurality have to listen. It's appalling that any state would have a voting system that could obscure what the consensus of the voters is.
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several replies to this comment. Reading other replies posted to this thread since I first wrote this comment, I see several mentions of the systems in the Pacific Northwest states of having mail ballots mailed to voters. When I lived in Taiwan, more than a decade ago, I had a post office box there. Sometimes I would receive postal mail from the United States for the previous holders of that post office box, including State of Oregon ballots for two different Oregon voters (who were presumably each other's roommates while living in Taiwan). I always wondered, without giving into the temptation, whether I could have successfully filled out one (or both?) of those ballots and mailed them back from Taiwan to cast votes in an Oregon election. By contrast, I was never able to cast a Minnesota absentee ballot from Taiwan, even the time when I should have been regarded as having a stable permanent residence address here in the United States. So I missed out on voting in both the 1984 election and the ever-so-controversial election of 2000. I have no clear awareness of how mail ballots are authenticated as having been mailed by the voter to whom they belong (a signature on the envelope?) and hope that someone is checking to prevent those ballots from being misused.
I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine. That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable…