Calibration!! Really?? Any software/hardware developer here worth his/her salt would agree that can't be it. Let's see what could have happened: 1) The Y axis of the screen was maladjusted 2) Touch Sensitivity of the screen was reduced due to incorrect settings 3) Touch area had hair/dust/oil on it. But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Don't they have independent watchdogs looking after this thing in United States? If shit like this went down in India, the Election Commission would have simply closed the whole damn polling booth(for the day) and arrange separate polling on a later day with extra scrutiny and security.
Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
191–200 of 659 posts
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#192If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time. If enough people cry foul to ru…
Definitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.
What about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did?
I think this verification may already be a reality. The alternative is to disallow any form of verification, as with the Reddit poster, but then we lose the ability to perform checks on the voting procedure, and would never have known about this current anomaly.
What's missing, though, is the proof that who you voted for is who the vote was internally counted for.
Due to anonymity you can't individually prove a confirmation number belongs to you - you could have found one on the street or made up some random number, but if 10000 people claim that their initial vote does not match the confirmed vote, it's worth looking into more carefully.
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#193This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to get them to go home).
There was also this, a few weeks ago: http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-ar...
The fact is that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to tamper with the vote every single election. I have no way of knowing whether this specific incident was malicious, but I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#194Earlier 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? :)
300m people is a complete red herring. That also means you have many more people available to process ballots / provide infrastructure.
If you use "number of issues that come up" as a measure of how bad things are, size is absolutely an issue. One-in-a-million errors will occur 300 times if everyone votes.
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? "I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney.…
Why are those not filmed?
FWIW:
Using a cell phone to take video in polling places in most states is prohibited, and in general "frowned upon" in others. I would not be surprised if he simply took a video as quickly as he could and then left. I agree it would have been a more believable incident if there was more video.
Based on the reddit story, I think this was Central PA, which definitely falls into the "not allowed to take video" category.
http://www.citmedialaw.org/state-law-documenting-vote-2012#P...
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#196Earlier 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…
>Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines....
I think the difference here is that there is absolute proof that it wasn't end user error whereas with the story you linked to there were no videos or any other demonstrations.
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#197If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time. If enough people cry foul to ru…
[deleted]
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?
What system, in your opinion, would minimize error?
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
Democrats have tried to increase the length of time early voting happens, increase the hours, and increase the number of voting locations. All of these changes make it easier for people who were on the fence about voting to vote. They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadv…
Increasing access to voting isn't a form of voting manipulation, because the whole point of voting is to provide voting opportunities to every person who is eligible to vote.
Re: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
#200The 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…
Americans tend to have this unbelievably naive idea that there's no high-level organized or institutional crime in their country.