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

211–220 of 659 posts

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

#211

Post by danielweber »

ars wrote: post #136
danielweber wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That receipt is actually legally iffy. In a small community you can keep track of who voted in what order, then look at the receipt and know who voted for who.

Seems about the same as having someone watch the order the paper ballots go into the box and then having someone go back through.

Of course, we have ways of securing access to ballot boxes to a reasonable degree, and those ways are also applicable to the paper receipts.

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

#212

Post by ceejayoz »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #192
eli wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> What about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did?

That'd be a felony in Wisconsin, presumably for that sort of reason. http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/Wisconsin_GAB_Is_Felony_...

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

#213

Post by tomp »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #151
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 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…

> Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly

Why would that discourage anyone? In slovenia, you are required by law to carry an ID when you turn 18/get voting rights. So there's really no excuse for anyone to not have an id (or driver's licence).

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

#214

Post by indiecore »

beatpanda wrote: post #193

This 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 g…

Isn't denying someone the right to vote a crime?

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

#215

Post by cabalamat »

goostavos wrote: post #154
eli wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ).

> What is the significance of it being secret?

So that people can't bribe or blackmail you into voting a particular way.

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

#216

Post by btilly »

danielweber wrote: post #155
genwin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistics tells you the odds that the exit poll would disagree by some degree with the actual result. If the odds show, for example, only a 1 in a 100 million chance of it happening, an investigation should take place. That you've never hit an exit pollster doesn't say much, because the odds can be computed with high confidence by polling only a tiny fraction of the voters. Statistics is highly valuable despite not…

And who regulates the exit pollsters? Normally I wouldn't worry about this, but if you want to give them power to invalidate an election (or force an "investigation," whatever that means), then you shouldn't just let them run around doing whatever they think is best. but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show. I don't even know what mindset produces this thought. While Nate Silver doesn't think Romney will wi…

Exit polls are like a canary in a coal mine. They can show evidence of manipulations that might have happened. If an investigation finds that no such manipulation seems to have occurred, then no harm is done.

Unfortunately current US elections are unauditable because voting machines DO NOT produce any kind of verifiable voting trail. Furthermore the apparent conclusion of the US media is that past discrepancies are evidence that their exit polling is flawed rather than that the voting process is being manipulated. (They are biased to decide that way because accusing the winners of manipulating the vote - even if it is true - pushes them away from the appearance of neutrality that they try to keep.)

Furthermore you can't do exit polling on mail-in ballots. So this potential signal of flawed elections is being lost at the same time that manipulation of elections is becoming even easier.

Personally if polls are overwhelming, and elections are in line with polls, I believe the result. But I believe that there are lots of people trying to slip a thumb on the scales, so if polls are close, I am dubious about the results. I personally believe that current evidence is that the Republicans are more successful in getting their thumbs on the scales, so I'm doubly suspicious when Republicans mysteriously do better than polls indicate they should.

I want us to have elections that I trust. I do not want crappy election machines. I want verifiable paper trails. I want random spot checks. We know how to run better elections than we do. We don't because nobody wants to put the work out. I want us to put the work out.

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

#217

Post by uhwuggawuh »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #192
eli wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Even taking video is illegal, as that could also be used as evidence of voting for a particular candidate, allowing candidates to buy votes.

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

#219

Post by morsch »

simonsarris wrote: post #121
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…

Well to inject a bit of optimism here let me tell how of how it "just works" in the second largest city in New Hampshire. There are several "wards" in the city, and each contains a school that is the voting location. Outside of each location will be people holding signs of all candidates, but all they said this morning are things like "Happy voting" and "Thank you for voting." Inside the location there will be about…

Thanks for sharing what I'm sure is a fairly normal experience.

It sounds very similar to the last time I voted (also in a school building), except I never experienced a line longer than, say, 2 persons -- I guess we have more, smaller locations/voter --, and of course there was no computer at the end, you just put your ballot in the box. And there were no people picketing near the location, and nobody thanked me for voting. Well, that's not true, the people inside said thanks (and so did I).

Representatives of all parties are present when the votes are counted (and recounted). We get the results in the evening, 2 or 3 hours after the elections close.

It's not entirely comparable since our ballot is quite simple, two pages with large letters, it takes about a minutes to fill out with two crosses in the right place. From what I understand you often vote on loads of things at the same time and it takes a while to fill out correctly.

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

#220

Post by jerf »

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #47
llambda wrote: post #37

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…

The consumer electronics industry has shipped hundreds of millions of touch screens in the last few years and i've not seen a single article complaining that they opened up their new tablet/phone to find it mis-calibrated and that their touches were off my such a huge margin. Why are voting machines apparently subject to calibration problems that other touch screen devices are not?

I have owned a ton of touch screen devices. None of them were miscalibrated, even after years of use.

I have used a ton of touch screen devices in public. I've encountered quite a few that were miscalibrated.

Public devices put up with abuse that your private devices do not.

Post reply on HN