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Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

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

#241

Post by danielweber »

wbrendel wrote: post #65

What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question. In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case. How are these electronic…

How do you count a smudge instead of a complete filling-in of the oval? You have humans go over them, and people hate that.

Just because you never see this issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that the ambiguous ballots don't matter in the vast majority of elections so no one cares.

I'm not saying computers are better than paper. They each have trade-offs.

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

#242

Post by notatoad »

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…

>Outside of each location will be people holding signs of all candidates

isn't it illegal to campaign within a certain radius of a polling place?

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

#243

Post by mrb »

danielrhodes wrote: post #127
grecy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc. Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you…

You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.

If Canada and the US merged, would it be twice as hard to vote? Of course not. Voting is the most trivial govt activity to scale up! It is the equivalent of an embarrassingly parallel pb.

The "300M citizens" excuse is even less valid in the context of presidential elections, because each state plans it independently from the others. So it is more like 52 tiny countries voting together!

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

#244

Post by Qworg »

btilly wrote: post #139
Alex3917 wrote: post #85

Earlier 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…

Vote manipulation? Yes.

Just what we need? Definitely.

I cannot think of a scenario where having more people in a representative sample would be worse than having less.

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

#245

Post by genwin »

Someone wrote: post #132
danielweber wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You also will have gotten rid of the idea that a vote is cast in private. A possible explanation for differences between exit polls and election results is that voters may not want to admit voting for extremist parties, or, conversely, may not want to publicly admit not having voted for party X.

Good points. A solution would be to give everyone a receipt for their vote, with an anonymous copy that can be put into an exit poll bin. And something equivalent for mail-in voters.

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

#246

Post by sp332 »

jarek wrote: post #223
sp332 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the States part of "United States of America"? Ever since Madison's brilliant compromise at the founding of our current government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise the USA has tried to be mindful of the sovereignty of the states. (America's previous government, under the Articles of Confederation, was a loose agreement among the states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State%27s_rights#Cont…

Yes, I have a bit of a grasp on the setup, I just think it's completely insane and not worth the tradeoffs :) Do you feel it's beneficial for New Hampshire to be in a federal union where it doesn't control its economic policy, central bank issues, or foreign policy, but can ensure it has its way on such issues on who can get married and how you vote in the federal elections, where your votes are ultimately largely me…

It's not so much about making each vote count for something (although people pay a huge amount of attention to NH's early primaries), it's about making sure the larger states don't steamroll the smaller ones.

The USA experimented with decentralized banks (each state printed its own currency for a while) and it was a mess, so centralized banking is more of a practical solution than an ideal one. Other issues including who gets married etc, are idiosyncratic to particular cultural and even subcultural groups, and seems best handled by responsive, representative legislation than blanket national policy.

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

#247

Post by yesbabyyes »

tomp wrote: post #213
yesbabyyes wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

An example: In Texas, a student ID is not good enough to count as a voter ID -- but an NRA member card is. I kid you not. The Simpsons could not have come up with something more absurd.

Minorities in the US are way less likely to carry photo ID. I could go on and on. In short, the situation is different than in Slovenia.

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

#248

Post by jarek »

wizzard wrote: post #198
michaelhoffman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?

What on earth? I marked the candidate I wanted to vote for with an X in a circle on a paper ballot. Marking circles for more than one candidate is a spoiled ballot you can replace instead of depositing if you wish. This isn't rocket science.

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

#249

Post by morsch »

tomp wrote: post #213
yesbabyyes wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's the same here. Well, similar, you're not legally required to carry it with you; most people do so anyway for convenience. But some countries don't have a national id, including but not limited to the US.

The UK briefly introduced and then scrapped a national ID system, bowing to public pressure. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006 -- a key phrase being "Many of the concerns focused on the databases underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves."

It's not something you can easily compare across borders and it's extremely loaded with all sorts of issues in the US, as far as I understand.

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

#250

Post by mtgx »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #140

If 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…

This system kind of does what you're asking:

http://www.wombat-voting.com

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