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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

#281

Post by hahainternet »

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…

That's just disturbing. The last time I went to vote I walked to a local school, waited politely in a queue, went and filled in my paper ballot and went home. A couple of people there were monitoring but nobody tried to influence or interrupt or anything. It was very British.

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

#282

Post by rlx0x »

howeyc wrote: post #237
btilly wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't be serious. More people voting == voter manipulation??!?? I would call that a MORE REPRESENTATIVE democracy.

sounds like a fox news argument

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

#283

Post by MartinCron »

tokenadult wrote: post #189

The system here in Minnesota works much better. All ballots are paper ballots that are indelibly marked by voters. My wife and I voted this morning in our busy precinct in Minnesota, where there are some tight statewide contests about constitutional amendments and perhaps the most contested race for our state's House of Representatives of any electoral district in our state. As usual, we voted by marking bubble-shape…

Bringing up the Coleman/Franken election reminds me of my particular pet peeve. When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, it's impossible to know the will of the people. One hundredth of one percent is not within any reasonable margin of error.

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

#284

Post by icarus_drowning »

genwin wrote: post #245
Someone wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a great idea. Obviously it would have to be implemented properly and would be subject to the some of the same problems exit polls already have (i.e., voters not wanting to participate), but it solves a lot of the other problems neatly.

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

#285

Post by LogicHoleFlaw »

notatoad wrote: post #242
simonsarris wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my experience the campaigners are instructed by the officials running the voting site what that radius is and stay outside of it.

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

#287

Post by slashedzero »

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…

My district in California was exactly like this, sans the people out front. This being the downtown of the capitol city, too.

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

#288

Post by sinnerswing »

eli wrote: post #238
scottmp10 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of research and sample implementations of electronic voting schemes in which the final outcome is verifiable without anyone being able to see anyone else's vote. As an example, I worked with Michael Clarkson on an implementation of Civitas: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf

Agreed. There are a couple of other papers as well. The problem is they are far too complicated to explain to voters which makes them unlikely to be adopted and unlikely to be trusted. Having a secure vote is obviously the primary goal, but having a vote that people trust is pretty important too.

Here's one FROM Romney to Obama

'DOZENS' OF COLORADO ROMNEY VOTERS CLAIM MACHINES CHANGED VOTES TO OBAMA

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Dozens-of...

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

#289

Post by EvilTerran »

revelation wrote: post #170
danielweber wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your plan to secure the machines is to have the source be open, you have already failed. You need a system that works well even if the source has been altered. Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.

And here I thought in the Turing year of 2012 people would finally start to understand what it means that any electronical voting machine contains a Turing equivalent machine. No magic can make the halting problem decidable.

An electronic voting machine doesn't have to be Turing-complete, surely? It would require especially-fabricated non-Turing-complete chips / ICBs, and some very simple interface like an LED bank and good old-fashioned physical buttons (as a touch-screen LCD unit alone is probably turing-complete), but I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to devise a specialised electronic voting system that couldn't have its behaviour altered without physical modification.

[edit PS] Of course, this is purely academic. You might as well fantasise about a voting system made of Babbage-esque clockwork.

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

#290

Post by mindrag »

blindhippo wrote: post #260
ry0ohki wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So say if some party were to gain power and start harassing people that voted for the other party...

If this is the reason, there is a bigger problem in America then simple voter fraud...

There are all sorts of laws that protect us from various government abuses, such as requiring search warrants, trial by jury, freedom of speech, etc. Voter secrecy is a prudent safeguard along those same lines.
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