Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by zerohp » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:28 PM UTC

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #341

jerf wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly curious - what kind of abuse could cause a calibration error? My kids abuse my iPad pretty heavily but generally smacking on the screen with their hands and fingers a lot but I still have never seen it mis-calculate a touch.

iPad uses a capacitive touch screen. Older technologies are very prone to mis-calibration, even if they are not in heavy use.

I recently had to help my mother recalibrate her sewing machine's touch screen.

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

#422

Post by danielweber » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #385

VMG wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is the other explanation then?

That since Romney and Obama are going to each get lots of votes that the touch screen has been completly worn away and is now not very accurate.

I wonder what happens if you push on the screen over a candidate's name really really really hard for a minute or so.

Not hard enough to knock the whole machine over, but way harder than "touch."

It doesn't even need to be malicious. Maybe someone really liked Obama.

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

#423

Post by alecperkins » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC

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.

The catch in this is that having proof of voting a particular way makes a voter susceptible to bullying, or gives them the ability to sell their vote. The Wombat Voting system attempts to address this with a public-key approach: http://www.wombat-voting.com/

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

#424

Post by kbutler » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC

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.

The extreme form would be to ensure that every person who favors your position gets a vote cast and counted, without changing the votes of others.

It's the difference between persuasion and "get out the vote". Persuading voters to your point of view is more honorable, but "get out the vote" is often more cost effective.

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

#425

Post by genwin » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:31 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #298

genwin wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exit pollsters should be regulated, I agree, if only to avoid an expensive unnecessary investigation. The media says that Obama and Romney are neck & neck, because that gets more viewers, which sells the advertisements they depend on. (Every presidential election in your lifetime is guaranteed to be declared a "virtual tie" by the media--you'll hear those exact words every 4 years.) Those who understand stats know (w…

How old are you? Within my lifetime there have been at least six presidential elections that were absolutely not reported as "virtual ties", including the last one.

Found in 5 seconds: "Gallup Daily: Obama-McCain Race Reverts to Virtual Tie"

Found in another 5 seconds: "National Poll Shows Bush, Kerry in Virtual Tie"

I could go on.

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

#426

Post by pnathan » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:33 PM UTC

hahainternet wrote: post #281

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.

> 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.

Exactly my experience as well. It was excruciatingly well behaved.

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

#427

Post by incongruity » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:35 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #405

incongruity wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer systems can only produce a paper facsimile of the vote cast – and thus it must be checked, immediately, by the voter to verify that their intentions were recorded and reflected. Further, that paper record must itself be capable of being re-read/re-counted by different hardware easily so that the (invisible) tally of votes can be verified. In the end, you need to essentially produce a paper ballot but you bur…

Read the link in tokenadult's post about Minnesota. Paper is hardly easy to count when you get to the dolts who don't know how to mark a ballot. What does it mean when the guy marks a vote for every question but also writes "LIZARD PEOPLE" in every write-in ballot spot? Lots of people really don't like the fact that the senator is chosen based on how 3 people sit down and decide what that means, or whether this chad…

>Computer touch-screen voting systems, like all other voting, have flaws, but one thing they don't have is any ambiguity how you count each ballot.

As someone who has designed questionnaires and computer interfaces, I think you miss a huge point here – electronic systems make vote counting easy because they constrain choice... but there's a lot less ability to verify that an electronic system actually captured the intention of the voter – just as this story shows.

So, how do you do that? 3 parts:

1) Use paper ballots, as I've argued for, above.

2) Count/scan each ballot immediately, before the voter leaves. Reject ones that do not process properly (i.e. the one you described above would be rejected if there were conflicting indicators). I thought I remembered MN doing that (I lived/voted there ~a decade ago), for example, and I'm pretty sure my poling place here in Illinois did that last time as well (haven't been there yet today). It's not an impossible task to enforce the same constraints on a paper ballot, doing so with the voter present and able to clarify/fix their ballot.

3)You try really, really hard to design easy to understand and use paper ballots (for all the reasons I said above, you need paper for an audit trail). Good communication design (i.e.: how you design/layout the ballot forms) matters a lot and most of them are terrible.

That, however, is no excuse for accepting an electronic system which gives up any ability to audit the count in a reliable way (and, unless the voter verifies a physical printout, no electronic system can be reliable, as discussed above).

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

#428

Post by MartinCron » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:35 PM UTC

mherdeg wrote: post #379

MartinCron wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, and in scenarios like that, perhaps the best thing to do is to flip a coin. Instead of going to all the expense of flipping a coin, though, you could just take the person who seemed to get the most votes (after you've counted them all really hard to make sure you're within the margin of error). Just an arbitrary rule, no biggie.

perhaps the best thing to do is to flip a coin

Or have a runoff election, or have instant-runoff voting. Having elections determined by real or statistical coin-flips undermines the (important) story of self-rule.

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

#429

Post by pulplobster » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:37 PM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #201

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…

In the particular case of roads, the issue is actually that America does not have enough people for it's size. The population density in many states is too poor to support, at tax rates that americans are willing to tolerate, the amount of road that is necessary. See: the disparity between road quality in Maryland (good density) and Pennsylvania (poor density). (or, to correct for climate, compare Pennsylvania with N…

The population density of Sweden is lower than the US and it has excellent roads.

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

#430

Post by gordonguthrie » Tue, Nov 06, 2012, 9:38 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #337

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

I haven't looked at Civitas. The other crypto based voting systems I did study don't actually hide voter's identity in real world elections. The trick to these systems is there's some one-way hash done. This requires a lot of ballots, with enough hash collisions to ensure one's ballot gets lost within the herd. Alas, elections in the USA are precinct-based, typically 1 to 1,000 voters in size. And our ballots are com…

This is all totally irrelevant - I speak as a former candidate for both the UK and Scottish Parliaments.

The count needs to be verifiable, and needs to be simply comprehensible.

The paper process has the following check points:

* the ballot box is seen to be empty at the beginning of the process

* the turnout can be collected and collated by the candidates nominees during the day

* the first count is the ballot count which the candidate's nominees can check against the recorded turnout

* the papers are sorted for the second count, publically - and the candidates nominees do what is called 'a box count' from which we can predict the final result

* the ballots are bundled and tallied in public

* disputed papers are agreed by the candidates and the candidates representatives

* the candidates have an automatic right of recount if the margin is below a certain amount, and at the returning officers discretion otherwise

On top of that we have collected voter id information and Reading cards so we can estimate the result based on the marked register after the event.

What this means is that not only is the result verifiable, it is publicly verifiable by almost anyone with basic high school maths.

The reason this is important because I have worked elections with Nazi candidates - and I worked in Belfast when the civil war was on and the degree of trust across the political communities was very low.

The critical purpose of the public count is not to establish who has won the election, but to bind the losers, and their voters into the result.

If I had to stand up on a platform and the Nazi said "they used these machines to take away our vote" and my only response is to start talking about how there are some papers that show if you have hard to factor prime numbers you can generate some low-collision hash or some other random klingon space talk, then it is game over.

The proportion of the UK who withdrew their consent to be governed during the 30 years of the war in Ireland was less than 1% - rising to 10% of Northern Ireland. Making it easy for a tiny number of people to be pulled out of consent by political extremists is crazy, crazy, crazy.

The 2007 Scottish Parliament election in the UK had a crappy ballot (edited originally said 9% which was wrong an error rate 4 times higher than expected - think of Florida's hanging chads across the whole country). If 26 votes had gone another way in one constituency we would have had a Labour Government not a Scottish National Party one.

This ballot paper was combined with electronic counting and it was a total shambles.

As a tallyman on the night I could not endorse or verify the result at all - we had no idea what the result was - except what the machine said it was. Everyone was all geared up for legal challenges - but the leadership of the two parties got together and agreed that everyone should walk away and we would let the chips fall as they did.

I never want to see that again - and we don't hate each other in Scotland like you American's do.

Paper ballots, paper counting is the way to go. (Don't get me started on how your electoral boundaries operate - or the fact that you don't have an independent electoral commission).