611–620 of 659 posts
I think the title is link bait. The voting machine isn't altering the vote. It's just off kilter. Besides, it's not like the user didn't know what box was being checked!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no ambiguity about a spoiled ballot. It's a legitimate protest with a clear outcome - the vote is not counted. A simple system of slips of paper marked by hand and counted by hand works better than anything involving chads, touch screens or electronic counting. Paper ballots are really the best solution we have at present and I'd argue the involvement of as many people as possible in counting and supervision…
What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble? I'm not trying to play Loki's Wager -- there really have been incredibly close elections where you have puzzle out just what the voter intended and it's just not clear. Nor can you make the boundary be "well if it's not clear throw it away," because you can't tell when it doesn't become clear. Thi…
Your picture of a someone inspecting a punch-card is not relevant to most paper voting systems - punch cards are like touch screen machines, they are unreliable technology, and should not have been introduced when the previous system worked perfectly well but just required manpower for counting (which can be mostly volunteers). Even the counting could be automated on paper ballots, but you need humans involved for the ambiguous cases, and I'm not sure automated counting is necessary if you have enough volunteers.
Simple paper ballots with a mark inside a square or circle are a tested solution which works well, and leaves an indisputable paper trail in case of recounts. Anything else we've tried just doesn't work as well, though no doubt it has made some companies fabulously rich in suppling the necessary machinery and constantly updating it when it proves to be unreliable.
So I'd contend that paper ballots, as used in the UK for example, are better than the computer voting machines available at present. I'm sure one day we'll come up with better machines, but they'd have to be open source, secure, verifiable and incredibly reliable - the antithesis of the machine in the video.
A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing:
"Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. 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. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."
However, this test does does not actually demonstrate anything. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated.
I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty.
Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.)
The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame.
There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares. Or that they don't happen...
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
Unfortunately current US elections are unauditable because voting machines DO NOT produce any kind of verifiable voting trail Please stop. The machine in the video (at least when deployed in NC) absolutely has a paper receipt that gets printed every time a button is pressed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm disappointed that the LA Times story doesn't include my favorite anecdote from the Franken/Coleman recount: the person who voted for "lizard people" http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/23/so_w...
I often vote for LIZARD PEOPLE as a write-in if there's one race where I don't know anything about the people in it, because of that guy. (I didn't know he had come forward until I searched for that story today.)
If you don't vote for the Lizard People, the wrong Lizard Person might get in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without it, they have no way of knowing if their coercion/blackmail worked or not. Sure they do: use a lie detector and ask them. Honestly, the situation you describe is the problem, not the presence or absence of verifiable voting. If you've got the mafia threatening your family, voting is the least of your problems.
What is this mythical lie detector you speak of? No trustworthy lie detector exists. If you disagree: does yours work for all mental variations (psychopaths, autism, retardedness, ...) and physical variations (Down syndrome, a score of other genetic abnormalities, ...)? Have you actually verified the research or trust someone who did?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The short answer is you can buy votes then. If you can prove to me who you voted for, I'll give you $5 or whatever.
What you're buying isn't a vote, but a receipt. What if we could increase the supply of valid receipts enough to make them effectively worthless? For example, voting machines could drop duplicate receipts into a bucket that voters are free to rummage around in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh. Ever dealt with a union election? That's exactly the problem with non secret ballots. You vote for unionization and libertarians show up at your house. Libertarians are among the most violent people around.
Perhaps you know libertarians that I don't. The ones I know are well armed, but about as non-violent as you can be and not be a Quaker.
The point is: Neither has he encountered union thugs beating somebody up because he was against unionization. It's a ridiculous myth.
Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly? The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might op…
The fact that the current implementation is not reliable doesn't make the whole idea of electronic voting bad. We've had electronic voting for general elections in Brazil since 2000, with very few accusations of fraud.
In our country (Brazil), the electronic voting machine is strongly marketed by the government and big media as a model for the entire world to copy.