Another Stolen ElectionFollow

And who do you suggest we "hand it over" to that wouldn't be susceptible to shady dealings? The government?

Totally, there's absolutely no way that could be tampered with.

Of course it could be tampered with, which is why you would sya, have both a registered Democrat, and a registered Republican count them. At the same time, both making sure that the other doesn't do anything stupid.


Seems to work for us, but then again, up here in Canada, we don't seem to be too worried about fixing elections.


Edit: High Definition surveilance cameras would also be a good idea in this case.

Edited, Oct 29th 2008 2:05pm by Driftwood

True enough I suppose.

I don't think we should "hand it over" to anyone. The bottom line is that whomever does the vote tally, there needs to be both transparency and accountability.

These voting machines companies have a copyright on the code that is used to tally the votes, which means there is absolutely no transparency or accountability. This is patently stupid. This means there is no way to verify any votes and no way to know for certain if any type of voter fraud occurred.

1. We need to have transparency with regard to how these machines work. A private corporation should not be able to keep secret the code that determines who the next leader of the most powerful country in the world is. What this means is that if this private corporation had a political agenda they could fabricate the results of the election (in a case-by-case precinct level manipulation) and elect whomever they wanted.

2. We need to have accountability with regard to how each citizen votes. It would be simple enough to assign you a PIN number and a password whenever you vote and create an online database where you could login with your PIN and password and verify who you voted for. That way every citizen could be responsible for checking his or her vote and verifying its accuracy.

This is completely absurd.

Electronic machines counting paper ballots (for physical verification). There's no good reason why the entire nation shouldn't be using that system. Touch screens should print a paper ballot which is deposited into the electronic counter.

Australia is doing it right.

This might work if people could actually verify that the printer paper ballot was accurate before it was deposited into the electronic counter. But then you would need to verify the integrity of the electronic counter to make sure it wasn't programmed (or hard-coded in the ROM) to modify the count.

Even with this system though you may run into problems like in the New Hampshire primary where the trail of custody for the paper ballot boxes was not secure, and many of the boxes had been slit open on the sides.

Why is it that when these things occur they always affect the candidate that is against the status quo? (Obama and Ron Paul in NH Primary) I don't like Ron Paul but I think that if people voted for him then their vote should count just as much as anyone else. There are no reports lately of Republican votes flipping (except a bogus one), just Democratic votes flipping to Republican.

Maybe the voting machines were just having a bad day and decided to be contrary.

I dug up some footage from that New Hampshire primary that illustrates why the paper ballots are just as easy to commit fraud with if the chain of custody is not maintained and the boxes are not secured.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5607

Notice that the "seals" do not really seal anything and that the boxes had been slit open on the sides enough to stuff ballots into them.

The Australian method sounds good as long as the ballots are not allowed to be placed in unsecured locations or, as has been allowed in the past, taken home by the local elections official for safe-keeping overnight.

As far as I know the ballot boxes are secured well and designed well, but they are also simply made of cardboard that is a one-use only thing and the ballots are ideally moved out of them fast and counted as soon as the booths close. The House of Reps boxes are pretty much only in use for 12 hours, then sent for recycling the next day.

The boxes are basically in one long chain of custody of Electoral Officials while they are in use, and are watched personally. I don't know if they are watched with tape too, that would probably be a good thing.

I have no idea what happens with the Senate boxes. That's a much longer count, and I was only ever in on the Reps count. Reps counts are almost always finished off before anyone goes home to sleep, no matter how long it takes.


All Electoral Officers are security vetted, and can not have ever belonged to a political party or worked in government. The full-time Officers are very trusted, watchful and watched, they are like an "In-club" of equivalent to high-clearance security agents. Which would be why they used to be allowed to take a box (I presume senate box) that was in their custody straight home overnight with them from the polling booth before they went into the Electoral Office the next day, for the beginning of the lengthy Senate count process.

But I agree it looks bad, no matter how above-board the Officers hopefully were, and it's better that the senate boxes are moved straight from the booths to the central office, no matter if the officers don't get any sleep that night.

Good FREAKING God.

Well, I still have no idea what happens with Australian Senate boxes.

But I can tell you right now, that when the Poll booths close at 7 pm at night and all the voting public is shuffled out of the building, the doors are locked and the Electoral Officers tip out all the House of Reps votes right there and then on one big table in the same room. Then with the Scrutineers watching, we do the entire House of Reps count (each officer often uses a separate smaller table, or a patch of floor off by themselves, which the Scrutineers camp or circulate around) and then we take the completed stacks back to the main table, which the Scrutineers are also circling or camping at whim) and no-one goes home till the official count from that booth is done and verified and signed off, and the results called into central head-quarters.

It's completely simple, primitive and manual (although we're collating preferential vote stacks, not the simpler 1 vote-only-to-only-one-candidate that I think you do in the American lower house). It works by having a ****-load of highly paid and security vetted* part-time staff come in for that one (roughly) 16 hour shift per election. But it's all done and dusted by midnight of the night of the election.

House of Reps votes don't hang around anywhere uncounted.


*I presume I now have an ASIO-file, although it's likely a small, inactive one

No system is ever going to be 100%. But you can definately work to make it as verifiably accurate as possible.

In the case of the machines we (in IL) use, you mark off a scan-tron sheet, or have the touch screen print one for you, and put it into the electronic counter. It drops into a locked metal compartment. At the end of the night, you have the counter print out three copies of the ballot results. One is posted on the door of the polling location, one is given to a county police officer (who is present) and one is attached to the box with the ballots. The ballots are placed into a box, sealed with tape bearing the signatures of the election judges from that station and then the box is transported to the county office by one election judge from each political party.

If there's a question as to the accuracy of the ballots, you have the paper records to confirm it. You have a paper ballot to look at before you deposit it rather than trusting a flakey touch screen. If someone was to try ballot stuffing the box en route to the county office, it'd be kind of pointless since the tally was already printed. You could claim the electronic counter was wrong and the paper ballot count was correct but that's easily checked both by checking the machine and matching ballots against the sign-in record when voters receive their ballots. You can't forge the tally given that one copy is already in the hands of the county police. Stuffing the electronic counter at the source would require the collusion of the other four judges, at least half of which represent the opposing political party. You also have your usual bevy of poll watchers from the parties, the occassional visit from the county police, etc.

In other words, you could come up with a scenario in which you have the collusion of all the judges or some other plot but it's not likely.

Not perfect but a hell of a lot better than electronic only ballots or paper only ballots and there's really no downside to it.

Edited, Oct 29th 2008 3:49pm by Jophiel

Republicans hate Motor-Voter initiatives.