Another Stolen ElectionFollow

Reports of inaccurate or possibly corrupted voting machines (or manual votes) really upset me a lot. I feel so strongly about the issue of everyone getting their own real vote counted, even if I hate the majority choice, that I feel very agitated if I think that this really truly might be going on.

I loathed that John Howard got in more than once, with what he did while he was in government. But at least I feel sure that the majority of adults* in Australia wanted him there and didn't see him the way that I saw him.


*Compulsory universal voting. It's a responsibility here, as well as a right. It's not compulsory to fill out a valid ballot, but you have to go on the day or do a postal or absentee vote.

Fixed this for you.

The video talks about Touch Screens. I use 100s of Touch Screens at work, and program them myself. They can be very finicky.

What the woman describes is a very common problem with touch screens.



Notice how from persons point of view, the finger would be covering the bottom Blue selection, yet finger is not fully on the button.

The problem is exaggerated further as the screens are closer to vertical. I have 2 very nice touch screens running a large operation through a SCADA program. These are mounted about 4 feet in the air, and are nearly vertical.

At times I catch myself accidently pressing the button above the one I meant to, even though from my point of view my finger does not appear to be covering the top button.

And it doesn't help that the woman in question is an old woman, clearly not an electrical engineer, who probably wouldn't be able to grasp the concepts of perspective and such when dealing with Touch screens.


So, YES, they can, and do, do things out of the ordinary, especially when dealing with human error compounded on top of any calibration issues of common Resistive Touch screens.


Edited, Oct 29th 2008 8:32pm by TirithRR

If we are to use computer code to decide the fate of our elections is it too much to ask that we can simply see the code?

The only argument I can think of against this is that it would make it easier for people to hack the machines and change the code if they had access to them, but it would be very difficult if it is ROM (Read Only Memory) and the integrity of the machines is verified beforehand and the chain of custody is not broken.

The Diebold machine I used today to vote worked just fine. However, we do not have any "straight down the ticket" option since local elections are nonpartisan.

I heard that the opposite problem is happening in Tennessee; people are selecting McCain/Palin and it's jumping to Obama/Biden.

You could argue that whoever is mucking around with the machines did this to throw off suspicion. But Occam's Razer says that the machines were just calibrated incorrectly.

If it were true this would still be a major problem.

Why are we using machines that are difficult to use, sometimes file votes incorrectly, and whose results cannot be verified?

Not really shown to be a hoax, just that no one could be contacted to bother and confirm the story and stuff like that.

"I couldn't get a hold of them to prove it, so I'm just going to ignore it."

The author is clearly biased. While he/she says they wish it wasn't a conspiracy, they obviously hope it is.

I didn't say it's not a huge problem, just that it's not a conspiracy.

Personally my county still does paper ballets. I have no problem doing it this way, and prefer it. I also prefer going up to the counter at the airport and dealing with the clerk in person rather than using the quick kiosk things. The clerks don't like me doing it, and usually get angry because I'm making them work rather than just sit there and talk with their co-worker about what they watched on TV last night.

I still prefer to do important things on paper. I pay for bills with checks, I don't sign up for auto payments on my debit card. I do have direct deposit on my paychecks, but that's because I work 8-5 and my bank is not open on the weekends, so I have a very hard time getting to the bank.

Funny that the blog makes essentially the same comment (actually states that all the confirmed cases involved democrat votes flipping to republican), and then 2 paragraphs later gives an example of a test on a voting machine which was flipping votes for McCain to Nader...


I think that's perception and not reality. The reality is that any computer system will have bugs. What I saw on the videos looked like a badly calibrated touch screen, which was registering about 3 inches below wherever you touched. The screen doesn't know what data is present at that location, so theories of some grand conservative conspiracy are just that. If all you test are attempts to push democrat candidates, you're never going to see an attempt to select a republican switched to something else, are you?


As to the broader issue? We've had this discussion many times. IMO, the method by which you vote isn't really that relevant. Whether it's a touch screen or a paper ballot that's scanned, either methodology has about the same likelihood of ******** it up. Touch screens are just newer, so we tend to subject them to greater scrutiny. Given that the reason for many election location switching to touch screens is specifically because of the number of "lost votes" due to mis-reading paper ballots (hanging chads, tearing, crumpling, etc) it's a bit unfair to simply point to the failures of touch screens without comparing their performance overall with that which they are replacing.


In my personal opinion, once the vote has been "processed" (either by scanning of a paper ballot, or transmission from a touch-screen system to a memory card), the likelihood of tampering is pretty much identical. Assuming you have some sort of paper trail system (which most do now), it's really a matter of two sets of data and whether they match. If we're to compare either system to the older "ballot box" system (where the ballots stay in paper form until delivered to some central location for processing and counting), all the electronic forms provide safer and more accurate results.

Despite all the talk, it's just plain much harder to hack into an electronic storage media than it is to stuff a box with slips of paper in it. From a "getting away with it" standpoint, people with the skills to tamper with electronic storage media aren't likely to do it, whereas you can get joe average guy on the street to stuff an old fashioned ballot box. In most cases, in order for election fraud to succeed, you really have to do it at the actual polling place and not in a central spot (or at least have coordination at the local level). At the end of the day, the number of ballots from a precinct have to match the number of people who physically signed in there. You can't tamper with that by hacking into a computer at some central spot. This means that to actually alter an election significantly, you need lots of boots on the ground at many locations in a state or county.

Whats perception and not reality? I promise I can make you a computer program that tallies vote that doesn't have any bugs, you can even pick from a choice of computer languages. You did see a badly calibrated touch screen (a big problem in itself), but you also saw the election clerk calibrate the machine and it still didn't function properly, which indicates it has programming errors.



You've completely missed the point, and you're completely wrong. There is NO TRANSPARENCY OR ACCOUNTABILITY with electronic voting machines. Look at the posts about how they do it in Australia and Illinois. There is a paper trail and a chain of custody and a method of accounting for the correct vote tally. With electronic voting machines there is none. It would be really easy for the machine to just switch the vote, or do whatever it wants, with no way of knowing.

The only thing you're right about is that this has to be done at the local precinct level, which is why we saw 0 votes for Obama in almost 80 precincts in New York during the primaries which led Mayor Bloomberg to publicly declare fraud.

I have not provided any conspiracy theories, but if you don't believe that people are conspiring to rig the election through electronic voting machines in the face of all contrary evidence I think you are the ones being naive.

http://www.seminolechronicle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/12/16/41c2fdb042ea1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3hUPP_bdOo

With proper checks put in place, I think electronic voting can be safely done.

That video on the blog site that shows them hacking a voting booth is unlikely to happen and it all hinges on someone slipping a bogus USB stick into the bunch. With proper checks and records that wouldn't happen. The only things and people coming into contact with the machines would be certified and registered.

It can be done safely and securely. These machines would not be have to be connected to any network, and that limits their vulnerability by a whole nother factor.

If everyone voted Republican we wouldn't be having this problem.

First, I think you're mostly right and I generally agree with what you said but:



I won't comment on what vote switches which way(it can easily be tampered either direction really), but the computer doesn't need to know what data is present on a specific place on the screen if it's been tampered with, the changing would occur once that data gets passed to the program.



I agree nothing is perfect, but a simple input summary before you finalize your voting picks should clear up any data input issues. I haven't voted electronically before so maybe someone can clear this up for me... they do have such a summary screen right?