Still waiting for a reliable system of counting votes

January 3, 2006

The LA Times had an interesting, albeit thoroughly depressing, article on the front page today on the electronic voting machines cities and states bought after the 2000 race — which they’re now looking to replace.

Five years after the vote-counting debacle in Florida suspended the election of a new U.S. president, California and other states are embroiled in a contentious debate over how voters should cast their ballots.

The maligned punch cards that snarled the 2000 count are all but gone. But with electronic machines under attack as unreliable and vulnerable to hackers, there is little consensus about what the new technology should look like.

That has left many counties nationwide in turmoil as they struggle with unproven technology while state regulations remain in flux and the federal government offers minimal guidance.

In some places, voters are facing their third balloting system in five years.

There are others better versed in the details of suspect voting machines than me, but nearly everyone, regardless of ideology, should be able to agree that this is a national problem in need of a remedy.

The LAT piece notes the alarming number of problems. In California, counties have “lurched from one voting system to another as the state has written and rewritten standards.” In Miami, officials no longer trust their 3-year-old electronic machines. In one Pennsylvania county, a court ordered officials to scrap their system because it’s unreliable. Indiana’s largest county has sued the company that sold it electronic voting machines. In Ohio, the opposite is true, with the same company having sued the state. And that’s just a small sampling.

For its part, Congress can do more. Lawmakers passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which sent money to states to upgrade systems, many of which turned out to be unreliable. The law created a federal commission to assist the states, but it was more than a year late in coming into existence, and didn’t release voting-machine guidelines until December 2004, a month after national elections. States, of course, are responsible for their own election systems, but I suspect some state-federal cooperation could improve the situation.

This doesn’t seem to be an issue on the national political radar — few say they’re worried about the integrity of the democratic voting process when asked about the key issues facing the country — but we’re looking at a very serious mess.

January 3, 2006 at 11:14 am

Manually counted paper ballots. They work!

I’m sticking with what I put forward in a thread at John Cole’s a couple weeks back [link ]:

It’s simple. I fill out a clear easy-to-understand and fill-out paper ballot that is optically scanned by me, the voter. My selections show up on the screen, and I then press “yes.” The paper ballot is then handed in, to be used in the event of a recount.

Results are collected electronically and instantaneously, yet verifiable with a paper trail.

In a perfect world, my ballot comes with a tab or the machine spits out a reciept that allows me to go online when I get home and verify my vote counted the way I intended.

Same goes with absentee. Give me a sub with a number that I can put in online to verify my vote was counted.

None of this touchscreen crap. Even if the machine gives me a reciept, how am I to know it’s not just mirroring my selections back to me, and then following some hack algorithm to skew the results at the end of the day?

—

This system uses a paper ballot to generate the vote. It IS the source. It is optically scanned by the voter who then confirms his selections on screen and “submits”.

The original paper ballot is available for a recount, but should, frankly IMO, be used to generate the actual official tally in the first place. Expediancy and logistics might prevent that, but I’d personally rather wait for results and trust them, then need to know who wins before I go to bed.

The reciept or tab I dream of in addition, that can be verified later (ie: tied to a specific voter) is for the voter’s piece of mind ONLY. Though in theory, if the election turned out questionably, and I went online to verify my vote, and saw incorrect candidates, by reciept could be linked back to my original ballot, proving the fraud.

This extra step maybe unneccesary and a nightmare. I’d certainly sacrifice it for a better, more accurate and verifiable original process.

With this system, I’m not even sure why you’d need a margin of error…

I asked then, and again now, what am I missing here? It seems like a foolproof plan. There must be something…

The problem is that counties have little to choose from in terms of systems. And the cost of changing from one system to another is prohibitive. Recently, the county I live in upgraded its voting machine system…from one Diebold machine to another. Why? Because it was cost prohibitive to bring in another system manufacturer.

http://www.dailyherald.com/search/searchstory.asp?id=137477

Sadly, I think we need to take the profit motive out of the process. Even if it means having NASA or some other governmental agency build and supply the voting machines.

We need a paper-based system like the one we have in Ann Arbor, MI. Fill in the little circles, then it gets scanned into a machine.

It would be better if I could see the scanned results, just to verify I checked the right things, but I wonder exactly how that information would be displayed to help the person. It sounds so simple, yet it’s amazing how confused people can get. People will rush along and not check their answers. And if the computer does change a vote here and there, only a manual recount will find the error. How many manual recounts nationwide did we have? Not many. A clever computer algorithm would not raise suspicion. (I have to say I don’t think that people have truly programmed these things to cheat, even though there have been some odd turnouts.)

I took part in a voting machine test a few years ago, where there were 7 different machines. You had to vote the same way on every machine, then record your results and comments. The interfaces were appallingly bad – I write software for a living and if we produced interfaces like those, we’d get laughed out of our market.

The way that you voted, then went on to the next screen, the way you couldn’t see all your selections without scrolling down (many novice computer users don’t know what scrolling is) and even some of the machines that produced a paper receipt for you were poorly, poorly designed.

For example, one printed a paper receipt, then put the receipt up in a little window for you to review. After about 10 seconds, the paper was zipped off into a bin, and I was only about half-way done reviewing my choices.

One used different colors for choices in different races, and had blocky fonts, instead of cleanly laying out the choices in nice boxes for review. They had “Next” buttons but no “Back” buttons, they had touch screens that were not very forgiving, and so on.

One voting machine had a little steering wheel you used to navigate the screens. It took me a few minutes to understand what it did or how it worked. I bet there are a lot of people who would encounter such a machine and just leave the booth and go home rather than ask for help with it. And the rest of the people would hold up everyone else in line while they asked for assistance. You heard about delays in some districts in 2004? You ain’t heard nothing yet if they put one of these steering wheel-navigated machines into action. Nothing will delay voters in lower-educated areas of the country more than to put in hard-to-use computer systems.

I think the only way that we could ensure a good voting machine is to have a non-partisan governmental office like the GAO design and build one, subject to testing by anyone who wants to take a stab at cracking it. I believe this system should be paper-based, where people fill out a circle with a pen, and get a receipt of some kind with their vote.

Then have a nation-wide phase-in for these machines. There are a lot of other things we’d like to spend our money on, but we have to take a look at ourselves and make sure all that democracy we’re supposedly promoting is really working here at home.

I think the first step needs to be to move self-interested parties (e.g., Ken Blackwell, Katherine Harris, et al) from having any direct control over the voting process. We’d find that a lot of these problems would clear up rather dramatically if the foxes no longer guarded the henhouses.

There may be better things to spend money on, but I’d sleep better at night knowing that the people deciding how to spend that money had been duly elected. If we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to invent a reliable, easy-to-use voting system in which we could all have confidence. I can get a paper receipt for my lottery picks – shouldn’t it be as easy to get one for my ballot?

I agree with other posters that perhaps the best way to go would be to have a non-partisan government office take control. Sad that it has come to this, but until we can assure voters that their votes will be properly counted, we’ll have a hard time bringing new voters into the process. Many of the people I know who don’t vote are suspicious of the process, and 2004 only increased their suspicion.

Fixing this may not be at the top of anybody’s “To Do” list right now, but if we wait until October 2008 to start thinking about it we’re all going to be sorry.

Comments are closed.