NationStates Jolt Archive

Ever feel like this stuff is circular? Florida, whose shitty punch cards in 2000 helped us along the road to electronic, paper-trail-less voting machines in the US, may have just delivered the killing blow to those selfsame machines (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/us/02voting.html?ei=5094&en=9f5342a78ef82375&hp=&ex=1170478800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print). And a Republican governor is helping do it, too (for those of you who say I never give the other side any credit).

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 1 — Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Those of you who have been around for a while know this is a pet issue for me. I've been on the anti-black box voting bandwagon since nearly the beginning, and I've long felt that optical scan machines, given the proper safeguards and random audits, are the best compromise for machine counting and paper ballots. It's a system that's designed to fail well, by which I mean that when something goes wrong--and something always goes wrong--the system doesn't crash and burn everything around it. Votes don't just disappear into the ether if the scanning machines stop working--there's something to count at the end of the day.

So yeah--Florida may well be the Bermuda triangle of voting, as one person in the article notes, but in this case, maybe, just maybe, the ship's gonna make it through the other side.

I hope so, a democracy can not function without sufficient checks and balances.

I take back half the bad things I've said about Florida.

i still cant get over that the USA use Voting Machines

I take back half the bad things I've said about Florida.

So do I, and I live here. ;)

i still cant get over that the USA use Voting Machines

If memory serves the Dutch used them as well...

Kind of saddened ... done right electronic measures like this could be more secure, less prone to error and all in all a good thing. But when you buy the "lowest bidder" in devices you often get what you pay for ...

If memory serves the Dutch used them as well...

well we just use paper ballots

well we just use paper ballots
Yeah well Floridians apparently have problems with them too ...

Though with a population of 300 mil + it is starting to get enticing to use them ...

Yeah well Floridians apparently have problems with them too ...

Though with a population of 300 mil + it is starting to get enticing to use them ...

WTF they must be messed up

WTF they must be messed up

Yeah not the brightest bulbs

We use a "complete the arrow" style up here

you basically have


--- ----> Politician name

You fill in the blank for the one you vote for

Pretty easy

Edit it appears to be taking my "spaces" out of the post ... the blank was suposed to be bigger lol

Edit2 like this
http://www.uhavavote.org/votingguide/arrow_writein.jpg

The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.
That's how they do it here and I don't understand how or why paper ballots would be done any other way.

Yeah not the brightest bulbs

We use a "complete the arrow" style up here

you basically have


--- ----> Politician name

You fill in the blank for the one you vote for

Pretty easy

Edit it appears to be taking my "spaces" out of the post ... the blank was suposed to be bigger lol

Edit2 like this
http://www.uhavavote.org/votingguide/arrow_writein.jpg

near the bottom is what ours look like
http://www.waec.wa.gov.au/voting/content.asp?section=voting#correctballot

Ever feel like this stuff is circular? Florida, whose shitty punch cards in 2000 helped us along the road to electronic, paper-trail-less voting machines in the US, may have just delivered the killing blow to those selfsame machines (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/us/02voting.html?ei=5094&en=9f5342a78ef82375&hp=&ex=1170478800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print). And a Republican governor is helping do it, too (for those of you who say I never give the other side any credit).



Those of you who have been around for a while know this is a pet issue for me. I've been on the anti-black box voting bandwagon since nearly the beginning, and I've long felt that optical scan machines, given the proper safeguards and random audits, are the best compromise for machine counting and paper ballots. It's a system that's designed to fail well, by which I mean that when something goes wrong--and something always goes wrong--the system doesn't crash and burn everything around it. Votes don't just disappear into the ether if the scanning machines stop working--there's something to count at the end of the day.

So yeah--Florida may well be the Bermuda triangle of voting, as one person in the article notes, but in this case, maybe, just maybe, the ship's gonna make it through the other side.
I can see it now. We will have to invent words to describe partial marks, multiple marks, erroneous marks, almost-made, but not quite visible marks...The possibilities are as endless as they were with chads.

I can see it now. We will have to invent words to describe partial marks, multiple marks, erroneous marks, almost-made, but not quite visible marks...The possibilities are as endless as they were with chads.

Better that than the un-recountable ballots your state uses.

Yeah not the brightest bulbs

We use a "complete the arrow" style up here

you basically have


--- ----> Politician name

You fill in the blank for the one you vote for

Pretty easy

Edit it appears to be taking my "spaces" out of the post ... the blank was suposed to be bigger lol

Edit2 like this
http://www.uhavavote.org/votingguide/arrow_writein.jpg
Normally we have a paper ballot system, where we just put a check mark beside the candidate/incumbent's name, fold it and slip it into the ballot box, but, in last year's municipal elections, we used the above system mentioned.

The paper is large and you have to be accurate. If you misfire, the machine can't read it. Even if your line is lousy, they keep the paper ballot and put it in a box so that if a hand recount is requested, it can be done.

Better that than the un-recountable ballots your state uses.

Maybe so, but I thought the idea behind the electronic machines was to eliminate the stochastic nature of punch cards. Now, y'all are potentially jumping right back into the same set of problems that plagued the 2000 elections.

The better move would have been to improve the electronic machines so that voting was both deterministic and results were reproducible. I don't think that's an impossible, or even difficult, task to perform. After all, we can send a man to the moon, we should be able to count votes.

we had a new machine this year that i liked very much. the poll workers printed out a custom ballot with only the candidates/races/referenda that the individual voter could vote on. the voter put the ballot into the counting machine that let you know whether or not it had been accepted.

the rules had the poll workers verify that the number of ballots put into the machine were the same as the number given out so that the idiots who put the paper in the wrong place while no one was looking still got their ballot counted.

and of course in new mexico no one is turned away from the polls. if you show up, you get to vote. those not on the rolls are given a provisional ballot that is counted later if it turns out that you really were eligible to vote.

we had a new machine this year that i liked very much. the poll workers printed out a custom ballot with only the candidates/races/referenda that the individual voter could vote on. the voter put the ballot into the counting machine that let you know whether or not it had been accepted.

the rules had the poll workers verify that the number of ballots put into the machine were the same as the number given out so that the idiots who put the paper in the wrong place while no one was looking still got their ballot counted.

and of course in new mexico no one is turned away from the polls. if you show up, you get to vote. those not on the rolls are given a provisional ballot that is counted later if it turns out that you really were eligible to vote.

Unfair. Your state should be forced to mess up voting just like every other state.

In principle, electronic voting machines are superior in terms of cost and efficiency, but they are still too insecure to really be used on a large scale. They'll need more improvements and refinements before they will really be able to work on a large scale. We'll eventually switch to them, but the present system simply isn't well suited to them.

Right now, they're just too risky and vulnerable to use.

Yeah.... e voting machine aren't particularly great. Especially if your government spends €50 million on them, they fail to work, fail to be rolled out nationally, get delayed for several years, then have the company who supplies them go into liquidation.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2007/0202/1170363380292.html

What's wrong with this ol' thing?
http://guineapig.article7.co.uk/imager/pencil.jpg


How the hell can you go wrong with this kind of system? Tick the bloody box!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Preferential_ballot.svg

and of course in new mexico no one is turned away from the polls. if you show up, you get to vote. those not on the rolls are given a provisional ballot that is counted later if it turns out that you really were eligible to vote.

To be fair, most states never count provisional ballots and absentee ballots at all. If the election is close, they will be counted. Otherwise, they aren't. It pisses me off because it means that the men and women serving in our military rarely get their votes counted.


Personally, I think the electronic voting would work well - better than paper ballots even - as long as we kept a paper record of the votes for possible recount later. An electronic voting machine could quite easily print out your votes, you could validate that everything was correct, and then fwd feed the printer into a locked box (or hand a paper copy to a poll worker). That way, the instant electronic vote is there, but if memory gets lost or there is some question as to whether or not the count was accurate, the validated paper copies would also be available.

Maybe so, but I thought the idea behind the electronic machines was to eliminate the stochastic nature of punch cards. Now, y'all are potentially jumping right back into the same set of problems that plagued the 2000 elections.

The better move would have been to improve the electronic machines so that voting was both deterministic and results were reproducible. I don't think that's an impossible, or even difficult, task to perform. After all, we can send a man to the moon, we should be able to count votes.

The optical scan system I used in San Francisco was pretty solid--the scanner wouldn't accept a ballot that had the above-mentioned smudges or the like. If it kicked the ballot, a poll worker looked at it and handed it back to the voter and pointed out what was wrong. If it was fixable, the voter fixed it and ran it again. If not, he got a new ballot and gave it another shot. If the ballot was good the first time, it automatically shot into a lock box.

For federal elections, Canada uses paper ballot counted by hand. The only machine counting I've ever seen is civic elections in Vancouver.

To be fair, most states never count provisional ballots and absentee ballots at all. If the election is close, they will be counted. Otherwise, they aren't. It pisses me off because it means that the men and women serving in our military rarely get their votes counted.
.

in this last election, they had to count every single ballot in newmexico's first district. it was that close. they didnt declare a winner until the end of november.

the new mexico secretary of state got a ration of shit for it but she had ads on the tv every day telling people what their voting rights were. it was an excellent education campaign.

in this last election, they had to count every single ballot in newmexico's first district. it was that close. they didnt declare a winner until the end of november.

Indeed. Close elections are when they actually do it. It just irks me that so many votes go uncounted because districts don't think they'll make a difference. At the very least, I'd like to have a truly accurate vote so that we can determine just how popular a given candidate was. The votes may current stand at 1000:500 with only 250 provisional/absentee ballots (on the small scale so that I don't have to do big numbers =), but that leaves the election suggesting that the voters support one candidate by a 2:1 margin. If you count those other votes, it could turn out to be more like a 4:3 margin.

The optical scan system I used in San Francisco was pretty solid--the scanner wouldn't accept a ballot that had the above-mentioned smudges or the like. If it kicked the ballot, a poll worker looked at it and handed it back to the voter and pointed out what was wrong. If it was fixable, the voter fixed it and ran it again. If not, he got a new ballot and gave it another shot. If the ballot was good the first time, it automatically shot into a lock box.

Okay. My ignorance of voting technology is exposed. That sounds pretty safe.

I take back half the bad things I've said about Florida.

I don't.

Its funny because the city I was born in is famous for dead people voting.

Okay. My ignorance of voting technology is exposed. That sounds pretty safe.

De nada. Besides, all the old-school ways of rigging an election are still in play. Posting fewer machines in the polling places of your opponent's district (easy to do if you're the Sec State, a la Ken Blackwell in 2004), posting fliers telling immigrants they can't vote or they'll go to jail, posting fliers with the wrong election date, voter intimidation, etc. No machine is going to stop that kind of stuff.

But voting machines save paper...and saving paper saves trees right?

So I guess it comes down to democracy or trees. Quite a dilemma.

The optical scan system I used in San Francisco was pretty solid--the scanner wouldn't accept a ballot that had the above-mentioned smudges or the like. If it kicked the ballot, a poll worker looked at it and handed it back to the voter and pointed out what was wrong. If it was fixable, the voter fixed it and ran it again. If not, he got a new ballot and gave it another shot. If the ballot was good the first time, it automatically shot into a lock box.

You don't see a problem with a poll worker looking at people's votes?
That ought to be a last resort, surely. Why not just destroy the failed ballot and tell the voter to try again?

I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist - but I don't like electronic voting machines. Some of those results in the last election were mighty hinky.

I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist - but I don't like electronic voting machines. Some of those results in the last election were mighty hinky.

There are easier ways to steal an election than by rigging election machines. My main concern is that there's no real backup in case something goes wrong mechanically, and something always seems to go wrong.

It (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantron) works for tests in schools...

Better that than the un-recountable ballots your state uses.
Or some guy with a wireless Laptop entering 1000 dead people into the database.

What's wrong with this ol' thing?
http://guineapig.article7.co.uk/imager/pencil.jpg



Nothing. Pencils are fuckin sexy.

Oh, I had the opportunity to do online voting in my city's municipal election. Twas pretty convenient and hassle-free! :)

De nada. Besides, all the old-school ways of rigging an election are still in play. Posting fewer machines in the polling places of your opponent's district (easy to do if you're the Sec State, a la Ken Blackwell in 2004), posting fliers telling immigrants they can't vote or they'll go to jail, posting fliers with the wrong election date, voter intimidation, etc. No machine is going to stop that kind of stuff.
Solve the problems in manageable steps. First, get the inside of the polls squared away, then work on the external problems. Personally, I think that the "wrong date" method is the most clever and the biggest test of whether or not the targeted people should be voting. I mean, if you don't even know when to vote...