A vicious circle

[Gary Sisco]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/us...=1&oref=slogin

What it leads to, inevitably, is the continuous electoral campaign.

I can't complain, though, since Bronwyn and I did the same -- voted early by absentee ballot -- last election and likely will again this time. After a while, knowing who you're going to vote (or against or neither), it gets to be silly waiting around for the official date when there'll be no changing of the mind.

[lynn]

I plan to vote today. Totally eliminates the stress of getting to the poles on voting day. I think it allows more people to participate too. I still don't totally trust the voting machines though.

[GoodSpeak]

Mrs. GoodSpeak and I tried the absentee vote thang but I honestly prefer the ritual of going to the polls.

Makes me feel like I'm actually affecting the vote.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by lynn

I still don't totally trust the voting machines though.

One thing I don't understand is the American voters' reverance for the voting machines, especially given all the disturbing items I've read about their easy hackability.
It has been a couple of years or so now that I have been reading about the so-called glitches and as far as I know, nothing substantial has been done to remedy the situation.
I can't believe that the machines are so trusted by so many, considering an alternative, paper ballots, could have easily been implemented since the last election in '04. There were lots of misgivings, from what I understand, about the electronic machine results, and yet....

[Scott Dolan]

Originally Posted by lynn

I plan to vote today. Totally eliminates the stress of getting to the poles on voting day. I think it allows more people to participate too. I still don't totally trust the voting machines though.

You mean the touch screen machines?

If so, I couldn't agree with you more.

[John P. Cooper]

And how about voting places you can barely find?

The last place was situated somewhere in a branch Pasadena library in an area with very little parking in a building where you had to walk through a pantry/broom closet, through a rear entrance to get to the dilapidated voting machines of the 'ink-a-blot' variety in which the lights aboue the machines in the room were not functioning, one ink-a-blot pen was totally dry and leaving NO impressions on the ballot. Totally pathetic. Old people were struggling to get to the building which was not near the parking area. The most convenient entrance was closed off to voters so as not to disturb the patrons of the library. BS.

One sign. People were asking each other where the place was.

Looks like the moved it again. Used to be in a church with 8 parking spaces b4 they moved it to Cal Tech which also sucked.

[Gary Sisco]

Going with voting machines isn't as frightening to me as going with the touch pad computers. The latter leave no paper ballots to count, should a recount be necessary.

I don't understand this issue, really. What's so hard about it? Here, we use paper ballots, mark them with a magic-marker-type pen, then put them through a simple scanner, technology that's been available for many years. If there's controversy, the paper ballots still exist and can be counted. People might say, oh yeah, well you live in a state of small towns, but everyone who votes, votes in a district polling place small enough to make paper recounts simple enough. It's not like the whole of NYC votes in one place.

I read an article the other day about the touch pads and their drawbacks. Let us hope, O hope!, that there aren't any cliff hangers.

I'll likely pick up ballots for us this week and be done with it. I'm not voting for anyone but Bernie Sanders, anyway, and he's far too square to be caught in a scandal or something between now and election day. I'm not voting for any of the gubernatorial candidates because I don't support any of them. I'll vote against a longtime state senator just because I can. The only reason she's been longtime is that no one worthwhile runs against her.

Might's well just get the voting done.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

I don't understand this issue, really. What's so hard about it? Here, we use paper ballots, mark them with a magic-marker-type pen, then put them through a simple scanner, technology that's been available for many years.

We do that here, we did the same in my district in Washington State. I've never used a touch screen machine. In New York City and in Fairfax County in the 90s, they had the booths with the draw curtain and the levers. The old Wizard of Oz-feeling machines, where the opening of the curtain also registered your vote. I guess those are expensive to maintain, but only those things really have the feel of voting to me.

I don't think the technology of voting is a partisan issue. All parties have an interest in the transparent fairness of the system. The problem comes in on the dramatic affordability of these new technologies, which is appealing to local and state election boards. The cheapness is the plus side and plenty of local boards, controlled by Dems or Repubs, want to save tax payer money and enhance their own budgets and reputations. The savings is the plus, but we see the downside as poll workers have to get used to the new machines, voters have a natural wariness of new processes, and actual problems combine with paranoic assertions about the fallibility or hackability of the new way of doing things.

Me, I'm for retaining as much of the old, analog, physical way of doing things as possible--and not just in voting. I've never seen so much as a Xerox machine get really improved by adding digital bells and whistles. True, ATMS have improved our lives, TIVO has improved TV (they say), complicated technologies do add choice and savings into the world. But voting is so simple. And expense may not be the highest value in the process, around which other values like voter trust and reliability are ordered.

Having said that, my cousin works for Diebold in Ohio. So don't kick her out of a job just yet.

[Gary Sisco]

We have booths with curtains, too, but afterward you take your ballot to the scanner. Your name gets checked coming in, when you pick up the ballot, and again as you're leaving. I agree with you that it would be better, if only for reasons of trust and transparency, if they stuck to the manual. Some things ought'nt be done with electrons.

[Gary Sisco]

This is the article I refered to above:

Crash and re-boot
Oct 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition

The wrong kind of voting machine could bring chaos to the mid-term elections

ReutersTHE polls go up, the polls go down and there are still more than three weeks to go: time for any amount of sleaze or terror to influence the voters. But it is quite possible that America's mid-term elections on November 7th will produce a close result, not just in the House of Representatives, where it has long been predicted, but in the Senate too. At which point things could get fraught.

The problem is voting machines. Not the ones with hole-punches and their chads, hanging, swinging and dimpled. Since the debacle of 2000 in Florida federal money to the tune of several billion dollars has been lavished on replacing them. Unfortunately, many have been replaced with new ones that may be even worse. In a close election the prospect of just a handful of the 435 House seats or one or two of the 33 Senate seats at stake being furiously challenged in court is all too plausible. Like the presidency in 2000, the colour of Congress could have to be decided by lawyers.

How could this have happened? Mainly because lots of states and counties went for touch-screen devices, very like ATMs, instead of a much better alternative, optical scanners that count votes marked by hand on paper ballots, rather like lottery forms or multiple-choice exam papers. The good thing about scanners is that the original ballot is by definition available for re-counting. With touch-screens, it isn't. Fortunately, more than half of America's 3,000-odd counties have opted for scanners. But about a third have chosen the touch-screens.

A thermal printer to produce a record is available as an added extra on some touch-screen machines. But when these were tried out, as they have been across the country in primary elections in the past few months, the results were not encouraging. If the paper is put in wrongly, the printer does not print at all. Even when it was the right way round, there were many cases of the paper jamming, tearing or producing unreadable results. The fact that most election officials are unpaid volunteers, very often elderly and with little or no training, also caused difficulties. At any rate, with a touch-screen system the paper-trail is produced by the machine, and so is only as good as the machine. And the machines, it also turns out, may be vulnerable to tampering.

In September three scientists at Princeton University got hold of the most popular touch-screen model and took it and its software to bits. They found serious flaws allowing a competent hacker to infect the machine with a program to transfer votes from one candidate to another. Such a change could be undetectable without a recount (assuming one were possible), and the program could be introduced into the machine far in advance by anyone having access to the machine's memory-card reader for as little as a minute. The readers are protected by a lock, but the lock is a standard one, and keys can be bought on the internet: besides, the keys circulate among election officials. And the researchers found that their program could be spread from machine to machine via the memory-cards. Voting-machine companies make things worse by keeping their software secret: were it published, security experts would be able to assess it and recommend fixes.

Pray for a clear result—and then buy some decent kit
Many people will see this as a conspiracy too far, and perhaps it is. But another problem is that the machines used at polling stations have a tendency to break down. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University who is also an election volunteer, has blogged scarily about his experiences at the primaries in Maryland. (In his case, most of the problems occurred not with the voting machines but with other terminals, designed to ensure that people are entitled to vote and have not voted twice.) Elsewhere, there have been horror stories of votes failing to register or upload, of memory-cards going missing, and of machines crashing and losing stored votes. Only a few such cases can damage confidence badly: and crashes, at the least, cause huge delays.

The solutions are not hard to find: a wholesale switch to paper ballots and optical scanners; more training for election officials; and open access to machine software. But it is too late for any of that this time—and that is a scandal.

******************

It's a little worrisome for any of us who remember the hyper-anxiety and confusion (not to mention the bullshit) of the 2000 election, er, annointment.

Once I had a chance to see one of the actual FL ballots, which were supposed to be so complex, I couldn't for the life of my understand how anyone could have made the wrong choice, unless an absolute idiot who can't follow a huge arrow to a name. But being an idiot is not a reason to discount a vote. You get one chance. Choose wrongly, you choose wrongly.

My father, who was infamous for never having voted "yes" to a tax in his life, once at Town Meeting got confused about the wording of a tax article and voted "yes" by mistake. When he started grousing, everyone cracked up. All through lunch I kept asking him what he'd do if the tax passed by one vote.

It didn't.

[Gary Sisco]

Of course, there's a questionable leap of logic involved with candidates who try to market themselves (I use the verb on purpose) to people who vote early by absentee ballot: that people who've decided to vote early are swayable early. This would be a mistaken assumption in many cases. I'd think it much more likely that the early votes are cast by those who won't be persuaded by any "marketing" that hopes to change their minds. It doesn't seem logical that the hesitant would vote early.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

We have booths with curtains, too, but afterward you take your ballot to the scanner. Your name gets checked coming in, when you pick up the ballot, and again as you're leaving. I agree with you that it would be better, if only for reasons of trust and transparency, if they stuck to the manual. Some things ought'nt be done with electrons.

I think that one of the things which has made the electronic voting machines so accepted is that many more things get voted on with them in any given election, it seems, than were with the paper ballot system. And shiny machines are always seen as being modern and desirable, even if they don't do the job any better.

So, efficiency was trumpeted, opening the door to what was seen as an easier and faster method of voting and then counting the vote.

But, I know that in Canada, which uses paper ballots, from coast to coast, the vote is counted and broadcast the same night, with any discrepencies sorted out within days.

Yes, it's true that our population is around 32 million compared to many times more than that in the U.S.
But, that only means that the U.S. has a larger pool of people to calculate the vote, after the polls are closed.
The electronic voting system, to my mind, set up a straw man.
In other words, it fixed something that wasn't broken.

As we saw in the 2000 and again in the 2004 Elections, any speed and efficiency which machines were supposed to provide was cancelled out by the controversy generated by interpretation of the results.

Voting machines are not only a multi-million dollar business, but a source of much anxiety regarding their apparent ease of hackability.

Just the possibility that the results could be pre-determined by unscrupulous politicians and their henchmen should certainly have prodded honest candidates to more action to reassure the electorate of their integrity than I have seen over the last five years.

But, it hasn't.

Those who question the accuracy of electronic voting machine results are seen as paranoid, not sticklers for accuracy and fairness.

It's probably too late to do anything about the mid-terms, but the upcoming Presidential Elections are still at risk, if even some of what is being said about electronic voting is true.

The question that plagues me is why either the Democrats or the Republicans feel that it's necessary to jig the vote, if what they say on the campaign trail is true?

But, it seems that bamboozling the voter is people like Karl Rove's job. If an honest campaign were the goal, how many would still be standing for election?

[Gary Sisco]

Believe it or not, there are still many millions of Americans who haven't the experience of looking at a computer screen every day.

I view this whole issue as another example of how Americans react to any given disaster, namely, irrationally. Their response often ends up creating more problems than it solves (zero tolerance policies are another example; I call them zero judgment policies). Instead of just fessing up about how a certain number of people in Florida were just too stupid to follow a large arrow to a name, they go wild in some other, not even necessarily rational direction.

Nothing's easier to count or check than a paper ballot with an inked X in this box or that.

Florida's problem was never one of technology and hence there is no techological fix for it.

The fear that is rational about the touch screens is the lack of a paper trail.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

The fear that is rational about the touch screens is the lack of a paper trail.

Agree, absolutely. There must be a verifiable record of the vote.
Asking the electorate to just trust us is crazy, given the record of the last few years.
The number of Americans who trust their politicians is smaller and smaller, bordering on miniscule.
I think that they are more likely to feel a certain helplessness.
That's not what a working Democracy is supposed to do for their citizens. Democracy is a participatory system and the citizenry are dangerously close to throwing up their hands in despair.
If their votes are not counted properly, "why cast them?", some seem to be saying.
Large segments of the citizenry seem to be being dropped off the voter lists for capricious reasons, only to be restored after the election is over.
What's up with that?
Inefficient polling stations seem to be numerous, sometimes hard to locate, with huge lineups, and people being turned away for strange reasons.
Isn't voting supposed to be easily accessable for all eligable voters?
And the list of questions goes on, the more time passes before the question of the veracity of the magical electronic machines is resolved, if it ever is.

[Jazzzoline]

Paper ballot doesn’t guarantee fraud less votes. A friend once told me they had to move a house for building a road in the village where he lived. When doing so, they found out the house basement was filled wit boxes full of paper votes.
It seems dishonesty always finds its way.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Jazzzoline

Paper ballot doesn’t guarantee fraud less votes. A friend once told me they had to move a house for building a road in the village where he lived. When doing so, they found out the house basement was filled wit boxes full of paper votes.
It seems dishonesty always finds its way.

While it's true that dishonesty will of course find a way to bypass most attempts to assure the citizenry that their votes will count, that's no reason for everyone to throw up their hands and just accept that they may be wasting their time voting.
The vote is the only voice that most people have, to determine how their country will behave on the world stage.
People have died over the years to get the right to vote.
Who are we to dismiss their herculean efforts, just because our generation takes that right for granted?

We still put our money in the bank, even though banks are robbed.
We still shop, even though theft makes the prices of goods much higher.
We still get married, even though stats tell us that fully half of marriages fail.
We still tell the truth, even though we know that we are being lied to by those who lead us, on a regular basis, from the top down.
Although there is dishonesty all around us, we can't just throw in the towel on everything that makes us a civilized society and let the barbarians over-run us.
We can't just trust our leaders, passing up the chance, with our vote, to have our voices heard.

[Gary Sisco]

Nothing guarantees anything. But paper ballots can at least be recounted.

The only thing that can or has ever guaranteed democracy is a people willing to fight for it. Nothing else. Nowhere, at any time in history.