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Post Info TOPIC: Electronic Voting Machines
Do you trust electronic voting machines [9 vote(s)]

Implicitly
0.0%
Hypothetically there could be problems, but I don't think there's much to get worked up about
33.3%
I realize that they have problems, but they are a solution to so many more problems that they're worth it
11.1%
I'm not sure
0.0%
I distrust them somewhat
11.1%
I think they need a lot of work before they're ready for prime time
22.2%
I think they're a bad idea, and there's no way to make them corruption free
22.2%


Head Chef

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Electronic Voting Machines


I got my sample ballot in the mail recently, and I discovered that my county is now using electronic voting machines. I must say that I'm really unhappy about that fact. I know for a fact how easy it is to fool those machines, and how impossible it is to recover an accurate vote count afterwards. I'm not basing my opinion purely off press reports, either. I've worked professionally with voting machines.

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Profuse Pontificator

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Count me in as an opponent.  Paper ballots don't lie (hanging chads to the contrary).

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Senior Member

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I am fine with electronic voting machines, especially when they also provide a paper printout.  We already use electronic information for everything we do, even important things like bank loans.


How often when you fill up, do you pass on receiving a receipt of one sort or another.  I think most of the issues raised regarding electonic voting machines don't have the weight of reality behind them.



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Head Chef

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The scale of issue is what makes it a problem. If someone sniffs out your credit card number, you're inconvenienced because you have to change numbers and, perhaps, challenge charges on your card. Even if someone sniffs out all the credit card numbers issued by a bank, the bank has certain procedures and everyone gets issued a new card. They've dealt with the issue before, and they can contain the damage. Even if they have to absorb the cost of a large number of fraudulent charges, it's not the end of the world.
However, the consequences if someone fixes an election are very serious. Sure, it's happened countless times over the years. Ballot box stuffing is a common way of going about this. But the nature of electronic voting machines makes it so much easier to do.
First, there's the motivation. Surely you can understand the temptation certain people would have to fix, say, a congressional election. It doesn't even need to be that egregious a change to tip the scales. Although we have seen egregious fraud in some counties that use electronic voting machines, such as more people voting than registered voters which live in that county.
Second, it's so incredibly hard to track. With a paper ballot, you have to modify, deface, or destroy it during a recount in order to get it to not count or count a different way. With electronic voting machines, it's a matter of changing a few bits. And due to the way the machines are implemented, you cannot tell what the results were before being changed, so even if you prove fraud, the best you can do is hold a new election, because you'll never find out what the real results were.
True, more and more voting machines now print out a paper record. But those aren't worth, well, the paper they're printed on. I know that at least some of them, and logically all of them probably do it, print out a barcode with each receipt. But that barcode does not tie the vote to a specific voter. It just contains, in computer readable format, the contents of the vote. If you're telling the machine to register 500 extra votes for Candidate B, it really isn't that hard to tell it to print out 500 extra receipts. That's much easier than trying to stuff extra ballots in the box while your fellow election judges are looking on. In fact, I don't know how it's handled in your county, but in mine the election judge is not supposed to, at any point, put the ballot in the box for the person, or even to touch the ballot at any point after the voter has voted.

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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
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Senior Member

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Hence the paper reciepts.  With more than one political party involved, everyone will be looking at the results.  Auditing the machines if you will.


Not as easy as you indicate.  Especially when all program changes are automatically logged.



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Head Chef

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The paper receipts are essentially worthless. They can be produced much more quickly and easily than paper ballots can be filled out and stuck in the ballot box.
And the system logging is really easy to get past in many ways. There have been many studies done proving their lack of security. But I'm not basing my opinion just off those studies. I've worked in Quality Assurance on certain of these machines.

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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
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Not really, for instance, you present the paper, and then you can recieve the printout of how you voted.  They might be able to change the vote, but they cannot change your mind.  So you could, along with the other people audited, state clearly that this was NOT your vote.


In the end you actually verify the audit.


 



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Head Chef

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Why change existing votes? By far the simplest thing to do is to add votes. This has clearly been done in certain elections which used electronic voting machines. There have been elections using said machines where the number of votes cast exceeded the number of registered voters in that county. Granted, people from other counties casting provisional votes in your county could inflate the numbers somewhat. But there is always a large percentage of registered voters who do not vote, and it is beyond belief that the number of provisional voters could not only make up for that lack, but exceed the number of registered voters by a significant margin.
Adding printed receipts does not fix such a problem. Sure, you can verify that your vote was recorded correctly. But since they cannot discover who cast a vote, they cannot track down every voter and verify how they voted. So how do they verify which of those votes are fraudulent? If there are only 10,000 registered voters (making up an example), and 12,000 votes were cast, do you just throw out 2,000 at random?

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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
- Samuel Adams


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Adding votes doesn't work.  The vote itself has to tie to a person and address.  Now if you make up 5 or 6 thousand addresses in a small district (which would have an impact), and an audit is made, and the sampling shows made up addresses and names, you still end up being found out.


And really, its not that different from the Chicago elections in which entire graveyards were voting, or in Orange County where Sanchez won her election due to illegals voting.  I think the more pressing problem isn't the software, but proper ID.



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Head Chef

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Jeffery_LQ1W wrote:

Adding votes doesn't work.  The vote itself has to tie to a person and address.  Now if you make up 5 or 6 thousand addresses in a small district (which would have an impact), and an audit is made, and the sampling shows made up addresses and names, you still end up being found out.


And really, its not that different from the Chicago elections in which entire graveyards were voting, or in Orange County where Sanchez won her election due to illegals voting.  I think the more pressing problem isn't the software, but proper ID.





You only need to tie a vote to an address and person when the voter shows up and is getting his card or access number to go to the machine and vote. That is, when they're verifying that you are registered to vote. But even then, you can register for a provisional ballot. Theoretically those can be challenged. In practice, I don't know of a single case where they have been successfully challenge. So it would be easy, for instance, for a non-citizen to vote.
But all of that is neither here nor there. The vote, when it is entered into a system, is not tied to a specific voter or address. It becomes completely anonymous. Besides, the true problem is not with a corrupt election judge printing out a few extra numbers or preparing a few extra cards and using them to vote. That's through the front door and small scale. The true problem is using any of a number of proven methods to hack into the machine and add a lot of votes at once.
You're right, that ballot box stuffing, by one method or another, is nothing new. What's new is the massive scale of fraud that this allows.

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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
- Samuel Adams


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No, that is not accurate.  When an audit occurs, the vote can be traced back to the person who voted and their address can be verified.  That is what happened in FL with the chads, in fact there isn't a real difference beside the fact that "chads" are not secure and electronic voting does not leave you "hanging".

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Head Chef

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Jeffery_LQ1W wrote:

No, that is not accurate.  When an audit occurs, the vote can be traced back to the person who voted and their address can be verified.  That is what happened in FL with the chads, in fact there isn't a real difference beside the fact that "chads" are not secure and electronic voting does not leave you "hanging".



Do you have a source to support your statement? I may not be right about all counties. But as far as electronic voting machines, my experience with the machines has been that no personal information is passed on to the voting machine. The only thing you get is a number or a card that determines, based on our precinct, what ballot you should get. I have even examined the data structures of the information stored on those cards, so I can speak with authority on what is or is not stored there.
Also, I trained as an election judge, back when my county was not yet using electronic voting machines. The procedure is that you verify the name on the list, their address, and which ballot to issue them. You do not record the serial number of the ballot they got with their personally identifying information. You simply issue them a ballot of the correct type for their precinct.
It may not be that way in all counties, and I'd be willing to believe that not all electronic voting machines operate exactly the way the ones I used do. But since what you state is contrary to my experience, I would need a source before I reconsider my stand.

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If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
- Samuel Adams


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Specific recommendations include requiring "automatic random audits of voter-verified paper records," which involves manually counting those paper records from randomly chosen machines or precincts and comparing those manual tallies with machine results.


"This report is required reading for anyone who wants to be able to talk intelligently about voting system security. It lays the foundation for improvements in the conduct of elections for years to come, including new security standards, new ways of evaluating the equipment, and new procedures," said Verified Voting's founder, Prof. David Dill. "It confirms everything we have been saying for several years. It is time for Congress to pass legislation to require secure, auditable voting systems, and for the Federal Elections Assistance Commission to get serious about developing standards that deal with the very real threats to our voting systems." Read more...


From http://www.verifiedvoting.org/


I underlined the salient part to more clearly explain my position.  Such audits are not automatically required in all states (but are in CA), but they can and often are put forward by voters on certain issues, especially in close elections (I think the website is a little misleading in that aspect).


We go through various audits after every election.  I am very aware of what is going on here in regard to electronic voting.


 


 



-- Edited by Jeffery_LQ1W at 12:40, 2006-10-17

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