in other news: "MT Posting Protocol Still Not Working On Unfogged."
(sorry, couldn't resist commenting on the double post)
Hey, it's tough being internet illiterate. Apparently, in order to delete an entry, you have to rebuild the site, which sounds scary and which I have no understanding of. I did it anyway, on the grounds that if I bother Becks every time I need to clean up after myself I'll never learn, but it takes a couple of minutes.
If only Bush v. Gore were good law, this would be an equal protection violation.
Caveat 1: It's possible that the holding in Bush v. Gore depends on a change in procedures after the date of the election.
Caveat 2: There have to be some machines in Ohio that predictably work better than the really bad ones.
Based on this I think you're right.
Actually, you only have to rebuild the indexes, which only takes a few seconds.
See the first sentence of comment 4. I have absolutely no idea of what I'm doing with the site on any level beyond making posts and deleting spam.
Last caveat: It seems clear that Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia would have decided it on the grounds (explained in their concurrence) of the so-called "independent state legislature" doctrine, if they could have gotten a majority for it. It's possible that that element was also essential to the holding. It isn't, as far as I know, present here.
And yes on Bush v. Gore. I can't understand how its holding that recount procedures which might possibly produce statistically distinguishable results in different counties are an unacceptable violation of the equal protection clause doesn't mandate that all voting procedures in every state be absolutely standardized statewide.
Why the push for electronic voting anyway? What's it supposed to accomplish? Not that I want to be scratching on pottery shards or anything, but it seems that any electronic system already requires a paper backup for verification anyway. So... what's the purpose?
Wasn't the argument for electronic voting something along like: our paper ballots seem to produce all those chads, the NY machines are steam-age and keep breaking, and, dammit, everyone knows how to use ATM machines?
Instant gratification on election night.
Why the push for electronic voting anyway?
Because certain companies with heavy lobbying presences stand to make a shitload of money off of it.
I voted Tuesday in Charlottesville, VA, where we use an electronic machine that boasts an iPod-like clickwheel. After the nice blue-haired lady explained how to operate the device, I commented it was "sorta like an iPod."
She stared back with a look of shock-and-awe, seemingly perplexed that a "young person" bothered to show up at 8am for city council elections and/or lamenting that I represented future of Amuricka.
(Not sure if it was a Diebold, though...)
And I think there's a certain "technology gud!!1!1!" appeal to a lot of people. As Henry Farrell points out, a lot of conservatarians are techno-optimists; they believe unfettered technology will solve all problems, which paradoxically can put them against science when it delivers pessimistic conclusions.
[On preview: what is this "iPod" of which you speak, sonny?]
Oh, okay. Well, fuck that then. If we're going to waste a lot of taxpayer money, then we should be getting, I dunno, an improvement on the old system?
If we keep screwing up elections, we'll deserve international election observers, not that the nationalists will ever allow that to happen. What the fuck happened to HAVA? Did all that money disappear into slush funds?
Don't get me wrong, I like technology. And if the new technology would, say, let absentee balloters just log in and vote from out of state, then it might be worth the expense. But, really, are we suffering horrid delays in determining who the president will be now? (Court challenges aside.)
Oh, and I purposefully did not use cui bono? I'm not expecting the push for electronic voting is really some evil conspiracy, but I just wasn't seeing the point of the push.
I just don't understand why it's so hard to get these systems to work. The ATM system seems to work, and I don't see what's sufficiently different about it that we couldn't adapt it to voting. It seems like we could practically just post a notice that said "Checking = Candidate X, Savings = Candidate Y." What is so hard? tom, care to weigh in?
The whole thing is stupid. Optical scan machines, where you connect the arrow or fill in the bubble, are cheap, fast, widely available, and have a built-in, verifiable audit trail in the form of the actual ballots that you feed into the machine. The only - ONLY - benefit that the Diebold touch machines offer is the savings on the printing of ballots (which is negligible), and that is directly offset by the lack of a verifiable audit trail.
This should be a no-brainer, which is why I can't help but suspect shenanigans.
what is this "iPod" of which you speak, sonny?
[Old-timey radio-reporter voice]: It's like a phonograph, see? And you can put it in your slacks, see? And head on down to the boardwalk, see? For a night on the town with the betties, see?
It's all modern! And cool! And we like pushing buttons! It's like voting on T.V.!
I think that was the rationale.
Seriously, I don't think there's anything conceptually hard about it -- the execution just keeps on sucking. You need some form of paper ballot to make fraud bulky and laborious, but beyond that, there's nothing much to it. I really don't quite understand why results have been so bad.
It's like a phonograph, see? And you can put it in your slacks, see?
I don't see what's sufficiently different about it that we couldn't adapt it to voting
I honestly think that the answer is simply, the banks have a very strong motivation to make sure their machines calculate #s properly, and when it comes to voting machines, a lot of people have strong motivations to make sure they don't.
It's kind of weird, really, given how much emphasis is put on paper trails in the law, that anyone ever thought these machines were a good idea. But, hey.
I really don't quite understand why results have been so bad.
That's just it, LB. Somebody obviously wants a system that will make fraud easier. There is simply no other explanation for resisting an audit trail.
I'm not so sure I'm happy with the optical scan bubble system. Sure, everyone who's been through a state school in the past fifteen years won't have much of a problem, but so much of the voting population is old.
Is that a myth about getting 150 points on the SAT just for filling in your name and school correctly?
The only - ONLY - benefit that the Diebold touch machines offer is the savings on the printing of ballots (which is negligible), and that is directly offset by the lack of a verifiable audit trail.
Actually there is the issue of accessibility. People who can't hold a pencil or stylus but who would be able to use an electronic machine (properly accessibilized) would benefit by being able to vote without someone in the booth to assist them.
Optical scan machines, where you connect the arrow or fill in the bubble, are cheap, fast, widely available, and have a built-in, verifiable audit trail in the form of the actual ballots that you feed into the machine
If you click through the story, Diebold (with the help of the Ohio election people) managed to screw these up too. One of the problems was that Diebold optical scan readers couldn't read the ballots printed. They were laid out wrong or something.
27: Beatrice!
(Bonus points for linking to a U.Va. server.)
JM, I don't think you're getting points for bubbling your name in. The deal, I believe, is that SAT scores are measured in standard deviations, 500 being the mean and 100 points for each standard deviation away from it, so by the time you're down to three standard deviations below the mean, the test just isn't trying to measure your performance, just like it can't measure your performance any more than 3 SDs above it. That could be wrong.
I didn't quite believe the points for filling in your name correctly thing either, but it fits in with my irrational loathing for everything associated with ETS, with which I believe some of you are already familiar.
For god's sake, what's wrong with having large print bubble forms, and then hand-counting the ones that are marked with, say, an X instead of filled in properly? Or writing software that will fill in the bubbles for you without filing a vote, then print out a ballot you can look over before putting it in the official box?
34: That sounds right. In fact, on the newly expanded SAT I assume the lowest possible score is 600.
For god's sake, what's wrong with having large print bubble forms, and then hand-counting the ones that are marked with, say, an X instead of filled in properly? Or writing software that will fill in the bubbles for you without filing a vote, then print out a ballot you can look over before putting it in the official box?
Nothing at all. I was just saying that accessibility is a reason other than the ONLY one apostropher asserted for wanting to use electronic voting machines.
That wasn't really a rant at you, just a cry out to the universe in general.
Why not vote using the same system as the Academy? They did a bang-up job this year selecting Crash.
*cough*
That wasn't really a rant at you, just a cry out to the universe in general.
Well now I don't feel special at all.
How about importing Japanese voting machines?
No links between the manufacturers and US politicians, and I'm sure those will work.
it seems that any electronic system already requires a paper backup for verification anyway
Ha ha ha ha ha!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
*cough*
Oh, if only. There's a (small, but not absent) chance that a state-level election in 2004 was decided here in NC by a voting machine simply losing a few thousand votes. There was no paper trail. The machine was "programmed wrong," it was said, so that it couldn't hold the number of votes that were cast using it. The guy who won that election is now one of only two Republicans on the Council of State, and the first Republican to hold that office in, oh, I dunno, decades? Century and a half? Something like that.
The only justification for electronic voting machines is increased accessibility - larger print, touch-screens, even voice recognition. However, they are almost universally designed to store the vote in a local database to be consolidated with other databases and tabulated at the end of the polling period. Very few of them produce paper receipts, and the ones that do are not producing them for audit purposes.
The proper system would be one in which an electronic voting machine were used to enable accessibility and to produce a filled out paper ballot at the end of a voter's time in the booth. That ballot would then be verified by the voter before being placed in a scanner/line-reader/bubble-reader/whatever so that it is the paper ballot that is counted, and is available for hand recounts, not the computer. However, there is nowhere I know of that is using this sytem, and I don't even think there are any machines made that are capable of being used in such a system.
Otherwise, the good ol' NC way - connect the line, scan the page - is the best way available at this time.
Anyone who advocates a machine that stores the vote in a software database is trying to sell you a stolen election. It is that simple. I work in the computer security field. If anyone thinks the electronic voting machines in use right now are safe or secure, I have got a hell of a lot of land I'd like to sell them.
I tried to talk out how to do secure online voting a couple of weeks ago on my own blog, and afterwards I have arrived at the conclusion that there are still a number of big questions looming over it to the point that I would lobby against it if it were proposed using today's technology. I think far bigger questions are still looming over the use of electronic machines that store votes locally on the drive, if that indicates to you how strongly I oppose paperless electronic balloting.
Your comparison to the ATM is a valid one, except for this: money can be refunded, replaced or recovered. There's a reason why banks have policies that you can't be held liable for the fraudulent activities of others that happen to involve your accounts. The banks' systems can be gotten around quite easily, and are quite frequently, but nobody screams because they can always get their money back later.
Votes that are stolen, once certified, are gone forever.
This is not an academic question, either. BlackBoxVoting.org is a great site to learn more about on-going investigations and questions of intent on the part of the makers and the buyers of this equipment (unannounced visits by Diebold to access voting machines when precinct managers are out of town, spurious or disputed results, machine serial numbers changing without explanation, all kinds of fun stuff). In February they released the results of a study and investigation they conducted regarding the electronic voting machines in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2004 election. Take a guess how many errors showed up in the logs of 40 machines? (Hint: It starts with 1 and is followed by five zeroes.)
How about importing Japanese voting machines?
Unfortunately that would render the election results inscrutable.
Anyone who advocates a machine that stores the vote in a software database is trying to sell you a stolen election. It is that simple.
RMcMP preaches truth. I know less about computer security than he does, but I can flatter myself that I probably know as much about computer software and networks in general, and the current electronic voting systems frighten and enrage me.
I agree with 44 anout he proper system. I'm pretty well convinced that electronic voting is a bad idea, but I know why I supported some sort of electronic voting, initially--though NOT over the internet. I wnted everyone to see a pop-up window that said, "Are you sure that you want to vote for Pat Buchanan?"
I voted once in a small town in Maine with about 400 registered voters. It was a real kick. There were tow permanent wooden voting booths with curtains in teh town hall which was only ever opened on election day.
It was a Democratic, primary, so there weren't many choices on the ballot, but the ballot was pretty simple. It was a small piece of paper, less than 8 1/2 x 11, and I did, indeed, mark an X in a box next to the name of my preferred candidate--Bradley, ahem. Then I stuck it in a wood box.