FIXING THE VOTE: New Hampshire presidential primary
ballot.
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Voters in the recent Iowa caucuses and Tuesday's New Hampshire primary will rely on paper ballots as they have for generations. In the very next primary on January 21, South Carolinians will vote with backlit touch-screen computers.
In an age of electronic banking and online college degrees, why hasn't the rest of the nation gone the way of the Palmetto State? The reason is simple and resonates with the contentious debate that has yet to be resolved after at least 15 years of wrangling over the issue of electronic voting. No one has yet figured out a straightforward method of ensuring that one of the most revered democratic institutions—in this case, electing a U.S. president—can be double-checked for fraud, particularly when paperless e-voting systems are used.
Electronic balloting has yet to reconcile two conflicting needs in the polling place: Any election must proceed under a cloak of anonymity. But if a recount is required, election officials must go back and reproduce a verifiable audit trail. No account number ties the transaction to an individual, as it does when he transfers cash from bank checking to savings. What tangible proof then is there that all 5,734 votes cast really registered at the elementary school on Main Street? "If you have a machine collecting and recording votes with an electronic ballot box there's no way to go back after the fact and see if the machine made a mistake, whether through malice or simple software error," says Stanford University computer science professor David Dill and founder of Verified Voting Foundation, a nonpartisan election watchdog.
Electronic voting has its share snafus to prove the case of the doubters. In 2006 voters in Florida's 13th Congressional District election learned firsthand that there is little recourse when e-voting election results are in dispute. That year Democratic nominee Christine Jennings, who lost the election by 369 votes to Republican Vern Buchanan, claimed that 18,000 ballots went uncounted in the district. Without a paper trail to follow, the matter was left to the courts and Buchanan held onto the seat.
"They couldn't audit the election because there was no way to evaluate the machine's accuracy," Dill says. "It's like you have a worker who's doing your accounts who is very smart but not very trustworthy. If you have some independent way of checking the numbers he started with against the numbers he finished with then you don't have to trust him. You can double-check his work and catch any major errors. That's what we need for voting machines."
How do you cast your ballot?
Voters can cast their ballot in a variety of ways, depending on the method adopted by their election district. This includes paper ballots; punch cards; two types of touch-screen electronic voting systems (one that prints out a receipt verifying your vote and one that does not); optical scanners used to digitize paper ballots; or some combination of these.
New Hampshire, like nearly two thirds of the country, has a paper ballot system that voters mark and turn in to election officials who count the ballots either by electrical scanners or by hand. With the optical-scan approach, if the ballot is not filled out properly or is unreadable, the scanner will not accept it but the voter can fix it before leaving the polling place, Dill says.
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20 Comments
Add CommentI have always been suspicious of South Carolina's voting results given the state's demographics, median household wealth and its consistent Republican leanings. Total electronic voting provides the means to fix elections at the highest levels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe need for secrecy out weighs any concern for convenience or ease on the election officials. With the already questionable elections in various states the last think the people need is to hand the politicians any sort of system that would allow them to fix elections. Electronic voting methods are certain to lead to voting fraud and lead there with ease. At least with paper systems the volume of paper necessary to fake to have an effect is so great, the ability to commit fraud is reduced just because it takes so much effort. Electronic voting just requires a couple of hackers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo how to do it, paper only which produces the verifiable trail. Marking with a pen is probably the best to reduce nonsense like Al Gore hanging chads. Still, there is some responsibility on the voter to make sure their pen mark or chad punch out are correct.
Another good method is mail in votes. Though some anonymity is lost because a liberal bent on exposing the voting practice of non-democrats could record what they pull out of the envelope but once the envelope and the vote card are separated, we have both an audit trail and confirmation we have one vote from one legal voter. It is easy enough to employ vegas casino count room security to ensure fraud or loss of anonymity does not happen.
Whatever chosen, electronic voting is a certain way to a mess, either fraud and fixing if elections or worse, the loss of anonymous voting. Losing the anonymous vote is worse because it is certain if how you vote is public knowledge, you will be met with attacks and abuse from other voters as Union voting has proven many times in the past. If anyone in a union thinks you voted the wrong way, the next thing you know people are in your front yard threatening you. Imagine that 100 times worse if democrats could figure out who is not voting in the insanity of socialism or religious fanatics thought you were not voting for their insanity.
Billions of "votes" are tallied every day with bulletproof accuracy in the lotteries that populate our liquor stores. Vote on a screen, get a paper trail receipt. Does the paper receipt match your selections? Yes: drop it in the box. No: redo.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Trade secret" proprietary voting machine software is IDIOTIC. Really. It's an adding machine. If there's some "proprietary" thing going on inside, it's corrupt. Open source it.
It's all unbearably stupid/simple.
In Nevada we have electronic voting machines with a paper trail why can't everybody?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we want verifiability, secrecy AND accuracy, the US would switch to the electronic/cryptographic voting mechanism which uses standard optical technology to vote and record, but allows each voter the ability to validate that their vote has been tallied correctly. This system, called Scantegrity, was described in MIT's online news in November 2009, and used in real election in Maryland.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is such a system largely unnoticed?
It would be child's play to program a computer to print out a correct copy of the voter's choices yet store a different result. Consider the new virus that tampers with bank balances but shows the victim correct bank balances when she inquires.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs others have said, this is pretty easy to do. But politicians are old and out of date on all of this. Just look at sopa. Plus, all these proprietary voting machine companies want to 'win out' and just push proprietary stuff that isn't needed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne thing that would make it trivial is if everyone had an electronic ID card. But everyone's suspicions about such technology keeps it from happening. They just don't get that if the government wants info on em that said info is all over the place, easy to get/take/steal.
I'm so glad I live in a a small rural city that still uses optically scanned paper ballots marked with a pen. Yes, the count by the scanners could be hacked just as with any electronic counting system but, no matter what, the actual hard marked by real human beings paper ballots always still exist for recounting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFYI: You'd all be amazed how many votes are consistently undercounted by the scanners. In the last local recount it was nearly 3%. Probably due to voter error, like lines maked to lightly but those who know no better. The hanging chads of paper ballots.
I would not be the first to note Americans' preference to technological solutions to problems over alternatives and, in a choice between technological solutions Americans will usually opt for the more complex rather than the simpler.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn this case, the preference for the technologically complex has resulted in voting systems that, because of their complexity, opaqueness and potential for hiding fraud do not have the confidence of voters and which produce results that many believe are invalid.
The simpler technology of paper-based ballots has two advantages not addressed in the comments above:
While electronic voting is opaque to the voter, candidates and, in fact, virtually all people involved, paper ballots can be understood and verified even by the illiterate. In some third world countries illiterate voters place their mark against the pictorial symbol of their party of choice. Once the vote has been cast (anonymously using the ballot box) it can be scrutinised by officials and representatives of the candidates, counted and, if necessary, re-counted.
Paper voting is consequently more likely to engender confidence in all parties involved.
Secondly, human beings can do something with ease, that machines find impossible: they can correctly interpret poorly formed marks and imprecise intentions. It is this ability that CAPTCHA technology exploits to exclude non-humans from internet sites. Human vote-counters can easily, accurately and reliably, interpret a poorly formed voter's mark that would defeat a machine.
My vote goes to paper-based elections.
So funny...seeing people being dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age. Paper ballots can easily be faked.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisElectronic voting has one big advantage - automated counting by computers is much faster and more accurate than hand counting by humans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe solution is simple. Each machine contains a roll of two ply NCR (No Carbon Required) paper. When the voter submits his/her vote, the tallies are printed on the paper. The top copy is spit out for the voter's records; the bottom copy is rolled up in the machine. No chance of printing two different records because they are printed at the same time. And the paper trail will show how each person has voted (but not WHO the voter was, preserving anonymity).
ALL voting systems give a receipt. This receipt shows exactly how you vited. You can check it and then change your vote if there are any errors. This receipt should (obviously) be clear to understand (though sometimes it has not in early systems). Clicking a touch screen or putting checks on a piece of paper is exactly the same thing. Electronic ballots are very hard to fake. Exit interviews should be done as a check, since if tampering is suspected or a recount needed, everyone would need to bring or mail a copy of their receipt for hand recounting. This system would greatly reduce the chances of people somehow magically voting many times and other transgressions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBring back the old voting machines. I'm generally forward thinking, but not where this is concerned. The old ones worked, and we should keep making them and no need to "fix" anything. I see no need for digital voting. If we all had to do a stint volunteering to make it happen, just like jury duty, so be it - anonymous voting is fundamentally important to democracy. And these computerized voting systems are untrustworthy. I believe that those who have forced them upon us are those who would like to find ways to exploit their weaknesses and use them to cheat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor Wayne.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBallot Stuffing, which is a common term for your "faked" ballots has been with us for thousands of years. It has been very rare as a process in the past 50+ years for the reasons expressed by priddseren above because of the overall physical effort required. Previously, it might have been more effective because there were fewer votes total.
I do not intend to be as gentle as some above. There is very strong anecdotal suggestion that the Republicans have benefited significantly from vote count difficulties. The most well known of these was the "hanging chad" in South Florida in the 2000 election. It is highly likely that as many as 20,000 voters were directly disenfranchised by that failure. Further, immediately following the 2004 presidential election, the reporters covering the Ohio results, using somewhat unscientific "exit Polls" were calling Ohio to Kerry by notably over 50% until ab out 11:00 pm when a preliminary actual count was presented by the Ohio Election Commission showing Bush by 53%. It was stated at the time that this was the first time ever that the exit poll process had been wrong. Ohio used electronic voting machines.
Another indirect observation. An acquaintance was posting a ballot using one of the touch screen machines, This person was constantly having to go back and reselect the candidate of choice. It was necessary to press the screen about 1/2 inch below the choice to get the correct selection to highlight. In the presidential entries the error delivered the selection to the Republican candidate whose name was displayed above the Democratic candidate. Of course, it is the voter's responsibility to insure the vote is correct. However, time is usually limited and the crowds in the polling places are distracting, which can contribute to inattention and error.
In any of these cases, the paper trail is the least expensive backup.
If we wish to use the internet, we need to develop some sort of crosscheck somewhat like the one we use when we e-file our Income Tax to confirm identity. Beyond that, some form of history needs to be maintained by the system and individual. This latter is an engineering issue that can be solved correctly and as suggested above by doctordawg, done with open systems, "non-proprietary" software.
The key issue with electronic voting is precisely that the politicians have resisted intensely the paper trail or any other verification portion of the process.
Not true. Here in Maryland we've been using electronic voting machines for several years. They do not provide receipts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd electronic ballots are quite easy to fake. The same programming which records each voter's vote could easily change those votes when they are stored in the machine. In fact, there needs to be careful checking and testing of the code in the machines to ensure votes are tallied correctly. Otherwise there could be an easy (and innocent) mistake in the code.
Paper ballots require a real human in a real place with real motive. Hacking can be done from Mom's basement in China.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpeaking of motive -- this article is highly suspect.
There are a lot of things wrong with our national voting system, not among the least, the Electoral College and the bipolar two party system. COmputer systems could be as secure as ATMs in a proper electronic system. Additional paper trail are optional. Voters could have a codename to check how their votes were recorded, and how they all added up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEveryone should have the option of a second, but public, vote, to reward standing up for what one believes. Those who get into situations where the might be dominated by others deserve what they get.
We need a ranked-vote system, such as IRV (or better), which tends to disrupt party systems. Parties tend to focus all issues into two views. Therefore I think third parties are impossible. We need to vote for people rather than parties.
priddseren, Oregon's vote-by-mail system is a little better than you suggest. One worker removes an outer envelope that identifies the voter. Another worker removes an inner envelope to process the ballot, so no one can connect voter with ballot.
There is NO totally secure voting system. Therefore, when votes tie, down to maybe 1% national popular vote, figure there's that much corruption or error and flip a coin, or some equivalent random means of choice.
I completely agree, doctordawg.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisItem 1 - A triple verification system is easy to do. The voter inputs their selections. The machine prints a copy for them and sends the result to 2 different machines. One machine for each of the major political parties in the state (or the top 2 candidates for primaries). The voter then checks both machines to insure that their data matches that stored at each machine. This way both parties know the same data and each voter knows their data is correct.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor anonymous voting you simply have the machines for each party display data only to the voter and the party flunkies can only see totals every 100 votes and no individual vote data. Each 100th voter will get running totals as well as their own votes and thus can check the running totals to insure that both machines have correct data. The running totals can be released to the media at every 100 votes per location.
When the voter finds that the results are incorrect on either party machine, they can sound the alarm and the voting station is shut down until the flaw is found and criminal charges filed. There will always be criminal charges filed because the tech will certify that the machine is working correctly and if it isn't they are guilty of fraud. If one party or the other is rigging the machines then the party flunkies involved get a nice treason charge so we can kill them.
If the voter is lying they get a fraud charge.
None of these machines would be internet connected and all tallies would be printed every 100 votes. The tallies would be verified by the 2 sets of party flunkies and then transfered to the election commission. The parties would then have actual numbers to compare to the election commission results making fraud much harder.
I have recently had the good fortune to be introduced to a company called VotRite. VotRite is currently utilizing an Advanced Electronic Voting System (AEVS)(manufactured by Precise Voting)as it main product for any and all private elections. The only thing keeping these machines out of the public sector is the ridiculous cost of certification, well in excess of $350,000. I can only invite all of you to view the videos on VotRite's website (www.votrite.com)to see that there is a DRE system out there that can be relied on for secure and accurate results. Results that can be verified and confirmed because with every vote, a ballot confirming the voter's selections is viewable behind a secure glass window. When the voter confirms their selections by touching the screen at "cast my ballot" the printed confirmation is mechanically dropped into the attached and locked ballot box.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe system has redundancy for multi backup of all data (that is encrypted for added security) and for ballots cast.
Please do me and yourself a favor, check out this voting system, and contact the folks behind it. I have.