EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws

Posted Nov 22, 2005 23:19 UTC (Tue) by kbob (guest, #1770) [Link]

I only have experience with the US system, but it is my understanding that we have more elections than most places. In any given election, each voter will vote on candidates, measures and referenda at the Federal, state, county, city, township, and other levels. A typical ballot might have 50-100 items to vote on. Some of the items might have five or six candidates running for one office.

I usually allocate two hours to study the voter information pamphlets, and about 15-20 minutes to actually fill out the ballot. I live in Oregon, which has paper ballots, so I spend 15-20 minutes coloring in boxes to indicate my choices. I don't consider myself overprepared at two hours' preparation.

In the US, elections are held at many different levels, and the different levels have different, overlapping boundaries. For example, I live in a state, a county, a school district, a US congressional district, a state senator's district, a state representative's district. (I don't live in a city.) The school district boundaries don't correspond with any of the other boundaries. Nor do the state senator's, state representative's or US congressional districts. So the election commission has to create a vast number of different ballots, one for every possible subset of overlapping districts, and ensure that each voter gets the right ballot.
(subset isn't the right word -- any topologists want to help me out?)

I am not defending this system. I'm just trying to describe what it is.

kbob

Posted Nov 25, 2005 6:46 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

It has to do with (a) American elections being run at the local level,
not by an overarching national or state electoral commission, and (b)
American business pushing 'solutions' at the individual electoral
officers, promising accuracy and long-term cost efficiency (ha ha ha).
Some counties in the US have been using privately designed and made
mechanical voting devices since 1891.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa111300b.htm

Originally mechanical voting machines were mechanical ballot boxes: step
into the box, pull exactly one lever, step out again. With this system
there is no ambiguity and a high degree of accuracy (providing the
machine works as advertised, and apparently the breakdown rate is high).

But in the 1940s (to cut costs? To make it easier to fake results
without detection?) manually punched cards were introduced, to be counted
by machine. The degree of error due to 'hanging chads' and the like has
never been reliably estimated -- but without a doubt it's far higher than
paper & pencil ballots counted by hand!

In Australia we happily used paper ballots exclusively until this
century, and they're still pretty rare (ACT only as far as I know, and it
runs free software!). The only decent grounds given for introducing
electronic voting machines, incidentally, were improved accessibility for
the disabled.