voting "machines" eliminate voting [LWN.net]

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 17:50 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: voting "machines" eliminate voting by grouch
Parent article: Sequoia v. Ed Felten

While those steps are auditable.. they are rarely audited... leaving most voting in the same
state as electronics. Looking at a gear system doesnt say much if the gears in the system are
so complicated all you can tell is that something moved and you end up with not looking at the
counters but the punch tape that no-one can see for 'privacy' concerns. 

And then there is which paper system you are going to use. At some point you are going to
count a million or so votes and people want answers quickly.. so automatic systems are going
to be used. The software in that is as easily hacked and unless the vote is 'close' or highly
out of whack with external polling.. its not going to be rechecked.

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voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 18:51 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

Plenty of countries, and subdivisions thereof, around the world have no problem manually
counting paper ballots in a timely fashion.  It is a task that can be (and usually is) broken
down into many parallel sub-tasks.

Mind, that's simplified even further if you print up a separate ballot for each separate
contest/issue in the election, as opposed to e.g. some of the massive four-page ballots I've
seen with multiple issues and positions to vote on.   Color code them so they get put in the
right ballot boxes.

Reliable paper-balloting systems aren't difficult (there'll still be attempts to defraud, as
with missing ballot boxes, improperly registered voters, etc, these tend to be rather
obvious).  Even automated paper-counting systems can be spot-checked with manual counts, and
the whole automatic count thrown out if there's a problem (you may end up with the "hanging
chad" issue; that can be resolved by ballot redesign and making very clear ahead of time what
constitutes a valid vs invalid vote.) Reliable machine-balloting systems are extremely
difficult, with too many ways to stealthily influence the outcome.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 20:32 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

> Plenty of countries, and subdivisions thereof, around the world have no 
> problem manually counting paper ballots in a timely fashion.  It is a
> task that can be (and usually is) broken down into many parallel
> sub-tasks.

OK for the record I am for paper ballots, but I do not see them as a panacea as places like
Chicago, Louisiana and New Mexico have shown that they can be rigged for a long time. 

The main problem is that as much as we argue about accountability, that is not what matters..
cost matters. The cost of using an automated counting system with a cramped ballot versus the
cost of paying 10's of thousands of people to count ballots by hand, ( and then doing
background checks on those people to see which ones have been paid off by various 'interested'
groups etc). And the problems are those are short term costs versus trying to figure out what
a long term cost of a subverted election would be. As long as the perceived cost of the
machines is smaller than the man-power costs.. you are on a losing argument.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 8:25 UTC (Wed) by socket (guest, #43) [Link]

What?

Are you seriously arguing that having an affordable system is more important than
accountability?  I don't know the numbers on how much it costs to run an election with the
different systems we're talking about, but really... if accountability doesn't matter more
than cost, what's the point of holding the election?  Let's just skip the election and just
give the presidency to whichever candidate is more popular with the supreme court.  That *has*
to be more affordable, and therefore better than actually bothering to count votes.

Oh, wait.  Somehow, I get the feeling that this could be a really, really bad idea.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 14:51 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I am not arguing that affordable is better than accountability.. I am arguing that it is
usually considered more important by people. People as a group are usually short-sighted and
end up with not thinking things through. So when they see they have to hire more people to run
an election or get some roads repaired, or raise taxes.. they will go with the roads getting
repaired. If they have the choice between hiring more people for an election or a bright
shiney gadget that will solve their problems and they dont have to stop road repairs or raise
taxes.. they will go for the gadget (because don't gadgets always make life easier?)

And only when it turns out that they made a bad decision, they will hem and haw for a couple
more elections until some better gadget comes out.. because we humans are built not to
recognize we bought a lemon.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 22, 2008 2:39 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

If something is not affordable, it won't happen. In a count of hands, you can do a recount
easily. A vote of the populace is rarely a complete recount, because it's too expensive to. If
the equivalent of recounting the paper ballots is cheap, it may be standard practice for every
ballot; if it's too expensive, it will only occur when a smoking gun appears. That's reality.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 23:50 UTC (Tue) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

"While those steps are auditable.. they are rarely audited..."

Writing from Australia, which uses paper-and-pencil ballots administered by a central government agency, this is wrong. Political parties have their representatives auditing every step of the election process at every election. Some merely interested individuals also do the same. I mean every step, from sitting all day in a polling place watching ballots being cast, to accompanying the ballot boxes to the tally room, to watching every vote being counted, to making sure those exact counts appear on the board in the national tally room. Your typical vote will have three mutually-untrusting people ensuring that your vote has been fairly and accurately treated from the moment you are given the ballot paper to the declaration of the election results.

As for speed, at the recent election we knew the result by 10pm east coast time (that is, the west coast polling booths had been closed for an hour). I'd say the paper-based system adds a delay of thirty minutes to an hour. Not a huge amount considering the many-weeks delay non-paper-and-pencil systems caused in determining the US Presidency in the Bush v Gore election.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 15:08 UTC (Wed) by holstein (subscriber, #6122) [Link]

It's the same here in Canada: major party representative are present in every step of the
vote.

I never understood why it could not be done this way in the US. It's not like it's rocket
science.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 16:20 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I think it has to do with the differences in states levels of control in Canada and the US..
plus the differences between parliamentary governments and the US 'style'. Each US state can
set its own election rules on who deals with the election materials. The Federal government
can really only give outlines and say that if you 'fail' to meet those standards you lose
federal funding. The states are really protective of this, as it is one of the last
'sovereign' powers they have in comparison to the Federal government. 

However, I will admit that I am on a thin branch here.. and could be quite wrong.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 25, 2008 7:37 UTC (Tue) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

It's not hard to count a million, or a hundred million, paper-votes quickly and correctly.

The task is trivial to split in any wanted number of smaller tasks.

You'll need about 3 hours to count 10.000 votes, count twice by two different people who don't
know the answers the other got and don't know who the other is, and let the result count as
the preliminary result if the numbers they give are off by less than say 1/1000.

But you don't even need to do that: Have voting-machines that record votes electronically AND
print a paper-ballot. Deposit the paper-ballot the traditional way.

Use the numbers from the machine for the preliminary results. Randomly check say 1% or 5% of
the ballots, by the trivially simple method of actually counting the slips of paper and
comparing them to the number the machine gave. If the numbers disagree, count everything, or
invalidate the entire election, probably okay here too to accept 1:10000 error or similar.

You don't need to count all the paper all the time. You DO need to be ABLE to check the
result. There's a difference.