My first experience with electronic voting oddities

[Jersey Devil]

1995 - I was running for Mayor in my small town in northern New Jersey. Republicans controlled the town council and our county (Bergen) government was exclusively Republican. We switched from the old lever machines to new ones (don't know the maufacturer) where you push on a slighly raised button next to the candidate of your choice and a little green "X" lights up. Then you push the large "Vote" button at the bottom.

We had the Repubs on the run we thought with local issues that voters were hot about. We had signs up all over town that outnumbered theirs at least 2 to 1. We lost by 2 votes for one candidate and about 40 for the other two (including me).

Afterwards we discovered oddities in the votes that didn't make sense to us. Several people on our side complained that when they pushed the buttons for us and then the "Vote" button they heard no "beep" that you hear when others' did the same thing. A few told us that when they pushed our buttons the lights for the Repubs went on and they almost voted for them before correcting the screen. So we looked further and found that in a few democratic districts say 500 people voted but 50-60 in each district did not vote for mayor and council at all.

OK, sometimes people don't vote locally while they vote nationally or for governor since they don't know the local candidates.

But then we went back to the previous year when we had lever voting and that phenomenon did not occur except in maybe 20 cases throughout the whole town.

I always have wondered about that election. There was no paper trail to double check, no way for us to find out if votes had vanished into thin air.

[L84TEA]

1. I think it is crap

That people don't get a reciept for their vote.
That has to be changed.
Personally I am not scared to show who I am voting for and most people are not.
Or have seperate ballots for each canidate...anything...I really hate this system.

[Jersey Devil]

2. Forgot to mention oddest thing that happened - voters voting for no one

We counted the number of voters who voted in one district and then checked it against the machine results. If there were no errors in the machine you would have to believe that 10 people entered the voting booth and voted for absolutely no one and then pushed the "Vote" button at the bottom, registering a vote for no one on the ballot, from top to bottom.

[SoCalDem]

4. People have never gotten a "receipt".. We must not ask for that

or a "paper trail".. Those two definitions are what the media ALWAYS calls it.. We don;t want receipts or trails.. WE WANT BALLOTS, that we can verify, and then drop into a ballot box inside the polling place.

Receipts have never been allowed, because in some ancient times past, people would "sell" their votes, and a receipt would be necessary to "prove" you voted for the person you were paid to vote for...so NO receipts..


In a perfect world, a touch screen machine would spit out a ballot that would have the names of the people you voted for, and a transaction number that corresponded with the same number showing on your screen.. the numbers could be randomized so that individual voters would not be recognizable...

At the end of the day, the disc or cd or whatever would be run and verified, and then a count of the "paper ballots".. The TOTALS should be dead on.. If NOT..PAPER WINS, because that is the record that the voter verified and deposited in the box.. The slips could actually be barcoded, and read with a barcode reader, to account for ALL the numbered slips...


Might it take a little while? Of course.. It would be infinitely cheaper to hire extra PEOPLE for a few days to tally and record the results..

I WANT correct.. I am not that concerned about Fast..easy..or fun :(

[Robert Oak]

3. this is action item #1

Over and over computer scientists, engineers and cybersecurity fraud experts many have shown that paperless ballot
voting is fraught with problems.

Believe me, it's all BS that they can't fix it.

Think about Nasdaq and gambling equipment and the ATM banking system,
electronic transfer...

these people are lying their heads off that they can't fix it or things are "just fine"...

and just moving voter repression and outright cheating into the digital era.

We have a chance to stop the manipulation and theft of elections right now and are failing miserably.

One of the ways they do it is through 'baffle and confusion' because
the issues are in weird pieces of computer code and so forth.

Yet thousands of computer experts have pointed out the problems, in layman's terms...

and are ignored.

[Jersey Devil]

5. Anecdotal evidence: sign in sheets did not match # voters on machines

In my town you sign in before you vote and there is a paper receipt that you have voted. The number of people who signed in in several districts was less than the number of voters who had cast votes on the machines in that district.

So, to believe there were no errors you would have to believe people took the time to go to the polls, sign in and then leave without ever entering the machines to vote. And there were no lines.