Can't help but think that visible voting glitches mask the real problem

[Cicero]

I mean, think about it, esp. all you fellow IT people out there. There's a whole lifecycle when it comes to writing code. You first spec out just what you want it to do. You determine the hardware it will run on so you have no surprises. Once you start having concrete ideas, you work up a project charter. Then functional specifications, and then tech specs. Finally, you start coding. When you are done coding, you test it by yourself on test data, and then you have system testing, usually performed by someone else on your team. Then User Acceptance tests. And then finally, when all is said and done and all the bugs and anomalous results have been weeded out, then you finally release it to the consumer.

At least, that's the way we do it where I work. If my team produced code that would drop items, miscount, would even show items changing right before the user's eyes before they verify their input, well, at the very least we would all get our asses chewed out. And depending on the impact and how much damage is done, it's "Hit the road, Jack."

What I'm saying is this: I'm damn sure that you can create a program that would tally votes, and make changes to those votes before recording them, and be absolutely undetectable to anyone. It could be done right after the last vote is entered in, or all throughout the day, it doesn't really matter. What's more, you could program it to erase the relevant portions of its own code that makes those changes so that anyone examining things after the fact wouldn't have a clue.

I guess I'm saying that, all these reports of machines having more votes than there are voters, or showing incorrect choices, or dropping votes. Are these really accidents? Or are they deliberate distractions, made to divert attention away from the real problem, which is the systematic rigging of the elections?

Just thought I'd stir the pot a bit...

Later,

[jean]

1. could very well be distractions. But if they can design a streamlined

program that works well from the voter's perspective but can contain all the undetectable features you mention, why not just give us the hell a paper trail so we'll be more complacent?

[glitch]

3. Paper trail gives us the option of a hand recount. nt

[Cicero]

5. Too much of a chance that the paper trail...

...could morph into an actual paper ballot, based on voter demand.

In fact, the kind of system I would support would be to have touch-screen systems used solely to produce a paper ballot that can be visually verified by a human being, as well as being suitable for use in an optical scanner.

Later,

[glitch]

2. Very good point - here's some more to chew on

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

About the idealogues who own the vote count corporations and their connections to *.

And this if you haven't seen it:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm

[ThoughtCriminal]

4. I've thought about this too

There are a couple of ways that this could be dealt with:

1. Random tests of machines destined to the polls that are run simultaneous with the election.
2. Paper output for verification and recount

What I find suspicious, is that almost all of these glitches, bugs, and design flaws seem to primarily benefit one party. Now that just might be my perception since only Democrats seemed to be concerned about the problem (that is also suspicious).

[snippy]

6. I think election reform is an issue democrats should focus on in Congress

This is fresh in everyones' minds and the GOP is vulnerable on this issue since there are so many stories of long lines, unreliable machines, inconsistent rules, and republicans attempting to suppress minority voters. Republicans hate having the truth be told about the rampant bigotry and racism in the GOP and would have a hard time defending trying to continue to disenfranchise minorities. Republicans hate the idea of election reform but they will look bad if they oppose it and democrats can take advantage of that. There is no reason that an election reform bill can not be one of the first thing passed by the next Congress. But the democrats have to make it an important issue.

[symphony]

7. this one was caught ... just because it was sooo obvious

about 600 people voted at that precinct
Bush got ove 4,000 votes :wtf:

No "glitch" in Kerry's favor, though. Why am I not surprised? :eyes:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result
The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.
The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections.
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.
In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.
Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.
The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.
When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.
"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem

[tandem5]

8. Yes I completely agree...

I think even the voter challengers they gathered up was a big show... and the "lost" absentee ballots as well. Don't get me wrong I think these things had an impact, but they aren't dependable enough to guarantee a win for them. I think the primary goal of such tactics (these days anyway) is to misdirect attention. They are tangible and easy to grab onto by the media and once dealt with in public forums create a sense of finality that suppresses the more serious and fundamental concerns. The obvious example is the 2000 election. So much focus was given to undervotes in that election that when everybody was done counting them (using various standards) all it did was muddle and confuse. So the conclusion was that the race was just too close for the technology to handle. But the larger issues were overvotes and the roll purging that implied that had all the votes been cast correctly it would not have been all that close. Which brings us to now - the media gave so much focus to "flawed punchcard technology"... and now we have unaccountable electronic voting. We have to be cautious, deliberate, and, above all, focused when voicing our concerns and make sure we aren't sacrificing millions of votes for thousands.

[ever_green]

9. I wouldn't doubt it

They're good at this, they've had practice...