The Guardian: Why machines are bad at counting votes

[kpete]

Why machines are bad at counting votes

Democracy is made difficult by the fact that electronic voting systems are inherently flawed



Click the box … voters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during last November’s presidential election hope their ballots won’t be ‘erased’. Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

It's commonly said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Yet this is what we keep doing with electronic voting machines - find flaws and try again. It should therefore have been no surprise when, at the end of March, California's secretary of state's office of voting system technology assessment decertified older voting systems from Diebold's Premier Election Solutions division. The reason: a security flaw that erased 197 votes in the Humboldt county precinct in last November's presidential election.

Clearly, 197 votes would not have changed the national result. But the loss, which exceeds the error rate allowed under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, was only spotted because a local citizen group, the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project (humtp.com) monitored the vote using a ballot-imaging scanner to create an independent record. How many votes were lost elsewhere?

Humboldt county used Diebold's GEMS operating system version 1.18.19 to tally postal ballots scanned in batches, or "decks". The omission of votes was a result of a flaw in the system, where, given particular circumstances, it deletes the first deck, named "Deck Zero", without noting it in the system's audit logs.

more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/30/e-voting-electronic-polling-systems

[Stevepol]

1. Business as usual for the biggest scam industry in the US next to Bernie Madoff.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. we had problems with some ballot files, also early voting

We had around 3,000 polling places open in Nov 2008.

During early voting we had problems with the reporting of results, which are sent to the
State Board of Elections website. Some votes were double reported, messing up the count.

Then there were cases where officials made errors in the ballot definition files, causing
errors there.

There's so many ways to foul it up.

[kster]

3. From the article

"It is shocking that in this day and age this has been allowed to continue."

In other words don't let the ballots leave the neighborhood before they are hand counted and recorded by the people in that neighborhood, its that simple people.

K&R

[Captain Hilts]

4. Why do we feel we have to have election results that night? I'd wait a few days. nt

[yowzayowzayowza]

5. Blaming machines for the vendor specific and ...

state dominated systems in which they are implemented is silly. The difference betwixt ATMs and voting machines is that the end user can verify the ATMz work. Were ballots standardized like money utilizing current OCR technology, we could design a class of machine to enable the end user, the voter, to verify the results in parallel to the official systems, thus wrestling control of the electoral process from the current electronic business and state monopolized systems.