Florida to Scrap Touch Screen Voting?

AlHunt writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is calling on the Florida Legislature to spend $30M to replace the troublesome touch screen voting machines with an optical scan system that allows a voter to mark an oval next to a candidate's name before slipping a ballot into an electronic reader."

Yeah sure.. can't break that.

[GodInHell]

Oh right, poll worker says: Democrats use blue ink, Republicans use pencils.

Hmm.. here's a thought - why don't we give out slips of paper with the names of the candidates on them, then you CIRCLE your candidate.. and then (get this) PEOPLE count up the ballots. Woah.. and SOOO much more expensive right?

-GiH

Re:Well, that worked so well BEFORE

[Gnavpot]

What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail? Yeesh.

Are you saying that the machines in questions actually makes such a paper trail?

The article says the opposite (Given the last sentence in the quote below, I assume that "card" means some kind of electronic data card):
"In a touch screen system, a voter receives a card and inserts it into an ATM-like machine and touches the screen to record choices. The card is sent to the supervisor of elections, where the choices are downloaded and counted.

No tangible record exists."

ACLU has sued for this kind of behavior before....

[gsfprez]

The ACLU fought against this exact kind of move in California - the use of paper ballots vs the use of electronic ballots - because according to them, electronic ballots are "twice as accurate" and the use of paper ballots would [cnn.com] disenfranchise voters [reason.com]. According to the left and the ACLU in 2003, "punch cards are unfit for use" [blogspot.com] and are all for electronic voting.

i was there when they did this, and MAN... they were insistent that paper ballots go into the dustbin of history because of their error rates and their propensity to "confuse minority voters". Their words, not mine.

So, i guess that the governor of Florida should get his lawyers ready for this... taking their state back into the dark ages...

Re:Yeah sure.. can't break that.

[Excelcia]

Canada's last federal election used machine-read paper. A sheed of paper with circles you mark an X in. They are put in an envelope you can't see through, then given to the election official who feeds the paper into a reader. You get a green light if the machine was able to read your vote, at which point the paper is sucked into the lock box in case a manual recount is needed. If it didn't read it, it is spat back out and you are given the option of destroying the ballot and getting a new one.

A certain number of polling stations in each area randomly have their machines opened and their electronic count matched against a manual count. If they are off by one, the entire district is manually counted.

All in all, this is the best voting system I have ever seen. Quietly implemented, without a fuss. Designed by people who are more interested in an accurate, quick, efficient system than they are interested in partisan politics or winning contracts for their favourite corporation.

I love living here.

Good! It's a simple, traceable system.

[dfenstrate]

What the Governor wants is exactly what we do here in New Hampshire.

The tallying is instantaneous, the technology is proven (scantron tests in every school in the country) and the paper trail is there.

If they ever want voting in Florida to cease being a national joke this is the way to do it.

Re:Yeah sure.. can't break that.

[dfenstrate]

We do a very similar thing here in New Hampshire except you put the sheet in the scanner yourself and the election officials are nearby.

Eliminating the election official's handling of a marked ballot reduces the opportunity they have to mess with it. No sleight of hand tricks are even remotely possible.

Re:Yeah sure.. can't break that.

[raehl]

Eliminating the election official's handling of a marked ballot reduces the opportunity they have to mess with it. No sleight of hand tricks are even remotely possible.

Nor necessary. Who do you think handles the scanners?

"The Swedish option" - straight paper ballots

[Dobeln]

Another option is the method used here in Sweden - the straight paper ballot, placed into an envelope, and then placed into the voting box by the voter him/her/itself, after officials check your name in the the voting register and eye your voter ID card (mailed out a few weeks earlier) and photo ID.

Ballots are picked up by the voter outside of the voting booth (there is a table available with all flavors) or brought in yourself. (Parties usually mail out their ballots prior to the election). Also, major parties will have their people outside, handing out ballots. Alternatively, you can just vote write-in by spelling out the party name on a blank ballot. (This results in "The Donald Duck Party", etc. garnering a few votes every year... ;) )

One envelope per election (regional, local, national, referendums, etc.)

Pros: Very simple, very unambigous (no "hanging chads" possible), straight paper trail, etc. Electronic tampering virtually impossible. Voter identity is assured.

Cons: Electoral secrecy compromised to some degree(although not fatally) if ballots stored out in the open. Sabotage against ballot storage is possible, and happens (I.e. snagging the ballots of "the enemy"). Voter ID requirements will garner cries of "voter suppression" from the usual suspects, not as TV-friendly (counting the votes takes some time).

Re:God your nation's hilarious...

[3.14159265]

"...the world's shining example of democracy"

I beg your pardon? Where did you get that from? As far as democracy goes, it is as bad as it gets.

Why voting machines at all?

[seadd]

I don't understand why authorities in the US insist on using voting machines. From my experience, I worked several times as NGO election observer on voting sites in my country (Croatia), and we had no problem with getting all the paper ballots and counting them. On practically every voting site in the country, there were (beside government appointed members) one representative from each political party and one or more NGO observers. Each of us had the chance to review the site and ballot boxes prior to voting, see them sealed, be present during opening of the boxes and counting and recount them himself. Also, each of us had to sign the final report and any observed irregularities.
I can assure that voting (at least on our site) was fair, since at the table were basically 7 people, and no two people there trusted each other:)
With all that, we managed to count all 1000 ballots for our site within 2-3 hours, and all the ballots were counted at least three times. Such system, in country of 4 million people enables us to get 90% of the sites processed by midnight of the voting day. Further, all the ballots are kept for one year, available for anyone's request for recount. I don't believe it's much different in any European country.

Re:Why not best of both worlds?

[JimBobJoe]

Let people fill in an optical scan ballot by hand OR give them a touch screen that will mark the ballot for them.

This technology does indeed exist [essvote.com] and is required in counties where optical scan ballot is used in order to comply with the disability requirements of HAVA.

Hypothetically, of course, such a system could be used where everyone marks their ballot on such a device. I have not heard of a county that does it that way though.

Re:Why not best of both worlds?

[MindStalker]

I used to live in Tallahassee, and the they used the scantron system that the governor wants to implement. And I can say it is excellent. You fill out your ballot, then you walk over to the machine and feed it into the machine yourself. You then wait a second, the machine either gives you a green light or it spits the ballot out. If there is any confusion whatsoever in how you bubbled the sheet it will spit out the ballot so you have to fix it. In 2000 there was a manual recount of the ballots here and we were the only county to have ZERO difference between the machine count and the manual recount.

Remember the HBO special "Hacking Democracy?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Near the end of that special the Supervisor of Elections for Leon County Florida (Tallahassee) did a demo trial of their optical-scan machines and allowed hacker Harri Hursti to supply the memory card for the demo. Mr. Hursti had discovered that there was a hook for executable code in the memory card, which is certainly a serious problem as you probably realize. Of course, the election was completely hacked (go watch the video, it's on Google Video) using a randomly selected optical scan machine made by Diebold.

The memory cards on these machines are supposed to be functionally equivalent to a floppy or a flash memory stick, yet the machines themselves have been programmed to go to a secret location in them, check for executable code, and to execute that code if found. Which is to say that they are designed from the ground up to facilitate fraud. Can you think of any other explanation for this?

Oh, and in Florida we already use optical scan machines in several counties. And we already have a law (pushed by Jeb Bush) which makes it illegal to look at the paper used without a court order. Just try to get that court order. Fat chance.

Mussolini was right, the merging of corporate and government interests has definite advantages . . . for a few. Our politicians can't begin to get elected without corporate money and support, so their interests are definitely merged. And look how easy it was to get rid of those pesky elections. And we haven't had any curbs on "trusts" since Reagan stopped all anti-trust enforcement. And the economy is doing so well too! Just ask them over at Halliburton, or GE, or any of the other war mongers.

And Americans sleep in front of their TVs.

Those of you in the rest of the world, take a good look at the people of the United States, this Christian country, and the fine example of "morality" we portray. Martin Luthor King, Jr. said it well: "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it." and "He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

Have a nice day.

BillyDoc