WV Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes 900
An anonymous reader writes "Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.
This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for 'Barack Obama' kept flipping to 'John McCain.'"
It's a touchscreen issue apparently (Score:5, Informative)
In it to steal it (Score:5, Informative)
John McCain's own polling gives him hope, an aide says
When John McCain insisted, during his appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," that he was doing "just fine" in a presidential race in which the polls have shown Barack Obama with a steady lead over the last few weeks, many may have dismissed the comment as just something that a candidate has to say.
Not so, said a campaign official who spoke on background with The Times' Bob Drogin. The aide said the campaign's internal polling showed McCain down only 4 percentage points nationally -- a sharp improvement from a week ago -- and closing fast.
State-by-state, the private polling also showed McCain up 1 point in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Missouri, and behind by only 3 points in Virginia (a new Washington Post survey found him down 8 there).
McCain almost assuredly needs to capture all five states to win the presidency. And even that may not be enough if he fails to win Pennsylvania, one of his campaign stops today. Without Pennsylvania, McCain needs to pull more electoral votes out of some combination of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico or Iowa -- all states where, as of now, the internal numbers look bleak.
The anonymous McCain official argued a comeback remains doable. "Check with me Wednesday," the aide said. "If we're still within the margin of error (in polling), we're going to win."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/john-mccains-ow.html [latimes.com]
Just like the last two times.
In the end, I'm not even sure how you would know (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Parallax, touch screens, stupidity, and conspir (Score:5, Informative)
I live in WV. The local news showed the ballots and exactly how this could happen and it was entirely feasible that it was user error due to bad software design.
The UI is poorly designed. McCain's name appears above Obama's. The bottom border of McCain's box touches the upper border of Obama's box. When looking down at the device it looks like you are selecting Obama when your finger is actually on McCain.
This effect can be compounded by initially touching the box with the tip of your finger and then rolling down so your fingerprint area is fully on Obama's name, but you initially touched the bottom of McCain's box. In this case your finger will fully be within Obama's box but McCain will remain selected.
However the people doing the voting should be double checking their vote on the screen and the paper receipt that scrolls up next to the screen as you vote.
Bottom line is, bad design, untrained user.
Re:More Cases Than Just This (Score:2, Informative)
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:4, Informative)
McCain doesn't e-mail because he can't type. He can't type because his arms were broken while he was a POW and weren't treated properly until he was back in the States. He also can't comb his own hair or tie his own shoes. In the 2000 election, he was called the most technologically savvy candidate in the race for using things like online fund raising. (Look it up, McCain was the first to do this.) Fun Fact: One of the other candidates in the race (who McCain was more technologically savvy than) was Al Gore, who was an Atari Democrat (a young Democrat who understood and ran partially on technological issues) who invented the Internet.
A person on the Internet may or may not know about McCain's history shouldn't be ridiculed. A person running for the highest office in the land, who is expected to do a little research into why something is true before releasing an ad, should be.
ACORN is about registration, not voting (Score:3, Informative)
ACORN has got nothing to do with actually voting - ACORN is about VOTER REGISTRATION. There's a massive difference.
An ACORN employee might register "Mickey Mouse" and "Mike Hunt" as potential voters, but that doesn't help these fictitious entities actually cast a vote unless they then actually turn up to vote with a photo ID, and if you do have a photo ID then no one should be denying you the ability to register to vote!
Re:Clarification (Score:3, Informative)
User idiosyncrasies are even worse than you think when it comes to touch screens.
The most common type of technology uses two plates of glass of glass with conductive coatings, placed closely with conductive surfaces facing each other. IIRC, it takes the resistance from various points around the perimeter of the front piece to various points about the perimeter of the bottom piece, and does a best fit calculation for estimating the center point of the press after a couple of hundred samples (see, there was a reason they made you take linear algebra).
Some users seem to have the touch for throwing that calculation off; maybe they bounce their touch a bit, or touch so lightly the contact is intermittent. It's possible that mechanical or electronic faults interact with different users' touch to act different behaviors. Maybe a machine could test fine for the person setting it up, but bad for some number of voters.
It isn't hard to imagine the machines operating differently as they heat up, or depending of power supply noise or ambient RFI. It's quite easy to imagine beta copies of a machine passing all manufacturer tests, then sample machines passing all acceptance tests by the buyer with flying colors, but then dozens of machines out of every hundred bought acting flaky in real world conditions. The problems in the machines could well defy every pre-setup test and post mortem tests the owners can think of.
I've worked on mobile technology since the days of the Newton. Touch screen technology is pretty good, but mainly because the devices they are in are very nearly disposable. Most of them drift out of calibration sooner or later, and quite a few of them develop problems staying in calibration, or downright flakiness. I wouldn't use the technology some place where it was critical to avoid problems, e.g. in an operating room or voting booth.
The voting booth is a particularly tough environment because you get a lot of different users, none of whom vote every day. You need a ridiculously high degree of predictability in that kind of application because you can't recover from glitches.
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:5, Informative)
Or disqualify McCain for the inability to use a computer.
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/is_mccain_unable_to_use_a_computer.html [factcheck.org]
Forbes, May 2000: His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. "She's a whiz on the keyboard, and I'm so laborious," McCain admits.
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:5, Informative)
I see. Therefore, we should disqualify Obama as Commander in Chief as well because he never served in the military.
Until you realize the founding fathers specifically and purposely made the chief of the military a CIVILIAN POSITION. They did not want military service to be a prerequisite for the presidency.
(Yes, I'm sure you're going to point out that Washington had been a general. But move on to Adams, Jefferson and Madison and you'll find no military service in their resumes.)
Re:More Cases Than Just This (Score:3, Informative)
Is it illegal for someone to take a cellphone into the booth and record this happening?
I hope so, because I don't want my boss or union steward to have me take a picture of my ballot so he can check it for mistakes.
That's a poor reason to ban cameras -- for one thing its the boss who is breaking the law by extorting you to vote a certain way, not the camera for being used. For another, there is no way for your boss to verify that the ballot you took a picture of is the one you actually voted with because you can always get a new paper ballot and if you are taking a picture of the computer screen, you can always go back and change it too.
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:2, Informative)
McCain is not a technophobe or a retrograde — his campaign is using technology quite a bit and has posted its share of YouTube videos (a very cheap way to get once message out). It is not as techno-cool as Obama's, but no less so than Hillary Clinton's or Biden's own campaigns were. Indeed, Bill Clinton — everybody's favorite bubble-creator [stock-mark...timent.com] — has sent a whopping two e-mails during his 8 years in office [cnn.com].
What keeps McCain himself from a computer — as has been repeatedly pointed out since Obama's revolting attack [theatlantic.com] — are the injuries sustained in Vietnamese prison [freerepublic.com], where his torturers were twisting his broken arms (waterboarding is for wussies). The man can't lift his arms above his shoulders to this day — I wonder, why Obama has not ridiculed his inability to comb his hair by himself...
And if you want to look forward, Sarah Palin — McCain's choice for a vice-president — is an avid e-mail user and has even come under criticism, as she found a creative solution to get around the law, with which the lawmakers aim to infringe on their executive's domain [gartner.com]. How good, do you think, is Biden with computers?
Paper ballots don't help steal elections (Score:5, Informative)
I just don't understand why a good paper ballot is so hard to accept...
It's because elections are so much harder to steal [commondreams.org] if you have a "good paper ballot".
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel actually owned the company that controlled the elctronic voting in the election that he won, in a stunning upset, in every demographic, including many black communities that had never voted Republican before. Nebraska hadn't voted for a Republican for Senate in 24 years.
In Georgia, Democratic Senator Max Cleland (who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, after he jumped on a grenade to save his fellow troops), was defeated by a Republican that alleged that Cleland was not patriotic enough. Even after the polls indicated that the voters did not actually believe this, the Diebold machines announced the Republican the winner. Surprise! And in another surprise, while the polls indicated that Democractic Governor Roy Barnes was winning, the Diebold machies announced that he lost as well to his Republican challenger. A whistleblower revealed that secret patches were applied to the machines late in the race, violating state law.
Here are other instances of Republicans winning through voting machine irregularities. [nytimes.com]
Re:Paper Ballots (Score:2, Informative)
As a Canadian new to San Francisco, I though like you did. Until someone explained to me that on November 4th, people in San Francisco will vote for a president, for or against about 12 proposed laws in California and for or against 10 proposed regulations in San Francisco.
That is way more than one candidate.
You wouldn't accept this behavior from an ATM. (Score:4, Informative)
If double-tapping on a name cancels the vote, that's a bug.
If double-tapping on a name resets it to a default, that's a BIG bug.
If the guys who configured the machines for that county knew about that bug, and arranged the names so that when people double-tap they get the candidate they want, that's fraud.
Whether or not some people are "click happy".
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:3, Informative)
The article you linked to suggests that McCain's war injuries are the reason he can not use the Internet. This contradicts his own observations on his lack of computer literacy. From The Huffington Post [huffingtonpost.com]:
I voted early in WV (Score:3, Informative)
The workers in the polling place gave us pencils with erasers to use. They said large fingers were causing multiple selections to be made. Apparently the touch sensors are overly sensitive, and cannot distinguish between the middle region being pressed. My guess is if the finger is being released unevenly, it registers the vote where the sensing was last received, which might be above or below depending on the angle of the finger. It worked correctly for me using the eraser end of the pencil.
There was also a sealed box with a long window on the side showing a paper roll with each selection being printed on it in text. It printed exactly what I voted for, as seen through the box. When the vote was finally confirmed, it printed some bar codes, which I assume is some kind of coding for the vote, maybe with a hash checksum. Presumably, if there is any need or demand for a paper audit, those rolls could be accessed and votes counted from there.
The machines were "iVotronic" [wikipedia.org] models.
Re:Parallax, touch screens, stupidity, and conspir (Score:3, Informative)
The only real documented fraud going on now is ACORN.
Incorrect. First of all we are talking about is registration fraud, which should be distinguished from vote fraud. When Mickey Mouse shows up to vote then it is vote fraud. Until then the only one getting screwed is ACORN who payed for someone to collect those garbage registrations.
Secondly, ACORN is not [reuters.com] the only documented registration fraud going on.
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:4, Informative)
Let's also remember that Obama's 'generation' also skips email. The 'myspace generation' has no idea what a MUA is. They think that sending messages on Myspace *IS* email.
Kids say email is dead [cnet.com].
Re:Paper ballots don't help steal elections (Score:3, Informative)
Uhh, no. He was reaching down to pick up a grenade that fell off his jacket, not knowing it was live.
Well, if you want to get technical about it -- the grenade did not come from his jacket [wikipedia.org] -- it came from the guy next to him, and Cleland had a month left in his tour. The M-26 had a design flaw, in that it came with straight pins, which made them very easy to dislodge. Experienced soldiers knew to either bend the pins or tape them, but the other guy didn't know that and was walking around with a vest full of the dangerous straight pins.
So I didn't remember all the details but the important part is that Max Cleland went to Vietnam, a place full of dangerous things like Viet Cong shooting at you and live grenades that were badly designed. His Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, avoided Vietnam [villagevoice.com] on 5 student deferments (University of Georgia 1966; University of Tennessee College of Law 1968) and a medical deferment for "bad knees" caused by football in college.
Democratic Max Cleland, on the other hand, was awarded the Silver Star [observer.com] "for gallantry in action" at the battle of Khe Sanh, one of the Vietnam war's fiercest firefights.
Re:50 million can't use a computer? Ain't it funny (Score:3, Informative)
Parent is Insightful? How about 'uninformed'?
George Bush was an officer and pilot in the Armed Services of the United States.
Sure. Here you go. (Score:4, Informative)
NC votes flip to Obama [blackboxvoting.com]
Votes switched from Bush to Kerry [archive.org]
Sorry to disappoint you.
These are just errors. It goes both ways.
I didn't say I was comfortable with Diebold's CEO saying what he did...but he didn't say he would "do anything to help the Republicans" (your obvious implication being he'd do anything, including rig his company's voting machines...even though it would take likely literally hundreds of people in the process to actually pull off what many people think happened in a coordinated fashion). What he said in a fundraising letter in his capacity as a Republican business leader in Ohio [boingboing.net] was, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
And even though Diebold had paper trail systems as options for many of their products, they often weren't purchased by municipalities because they weren't required by law.
And I didn't say e-voting was superior. I said that it was thought to be superior by those in Congress (many Democrats, including those who sponsored the legislation which resulted in the increases in electronic voting machines, ostensibly to make the process modern and fair). The major oversight was And if you read my post, I agreed that paper voting is the way to go, if only for a reason of maintaining confidence in the process. That alone would be worthwhile.
You can't even pretend to be informed about e-voting, at all, if you had never even seen a case of votes being "switched" to anything but Republican, when there are plenty of examples of both ways. It's just that the bloggers and activists who think it's all a vast right-wing conspiracy to steal elections are a lot louder.
I'm definitely looking forward to your reply.